The Happy End Part 5

"Do you want Wilmer?" he demanded. "Do you love him truly? Is he enough?"

"I don't know." Slow tears wet her cheeks. "I can't say. I ought to; he's good and faithful, and with some of me that's enough. But there's another part; I can't explain it except to say it's a kind of excitement for the life Mr. Eckles told us about, all those lights and restaurants and theaters. Sometimes I think I'll die, I want it so much; then it comes over me how ungrateful I am to you and Aunt Ettie, and I hate myself for the way I treat Wilmer."

"Do you love him?" he insisted.

"Perhaps not like you mean."

All that had been so long obscured in his mind and heart slowly cleared to understanding--Lucy Braley, Richmond's wife; Phebe; Hannah; and again Lucy, Lucy Vibard had this common hunger for life, for brightness; they were as helpless in its grasp as he had been to hold Hannah. Phebe's return, Martin Eckles--were only incidents in a great inner need. In itself it wasn't wicked; circ.u.mstance had made it seem wrong; Phebe's greenish hair, the mark of so much spoiled, Hannah's unhappy death--were the result of aspirations; they fretted and bruised, even killed themselves, like gay young animals, innocent animals, in a dark lonely enclosure.

They were really finer than the satisfied women who faded to ugliness in the solitary homes of the Greenstream mountains; not better, for example, than Ettie--it might be that they weren't so good, not so high in heaven; but they were finer in the manner of blooded horses rebelling against the plow traces. They were more elegant, slimmer, with a greater fire. That too was the secret of their memorable power over him; he wanted a companion different from a kitchen drudge; when he returned home at evening, he wanted a wife cool and sweet in crisp white with a yellow ribbon about her waist, and store slippers. He loved Lucy's superiority--it was above ordinary things. "Like a star," Calvin Stammark told himself.

He, with everything else that had combated their desire, depriving them of the very necessities for his adoration, had been to blame.

"Lucy," he said, bending over her and speaking rapidly, "let's you and me go and learn all this life together. Let's run away from Greenstream and Wilmer Deakon and even Ettie, what we ought to hold by, and see every theater in the country. I've got enough money----"

The radiance of the gesture by which she interrupted his speech filled him with pounding joy.

"Oh, shall we!" she cried; and then hugged him wildly, her warm young arms about his neck.

"Of course we will," he rea.s.sured her; "and right away, to-morrow. You and me."

He felt her lips against his, and then more cautiously she took up the immediate planning of their purpose. It would be ridiculously easy; they would drive to Stanwick in the buggy.

"The hotels and all," she continued with shining eyes; "and n.o.body will think it's queer. I'll be your daughter, like always."

Calvin turned abruptly from her and faced the valley saturated with slumberous sunlight. Lucy hesitated for a moment and then fled lightly into the house. After a little he heard her singing on the upper floor.

People wouldn't think it was queer because she would be his daughter, "like always."

Yet he wasn't old beyond hope, past love--as strong and nearly as springy as a hickory sapling. He had waited half his life for this.

Calvin slowly smiled in bitterness and self-contempt; a pretty figure for a young girl to admire, he thought, losing the sense of mere physical fitness. Anyhow Lucy was supremely happy and safe, and he had accomplished it. He was glad that he had been so industrious and successful. Lucy could have almost anything she wanted--pretty clothes and rings with real jewels, necklaces hung with better than Scotch pebbles.

Perhaps when she had seen the world--its bigness and noise and confusion--after her longing was answered, she would turn back to him.

Already he was oppressed by a feeling of strangeness, of loss at leaving the high valleys of home.

THE EGYPTIAN CHARIOT

Lemuel Doret walked slowly home from the prayer meeting with his being vibrating to the triumphant beat of the last hymn. It was a good hymn, filled with promised joy for every one who conquered sin. The long twilight of early summer showed the surrounding fields still bright green, but the more distant hills were vague, the sky was remote and faintly blue, and shadows thickened under the heavy maples that covered the single street of Nantbrook. The small frame dwellings of the village were higher than the precarious sidewalk; flights of steps mounted to the narrow porches; and though Lemuel Doret realized that his neighbors were sitting outside he did not look up, and no voices called down arresting his deliberate progress.

An instant bitterness, tightening his thin metallic lips and narrowing a cold fixed gaze, destroyed the harmony of the a.s.sured salvation. Lemuel Doret silently cursed the pinched stupidity of the country clods. The slow helpless fools! If instead of muttering in groups one of the men would face him with the local hypocrisy he'd sink a heel in his jaw. The bitterness expanded into a hatred like the gleam on a knife blade; his hands, spare and hard, grew rigid with the desire to choke a thick throat.

Then the rage sank before a swift self-horror, an overwhelming conviction of his relapse into unutterable sin. He stopped and in a spiritual agony, forgetful of his surroundings, half lifted quivering arms to the dim sky: "O Christ, lean down from the throne and hold me steady."

He stood for a moment while a monotonous chatter on a porch above dropped to a curious stillness. It seemed to him that his whisper was heard and immediately answered; anyhow peace slowly enveloped him once more, the melody of hope was again uppermost in his mind. He went forward, procuring a cigarette from a mended ragged pocket.

His house, reached by a short steep path and sagging steps, was dark; at first he saw no one, then the creak of a rocking-chair in the open doorway indicated Bella, his wife.

"Give me a cigarette," she demanded, her penetrating voice dissatisfied.

"You know I don't want you to smoke anywhere you can be seen," he answered. "Since we've come here to live we have to mind the customs.

The women'll never take to you smoking cigarettes."

"Ah, h.e.l.l, what do I care! We came here, but it ain't living. It makes me sick, and you make me sick I Can't you sing and pray in the city as well as among these hicks?"

"I'm afraid of it," he said, brief and somber. "And I don't want Flavilla brought up with any of the gang we knew. Where is she?"

"I sent her to bed. She fussed round till she got me nervous."

"Did she feel good?"

"If she didn't a smack would have cured her."

He pa.s.sed Bella, rocking sharply, into the dank interior.

On the right was the bare room where he had his dilapidated barber's chair and shelf with a few mugs, brushes and other scant necessities.

There had been no customers to-day nor yesterday; still, it was the middle of the week and what trade there was generally concentrated on Sat.u.r.day. Beyond he went upstairs to Flavilla's bed. She was awake, twisting about in a fragmentary nightgown, dark against the disordered sheet.

"It's dreadful hot," she complained shortly; "my head's hot too. The window won't go up."

Lemuel Doret crossed the narrow bare floor and dragged the sash open; then he moved his daughter while he smoothed the bed and freshened a harsh pillow. She whimpered.

"You're too big to cry without any reason," he informed her, leaving to fetch a gla.s.s of water from the tap in the kitchen.

Usually she responded to his intimations of her increasing age and wisdom, but to-night she was listless. She turned away from him, her arms flung above her head and wispy hair veiling her damp cheek.

"Keep still, can't you?" and he gathered her hair into a clumsy plait.

The darkness about him seeped within, into his hope and courage and resolution; all that he had determined to do seemed impossibly removed.

The whole world resembled Nantbrook--a place of universal condemnation, forgiving nothing. He felt a certainty that even the few dollars he had honestly earned would now be stopped.

The air grew clearer and deeper in color, and stars brightened. Lemuel Doret wondered about G.o.d. There was no doubt of His power and glory or of the final triumph of heaven established and earth, sin, destroyed.

wickedness was equally plain; it was the ways of the righteous that bewildered him--the conduct of the righteous and, in the face of his supreme recognition, the extreme difficulty of providing life for Flavilla--and Bella.

He consciously added his wife's name. Somehow his daughter was the sole objective measure of his determination to build up, however late, a home here and in eternity.

It was not unreasonable, in view of the past, to suppose that he had no chance of succeeding. Yet religion was explicit upon that particular; it was founded on the very hopes of sinners, on redemption. But he could do nothing without an opportunity to make the small living they required; if the men of Nantbrook, of the world, wouldn't come to him to be barbered, and if he had no money to go anywhere else to begin again, he was helpless. Everything was conspiring to thrust him back into the city, of which he had confessed his fear, back----

He rose and stood above the child's thin exposed body--suddenly frozen into a deathlike sleep--chilled with a vision, a premonition, the insidious possibility of surrender. He saw, too, that it was a solitary struggle; even his devotion to Flavilla, shut in the single s.p.a.ce of his own heart, helped to isolate him in what resembled a surrounding blackness rent with blinding flashes of lightning.

The morning sun showed him spare, with a curious appearance of being both wasted and grimly strong; he moved with an alert, a watchful ease, catlike and silent; and his face was pallid with gray shadows. He stood in trousers and undershirt, suspenders hanging down, before the small dim mirror in the room where he had the barber chair, pasting his hair down with an odorous brilliantine. This was his intention, but he saw with sharp discomfort that bristling strands defied his every effort.

The hot edge of anger cut at him, but, singing, he dissipated it:

"_Why should I feel discouraged?

Why should the shadows fall?

Why should my heart be lonely, And long for heaven_----"