The Deliverance Part 60

"I'm much obliged to you," returned Christopher, and felt that he might as well have wasted his irony on a beaten hound. Turning away from the wild entreaty of Will's eyes, he walked slowly up and down the room, taking care to step lightly lest the boards should creak and awaken Tucker.

The parlour was just as Mrs. Blake had left it; her highbacked Elizabethan chair, filled with cushions, stood on the hearth; the dried gra.s.ses in the two tall vases shed their ashy pollen down upon the bricks. Even the yellow cat, grown old and sluggish, dozed in her favourite spot beside the embroidered ottoman.

On the whitewashed walls the old Blake portraits still presided, and he found, for the first time, an artless humour in the formality of the ancestral att.i.tude--in the splendid pose which they had handed down like an heirloom through the centuries.

Among them he saw the comely, high-coloured features of that gallant cynic, Bolivar, the man who had stamped his beauty upon threegenerations, and his gaze lingered with a gentle ridicule on the blithe candour in the eyes and the characteristic touch of brutality about the mouth. Then he pa.s.sed to his father, portly, impressive, a high liver, a generous young blood, and then to the cla.s.sic Saint--Memin profile of Aunt Susannah, limned delicately against a background of faded pink. And from her he went on to his mother's portrait, painted in shimmering brocade under rose garlands held by smiling Loves.

He looked at them all steadily for a while, seeking from the changeless lips of each an answer to the question which he felt knocking at his own heart. In every limb, in every feature, in every fiber he was plainly born to be one of themselves, and yet from their elegant remoteness they stared down upon the rustic labourer who was their descendant. Degraded, coa.r.s.ened, disinherited, the last Blake stood before them, with his poverty and ignorance illumined only at long intervals by the flame of a soul which, though darkened, was still unquenched.

The night dragged slowly on, while he paced the floor with his thoughts and Will moaned and tossed, a shivering heap, upon the sofa.

"Stop your everlasting cackle!" Christopher had once shouted angrily, forgetting Tucker, and for the s.p.a.ce of a few minutes the other had lain silent, choking back the strangling sobs. But presently the shattered nerves revolted against restraint, and Will burst out afresh into wild crying. The yellow cat, grown suddenly restless, crossed the room and jumped upon the sofa, where she stood clawing at the cover, and he clung to her with a pathetic recognition of dumb sympathy--the sympathy which he could not wring from the careless indifference of Christopher's look.

"Speak to me--say something," he pleaded at last, stretching out his hands. "If this keeps up I'll go mad before morning."

At this Christopher came toward him, and, stopping in his walk, frowned down upon the sofa.

"You deserve everything you'd get;" he said angrily. "You're as big a fool as ever trod this earth, and there's no reason under heaven why I should lift my hand to help you. There's no reason --there's no reason," he repeated in furious tones.

"But you'll do it--you'll get me out of it!" cried Will, grasping the other's knees.

"And two weeks later you'd be in another sc.r.a.pe."

"Not a single drop--I'll never touch a drop again. Before G.o.d I swear it!"

"Pshaw! I've heard that oath before."

Strangling a scream, Will caught him by the arm, dragging himself slowly into a sitting posture. "I'll hang myself if you let them get me," he urged hysterically. " I'll hang myself in gaol rather than let them do it. I can't face it all I can't--I can't. It isn't grandpa I mind; I'm not afraid of him. He was a devil. But it's the rest--the rest."

Roughly shaking him off, Christopher left him huddled upon the floor and resumed his steady walk up and down the room. In his ears the incoherent phrases grew presently fainter, and after a time he lost entirely their frenzied drift. "A little blow--just a little blow," ended finally in m.u.f.fled sounds of weeping.

The habit of outward composure which always came to him in moments of swift experience possessed him so perfectly now that Will, lifting miserable eyes to his face, lowered them, appalled by its unfeeling gravity.

"I've been a good friend to you--a deuced good friend to you,"

urged the younger man in a last pa.s.sionate appeal for the aid whose direction he had not yet defined.

"What is this thought which I cannot get rid of?" asked Christopher moodily of himself. "And what business is it of mine, anyway? What am I to the boy or the boy to me?" But even with the words he remembered the morning more than five years ago when he had gone out to the gate with his bird gun on his shoulder and found Will Fletcher and the spotted foxhound puppies awaiting him in the road. He saw again the boy's face, with the sunlight full upon it--eager, alert, a little petulant, full of good impulses readily turned adrift. There had been no evil upon it then--only weakness and a pathetic absence of determination. His own d.a.m.nable intention was thrust back upon him, and he heard again the words of Carraway which had reechoed in his thoughts. "The way to touch the man, then, is through the boy." So it was the way, after all .

He almost laughed aloud at his prophetic insight. He had touched the man vitally enough at last, and it was through the boy. He had murdered Bill Fletcher, and he had done it through the only thing Bill Fletcher had ever loved. From this he returned again to the memory of the deliberate purpose of that day--to the ribald jests, the coa.r.s.e profanities, the brutal oaths. Then to the night when he had forced the first drink down Will's throat, and so on through the five years of his revenge to the present moment. Well, his triumph had come at last, the summit was put upon his life's work, and he was--he must be--content.

Will raised his head and looked at him in reviving hope.

"You're the only friend I have on earth," he muttered between his teeth.

The first streak of dawn entered suddenly, flooding the room with a thin gray light in which the familiar objects appeared robbed of all atmospheric values. With a last feeble flicker the lamp shot up and went out, and the ashen wash of daybreak seemed the fit medium for the crude ugliness of life.

Towering almost grotesquely in the pallid dawn, Christopher came and leaned above the sofa to which Will had dragged himself again.

"You must get out of this," he said, "and quickly, for we've wasted the whole night wrangling. Have you any money?"

Will fumbled in his pocket and brought out a few cents, which he held in his open palm, while the other unlocked the drawer of the old secretary and handed him a roll of banknotes.

"Take this and buy a ticket somewhere. It's the money I sc.r.a.ped up to pay Fred Turner."

"To pay Fred Turner?" echoed Will, as if in that lay the significance of the remark.

"Take it and buy a ticket, and when you get where you're going, sit still and keep your mouth shut. If you wear a bold face you will go scot--free; remember that; but everything depends upon your keeping a stiff front. And now go--through the back door and past the kitchen to the piece of woods beyond the pasture. Cut through them to Tanner's Station and take the train there, mind, for the North."

With a short laugh he held out his big, knotted hand.

"Good--by," he said, " and don't be a d.a.m.ned fool."

"Good--by," answered Will, clinging desperately to his outstretched arm. Then an ashen pallor overspread his face, and he slunk nervously toward the kitchen, for there was the sound of footsteps on the little porch outside, followed by a brisk rap on the front door.

"Go!" whispered Christopher, hardly taking breath, and he stood waiting while Will ran along the wooden platform and past the stable toward the pasture.

The rap came again, and he turned quickly. "Quit your racket and let me get on my clothes!" he shouted, and hesitated a little longer.

As he stood alone there in the center of the room, his eyes, traversing the walls, fell on the portrait of Bolivar Blake, and with one of the fantastic tricks of memory there shot into his head the dying phrase of that gay sinner: "I may not sit with the saints, but I shall stand among the gentlemen."

"Precious old a.s.s!" he muttered, and unbarred the door.

As he flung it open the first rays of sunlight splashed across the threshold, and he was conscious, all at once, of a strange exhilaration, as if he were breasting one of the big waves of life.

"This is a pretty way to wake up a fellow who has been planting tobacco till he's stiff," he grumbled. "Is that you, Tom?" He glanced carelessly round, nodding with a kind of friendly condescension to each man of the little group. "How are you, Matthew? h.e.l.lo, Fred!"

Tom drew back, coughing, and sc.r.a.ped the heel of his boot on the topmost step.

"We didn't mean to git you out of bed, Mr. Christopher," he explained apologetically, "but the truth is we want Will Fletcher an' he ain't at home. The old man's murdered, suh."

"Murdered, is he?" exclaimed Christopher, with a long whistle, "and you want Will Fletcher--which shows what a very pretty sheriff you would make. Well, if you're so strong on his scent that you can't turn aside, most likely you'll find him sleeping off his drunk under my haystack. But if you're looking for the man who killed Bill Fletcher, then that's a different matter,"

he added, taking down his hat, "and I reckon, boys, I'm about ready to come along."

CHAPTER X. The Wheel of Life

Throughout the trial he wore the sullen reserve which closed over him like a visor when he approached one of the crises of life. He had made his confession and he stood to it. "I killed Bill Fletcher" he gave out flatly enough. What he could not give was an explanation of his unaccountable presence at the Hall so nearly upon midnight. When the question was first put to him he sneered and shrugged his shoulders with the hereditary gesture of the Blakes. "Why was he there? Well, why wasn't he there?" That was all. And Carraway, who had stood by his side since the day of the arrest, retired at last before an att.i.tude which he characterised as one of defiant arrogance.

It was this att.i.tude, people said presently, rather than the murder of Bill Fletcher, which brought him the sentence he heard with so insolent an indifference.

"Five years wasn't much for killin' a man, maybe," Tom Spade observed, "but it was a good deal, when you come to think of it, for a Blake to pay jest for gettin' even with a Fletcher. Why, he might have brained Bill Fletcher an' welcome," the storekeeper added a little wistfully, "if only he hadn't put on such a nasty manner afterward."

But it was behind this impregnable reserve that Christopher retreated as into a walled fortress. There had been no sentiment in his act, he told himself; he had not even felt the romantic fervour of the sacrifice. A certain staunch justice was all he saw in it, relieved doubtless by a share of his hereditary love of desperate hopes--of the hot--headed clinging to that last shifting foothold on which a man might still make his fight against the power of circ.u.mstance. And so, with that strange mixture of rustic crudeness and aristocratic arrogance, he turned his face from his friends and went stubbornly through the cross-questioning of the court.

>From first to last he had not wavered in his refusal to see Maria, and there had been an angry vehemence in the resistance he had made to her pa.s.sionate entreaty for a meeting. When by the early autumn he went from the little town gaol to serve his five years in the State prison, his most vivid memory of her was as she looked with the moonlight on her face in the open field. As the months went on, this gradually grew remote and dim in his remembrance, like a bright star over which the clouds thicken, and his thoughts declined, almost without an upward inspiration, upon the brutal level of his daily life. Mere physical disgust was his first violent recoil from what had seemed a curious deadness of his whole nature, and the awakening of the senses preceded by many months the final resurrection of the more spiritual emotions. The sources of health were still abundant in him, he admitted, if the vile air, the fetid smells, the closeness as of huddled animals, the filth, the obscenity, the insufferable b.e.s.t.i.a.l humanity could arouse in him a bodily nausea so nearly resembling disease. There were moments when he felt capable of any crime from sheer frenzied loathing of his surroundings--when for the sake of the clean s.p.a.ce of the tobacco fields and the pure water of the little spring he would have murdered Bill Fletcher a dozen times. As for the old man's death in itself, it had never caused him so much as a quiver of the conscience. Bill Fletcher deserved to die, and the world was well rid of him--that was all.

But his own misery! This was with him always, and there was no escape from the moral wretchedness which seemed to follow so closely upon crime. Fresh from the open country and the keen winds that blow over level s.p.a.ces, he seemed mentally and physically to wither in the change of air--to shrink slowly to the perishing root, like a plant that has been brought from a rich meadow to the aridity of the close--packed city. And with the growing of this strange form of homesickness he would be driven, at times, into an almost delirious cruelty toward those who were weaker than himself, for there were summer nights when he would brutally knock smaller men from the single window of the cell and cling, panting for breath, to the iron bars. As the year went on, his grim silence, too, became for those around him as the inevitable shadow of the prison, and he went about his daily work in a churlish loneliness which caused even the convicts among whom he lived to shrink back from his presence.