The Soldier of the Valley Part 21

"Yes," I answered, still stroking the old hound's head. "Very badly.

But he'll be all right in a few days--and we'll go on watching the mountains--and thinking--and chasing foxes--to the end--the end that comes to all poor dogs."

"It's curious how attached one gets to a dog," said Perry sagely, resuming his rocking from heel to toe and toe to heel.

"It is curious," I said, smoking calmly. I even forced a grim smile.

Now that I could smile, I was prepared to hear what Perry had to tell me, for after all I had been drawing conclusions from what might prove to be but inferences of his. But he had been so positive that in my inmost heart I knew the import of all he had to say.

"Well, Perry," I said, "you did give me a surprise. I didn't know it, and, to tell the truth, was taken back a bit, for it hurt me here." I imitated his effective waistcoat-pocket gesture, which caused him much amus.e.m.e.nt. "I had hopes myself--you know that, and as I neither fiddled nor recited poetry your own conclusions may be wrong."

"But Tim didn't do nothin'," Perry cackled. "He just goes away and lets her pine. When he comes back she falls right into his arms and gazes up into his eyes, and--" Perry stopped rocking and looked into the fire. "You know, Mark," he said after a pause, "it must be nice not to be disappointed."

"It must be very nice," said I, smoking harder than ever.

"That's what I said to myself as I looked in the window and seen them."

"You looked in the window--you peeped!" I fairly shouted, making a hostile demonstration with a crutch.

"Why, yes" said Perry, looking hurt that I should question his action in the least. "I didn't mean to. Comin' from over the ridge I pa.s.sed Warden's and thought I'd stop in and warm up and see how Weston was.

So I stepped light along the porch, not wantin' to disturb him, and seein' a light in the room, I looked in before I knocked. But I never knocked, for I says to myself, 'I'll hurry down and tell Mark; it'll please him.'"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "And seein' a light in the room, I looked in."]

"And you saw Tim and Mary," said I.

"I should say I did," said Perry, "till I slipped away. But says I to myself, 'It must be nice not to be disappointed.'"

"You said you saw Tim and Mary," said I, a trifle angrily.

"I should say I did," Perry answered, chuckling and rocking again on his feet. "The two of 'em, standin' there in the lamplight by the table, him a-lookin' down like he was dyin', her a-lookin' up like she was dyin' and holdin' on to him like he was all there was left for her in the world. It made me swaller, Mark, it made me swaller."

There was a lump in Perry's throat at that moment, and he stopped his rocking and turned to the fire, so his back was toward me.

"Of course you knocked," said I, after a silence.

"Of course I didn't," he snapped. "Do you suppose I was wanted then?

'No, sir,' I says, 'for them there is only two people in all the world--there's Tim and there's Mary.'"

Perry was putting on his overcoat, winding his long comforter about his neck and drawing on his mittens.

"To tell the truth," he said, with a forced laugh, "I don't feel as chipper as I usually do under such like circ.u.mstances. It seems to me you ain't so chipper as you might be, either, Mark."

"Good-night, Perry," I said, smoking very hard.

"Good-night," he answered. At the door he paused and gazed at me.

"Say, Mark," he said, "them two was just intended for one another--you know it--I see you know it. G.o.d picked 'em out for one another. I know it. You know it, too. But it's hard not to be picked yourself--ain't it?"

Tim's minute! G.o.d keep me from such another!

It was all so plain now. The fire was dying away. The hands of the clock were crawling off another hour, and still he did not come. But what did I care? All in the world that I loved I had lost--Mary and my brother--and Tim had taken both. He who had so much had come in his strength and robbed me, left me to sit alone night after night, with my pipe and my dogs and my crutches. Had he told me that night when I came back to the valley that he loved the girl in all truth, I should have stood aside and cheered him on in his struggle against her, but I had not measured the depth of his mind nor given him credit for cunning. Perry Thomas saw it. He had gone away from her and wounded her by his neglect. In the fabrication of the other girl, the beautiful Edith, whose charms so outshone all other women, he had hit at the heart of her vanity; and now he had come back so gayly and easily to take from me what I might not have won in a lifetime. Losing her, I cared little that what he had done had been in ignorance that I loved her and that she was plighted to me. Losing her, I had no thought of blame for the girl, for when she told me that in all the world she cared for none so much as me, she meant it, for she believed that he had pa.s.sed out of her life.

By the fireplace, so close that I could put my hand upon the arm, was the rocking-chair I had placed for her, and many a night had I sat there watching it and smiling, and picturing it as it was to be when she came. There would Mary be, sewing beneath the lamplight; there the fire burning, with old Captain and young Colonel, snuggling along the hearthstone; here I should be with my pipe and my book, unread, in my lap, for we should have many things to talk of, Mary and I. We should have Tim. As he played the great game, we should be watching his every move. And when he won, how she and I would smile over it and say "I told you so!" When he lost--Tim was never to lose, for Tim was invincible! Tim was a man of brain and brawn. His arm was the strongest in the valley; in all our country there was no face so fine as his; in all the world few men so good and true.

Now he had come! The chair there was empty. So it would always be.

But here I should always be with my pipe and my crutches, and the dogs snuggling by the fire.

Tim had come! The clock hands were crawling on and on. His minute had better end. I hurled my pipe into the smouldering coals; I tossed a crutch at little Colonel, and the dog ran howling from the room. Old Captain sat up on his haunches, his slantwise eyes wide open with wonder.

Aye, Captain, men are strange creatures. Their moods will change with every clock-tick. One moment your master sits smoking and watching the flames--the next he is tearing hatless from the house; and it is cold outside and the wind in the chimney is tumbling down the soot. When the wind sings like that in the chimney, it is sweeping full and sharp down the village street, and across the flats by the graveyard, whither he goes hobbling.

Little Colonel comes cautiously into the room, hugging the wall till he is back at the fireside. With his head between his fore-paws and one eye closed, he watches the tiny tongue of flame licking up the last coal. There are worse lives than a dog's.

XVI

Tim came whistling down the road. He whistled full and clear, and while he was still at the turn of the hill the wind brought me a bit of his rollicking tune as I huddled on the school-house steps, waiting.

The world was going well with him. He had all that the wise count good; he was winning what the foolish count better. With head high and swinging arms he came on, the beat of his feet on the hard road keeping time to his gay whistling. Tim was winning in the game. While his brother was droning over the reader and the spelling-book with two-score leather-headed children, he was fighting his way upward in the world of commerce. While his brother was wringing a living from a few acres of n.i.g.g.ardly soil and a little school, he was on the road to riches; while his brother was wrangling with the worthies of the store over the momentous problems of the day, he was where those problems were being worked out and standing by the men who were solving them.

All in this world worth having was Tim's, and now even what was his brother's he had taken. To him that hath! From him that hath not! He had all. I had nothing. Now as he came swinging on so carelessly, I knew that I had lost even him.

Never once had there come to my mind the thought of doing my brother any bodily harm. My emotions were too conflicting for me to know just why I had come at all into the night to meet him. Now it was against him that the violence of my anger would vent itself. Now it was against myself, and I cursed myself for an idle, dreaming fool. Then came over me, overwhelming me, a sense of my own utter loneliness, and against it Tim stood out so bold and clear-cut and strong; that I felt myself crying out to him not to desert me and let a woman take him from me. I thought of the old days when he and I had been all in all to each other, and I hated the woman who had come between us, who had lured me from him, who had lured him from me. Then as against my misery, she stood out so bold and good, so wholly fair, that I cursed Tim for taking her from me. I wanted to see him in the full heat of my anger to tell him to his face how he had served me; to stand before him an accuser till he slunk from me and left me alone, as I would be alone from now to the end.

So I had quickened my pace, hobbling up the starlit road to the school-house. There I was driven by sheer exhaustion to the shelter of the doorway, and in the narrow refuge I huddled, waiting and listening.

The keen wind found me out and seemed to take joy in rushing in on me in biting gusts and then whirling away over the flat. By and by it brought me the rollicking air my brother whistled, and then came the sound of foot-falls. In a moment he would be pa.s.sing, and I arose, intending to hail him. It was easy enough when I heard only his whistling to picture myself confrating him in anger, but now that in the starlight I could see his dark form coming nearer and nearer; now that he had broken into a s.n.a.t.c.h of a song we had often sung together, my courage failed me and I slunk farther into my retreat.

So Tim pa.s.sed me. He went on toward the village, singing cheerfully for company's sake, and I stood alone, in the shadow of the school-house woods, listening. His song died away. I fancied I heard the beat of his stick on the bridge; then there was silence.

I turned. Through the pines on the eastward ridge the moon was climbing, and now the white road stretched away before me. It was the road to her house. The light that gleamed at the head of the hill was her light, and many a night in this same spot I had stopped to take a last look at it. It used to wink so softly to me as I waved a hand in good-night. Now it seemed to leer. The friendly beacon on the hill had become a wrecker's lantern. A battered hulk of a man, here I was, stranded by the school-house. As the ship on the beach pounds helplessly to and fro, now trying to drive itself farther into its prison, now struggling to break the chains that hold it, so tossed about my love and anger, I turned my face now toward the hill, now toward the village. The same impulse that caused me to draw into the darkness of the doorway instead of facing Tim made it impossible for me to follow him home. Angry though I was, I wanted no quarrel, yet I feared to meet him lest my temper should burst its bounds. But I had a bitter wind to deal with, too, and if I could not go home, neither could I stand longer in the road, turning in my quandary from the beacon on the hill, where she was, to the light that gleamed in our window in the village, where he was.

The school-house gave me shelter. I groped my way to my desk and there sank into my chair, leaned my head on my hands, and closed my eyes. I wanted to shut out all the world. Here in the friendly darkness, in the quiet of the night, I could think it all out. I could place myself on trial, and starting at the beginning, retracing my life step by step, I would find again the course my best self had laid down for me to follow. For the moment I had lost that clear way. Blinded by my seeming woes, I had been groping for it, and I had searched in vain.

But now the dizziness was going, and as I sat there in the darkness, my eyes closed to shut out even the blackness about me, the light came.

After a long while I looked up to see the moon high over the pines on the eastward ridge, and its yellow light poured into the room, casting dim shadows over the white walls, and bringing up before me row on row of spectre desks. The chair I sat in, the table on which I leaned were real enough. They were part of my to-day, but that dim-lighted room was the school-house of my boyhood. The fourth of those spectre desks measuring back from the stove, was where Tim and I sat day after day together, with heads bowed over open books and eyes aslant. That was not the same Tim who had pa.s.sed me a while before, swaggering and singing in the joy of his conquest; that was not the same Tim who had stood before me that very afternoon in all the pomp of well-cut clothes, drawing on his whitened hands a pair of woman's gloves; that was not the same Tim who by his artful lies had won what had been denied my stupid, blundering devotion. My Tim was a st.u.r.dy little fellow whose booted legs scarce touched the floor, whose tousled black head hardly showed above the desk-top. His cheeks would turn crimson at the thought of woman's gloves on those brown hands. His tongue would cleave to his mouth in a woman's presence, let alone his lying to her. That was the real Tim--the rare Tim. To my eyes he was but a small boy; to my mind he was a mighty man. The first reader that presented such knotty problems to his intellectual side was but part of the impedimenta of his youth, and was no fair measure of his real size.

That very day he had fought with me and for me; not because I was in the right, but because I was his brother.

A lean, cadaverous boy from along the mountain, a born enemy of the lads of the village, had dared me. I endured his insults until the time came when further forbearance would have been a disgrace, and then I closed with him. In the front of the little circle drawn about us, right outside there in the school-yard, Tim stood. As we pitched to and fro, the cadaverous boy and I, Tim's shrill cry came to me, and time and again I caught sight of his white face and small clinched hands waving wildly. I believe I should have whipped the cadaverous boy. I had suffered his foul kicks and borne him to the ground; in a second I should have planted him fairly on his back, but his brother, like him a lank, wiry lad and singly more than my match, ran at me. My head swam beneath his blows, and I released my almost vanquished enemy to face the new foe with upraised fists. Then Tim came. A black head shot between me and my towering a.s.sailant. It caught him full in the middle; he doubled like a staple and with a cry of pain toppled into the snow. This gave me a brief respite to compel my fallen enemy to capitulate, and when I turned from him, his brother was still staggering about in drunken fashion, gasping and crying, "Foul!" Tim did not know what he meant, but was standing alert, with head lowered, ready to charge again at the first sign of renewed attack. He knew neither "fight foul" nor "fight fair"; he knew only a brother in trouble, and he had come to him in his best might.

That was the real Tim!

"I guess me and you can whip most anybody, Mark," he said, as he looked up at me from his silly spelling-book that day.

"As long as we stick together, Tim," I whispered in return.

He laughed. Of course we would always stand together.