Once to Every Man Part 22

The violet eyes flew wider. Old Jerry was certain that he caught a gleam of apprehension in them. She took one faltering step toward him and then stopped, irresolute, apparently. Somehow the mute appeal in that whole poise was too much, even for his outraged dignity. Maybe he had gone a little too far. He attempted to temper the harshness of it.

"Not a-course," he added deprecatingly, "meanin' that anything like that would be likely to happen to you. Seein' as you didn't exactly understand, I wouldn't take no steps against you." And, even more encouragingly, "I doubt if I'd hev any legal right to proceed against anybody without seeing Den--without seeing the rightful owner first."

He bit his tongue painfully in covering that slip, but Dryad had not seemed to notice it. She crossed back to the stove and in an absolute silence fell to prodding with a fork beneath steaming lids.

"I really should have thought of that myself," she murmured pensively.

"After seeing you return from here every afternoon, I should have known he--the place had been left in your care."

It rather startled him--that half absent-minded statement of hers--it disturbed his confidence in his command of the situation. Sitting there he told himself that he should have realized long ago that she could easily watch the hill road from the door of the little drab cottage huddled at the end of Judge Maynard's acres.

He began to feel guilty again--began to wonder just how much his daily visits to Denny's place had led her to suspect. But Dryad did not wait for any reply. She had turned once more until she was facing him, her lips beginning to curl again, petal-like, at the corners.

"But you would have to interview the real owner first?" she inquired insistently. "You do think that would be necessary before you could make me leave, don't you?"

He nodded--nodded warily. Something in her bearing put him on his guard. And then, before he knew how it had happened, a little rush had carried her across the room and she was kneeling at his feet, her face upflung to him.

"Then you'll have to interview me,"--the words trembled madly, breathlessly, from her lips. "You'll have to interview me--because--because I own it all--all--every bit of it!"

And she laughed up at him--laughed with a queer, choking, strained note catching in her throat up into his blankly incredulous face. He felt her thin young arms tighten about him; he even half caught her next hysterical words in spite of his amazement, and for all that they were quite meaningless to him.

"You dear," she rushed on. "O, you dear, dear stubborn old fraud! I punished you, didn't I? You were frightened--afraid I'd go! You know you were! As if I'd ever leave until--until--" She failed to finish that sentence. "But I'll never, never tease you so again!"

Then there came that lightning-like change of mood which always left him breathless in his inability to follow it. The mirth went out of her eyes--her lips drooped and began to work strangely as she knelt and gazed up at him.

"I bought his mortgage," she told him slowly. "I bought it from Judge Maynard a week ago with part of the money he gave me for our place there below his. He was very generous. Somehow I feel that he paid me--much more than it was worth. He's always wanted it and--and I--there wasn't any need for me to stay there any more, was there?"

Old Jerry had never seen a face so terribly earnest before--so hungrily wistful--but it was the light that glowed in that kneeling girl's eyes that held him dumb. It left him completely incapable of coherent thought, yet mechanically his mind leaped back to that night, two weeks before, when Young Denny had stumbled and gone floundering to his knees before her, there on that very threshold. The boy's own words had painted that picture for him too vividly for him to forget.

And he knew, without reasoning it out, just from the world of pain there in her eyes, that she, too, at that moment was thinking of that limp figure--of the great red gash across its chin.

"I didn't help him," she went on, and now her voice was little more than a whisper. "I went and left him here alone--and hurt--when I should have stayed, that night when he went away. And so I bought it--I bought it because I thought some day he might come back--and need me even more. I thought if he did come--he'd feel as though he had just--come back home! And--and just to be here waiting, I thought, too, might somehow help me to have faith that he would come, some day--safe!"

The old man felt the fiercely tense little arms go slack then. Her head went forward and lay heavy, pillowed in her hands upon his knees.

But he sat there for a full minute, staring down at the thick, shimmering ma.s.s of her hair, swallowing an unaccountable lump that bothered his breathing preparatory to telling her all that he had kept waiting for just that opportunity, before he realized that she was crying. And for an equally long period he cast desperately about for the right thing to say. It came to him finally--a veritable inspiration.

"Why, you don't want to cry," he told her slowly. "They--they ain't nothing to worry about now! For if that's the case--if you've gone to work and bought it, why, I ain't got no more jurisdiction over it--none whatever!"

Immediately she lifted her head and gazed long and questioningly at him, but Old Jerry's face was only guilelessly grave. It was more than that--benevolent rea.s.surance lit up every feature, and little by little her br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes began to clear; they began to glisten with that baffling delight that had irritated him so before. She slipped slowly to her feet and stood and gazed down at him. Old Jerry knew then that he would never again see so radiant a face as hers was at that moment.

"I wasn't crying because I was worried," she said, and she managed not to laugh. "I've been doing that every night, all night long, for two weeks. That was before I understood--things! But today--this afternoon I found something--read something--that made me understand better.

I--I'm just crying a little tonight because I am so glad."

Old Jerry couldn't quite fathom the whole meaning of those last words of hers. They surprised him so that all the things he had meant to tell her right then of Young Denny's departure once more went totally out of mind. He wondered if it was the red-headlined account of his first battle that she had seen. No matter how doubtful it was he felt it was very, very possible, for at each day's end he had been leaving Denny's roll of papers there just as he had when the boy was at home.

But the rest of it he understood in spite of the wonder of it all.

Whenever he remembered Young Denny asprawl upon the floor it seemed to him a thing too marvelous for belief, and yet, recalling the light that had glowed radiant in that girl's eyes, he knew it was the only thing left to believe.

He talked it over with himself that night on the way home.

"She bought it so's if he ever did want to come back, he'd feel as if he had come back home," he repeated her words, and he pondered long upon them. There was only one possible deduction.

"She thought he wouldn't have nothing left to buy it back when he did come--that he'd be started on the road all the rest of 'em traveled and pretty well--shot--to--pieces! That's what she thought," he decided.

He shook his head over it.

"And she didn't know," he marveled. "She didn't know how that old jug really got broke--because I ain't told her yet! But she's waitin' for him just the same--just a-waitin' for him, no matter how he comes.

Figurin' on takin' care of him, too--that's what she was doin'--her that ain't no bigger'n his little finger!"

The storm had blown over long before his buggy went rattling down that long hill, and he sat with the reins dangling neglected between his knees and squinted up at the stars.

"I always did consider I'd been pretty lucky," he confided after a time to the plump mare's lazily flopping ears, "never gettin' mixed up in any matrimonial tangle, so to speak. But now--now I ain't quite so sure." A lonesome note crept into the querulous voice. "Maybe I'd hev kept my eyes open a little mite wider'n I did if I'd ever a-dreamed anybody could care like that.... Don't happen very often though, I reckon. Just about once in a lifetime, maybe. Maybe, if he ain't too blind to see it when it does come ... maybe once to every man!"

That next week marked the beginning of an intimacy unlike anything which Old Jerry had ever before known in all his life, for in spite of the girl's absolute proprietorship he continued his daily trips up the long hill, not only for the purpose of leaving Young Denny's bundle of papers and seed catalogues, but to attend to the stock which the boy had left in his care as well. It never occurred to him that that duty was only optional with him now.

He never again attempted either, after that night, to explain his delinquency and deliver Young Denny's message to her. There seemed to him absolutely no need now to open a subject which was bound to be embarra.s.sing to him. And then, too, a sort of tacit understanding appeared to have sprung up between them that needed no further explanation.

Only once was the temptation to confess to her the real reason for Denny's sudden going almost stronger than he could resist. That was quite a month later, when the news of the boy's second battle was flaunted broadcast by the same red-headlined sheet. Then for days he considered the advisability of such a move.

It was not some one to share his hot pride that he wanted; he had lived his whole life almost entirely within himself, and so his elation was no less keen because he had no second person with whom to discuss the victory. He wanted her opinion on a quite different question--a question which he felt utterly incapable of deciding for himself. It was no less a plan than that he should be present at the match which was already hinted at between "The Pilgrim" and Jed The Red--Jeddy Conway, from that very village.

There were days when he almost felt that she knew of this new perplexity of his, felt that she really had seen that account of Young Denny's first fight and had been watching for the second, and at such times only a mumbled excuse and a hasty retreat saved him from baring his secret desire.

"She'd think I'd gone stark crazy," he excused his lack of courage.

"She'd say I was a-goin' into my second childhood!"

Yet in the end it was the girl with the tip-tilted eyes who decided it for him.

Spring had slipped into early summer when the day came which made the gossip of "The Pilgrim's" possible bid for the championship a certainty. It was harder than ever for Old Jerry after that. Each fresh day's issue brought forth a long and exhaustive comparison of the two men's chances--of their strength and weaknesses. The technical discussion the old man skipped; it was undecipherable to him and enough that Young Denny was hailed as a certain winner.

And then as the day set for the match crept nearer and nearer, he began to notice a new and alarming change in the tone of that daily column. At first it was only fleeting--too intangible for one to place one's finger upon it. But by the end of another week it was openly inquiring whether "The Pilgrim" had as much as an even chance of winning after all.

It bewildered Old Jerry; it was beyond his comprehension, and had he not been so depressed himself he would have noted the change that came over the girl, too, these days. He never entered the big back kitchen now to hear her humming softly to herself, and sometimes he had to speak several times before she even heard him.

That continued for almost a week, and then there came a day, a scant three days before the date which he had hungrily underlined in red upon a mental calendar, which brought the whole vexing indecision to a precipitate head.

Old Jerry read that day's column in the sporting extra with weazened face going red with anger--read it with fists knotted. Those others had been merely skeptical--doubtful of "The Pilgrim's" willingness to meet the champion--and now it openly scoffed at him; it laughed at his ability, lashed him with ridicule. And, to cap it all, it accused him openly of having already "sold out" to his opponent.

When the little white-haired driver of the buggy reached the house on the hill that night he was as pale as he had been red, hours before, and he pleaded fatigue to excuse his too hasty departure. He did not see that she was almost as openly eager to have him go or that she almost ran across to the table under the light with the packet of papers as he turned away.

Had he noticed he would have been better prepared the next night for the scene that met him when he opened her door at dusk. One step was all he took, and then he stopped, wide-eyed, aghast. Dryad was standing in the middle of the room, her hair loose about her shoulders, lips drawn dangerously back from tight little teeth, fists clenched at her throat, and her eyes flaming.

Old Jerry had never before seen her in a rage; he had never before seen anybody so terribly, pallidly violent. As he entered her eyes shot up to his. He heard her breath come and go, come and go, between dry lips. And suddenly she lifted her feet and stamped upon the newspaper strewn about her on the floor--infinitesimal shreds which she had torn and flung from her.

"It's a lie!" she gasped. "It's a lie--a lie! They said he couldn't win anyway; they said he had sold--sold his chance to win--and they lie! He's never been whipped. He's never--been--whipped--yet!"

It frightened him. The very straining of her throat and the mad rise and fall of her breast made him afraid for her. In his effort to quiet her he hardly reckoned what he was saying.