The Happy End Part 3

Soon it would be evening and the frogs would begin again, the frogs and whippoorwills. The valley, just as Hannah had said, was lonely.

He stirred and later found himself some supper--in the kitchen where everything was new.

On the following morning he left the Greenstream settlement; it was Friday, and Monday he returned with Ettie, his sister. She was remarkably like him--tall and angular, with a gaunt face and steady blue eyes. Older than Calvin, she had settled into a complete acquiescence with whatever life brought; no more for her than the keeping of her brother's house. Calvin, noting the efficient manner in which she ordered their material affairs, wondered at the fact that she had not been married. Men were unaccountable, but none more than himself, with his unquenchable longing for Hannah.

This retreated to the back of his being. He never spoke of her. Indeed he tried to put her from his thoughts, and with a measure of success.

But it never occurred to him to consider any other girl; that possibility was closed. Those he saw--and they were uniformly kind, even inviting--were dull after Hannah.

Instead he devoted himself to the equivalent, in his undertakings, of Ettie's quiet capability. The following year a small number of the steers grazing beyond the road were his; in two years more Senator Alderwith died, and there was a division of his estate, in which Calvin a.s.sumed large liabilities, paying them as he had contracted. The timber in Sugarloaf Valley drew speculators--he sold options and bought a place in the logging development.

It seemed to him that he grew older, in appearance anyhow, with exceptional rapidity; his face grew leaner and his beard, which he continued to shave, was soiled with gray hair.

He avoided the Braleys and their clearing; and when circ.u.mstance drew him into conversation with Richmond or Hosmer he studiously spoke of indifferent things. He heard nothing of Hannah. Yet he learned in the various channels of communication common to remote localities that Richmond Braley was doing badly. Hosmer went to bank in one of the newly prosperous towns of West Virginia and apparently left all family obligations behind; Susan died of lung fever; and then, at the post-office, Calvin was told that Richmond himself was dangerously sick.

He left the mail with Ettie at his door and rode on, turning for the first time in nine years into the narrow valley of the Braleys' home.

The place had been neglected until it was hardly distinguishable from the surrounding tangled wild. Such sheep as he saw were in wretched condition, wild and ma.s.sed with filth and burrs.

Mrs. Braley was filling a large gla.s.s flask with hot water for her husband; and to Calvin's surprise a child with a quant.i.ty of straight pale-brown hair and wide-opened hazel-brown eyes was seated in the kitchen watching her.

"How is Richmond?" he asked, his gaze straying involuntarily to the girl.

"Kingdom Come's how he is," Lucy Braley replied. "Yes, and the poorhouse will end us unless Hosmer has a spark of good feeling. I sent him a postal card to come a long while back, but he hasn't so much as answered. Here, Lucy"--she turned to the child--"run up with this."

"Lucy?" Calvin Stammark asked when they were alone.

"Been here two weeks," Mrs. Braley told him. "What will become of her's beyond me. She is Hannah's daughter, and Hannah is dead."

There was a sharp constriction of Calvin's heart. Hannah's daughter, and Hannah was dead!

"As far as I know," the other continued in a strained metallic voice, "the child's got no father you could fix. Her mother wrote the name was Lucy Vibard, and she'd called her after me. But when I asked her she didn't seem to know anything about it.

"Hannah was alone and dog poor when she died, that's certain. Like everything else I can lay mind on she came to a bad end--Lord reckons where Phebe is. I always thought you were weak fingered to let Hannah go--with that house built and all. I suppose maybe you weren't, though; well out of a slack bargain."

Calvin Stammark scarcely heard her; his being was possessed by the pitiable image of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. He had always pictured her--except in the fleet vision of debas.e.m.e.nt--as young and graceful and disturbing. Without further speech he left the kitchen and crossed the house to the shut parlor. It was screened against the day, dim and musty and damp. The orange plush of the chairs and the narrow uncomfortable sofa, carefully dusted, was as bright as it had been when he had last seen it--was it ten years ago?

Here she had stood, her fingers tapping on the table, when he had made the unfortunate remark about Phebe; the lamplight had illuminated her right cheek. Here she had proclaimed her impatience with Greenstream, with its loneliness, her hunger for life. Here he had lost her. A sudden need to see Hannah's daughter invaded him and he returned to the kitchen.

The child was present, silent; she had Hannah's eyes, Hannah's hair.

Seated by Richmond Braley's bed he realized instantly that the old man was dying; and mentally he composed the urgent message to be sent to Hosmer. But that failed to settle the problem of Lucy's safety--Hannah's Lucy, who might have been his too. The solution of that difficulty slowly took form in his thoughts. There was no need to discuss it with Ettie--his duty, yes, and his desire was clear.

He took her home directly after Richmond's funeral, an erratic wind blowing her soft loose hair against his face as he drove.

VII

There had been additions to Calvin Stammark's house--the half story raised, and the length increased by a room. This was now furnished as the parlor and had an entrance from the porch extended across the face of the dwelling; the middle lower room was his; the chamber designed for his married life was a seldom used dining room; while Ettie and Lucy were above. A number of sheds for stabling and implements, chicken coops and pig pen had acc.u.mulated at the back; the corn and buckwheat climbed the mountain; and the truck patch was wide and luxuriant.

A narrow strip, bright, in season, with the petunias and cinnamon pinks which Ettie tended, separated the dwelling from the public road; and the flowers more than anything else attracted Hannah's daughter. Calvin talked with her infrequently, but a great deal of his silent attention was directed at the child.

Already Lucy had a quality of appeal to which he watched Ettie respond.

The latter took a special pride in making Lucy as pretty as possible; in the afternoon she would dress her in sheer white with a ribbon in her hair. She spared Lucy many of the details of housework in which the latter could have easily a.s.sisted her; and when Calvin protested she replied that she was so accustomed to doing that it was easier for her to go ahead.

Calvin's feelings were mixed. At first he had told himself that Lucy would be, in a way, his daughter; he would bring her up as his own; and in the end what he had would be hers, just as it should have been Hannah's. However, his att.i.tude was never any that might be recognized as that of parenthood. He never grew completely accustomed to her presence, she was always a subject of interest and speculation. He continued to get pleasure from her slender graceful being and the little airs of delicacy she a.s.sumed.

He was conscious, certainly, that Lucy was growing older--yet not so fast as he--but he had a shock of surprise when she informed him that she was fifteen. Calvin pinched her cheek, and, sitting on the porch, heard her within issuing a peremptory direction to Ettie. The elder made no reply and, he knew, did as Lucy wished. This disturbed him. There wasn't a finer woman living than Ettie Stammark, and he didn't purpose to have Lucy impudent to her. Lucy, he decided, was getting a little beyond them. She was quick at her lessons, the Greenstream teacher said.

Lucy would have considerable property when he died; he'd like her to have all the advantages possible; and--very suddenly--Calvin decided to send her away to school, to Stanwick, the small city to and from which the Greenstream stage drove.

She returned from her first term at Christmas, full of her experiences with teachers and friends, to which Ettie and he listened with absorbed attention. Now she seemed farther from him than before; and he saw that a likeness to Hannah was increasing; not in appearance--though that was not dissimilar--but in the quality that had established Hannah's difference from other girls, the quality for which he had never found a name. The a.s.sumptions of Lucy's childhood had become strongly marked preferences for the flowers of existence, the ease of the portico rather than the homely labor of the back of the house.

Neither his sister nor he resented this or felt that Lucy was evading her just duties; rather they enjoyed its difference from their own practical beings and affairs. They could afford to have her in fresh laundered frills and they secretly enjoyed the manner in which she instructed them in social conventions.

At her home-coming for the summer she brought to an end the meals in the kitchen; but when she left once more for Stanwick and school Ettie and Calvin without remark drifted back to the comfortable convenience of the table near the cooking stove.

This period of Lucy's experience at an end she arrived in Greenstream on a hot still June evening. Neither Calvin nor his sister had been able to go to Stanwick for the school commencement, and Calvin had been too late to meet the stage. After the refreshing cold water in the bright tin basin by the kitchen door he went to his room for a presentable necktie and handkerchief--Lucy was very severe about the latter--and then walked into the dining room.

The lamp was not yet lit, the light was elusive, tender, and his heart contracted violently at the youthful yet mature back toward him. She turned slowly, a hand resting on the table, and Calvin Stammark's senses swam. An inner confusion invaded him, pierced by a sharp unutterable longing.

"Hannah," he whispered.

She smiled and advanced; but, his heart pounding, Calvin retreated. He must say something reasonable, tell her that they were glad to have her back--mustn't leave them again. She kissed him, and, his eyes shut, the touch of her lips re-created about him the parlor of the Braleys,--the stiffly arranged furniture with its gay plush, the varnished fretwork of the organ, the pink glow of the lamp.

She was Hannah! The resemblance was so perfect--her cheek's turn, her voice, sweet with a trace of petulance, her fingers--that it was sustained in a flooding illumination through the commonplace revealing act of supper. It was as if the eighteen years since Hannah, his Hannah, was a reality were but momentary, the pa.s.sage of the valley. His love for her was unchanged--no, here at least, was a difference; it was greater, keener; exactly as if during the progress of their intimacy he had been obliged to go away from her for a while.

She accompanied Ettie to the kitchen and Calvin sat on the porch in a gathering darkness throbbing with frogs and perfumed with drifting locust blooms. Constellation by constellation the stars glimmered into being. Hannah, Lucy! They mingled and in his fiber were forever one. He gave himself up to the beauty of his pa.s.sion, purified and intense from long patience and wanting, amazed at the miracle that had brought back everything infinitely desirable.

He forgot his age, and, preparing for the night, saw with a sense of personal outrage his seamed countenance reflected in the mirror of the bureau. Yet in reality he wasn't old--forty-something--still, not fifty.

He was as hard and nearly as springy as a hickory sapling. There was a saying in which he found vast comfort--the prime, the very prime of life.

VIII

His enormous difficulty would be to bring Lucy to the understanding of his new--but it was the old--att.i.tude toward her. If she had never become completely familiar to him a.s.sociation had made him a solid recognized part of her existence; if not exactly a father, an uncle at the very least. Calvin realized that she would be profoundly shocked by any abrupt revelation of his feeling. Yet he was for the time in no hurry to bring about the desired change in their relationship. His life had been so long empty that it was enough to dwell on the great happiness of his repossession.

This, he knew, could not continue, but at present, today, it was almost enough. Before he was aware, the summer had gone, the mountains were sheeted in gold; and he was still dreaming, putting off the actuality before them.

The logging in Sugarloaf Valley had grown to an operation of importance, and a great deal of his time was spent watching the spur of railroad creep forward and the clearing of new sections; sawmills and camps were in course of erection; and what had been a still green cleft in the mountains was filled with human activity. He had secured an advantageous position for a young man from the part of the county inhabited by the Stammark family, Wilmer Deakon, and consulted with him frequently in connection with his interests.

Wilmer was to the last degree dependable; a large grave individual who took a serious interest in the welfare of his fellows and supported established customs and inst.i.tutions. He sang in a resounding barytone with the Methodist Church choir; his dignified bearing gave weight to the school board; and he acc.u.mulated a steadily growing capital at the Greenstream bank. An admirable individual, Calvin thought, and extended to him the wide hospitality of his house.

Lucy apparently had little to say to Wilmer Deakon; indeed, when he was not present, to their great amus.e.m.e.nt she imitated his deliberate balanced speech. She said that he was too solemn--an opinion with which Calvin privately agreed--and made an irreverent play on his name and the place he should occupy in the church. It seemed that she found a special pleasure in annoying him; and on an occasion when Calvin had determined to reprove her for this he was surprised by Winner's request to speak to him outside.

Wilmer Deakon said abruptly: "Lucy and I are promised to each other."

Calvin stood gazing at him in a lowering complete surprise, at a loss for words, when the other continued with an intimation of his peculiar qualifications for matrimony, the incontrovertible fact that he could and would take care of Lucy. He stopped at the appropriate moment and waited confidently for Calvin Stammark's approval.

The latter, out of a gathering immeasurable rage, almost shouted: "You get to h.e.l.l off my place!"

Wilmer Deakon was astounded but otherwise unshaken. "That's no way to answer a decent man and a proper question," he replied. "Lucy and I want to be married. There's nothing wrong with that. But you look as if I had offered to disgrace her. Why, Mr. Stammark, you can't keep her forever.

I reckon it'll be hard on you to have her go, but you must make up your mind to it some day. She's willing, and you know all about me. Then Lucy won't be far away from you all. I've cleared the brush up and right now the bottom of our house is laid in Sugarloaf."

Calvin's anger sank before a sense of helplessness at this latter fact.