The Happy Warrior Part 46

She answered: "That all I had tried should be broken suddenly--suddenly as a star falls. I had not minded if I had been warned."

"What have you tried, Ima?--I want to know--to show you how sorry I am."

She was silent for a considerable s.p.a.ce. When she began to speak she spoke without pause, without modulations of her low tone, without notice of the stammered exclamations that her words broke from him.

"Hear me, then," she said. "The thing is no more mine--thou mayst know it. To what shall I go back for when I first knew that I loved thee?--"

"_Ima!_"

"Why, from the first I knew it and began to try to fit me for thee.

Why went I to shut myself in roofs and walls, to learn hard books and gentle ways and how to speak in thy fashion?--so thou shouldst not scorn me, so I might make me to be seemly in thy sight--"

"_Ima! I never dreamt--!_"

"--Why have I gone my ways so--winter by winter leaving my father's van? Because I loved thee since I first saw thee--"

"Don't! Don't!" he cried. There was something completely terrible to him in this avowal from a woman--immodest, shameful, horrible--that must cause her violation of her most sacred feelings as they would be violated were she thrust naked before him; that caused him agony for her suffering, and agony that he should see it, as he would endure agony for her and for himself if made to see her nudity. "Don't, Ima!

Don't! I understand--I see everything now. I ought to have known!"

But she went on--it might have been some requiem she made to some poor treasured thing now dead in her extended arms. She went on: "Because I loved thee--ah, worshipped all thy doings, all thy looks--loved thee with all the love that men and women love--as mothers love, as lovers love, as friends love, as brothers love,--there is no love but I have loved thee with it, and I have thought them all and loved thee with each one the better to enjoy my love--"

"_Ima!_"

"--Why cried I 'this to happen!' Because by thy kiss I saw that I was nothing to thee--and less than nothing. All my poor trying suddenly proved of no avail. All my poor fancy that haply thou mightst turn to me if I could be worthy of thee suddenly gone to dust that the winds sport. Why cried I 'ended that!'--"

She sighed very deeply. Her trembling had in some degree communicated itself to him. He trembled for the shame he knew she must be suffering, and for the effect upon him that her gentle, even voice had, crooning its tragedy in the darkness of their remote and silent situation, and for the effect upon him of that long sigh--rising and then falling away to tiniest sound, as it had been the pa.s.sing of some spirit released to glide away across the bracken.

"--Why cried I 'ended that'?" and then her long, sad sigh; and then: "Because all is nought, little master;" and he saw her fingers extend and her head bow a little....

She arose then, slowly, and he went back to give her room. Her hair had slipped the last coil that held it, and was in a black sheen to her waist before one shoulder and in a black sheen to her waist behind her back. She began to loop it up with deft but tired fingers and looked at him while she twined it. Her face was very kind to him; the stars caught it, and he saw those stars upon her mild mouth that had tricked him to his wanton act: they seemed to show her almost smiling at him.

He asked: "Are we going now?"

She smiled then, gently. "Nay," she said. "I have left my poor secrets here--suffer me to go alone." Then turned and left him; and he watched her form swiftly merging to the darkness--now high among the bracken, now lower and lower yet, as though it were a deepening pool she entered. Now gone.

III

It seemed to Percival, left alone, as if some horrible and most oppressive trouble had befallen him. This piteous thing had struck so suddenly that for some moments he remained only numbed by it, as numbness precedes the onset of pain from a blow. When the full meaning returned to him, "Good G.o.d!" he cried aloud, "What a thing to have happened!" and most tenderly--with increasing tenderness, with increasing grief--he went through all she had revealed and how she had revealed it. It was surely the most monstrous pitiful thing that ever could be, her secret plots and strivings to fit herself for what she yearned--tasking herself in "gentle ways," in speech of his fashion, in hard books, in the life between walls and under roofs; he ached for her in every bone as he thought of her thus schooling herself--for him.

"Oh, horrible, horrible!" he muttered, writhing for her to remember all her little cares for him--her attention to his clothes, her concern that he should not get into "rough ways"; horrible! horrible! now that he knew their loving purpose. And then her revelation of it! He must rise and pace, the better to endure the recollection of that. How terribly she struggled in his arms! "G.o.d, what a beast a man can be!"

he cried. What agony must have wrung that cry, "Ah, Percival, how you must despise me!" What agony that "This to happen!" What pain, what bleeding of her heart, that lamentable ending--"Because all is naught, little master!" Happy, happy time when first she used to call him by that quaint endearment; in what travail, in what blackness, it had come from her now! What had she done? Why fastened such a love upon him whose love was utterly pledged away? Nay, the torment was What had he done? What vile and brutal ends had he used to knock her to her senses? What manner of sympathy had he given her when she lay bleeding?

"I must go to her," he said abruptly; and at the best speed the darkness would admit he twisted his way through the paths among the bracken towards the distant nest of lights.

CHAPTER III

PERCIVAL SHOWS HIS FISTS

I

He ran in two moods. First he was earnest above all things to hold her hands and comfort her--to explain, to soothe, to endear. To hold her hands and tell her how fond, how very, very fond he was of her, of how they should be sister and brother, and the happiest and fondest sister and brother that ever were. To thank her, thank her for all her sweet, devoted ways. To tell her how good she was, how he admired her. That was one mood. The other was a savage and burning anger at himself, partly for his wanton act towards her, partly born of his agony of discomfort at the revelation she had made. The moods were intermingled. He yearned to comfort her for her suffering, he writhed to think he had witnessed that suffering. He was in the one part utter tenderness towards her--in the other flame, furious flame, most eager for vent.

The tricks and chances of life had fuel for the flame, not outlet for the tenderness, as he came to the nest of lights.

He went quickly to j.a.phra's van. It was end-on to him as he approached; and as he came to the shafts he saw a group of men there talking,--j.a.phra, Stingo, Boss Maddox. He supposed--and was confirmed by the words he caught as he pa.s.sed them--that they were discussing the dispute. "I'll ask Pinsent," he heard Boss Maddox say, and saw and heard him turn and call "Pinsent! Here, Foxy, where are you?" as though Foxy Pinsent had been of the group a moment before.

He pa.s.sed quickly to the tail of the van and himself found Pinsent.

"Angry, my pretty duck?" Foxy Pinsent was saying. "Angry? Chuck!

chuck!"

It was to Ima that he was saying it; and with his last words, lolling against the entrance steps, he put out a hand to chuck her chin. She stepped out of his reach, and in relief cried, "Ah, Percival!" as Percival approached.

Flame, furious flame most eager for vent!

Choked for words by the flame's fierce leap and burn, "Clear out of this!" Percival said.

Foxy Pinsent turned his head slowly from Ima to Percival and looked Percival coolly up and down with the foxy smile. He put his elbows back to lean against the van, and very deliberately crossed one foot over the other. "Go to h.e.l.l, won't you?" he said mildly.

It was a double smart he took to wipe the studied insolence from his face and to plant venom there. Percival's open hand that struck his mouth--a tough, vicious jolt with the arm half-crooked, a boxer's. .h.i.t--drove his head against the van; and his "Ah, curse you!" followed the sharp smack and thud quick as if the three sounds--clip, thud, hiss--belonged to some instrument discharged.

He sprang forward, head back, hitting quickly with both hands, like the rare boxer he was--feinted with his right, drove his left against Percival's forehead, took a sharp _one-two!_ on mouth and throat, and they were engaged, fighting close, fighting hard, and savage and glad, and fierce and exultant, each of them, at last to spring their common hate.

In its suddenness and fury, in its briefness and the manner of its check, the thing was like the sudden _woof!_ of flame of a spark to a handful of gunpowder. There is the belch and blinding flash of heat, then the thick cloud of smoke. There was the swift drum of blows, then the rush of feet--Stingo, j.a.phra, Boss Maddox, men from here, men from there, in that trap-door swiftness with which commotion throws up a crowd--and the two were grasped and pulled apart and held apart, struggling like terriers that have had the first taste of blood and to collect the glut are gone blind to blows or authority.

Stingo from behind threw his two immense arms about Percival and leant with all his weight the better to lock them. Boss Maddox thrust his tall form before Pinsent, and s.n.a.t.c.hed a wrist and gripped it in his long fingers. j.a.phra was at Percival's hands that tore at Stingo's.

"Lay on here, some of you!" Boss Maddox called, struggling with Pinsent's arm. "Get that other arm!--Dago! Frenchy! Jackson!

Darkie! Look alive with it! Drop it, Foxy! Drop it! What the devil's up with you?"

And Stingo's strained whispers, in jerks and gusts by reason of his exertions: "Easy, Percival! Easy with it! Easy, I say! You can't shift me, boy! Get that hand, j.a.phra! Get that hand!"

Then the smoke clears and there remains only the acrid smell of the burning, and the sense of heat.

The two were dragged apart till a safe s.p.a.ce separated them and they fronted each other before the groups about them--their faces furious, their bodies still, but their hands plucking at the hands that held them as they made their answers.

"Struck me!" Foxy Pinsent shouted. "Struck me! By G.o.d! I'll teach him! I've been saving it up for him a long time. Let me go, Boss!

What's the sense of holding me like this? Struck me, the whelp, I tell you! I've got to have him first or last! Let me go!"

And Percival: "And more to give you, Pinsent! Teach me, eh? If I could get!--j.a.phra! Stingo! It's no business of yours, this! d.a.m.n your interference! j.a.phra! j.a.phra! Let go my hands!"

They cooled a little as the hands still held them and their explanations were demanded. Boss Maddox left Pinsent to other constraint and came and stood in the little s.p.a.ce between the two groups, hands behind his back in the familiar posture, shoulders slightly hunched, head on one side, and turning it this way and that as Percival or Pinsent spoke.

Presently he looked at Stingo. "That boy's right," he said, with a jerk back at Pinsent. "He's been struck. He's Foxy. This can't end here. He's got to have his rights."

"He'll get 'em," Stingo said, with as much grimness as his huskiness could convey. "He'll get 'em if I let this lot loose. Don't you let him worry, Boss."