The Choir Invisible Part 13

After a little pause she began to speak of Major Falconer as the school-master had never known her to speak; tremulously of his part in that battle, a Revolutionary officer serving as a common backwoods soldier; eloquently of his perfect courage then and always, of his perfect manliness; and she ended by saying that the worst thing that could ever befall a woman was to marry an unmanly man.

"If any one single thing in life could ever have killed me," she said, "it would have been that."

With her last words she finished the dressing of his wounds. Spots of the deepest rose were on her cheeks; her eyes were lighted with proud fire.

Confusedly he thanked her and, lying back on his pillow, closed his eyes and turned his face away.

When she had quickly gone he sat up in the bed again. He drew the book guiltily from under his pillow, looked long and sorrowfully at it, and then with a low cry of shame--the first that had ever burst from his lips--he hurled it across the room and threw himself violently down again, with his forehead against the logs, his eyes hidden, his face burning.

XIV

THE first day that John felt strong enough to walk as far as that end of the town, he was pulling himself unsteadily past the shop when he saw Peter and turned in to rest and chat.The young blacksmith refused to speak to him.

"Peter!" said John with a sad, shaky voice, holding out his hand, "have I changed so much? Don't you know me?"

"Yes; I know you," said Peter. "I wish I didn't."

"I don't think I recognize you any more," replied John, after a moment of silence. "What's the matter?"

"Oh, you get along," said Peter. "Clear out!"

John went inside and drank a gourd of water out of Peter's cool bucket, came back with a stool and sat down squarely before him.

"Now look here," he said with the candour which was always the first law of nature with him, "what have I done to you?"

Peter would neither look nor speak; but being powerless before kindness, he was beginning to break down.

"Out with it," said John. "What have I done?""You know what you've said."

"What have I said about you?" asked John, now perceiving that some mischief had been at work here. "Who told you I had said anything about you?"

"It's no use for you to deny it."

"Who told you?"

"O'Bannon!"

"O'Bannon!" exclaimed John with a frown. "I've never talked to O'Bannon about you--about anything."

"You haven't abused me?" said Peter, wheeling on the schoolmaster, eyes and face and voice full of the suffering of his wounded self-love and of his wounded affection.

"I hope I've abused n.o.body!" said John proudly.

"Come in here!" cried Peter, springing up and hurrying into his shop.

Near the door stood a walnut tree with wide-spreading branches wearing the fresh plumes of late May, plumes that hung down over the door and across the windows, suffusing the interior with a soft twilight of green and brown shadows. A shaft of sunbeams penetrating a crevice fell on the white neck of a yellow collie that lay on the ground with his head on his paws, his eyes fixed reproachfully on the heels of the horse outside, his ears turned back toward his master. Beside him a box had been kicked over: tools and shoes scattered. A faint line of blue smoke sagged from the dying coals of the forge toward the door, creeping across the anvil bright as if tipped with silver. And in one of the darkest corners of the shop, near a bucket of water in which floated a huge brown gourd, Peter and John sat on a bench while the story of O'Bannon's mischief-making was begun and finished. It was told by Peter with much cordial rubbing of his elbows in the palms of his hands and much light-hearted smoothing of his ap.r.o.n over his knees. At times a cloud, pa.s.sing beneath the sun, threw the shop into heavier shadow; and then the school-master's dark figure faded into the tone of the sooty wall behind him and only his face, with the contrast of its white linen collar below and the bare discernible lights of his auburn hair above--his face, proud, resolute, astounded, pallid, suffering--started out of the gloom like a portrait from an old canvas.

"And this is why you never came to see me." He had sprung up like a man made well, and was holding Peter's hand and looking reproachfully into his eyes.

"I'd have seen you dead first," cried Peter gaily, giving him a mighty slap on the shoulder. "But wait! O'Bannon's not the only man who can play a joke!"

John hurriedly left the shop with a gesture which Peter did not understand.

The web of deceptive circ.u.mstances that had been spun about him had been brushed away at last: he saw the whole truth now--saw his own blindness, blundering, folly, injustice.

He was on his way to Amy already.

When he had started out, he had thought he should walk around a little and then lie down again. Now with his powerful stride come back to him, he had soon pa.s.sed the last house of the town and was nearing the edge of the wilderness. He took the same straight short course of the afternoon on which he had asked Mrs. Falconer's consent to his suit. As he hurried on, it seemed to him a long time since then! What experiences he had undergone!

What had he not suffered! How he was changed!

"Yes," he said over and over to himself, putting away all other thoughts in a resolve to think of this nearest duty only. "If I've been unkind to her, if I've been wrong, have I not suffered?"

He had not gone far before his strength began to fail. He was forced to sit down and rest. It was near sundown when he reached the clearing.

"At last!" he said gratefully, with his old triumphant habit of carrying out whatever he undertook. He had put out all his strength to get there.

He pa.s.sed the nearest field--the peach trees--the garden--and took the path toward the house.

"Where shall I find her?" he thought. "Where can I see her alone?"

"Between him and the house stood a building of logs and plaster. It was a single room used for the spinning and the weaving of which she had charge.

Many a time he had lain on the great oaken chest into which the homespun cloth was stored while she sat by her spinning-wheel; many a talk they had had there together, many a parting; and many a Sat.u.r.day twilight he had put his arms around her there and turned away for his lonely walk to town, planning their future. "If she should only be in the weaving-room!"

He stepped softly to the door and looked in. She was there-- standing near the middle of the room with her face turned from him. The work of the day was done. On one side were the spinning-wheels, farther on a loom; before her a table on which the cloth was piled ready to be folded away; on the other the great open chest into which she was about to store it. She had paused in revery, her hands clasped behind her head.

At the sight of her and with the remembrance of how he had misjudged and mistreated her--most of all swept on by some lingering flood of the old tenderness--he stepped forward put his arms softly around her, drew her closely to him, and buried his check against hers:

"Amy!" he murmured, his voice quivering his whole body trembling, his heart knocking against his ribs like a stone.

She struggled out of his arms with a cry and recognizing him, drew her figure up to its full height. Her eyes filled with pa.s.sion, cold and resentful.

He made a gesture.

"Wait!" he cried. "Listen."

He laid bare everything--from his finding of the bundle to the evening of the ball.

He was standing by the doorway. A small window in the opposite wall of the low room opened toward the West. Through this a crimson light fell upon his face revealing its pallor, its storm, its struggle for calmness.

She stood a few yards off with her face in shadow. As she had stepped backward, one of her hands had struck against her spinning-wheel and now rested on it; with the other she had caught the edge of the table. From the spinning-wheel a thread of flax trailed to the ground; on the table lay a pair of iron shears.

As he stood looking at her facing him thus in cold half-shadowy anger--at the spinning wheel with its trailing flax--at, the table with its iron shears--at her hands stretched forth as if about to grasp the one and to lay hold on the other--he shudderingly thought of the ancient arbitress of Life and Death--Fate the mighty, the relentless. The fancy pa.s.sed and was succeeded by the sense of her youth and loveliness. She wore a dress of coa.r.s.e snow-white homespun, narrow in the skirt and fitting close to her arms and neck and to the outlines of her form. Her hair was parted simply over her low beautiful brow. There was nowhere a ribbon or a trifle of adornment: and in that primitive, simple, fearless revelation of itself her figure had the frankness of a statue. While he spoke the anger died out of her face. But in its stead came something worse--hardness; and something that was worse still--an expression of revenge.

"If I was unfeeling with you," he implored, "only consider! You had broken your engagement without giving any reason; I saw you at the party dancing with Joseph; I believed myself trifled with, I said that if you could treat in that way there was nothing you could say that I cared to hear. I was blind to the truth; I was blinded by suffering.

"If you suffered, it was your own fault," she replied, calm as the Fate that holds the shears and the thread. "I wanted to explain to you why I broke my engagement and why I went with Joseph: you refused to allow me."

"But before that! Remember that I had gone to see you the night before. You had a chance to explain then. But you did not explain. Still, I did not doubt that your reason was good. I did not ask you to state it. But when I saw you at the party with Joseph, was I not right, in thinking that the time for an explanation had pa.s.sed?"