Once to Every Man Part 13

But she was watching still--watching with small, gold-crowned head nodding heavily, eyes half-veiled with sinking lids--when that half-shaded window in the dark house glowed suddenly yellow with the light behind it. She was still hoping, praying dumbly that it might be, when Young Denny lifted the black-chimneyed lamp from its bracket on the kitchen wall that night, after he had stood and listened with a smile on his lips to Old Jerry's hurried departure, and carried it into the front room which he scarcely ever entered except upon that errand.

At first she did not believe. She thought it was only a trick of her brain, so tired now that it was as little capable of connected thought as her worn-out body was of motion. Hardly breathing she stared until she saw the great blot of his body silhouetted against the pane for a moment as he crowded between the lamp, staring across at her, she knew.

She rose then, rose slowly and very cautiously as though she feared her slightest move might make it vanish. Young Denny's bobbing lantern, swinging in one hand as he crossed before the house and plunged into the thicket that lay between them, was all that convinced her--made her believe that she had seen aright.

"I can't go--I can't!" she breathed. And then, lifting her head, vehemently, as if he could hear:

"I want to--oh, you know I want to! But I can't come to you tonight--not until I've had a little longer--to think."

Almost before she had finished speaking another voice answered, a soft, dreamy voice that came so abruptly in the quiet house that it made her wheel like a startled wild thing. She had forgotten him for the time--that little, stooped figure at its bench in the back room workshop. For hours she had not given him a thought, and he had made not so much as a motion to make her remember his presence. She could not even remember when his sing-song, unending monologue had ceased, but she realized then that he had been more silent that night than ever before.

Earlier in the evening when she had lighted his lamp for him and set out his lump of moist clay, and helped him to his place on the high stool, she had thought to notice some difference in him.

Usually John Anderson was possessed of one or two unvarying moods.

Either he plunged contentedly into his task of reproducing the mult.i.tude of small white figures around the walls, or else he merely sat and stared up at her hopelessly, vacantly, until she put the clay herself into his hands. Tonight it had been different, for when she had placed the damp ma.s.s between his limp fingers he had laid it aside again, raised astonishingly clear eyes to hers and shaken his head.

"After a little--after a little while," he had said. "I--I want to think a little first."

It had amazed her for a moment. At any other time it would have frightened her, but tonight as she stroked his bowed head, she told herself that it was nothing more than a new vagary of his anchorless mind.

But that same strangely clear, almost sane glow which had puzzled her then was still there when she turned. It was even brighter than before, and the slow words which had startled her, for all their dreamy softness, seemed very sane as well.

"You have to go," John Anderson answered her faltering, half-audible whisper. "You have to go--but you'll be back soon. Oh, so soon! And I'll be safe till you come!"

Dryad flashed forward a step, both hands half-raised to her throat as he spoke, almost believing that the miracle for which she had ceased even to hope had come that night. And then she understood--she knew that the bent figure which had already turned back to its bench had only repeated her words, parrotlike; she knew that he had only pieced together a recollection of the absence which her vigil before the window had meant on a former occasion and repeated her own words of that other night.

And yet her brain clamored that there was more behind it all than mere witless repet.i.tion. John Anderson was smiling at her, too, smiling like a benevolent wraith. She saw that his pile of clay was still untouched, but there was no hint of petulant perplexity in his face, nothing of the terrified impotence which the inactivity of his fingers had always heralded before. He was just smiling--vaguely to be sure and a little uncertainly--but smiling in utter contentment and satisfaction, for all that.

Very slowly--wonderingly, she crossed to him and put both arms about his white head and drew it against her.

"I think you knew," she said to him, unsteadily. "I think you are able to understand better than I can myself. And I know, too, now. I do have to go--I must go to him. But he need not even know, until I tell him some day--that I was with him tonight."

The old man pulled away from her clasp, gently but very insistently.

And he nodded--nodded as though he had understood. She paused and looked back at him from the doorway, just as she had always hesitated. He was following her with his eyes. Again he shook his head, just as positively as he might have, had he been the man he might have been.

"Some day," he reiterated, serenely, "some day! And she'll know then--some day I'll tell her--that I was with her tonight."

She had forgotten the rain. It was coming down heavily, and it was dark, too--very, very dark. She stopped a while, as long as she dared, and waited with the rain beating cold upon her uncovered head and bare throat until her eyes saw the path a little more clearly. It took her a long time to feel her way forward that night. And even when she came within sight of Denny's lantern, even when she was near enough to see him through the thicket ahead of her, in the little patch of light, she had not decided what she meant to do.

But with that first glimpse of him squatting there in the small cleared s.p.a.ce it came to her what her course should be. She realized that if it was an impossibility for her to go to him, she could at least let him know she had been there--let him know that he had not been entirely alone while he waited. She even smiled to herself--smiled with wistful, half-sad, elfen tenderness as she, too, huddled down without a sound, there in the wet bushes opposite him, and decided how she would tell him.

Denny Bolton never quite knew how long he waited in the rain before he was certain that there was no use waiting longer. More than half the night had dragged by when he reached finally into the pockets of his coat and searched for a sc.r.a.p of paper. Watching from her place in the thicket near him, she recognized the small white card which he discovered--she even reached out one hand instinctively for her invitation from the Judge, which she had told him had never arrived and for which she had hunted in vain throughout the following days.

With an unaccountable gladness because he knew straining at her throat, she watched him draw the lantern nearer and read again the words it bore before he turned it over and wrote, laboriously, with the thick pencil that he used to check logs back in the hills, some message across its back.

It was a message to her, she knew; and she knew, too, that he was going now. Deliberately she reached out then and found a rotten branch beside her. Young Denny's head shot up as it cracked between her hands--shot swiftly erect while he stared hard at that wall of darkness which hid her. And swiftly as she fled, like some noiseless night creature of the woods, his sudden, plunging rush almost discovered her.

Back in the safety of the blackness she stood and saw him bend over the place where she had been crouching; she saw him put his hand upon the patch of dead ferns which her body had crushed flat, and knew that he found it still warm. She even held up her face, as though she were giving him her lips--she reached out her arms to him--when she saw him rise from an examination of her foot-prints in the mold, smiling his slow, infinitely grave smile as he nodded his head over what he had seen.

Back over the path she had come she followed the dancing point of his lantern, sometimes almost upon him, sometimes lagging far behind when he stopped and strained his ears for her. All recollection of the night before was gone from her mind, wiped out as utterly as though it had never existed. Nothing but a great gladness possessed her, a joy that amounted almost to mischievous glee whenever he stood still a moment and listened.

Not until she had waited many minutes after he stooped and slipped the card beneath the door did she come out from the cover of the woods.

But she raced forward madly then, and flung the door open, and stooped for it where it lay white against the floor.

All the mischievous glee went from her face in that next moment. Bit by bit it faded before the advance of that same strained whiteness that had marred it, hours before. All the wistfulness that made her face so childlike, all the hunger that made the hurt in her breast came back while she read, over and over, the words which Denny had written for her across the back of her card, until she could repeat them without looking at it. And even then she only half-understood what they meant. Once she opened the door and peered out into the blackness, searching for the lantern that had disappeared.

"Why--why he's gone! He came to tell me that he was going away," she murmured, dully. And then, still more dully:

"And I didn't tell him I was sorry. I've let him go without even telling him how sorry I was--for the hurt upon his chin!"

Perhaps it was the silence that made her turn; perhaps she simply turned with no thought or reason at all, but she faced slowly about at that moment, just in time to see John Anderson nod and smile happily at something he alone could see--just in time to hear him sigh softly once, before his arms went slack upon his work-bench and his head drooped forward above them.

The bit of a card fluttered to the floor as both her tight-clenched fists lifted toward her throat. The softest of pitying little moans came quavering from her lips. She needed no explanation of what that suddenly limp body meant! And she understood better now, too, that untouched lump of clay upon the boards beside his bowed head. John Anderson's long task was finished. He had known it was finished, and had been merely resting tonight--resting content before he started upon that long journey, before he followed that face, tumbled of hair and uplifted of lip, which seemed always to be calling to him.

The slim-bodied girl whose face was so like what that other woman's face had been went slowly across to him where he sat. After a while she slipped her arm about his wasted shoulders, just as she had done so often on other nights. A racking sob shook her when she first tried to speak--and she tried again.

"You kept faith, didn't you, dear?" she whispered to him. "Oh, but you kept faith with her--right--right up to the end. Please G.o.d--please G.o.d, I may get my chance back again--to try to keep it, too. You've gone to her--and--and I'm glad! You waited a long time, dear, and you were very patient. But, oh, you've left me--you've left me all alone!"

The tears came then. Great, searing drops that had been hopelessly dammed back the night before rolled down her thin cheeks. She stooped and touched the silvered head with her lips before she groped her way into the other room and found her chair at the table.

"He knew I was there with him," she tried to whisper. "He knew I was, I know! But I wish I could tell him I'm sorry. Oh, I wish I could!"

And Old Jerry found her so, head pillowed upon her outstretched arms, her hair in a marvelous shimmering ma.s.s across her little shoulders when he came the next morning, almost before the day was fairly begun, to tell her all the things there were for him to tell.

CHAPTER XII

Monday morning was always a busy morning in Jesse Hogarty's Fourteenth Street gymnasium; busy, that is to say, along about that hour when morning was almost ready to slip into early afternoon. The reason for this late activity was very easy to understand, too, once one realized that Hogarty's clientele--especially that of his Monday mornings--was composed quite entirely of that type of leisurely young man who rarely pointed the nose of his tub-seated raceabout below Forty-second Street, except for the benefits of a few rather desultory rounds under Hogarty's tutelage, a shocking plunge beneath an icy shower, and the all pervading sense of physical well-being resultant upon a half hour's kneading of none too firm muscles on the marble slabs.

It was like Jesse Hogarty--or Flash Hogarty, as he had been styled by the sporting reporters of the saffron dailies ten years back, when it was said that he could hit faster and harder out of a clinch than any lightweight who ever stood in canvas shoes--to refuse to transfer his place to some locality a bit nearer Fifty-seventh Street, even when it chanced, as it did with every pa.s.sing year, that he drew his patrons--at an alarmingly high rate per patron--almost entirely from far uptown.

"This isn't a turkish bath," Flash Hogarty was accustomed to answer such importunities. "If you are just looking for a place to boil out the poison, hunt around a little--take a wide-eyed look or two! There are lots and lots of them. This isn't a turkish bath; it's a gymnasium--a _man's_ gymnasium!"

That was his invariable formula, alike to the objections of the youthful, unlimited-of-allowance, more or less hard-living sons that it "spoils the best part of the week, you know, Flash, just running 'way down here," and the equally earnest and far more peevish complaints of the ticker tired, just-a-minute-to-spare fathers that it cost them about five thousand, just to take an hour to work off a few pounds.

But they kept on coming, in spite of their lack of time and Hogarty's calm refusal to consider their arguments--some of the younger men because they really did appreciate the sensation of flexible muscles sliding beneath a smooth skin, some of them merely because they liked to hear Hogarty's fluently picturesque profanity, always couched in the most delightfully modulated of English, when the activity of a particularly giddy week-end brought them back a little too shaky of hand, a little too brilliant of eye and a trifle jumpy as to pulse.

Hogarty had a way of telling them just how little they actually amounted to, which, no matter how wickedly it cut, never failed to amuse them.

The older generation dared do nothing else, even in the face of the ex-lightweight's scathingly sarcastic admiration of their constantly increasing waist-line--or lack of one. For their lines were largely a series of curves exactly opposite to those on which Nature had originally designed them.

They continued to come; they ran down-town in closed town cars, padded heavily across the sidewalk like sad bovines going to the slaughter, to reappear an hour or two later stepping like three-year-olds, serenely, virtuously joyous at the tale of the scales which indicated a five-pound loss. And the Sat.u.r.day and Sunday week-end out of town which presently followed, with the astoundingly heavy dinners that accompanied it, brought them back in a week, sadder even than before.

Monday morning was always a very busy morning in Hogarty's--but never until along about noon. And because he knew how infallible were the habits of his patrons, Hogarty did not so much as lift his eyes to the practically empty gymnasium floor when a clock at the far side of the room tinkled the hour of eleven. The two boys who were busily scrubbing with waxing-mops the floor that already glistened like the unruffled surface of some crystal pool were quite as unconcerned at the lack of activity as was their employer. They merely paused long enough to draw one shirt sleeve across the sweat-beaded foreheads--it was a very early spring in Manhattan and the first heat was hard to bear--and went at their task harder than ever.

Hogarty had one other reason that morning which accounted for his absolute serenity. From Third Avenue to the waterfront any one who was well-informed at all--and there was no one who had not at least heard whispers of his fame--knew that the thin-faced, hard-eyed, steel-sinewed ex-lightweight who dressed in almost funeral black and white and talked in the hushed, measured syllables of a professor of English, loved one thing even more than he loved to see his own man put over the winning punch in--say the tenth. It was common gossip that a set of ivory dominoes came first before all else.