The Forfeit Part 36

The rack of that moment was superlative. The woman's hands clenched and her finger nails dug into the soft flesh of her palms. There was no greeting upon her lips. She only had power to stare; her wide beautiful eyes were searching the face of the man she loved, searching it as the criminal in the dock might search the face of the judge about to pa.s.s sentence.

Her tongue was ready for its release. Pent words lay deep in her soul for an outpouring at the lightest sign. But these things were dependent, dependent upon the reading she found in the man's eyes.

The horse stood drooping at the termination of its effort. The man sprang from the saddle. A barn-hand took the beast away to its stable.

Elvine's tongue remained almost cleaving to the roof of her mouth.

The man's fair brows were depressed. His eyes were sternly cold. And not once did they turn in her direction. He spoke in his usual tone to the barn-hand. He issued his orders without a sign of emotion.

Elvine could stand no more. She stirred. Then slowly she pa.s.sed within the house.

Presently Jeff's step sounded on the veranda. It was quick. There was nothing lagging in it. The woman gripped the back of a chair in the living-room in which she had taken refuge. She was seeking support.

The man entered the room. Nor did he remove his hat. He stood just within the window opening, and his eyes, cold as the gleam of the mountain glaciers, regarded her steadily.

"I see you understand," he said. "You realized what must happen when I visited Dug McFarlane in the matter of Peters, who bought your dead husband's farm. You knew it when you read that letter I gave you. And so you protested. So you a.s.sured me of--your regard."

He came a step nearer. The movement was almost involuntary.

"I have prayed to G.o.d that some day he might bring me face to face with the person who sold my brother's life. He has granted me my prayer.

But it never entered my wildest dreams that it could be the woman I married. I never questioned your past. To me it was sufficient that you had taught me the meaning of love. To me you must be all you seemed. No more, no less. G.o.d help me, I had no imagination to tell me that so fair a body could contain so foul a heart. Were you not my wife, were you a man, I should know how to deal with that which lies between us. As it is you must thank the difference in our s.e.x for that which nothing else could have done for you. As yet I have not had the time to arrange the details of our future. To-morrow, perhaps, things will have cleared in my mind. I shall sleep to-night over at Bud's----"

"Oh, Jeff, Jeff, have mercy. I----"

"Mercy? Mercy?" A sudden fire blazed up where only a frigid light had shone. The man's tones were alive with a fury of pa.s.sion. "Did you have mercy? Was there one merciful, womanly emotion in your cruel, selfish heart when you sent those men, that man to his death for ten thousand filthy dollars? Pray to G.o.d for mercy, not to me."

A curious sullen light dawned in the woman's eyes. But even as it dawned it faded with the man's movement to depart.

"You--you won't leave me?" she pleaded. "Oh, Jeff, I love you so.

What I did was in ignorance, in cruel, selfish longing. I had been reduced to the life of a drudge without hope, without even a house fit for existence. I believed I had honest right. I believed even that my act was a just one. Jeff, Jeff, don't leave me, don't drive me out of your life. I cannot bear it. Anything, anything but that. My G.o.d, I don't deserve it. I don't--true. Jeff--Jeff!"

Her final appeal came as the man, without a word, pa.s.sed through the open window. She followed him in a desperate hope. But the hope was vain. She saw him mount the fresh horse which had been brought round and left at the tying post.

As he turned the beast about to depart, just for one instant he looked in her direction.

"I will see you again in the morning. By that time I shall have decided what is best for us both."

He waited for no more. There was nothing to wait for. He lifted the reins and his horse set off. The dust rose up and screened him from view.

Once more Elvine was standing on the veranda. Once more her gaze was following the trail of rising dust. But there was no fever of suspense in her beautiful eyes now. There were not even tears. The blow had fallen. Fate had caught up with her. Its merciless onrush had overwhelmed her. She was crushed. She was broken under its sledge-hammer blow. She stood drooping, utterly, utterly broken and spiritless before the man's swift, brief indictment and action.

The end had come. Nor had it anything of the end she had visualized in her dread. It was ten times more cruel than she had even dared to dream.

CHAPTER XX

AT BUD'S

Supper was over when Jeff arrived. He came straight into the room where the colored girl had just finished clearing the table. Nan was returning a few odds and ends to their places. Bud had already lit his evening pipe preparatory to settling down for the brief interim before turning in for the night.

There was no preamble. There was no sign of emotion, even at the moment of his arrival. Jeff launched his request at father and daughter in a voice such as he might have used in the most commonplace of affairs.

It was a request to be put up for the night.

But both Bud and Nan were startled. Nan's cheeks paled, and imagination gripped her. She said nothing. With Bud to be startled was to instantly resort to verbal expression.

"Wot's wrong?" he demanded.

Then the storm broke. It broke almost immoderately before these two who were the intimates of Jeff's life. All that had been withheld before Dug McFarlane, all which he had refused to display before the wife he had set up for his worship, Jeff had no scruples in laying before these two. It was the sure token of the relations between them, relations of perfect trust and sympathy.

Bud sat gazing at the outward sign of the pa.s.sionate fires he had always known to lie smouldering in the depths of this man's soul. Nan stood paralyzed before such violence. Both knew that h.e.l.l was raging under the storm of emotion. Both knew that the wounds inflicted upon this man's strong heart were well-nigh mortal.

The whole story was told, broken, disjointed. For the first time Nan learned the result of the search for an erring twin brother, and her horror was unbounded. A heart full of tenderness bled for the man whose sufferings she was witnessing. The story of Elvine's own actions filled her with revolting, yet with pity. It was not in her to condemn easily. She felt that such acts were beyond her powers of judgment.

The man's grief, his bitter, pa.s.sionate resentment smote her beyond any sufferings she had ever known herself. Elvine absorbed all the anger she could bestow, but even so it was infinitesimal beside the harvest of grief which the sight of this man's suffering yielded her. That was the paramount emotion of the moment with her. That, and the injustice she deemed to have been meted out to him.

It was not until the great crescendo of the man's storm of grief had pa.s.sed that Nan bethought herself of the need in which he stood. Nor was that need apparent until his whole note had changed to a moody bitterness with which he regarded the future. Then she understood the demon that was knocking at the door of his soul.

Immediately her decision was taken. She left the two men together and went to make the necessary preparations for this refugee's accommodation. Curiously enough, these preparations were not complete for nearly an hour, at the time, in fact, that it was her father's habit to seek his bed.

When she returned to the parlor the place was full of the reek of Bud's tobacco, but it was only from the one pipe. Neither of the men were talking when she entered the room, and her glance pa.s.sed swiftly from one to the other.

She moved over to where Jeff was sitting with his back turned to her, and stood behind his chair.

"Everything's fixed for you, Jeff," she said. "But--but maybe you don't feel like turning in yet. My Daddy usually goes at this time, and--he's had a hard day."

Bud looked across at her. His pipe was removed from his mouth for the purpose of protest. But the protest remained unspoken in face of the meaning he beheld in the girl's brown eyes. Instead he rose heavily from his rocker.

"Say, jest take your time, Jeff, boy," he said. "Guess you'll need to think hard before mornin'. I don't guess it's your way to jump at things. I ain't never see you jump yet. Anyway, when you're thinkin', boy, it'll be best to remember that a woman's jest a woman, an' her notions ain't allus our notions."

Nan came over to him, and he rested one great arm about her shoulders, and stooped and kissed her.

"Good-night, little gal," he said. "Maybe Jeff'll excuse me. An'

maybe you ken tell him some o' them things that don't come easy to me.

So long, Jeff. I'll sure see you in the mornin' before you quit."

He stood uncertainly for a moment with his arm upon Nan's shoulders.

He seemed to want to say more, and was at a loss how to say it.

Finally he stuck his pipe back into his mouth with a savage thrust and lumbered heavily from the room.

Nan understood. She knew he was laboring under profound emotion, and a feeling of self-disgust at his own inability to help his partner and friend.

As the door closed she moved over to the table and leaned against it.

Jeff's back was toward her, and his face was turned in the direction of the window, across which the curtains had not yet been drawn.

He was leaning forward, his gaze intent and straight ahead out into the black night beyond. His elbows were on his knees, and his hands were clasped, and hanging between them. To the sympathetic heart of Nan there was despair in every line of his att.i.tude. She nerved herself to carry out her decisions.

"Jeff!"