The Happy End Part 4

Wilmer was building a house for her just as he had built one for Hannah.

He remembered his delight and pride as it had approached completion; he remembered the evening, nearly twenty years ago, when he had sat on the bank across the road and seen it finished. Then he had ridden, without waiting to fix up, to the Braleys'; Hannah had scolded him as they sat in the parlor.

"I must talk to Lucy," he said in a different weary tone. Bareheaded he walked over into the pasture, now his. The cattle moved vaguely in the gloom, with softly blowing nostrils, and the streams were like smooth dark ribbons. When he returned to his house the lights were out, Wilmer Deakon was gone and Lucy was in bed.

He again examined his countenance in the mirror, but now he was surprised that it was not haggard with age. It seemed that twenty more years had been added to him since supper. He wondered whether there had ever been another man who had lost his love twice and saw that he had been a blind fool for not speaking in the June dusk when Lucy had come back from school.

Lucy, it developed, had spoken to Ettie, and there was a general discussion of her affair at breakfast.

Calvin carried away from it a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction, but for this he could find no tangible reason. Of course, he silently argued, the girl could not be expected to show her love for Wilmer publicly; it was enough that he had been a.s.sured of its strength; the fact of her agreement to marry him was final.

He went about his daily activities with a heavy absent-mindedness, with a dragging spirit. A man was coming from Washington to see him in the interest of a new practically permanent fencing, and he met him at the post-office, listened to a loud cheerful greeting with marked inattention.

The salesman was named Martin Eckles, and he was fashionably dressed in a suit of shepherd's check bound with braid, and had a flashing ring--a broad gold band set with a mystic symbol in rubies and diamonds. After his supper at the hotel he walked, following Calvin's direction, the short distance to the latter's house, where Calvin and Ettie Stammark and Lucy were seated on the porch.

Martin Eckles, it developed, was a fluent and persuasive talker, a man of the broadest worldly experiences and wit. He was younger than Calvin, but older than Wilmer Deakon, and a little fat. He had a small mustache cut above his lip, and closely shaved ruddy cheeks with a tinge of purple about his ears. Drawing out his monologue entertainingly he gazed repeatedly at Lucy. Calvin lost the sense of most that the other said; he was immersed in the past that had been made the present and then denied to him--it was all before him in the presence of Lucy, of Hannah come back with the unforgetable and magic danger of her appeal.

IX

In the extension of his commercial activity Martin Eckles kept his room at the Greenstream hotel and employed a horse and buggy for his excursions throughout the county. It had become his habit to sit through the evenings with the Stammarks where his flood of conversation never lessened. Lucy scarcely added a phrase to the sum of talk. She rocked in her chair with a slight endless motion, her dreaming gaze fixed on the dim valley.

Wilmer Deakon, on the occasion of his first encounter with Eckles at the Stammarks', acknowledged the other's phrase and stood waiting for Lucy to proceed with him to the parlor. But Lucy was apparently unaware of this; she sat calm and remote in her crisp white skirts, while Wilmer fidgeted at the door.

Soon, however, she said: "For goodness' sake, Wilmer, whatever's the matter with you? Can't you find a chair that suits you? You make a person nervous."

At the same time she rose ungraciously and followed him into the house.

Wilmer came out, Calvin thought, in an astonishingly short time.

Courting was nothing like it had been in his day. The young man muttered an unintelligible sentence that, from its connection, might be interpreted as a good night, and strode back to the barn and his horse.

Martin Eckles smiled: "The love birds must have been a little ruffled."

And Calvin, with a strong impression of having heard such a thing before, was vaguely uneasy. Eckles sat for a long s.p.a.ce; Lucy didn't appear, and at last the visitor rose reluctantly. But Lucy had not gone to bed; she came out on the porch and dropped with a flounce into a chair beside Calvin.

"Wilmer's pestering me to get married right away," she told him; "before ever the house is built. He seems to think I ought to be just crazy to take him and go to that lonely Sugarloaf place."

"It's what you promised for," Calvin reminded her; "nothing's turned up you didn't know about."

"If I did!" she exclaimed irritably. "What else is a girl to do, I'd like to ask? It's just going from one stove to another, here. Only it'll be worse in my case--you and Aunt Ettie have been lovely to me. I hate to cook!" she cried. "And it makes me sick to put my hands in greasy dishwater! I suppose that's wicked but I can't help it. When I told Wilmer that to-night he acted like I'd denied communion. I can't help it if the whippoorwills make me shiver, can I? Or if I want to see a person go by once in a while. I--I don't want to be bad--or to hurt you or Wilmer. Oh, I'll settle down, there's nothing else to do; I'll marry him and get old before my time, like the others."

Calvin Stammark leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and stared at her in shocked amazement--Hannah in every accent and feeling. The old sense of danger and helplessness flooded him. He thought of Phebe with her dyed hair and cigarette-stained lips, her stories of the stage and life; he thought of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. Now Lucy----

"Do you remember anything about your mother," he asked, "and before you came here?"

"Only that we were dreadfully unhappy," she replied. "There was a boarding house with actresses washing their stockings in the rooms and a landlady they were all afraid of. There was beer in the wash-stand pitcher. But that wouldn't happen to me," she a.s.serted; "I'd be different. I might be an actress, but in dramas where my hair would be down and everybody love me."

"You're going to marry Wilmer Deakon and be a proper happy wife!"

he declared, bringing his fist down on a hard palm. "Get this other nonsense out of your head!"

Suddenly he was trembling at the old catastrophe reopened by Lucy. His love for her, and his dread, choked him. She added nothing more, but sat rigid and pale and rebellious. Before long she went in, but Calvin stayed facing the darkness, the menace of the lonely valley. Except for the lumbermen it would be worse in the Sugarloaf cutting.

d.a.m.n the frogs!

Martin Eckles appeared in the buggy the following evening and offered to carry Lucy for a short drive to a near-by farm; with an air of indifference she accepted. Wilmer didn't call, and Calvin sat in silent perplexity with Ettie. The buggy returned later than they had allowed, and Lucy went up to bed without stopping on the porch.

The next morning Ettie, with something in her hand, came out to Calvin at the stable shed.

"I found this in Lucy's room," she said simply.

It was Martin Eckles' gold ring, set with the insignia in rubies, suspended in a loop of ribbon.

A cold angry cert.i.tude formed in his being. What a criminal fool he had been! What a blind b.o.o.by! His only remark, however, brought a puzzled expression to Ettie's troubled countenance. Calvin Stammark exclaimed, "Phebe Braley." He was silent for a little, his frowning gaze fixed beyond any visible object, then he added: "Put that back where you found it and forget everything."

Ettie laid a hand on his sleeve. "Now, Calvin," she begged, her voice low and strained, "promise me----"

"Forget everything!" he repeated harshly.

His face was dark, forbidding, the lines deeply bitten about a somber mouth, his eyes were like blue ice. He walked into Greenstream, where he saw the proprietor of the small single hotel; then, back in his room, he unwrapped from oiled leather a heavy blued revolver; and soon after he saddled his horse and was clattering in a sharp trot in the opposite direction from the village.

It was dark when, having returned, he dismounted and swung the saddle from the horse to its tree. Familiar details kept him a long while, his hands were steady but slow, automatic in movement. He went in through the kitchen past Ettie to his room, and after a little he re-wrapped the revolver and laid it back in its accustomed place. Supper, in spite of Lucy's sharp comment, was set by the stove, and Ettie was solicitous of his every possible need. He ate methodically what was offered, and afterward filled and lit his pipe. It soon went out. Once, on the porch, he leaned toward Lucy and awkwardly touched her shoulder.

X

Wilmer came. He was late, and Lucy said wearily, "I've got a headache to-night. Do you mind if we stay out here in the cool?"

He didn't, and his confident familiar planning took the place of Martin Eckles' more exciting narratives.

The next day, past noon, the proprietor of the Greenstream hotel left an excited group of men to stop Calvin as he drove in from Sugarloaf Valley.

He cried: "Eckles has been shot and killed. First they found the horse and buggy by the road, and then Martin Eckles. He had fallen out. One bullet did it."

"That's too bad," Calvin replied evenly. "Lawlessness ought to be put down." He had known Solon Entreken all his life. The level gaze of two men encountered and held.

Then: "I'll never say anything against that," the other p.r.o.nounced.

"It's mighty strange who could have shot Eckles and got clear away.

That's what he did, in spite of h.e.l.l and the sheriff."

Turning, after inevitable exclamations, toward home, Calvin found Lucy sitting moodily on the porch.

"I've got a right ugly piece of news," he told her, masking the painful interest with which he followed her expression. "Martin Eckles was killed yesterday; shot out of the buggy."

She grew pale, her breast rose in a sudden gasp and her hands were clenched.

"Oh!" she whispered, horrified.

But there was nothing in her manner beyond the natural detestation of such brutality; nothing, he saw, hidden.

"He wanted me to go away with him," she swept on; "and get married in Stanwick. Martin wanted me to see the world. He said I ought to, and not stay here all my life."

The misery that settled over her, the hopelessness dulling her youth filled him with a pa.s.sionate resentment at the fate that made her what she was and seemingly condemned her to eternal denial. His love for her--Lucy, Hannah, Hannah, Lucy--was intolerably keen. He went to her, bending with a riven hand on the arm of her chair.