CHAPTER XXXVI
Anne Masters looked out of the car windows with shadowed and preoccupied eyes on that journey from the mountains back to Louisville. The old conductor who always stopped and chatted with her, after a glance at her expression, punched her ticket and passed on. Something was not well with her, he reflected.
To this girl, the joyous sense of freedom had been the essence of life, and now she was going home with the feeling of one who has passed under a yoke. It was as if henceforth she were to know the sea which she had adventurously sailed in liberty only from the chained oar bench of the galley slave. She felt humiliated and utterly miserable, and perhaps, worst of all, she was oppressed by an unrelieved realization of her own futility. Beside the competence of the young woman who took dictation at Morgan's desk, her own social accomplishments appeared for the first time summoned for comparison, and the parallel left her branded in her own mind as an economic parasite. Marriage was the one way in which a woman of her sort could finance her life, and the only marriage which for her would be a fulfilment and not a travesty – itself requiring financing – lay remote.
Anne repressed the first indignant impulse to write to Boone of the unjustifiable charge against him to which she had been forced to listen. There at the capital he was adjusting himself to new duties and settling his shoulders into an unaccustomed harness. She knew that he took these things seriously since he meant to use their opportunities as stepping-stones to broader achievement, and a letter on such a subject would seem hysterical and wanting in faith, when perhaps he was most depending on that faith. Now she told herself that except for having unalterably committed herself to that course with foolish emphasis, she would not even speak incidentally to Boone of the matter. She assured herself that already she knew the answer and needed no further evidence – but a pledge was a pledge, and she must have the reply to take from his lips to her father.
Yet in the weeks which intervened before that opportunity arrived, the repudiated matter rankled like a poison, which abates none of its malignity because its victim has pasted an innocuous label on the bottle.
So one day, while Anne was being tortured in spirit and was telling herself that she was serenely untroubled, Boone was at the school where Happy Spradling had for some years been a member of the teaching staff.
His eyes were glowing with appreciation as he went about the place, recognizing the magic that had grown there. It had woven its spell out of the dauntless resolution of a little coterie of women who, like unostentatious vestals, had kindled and fed here, where it meant everything, the fire of education and wholesomeness. Surrounded by a hinterland where sloven illiteracy fostered lawlessness, that fire burned in houses that stood up as monuments both of practical utility and surprising beauty. Its light was reflected in keen young faces hungry for education and smiling young eyes in which Boone read the presage of a new future for his people.
Women had done this thing: women for the most part from the Bluegrass who had surrendered ease and chosen effort: women who, out of a volunteer greatness of spirit, elected to "wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild."
Boone drew a long breath of silent tribute and homage. It pleased him to think, too, that not all of the magic-makers came from beyond the hills. Happy was one of them. In these years she had developed until one might not have guessed that she, too, had not come from the source of a gentler rearing. She had met the representative of her district as an old friend, but in no glance or inflection was there a hint that between them lay any buried memory.
"They sent for you to come here," the girl told him, as she showed him over the redeemed grounds, "because we want your help. They didn't know that we were old friends, and I didn't mention it. You see what we are trying to do here, but we need roads. A country without highways is a house without windows. That is where you can help us. We're very poor, you know."
"You're making the country very rich," he answered gravely, and he returned to Frankfort with the affairs of that school near his heart.
That week-end he went to Louisville, and as he sat at Anne's right at a dinner party a mood of romanticism laid its glamour upon his thoughts. Tonight he could seem to step back across the years and stand looking into the hungry, discontented eyes of a boy in hodden-gray perched on the topmost rail of a rotting fence. It seemed incredible that that boy had been himself. To that boy, all life except the hard realities of a pioneer people had been an untried thing of formless dream tissue.
And tonight he sat here! In many respects it was just such a table and just such a company as everywhere reflected the niceties of civilized society, yet in the little intimate things it was distinctive.
In the voices, the colloquialisms – the very colour of thought – spoke the spirit of the South – not the Old South, perhaps, yet the offspring of a mother who had passed on much of herself.
From the log cabin to this dinner seemed to him the measure of his progress thus far. It was as though with seven-league boots he had crossed the centuries!
Behind him lay a boyhood that belonged to the little sectionalism of the backwoods settlement. Here was the widening circle of the life evolved out of it, yet still a circle of sectionalism. What lay beyond?
In his imagination the young Kentuckian saw the dome of the capitol at Washington, the nerve centre of the nation, where functioned the broad affairs of statecraft. Above the dome an afterglow hung in the sky, and in it shone a single star – the evening star. That, of course, was a long way off, yet from Louisville to Washington seemed a shorter and smoother road than from the laurel thickets to Louisville. Youth was his, and a resolution forged and tempered. Ambition was his, and the incentive of a beacon whose light he renewed whenever he looked into the violet eyes that were not far from his own.
The race would not, of course, be easy. There would be the heart-testing smother of effort before the prize was won, but the future lay open, and he coveted no victory of unwrung withers and unwearied lungs.
Thank God, the one thing without which he must fail was surely his: the loyalty of the woman he loved.
Anne had been unusually quiet and grave this evening, but he had arrived on a late train and had as yet had no opportunity for talk with her alone. That would come later.
When he had driven home with her, he followed her into the old parlour, with its ripe portraits from the brush of Jouett, and the cheery blaze of its open fire. With her opera cloak thrown across his arm, he watched her go over and stand on the hearth, while the firelight played on the ivory whiteness and the satin softness of her neck and shoulders, and made a nimbus about her bright hair.
"You're not wearing your string of pearls tonight," he smiled; and she smiled, too, but not happily.
"No," she said. "I thought I wouldn't."
She did not add that she had not worn them because they were the gift of Colonel Wallifarro and seemed to her an emblem of bondage.
All that she would tell him in a few minutes, but first she had an awkward question to ask which had hung over her all evening as the threat of bedtime punishment hangs over a child. Now she meant to dispose of that quickly and categorically and have it done with. She felt shamed, as his frank eyes met hers, to broach an inquiry that seemed so nearly an insult to his allegiance. But she stood pledged and she had planned the matter in just one fashion. There would be the question and the negative reply, then the ghost would be laid.
That there could be any other answer than "No," however modified or justified by circumstance, had not entered into her premises of thought as conceivable. The general who, no matter how flawless his plan-in-chief, has arranged no alternative strategy, is a commander doomed. Anne had admitted in advance no substitute for absolute denial.
Now she turned and spoke gently:
"Before we talk of anything else, dear, there's a question I must ask you, and you must answer it in one word – yes, or no. You'll want to say more, and afterwards you may – but not at first." She paused, and a note of apology crept into the voice that went on again: "I feel disloyal even to ask it, but it's a thing I'm pledged to do, and I'll explain the reason afterwards."
Boone smiled with the confidence of a man for whom the witness stand holds no terror.
"Ask it, dearest."
"Did you … ever" – she faltered a moment, then went hurriedly on, as if racing against a failure of resolve – "ask … any other girl … to marry you?"
The smile was struck from his face in an instant, leaving his eyes pained and his lips straight and tight, and her gaze, fixed on his, read the swift change of expression and responded with a sudden terror in her own pupils.
"I was never … in love with any one…!"
"One word!" Her interruption came in a tone he had never heard her use before. It was so quiet that it carried with it a chill like that of death. "Yes or no."
Boone felt a cold moisture on his hands and temples. A matter easy to explain had, of a sudden, become inexplicable. Looking back over lapsed years, all the quixotic urging of a false sense of justice had gone out of conduct which had then seemed so mandatory. The inescapable obligation to which he had responded seemed empty and twisted now. He could see only that he had insulted Happy with a half offer and been false to his avowed love of Anne and to his duty to himself.
That, at the time, he had been groping toward a callow and half-baked conception of honour failed now to extenuate his blunder, and if he himself could no longer understand it, how could he hope to make her do so?
His voice came in a dull monotone.
"Yes," he said, "I did. May I explain?"
In the credo of this girl's life fairness and generosity were twin cornerstones, and condemnation without hearing was an abhorrent and mean injustice. But the unadmitted poison of an accusation fought in secret had been insidiously undermining her sanity on the one central theme of her life, and Boone's affirmative had seemed to sever with a shock of complete surprise the anchor cable of her faith.
"No," she said, and for once it might have been the acid-marred voice of her mother, "that's all I need to know."
"But, Anne" – Boone took an impulsive step toward her and sought to speak sanely, while he held off the sense of chaos under which his brain staggered – "but, Anne, after all these years, you can't throw overboard your faith in me without giving me a chance to be heard."
She laughed bitterly, and of course that was hysteria, but to the man it seemed only derision.
"Until three minutes ago," she said, "I would have staked my life on my faith in you … I did just about do it… Now, I'm afraid … there isn't any left … to throw away."
"If you ever had any," he declared – and he, too, spoke under a stress that gave an unaccustomed hardness to his voice, "there should be some still. The answer you held me to answers nothing. It gives no reason – no explanation."
"The reasons … don't count for much. Yes means yes. It means years of deceit and lies to me… Good-bye."
Boone Wellver turned and walked to the door. His eyes, fixed ahead, saw nothing. As he went, he collided with a table and paused, looking at it with a dazed sense of injury. On the threshold he halted to speak in a voice which was queer and uncommanded.
"You are sending me away," he said, "without a chance. I still have faith in you … unless it's a false faith, you'll send for me to come back … and give me that chance… Until you do, I won't ask it … or try to see you."
The girl stood looking past him in a sort of trance. "Good-bye," she repeated, and he took up his coat and hat and went out.
For a little while after he had gone Anne Masters remained staring with a stunned and transfixed immobility at the empty frame of the door through which he had gone; a frame it seemed to her out of which had suddenly been torn the picture of her life, leaving a tattered canvas. She shivered violently; then she, too, started toward the door, swayed unsteadily, and fell insensible.
A measure before the lower house of the General Assembly had split it so evenly that when the roll call came on the vote, a deadlock was predicted and one absentee might bring defeat to his cause. After each adjournment noses were jealously counted, and the falling gavel, calling each session to order, found Boone in his seat with a face that sought to mask its misery behind a stony expressionlessness. It was a deadly sober face with eyes that wandered often into abstraction, so that men who had seen it heretofore ready of smile commented on the change, yet hesitated to question one so palpably aloof.
In these days it was hard for Boone to see, with his single purpose shattered, the reason or value of any purpose, yet habit held him to his routine duties with an overserious and humourless inflexibility.
After the first dull wretchedness of the night when he and Anne had parted, he had laid hold upon a hope which had not endured. He had told himself with the persistence of a refrain that the girl who had that night condemned him out of hand was a girl temporarily bereft of reasoning balance by a tide of heartache and a tempest of anger. The mail would soon bring him a note announcing the restoration of the woman he loved to her own gracious fairness and serene self-recovery. He could not, without losing his whole grip on life, bring himself to the admission that the passion of a wild, ungenerous moment would endure. Indeed, the thought of what she must have suffered – what she must still be suffering – so to carry her and hold her outside her whole orbit of being, tortured him as much as his own personal loss and grief.
But no word had come. That wild, hurried interview had moved with such torrential haste and violence to its culmination of breached understanding that there had been no time for stemming it with moderation or explained circumstances.
She had not had the chance to tell him of the disclosures her father had made, or of the sense of bondage that had weighed upon her until the colour of her thought had lost its clarity and become bewilderingly turgid. She had not been able to let the light into the festering brooding that had subconsciously poisoned her mind. A single idea had carried all else with it as a flood carries wreckage. For years she had stood out for Boone. A time had come when he had been charged with absolute duplicity toward her, and she had scornfully wagered her life on his fealty and submitted the whole vital matter to one question. His answer had been a confession.
There had been no years of intermittent association when he could logically or decently have entertained another love affair. From the first day of his avowed allegiance until now there had been no break in his protestations. Therefore, the word "yes" or "no" contained all the answer there could be to the question of his loyalty, and the word which shattered the whole dream came from his own lips.
One day, as Boone was leaving his hotel room for the state house, two letters were handed him, and his heart leaped into drum-beat. One was addressed in her hand, and that one he thrust into his pocket, as one saves the best to read last.
The other was an invitation from Colonel Wallifarro: an engraved blank filled in with a name and date. In a secluded corner of the hard-frozen, state house grounds he sat on a bench to read the note from Anne, but when he had torn the envelope and glanced at the sheet the light went out of his eyes and his bronzed cheeks became suddenly drawn.
"I thought you might like to know," she said. "The invitation from Uncle Tom looks innocent enough, but I don't think you'd enjoy the party. It's given to announce my engagement to Morgan."
Boone sat there dazed, while in the icy air his breath floated cloudlike before his lips.
Eventually he awoke to some realization of the passage of time, and looked at his watch. It was past the hour for the roll-call on the bill which his absence might deliver into the hands of the enemy, the cause for which he and his colleagues had been fighting.
He came with an effort to his feet and went heavily through the corridor and into the chamber. At the door, where he leaned against the casing, he heard the clerk of the house calling the roll, and the staccato "Ayes" and "Noes" of the responses. Already the alphabetical sequence had progressed to the U's, and soon his own name would follow. Then it came, and at first his stiff tongue could not answer. He was licking his lips and his throat worked with some spasmodic reflex. Finally he heard a strained and unnatural voice, which he could hardly recognize as his own, answering "No."
Heads turned toward him at the queer sound, and from somewhere rose a twittering of laughter. That was perhaps natural enough, for to the casual and uncomprehending eye he made a spectacle both sorry and ludicrous – this usually self-contained young man who now stood stammering and disordered of guise, like a fellow not wholly recovered from a night-long debauch.
CHAPTER XXXVII
The transforming touch of a razor, a studied amendment of manner and apparel, and the passing of ten years: these are things which can work an effective disguise for an Enoch Arden returned to village streets that knew him long ago. Quietly dressed in clothes that were neither good enough nor mean enough to arrest the passing eye, a middle-aged man dropped from the evening train onto the cinder platform at Marlin Town.
Shrewd winds whipped in through icicled ravines, and the new arrival fresh from equatorial latitudes shivered under their sting.
He thrust his hands into his pockets and scowled about him. For so long his memory had softened the uneven contours and colours of this town with the illusory qualities of homesickness that now its tawdry actuality brought something of a shock. It was all raw and comfortless, and as the newcomer looked up at the forbidding summits he snarled to himself, "They ain't a patch on the Andes."
Across from the old brick court house, with its dilapidated cupola and its indefinable air of the mediaeval, sat the general store, proclaimed in a sign of crippled lettering, "The Big Emporium." Tom Carr's nephews directed this centre of industry and, from a grimy "office" above stairs, Tom Carr directed his nephews. Until recent days he had also directed, with a dictator's fiat power, most of the affairs of the countryside. From that second-story room, the Gregories would have declared with conviction Tom's father had "hired" Asa's father killed. It was in its unadorned fashion a place of crumbling traditions.
Sitting there of late, Tom had done some unvarnished thinking anent the expanding influence of young Boone Wellver.
He was sitting there now in the light and reek of a smoky lamp, by a stove that was red-hot with no window open, and he was alone. He heard the wooden stairs creaking under the ascending tread of stranger feet, for to his acute ears footsteps were as individual as voices, and his head inclined expectantly. Tom was waiting there for a man who had written him a letter.
There followed a rap on the panels, and in response to his growled permission the door opened and closed almost without sound, showing inside the threshold a man clean shaven and inconspicuously dressed.
"Howdy, Saul," welcomed the seated baron of diminished powers. "I'd call hit a right boldacious thing ter do – comin' back hyar – if I stood in yore shoes."
Into the furtive eyes of the visitor came a shallow flash of bravado.
"Who's to hinder me, Tom?"
"Young Boone Wellver's got ter be a right huge power in these parts here of late. He don't love ye none lavish, ef what folks norrates be true."
Saul seated himself, with a shrug of the shoulders. "I've had run-ins with worse men than him," he declared, "and I'm still on the hoof."
"On the hoof an' fattenin', I should say," graciously acceded the leader of the Carrs. "Ye've got a corn-fed look about ye, Saul."
"I stayed away from home," continued Fulton, "so long as it was to my profit to be elsewheres. Now it suits me to come back, and there isn't room enough here for both me an' him."
The elderly feudist surveyed his visitor with a cool shrewdness, and after a long pause he remarked drily: "Ef so be, Boone Wellver was called ter his reward, Saul, I wouldn't hardly buy me no mournin' clothes, but for my own self I don't dast break ther truce. Howsomever, when a feller hits at a snake he had ought ter git hit. Thet feller thet ye hired ter lay-way him hyar of late didn't seem ter enjoy no master luck."
"All he needed was a little overseein'," retorted Saul blandly. "That's why I'm here now. I've got to lay low for a while because there's still the little matter of an indictment outstandin' but the same man stands in your light and mine – we ought to be able to do some business together."
"Things have changed a mighty heap," demurred Tom uneasily, but Saul laughed.
"Let's change them back, then," he responded.
The plotting of a murder is erroneously presumed by the unpracticed to be an affair of hushed voices and deeply closeted conspirators. Between these two craftsmen it was discussed in the calm hard-headedness of severe practicality. To Saul, who had been long an absentee, Tom Carr's intimate familiarity with current conditions proved a bureau of vital statistics. To Tom, who saw in Boone a dangerous trouble-maker and who yet hesitated to make a feud-killing of the matter, the hand of a volunteer was welcome, and so, as they talked, a community of interests developed. Tom was to provide Saul with an inconspicuous refuge, and Saul was to do the rest. A few others whose active participation was needed were to be taken into confidence, but the secret was to be held in close-guarded circle.
It is said that no other bitterness can be so saturated as that of the apostate, and Saul brought into Tom's presence one day a boyish fellow whose blood was Gregory blood but whose one strong emotion seemed to be hatred of his own breed. He had been selected by the intriguer as the man to take in hand and carry to success the assassination of Boone Wellver.
Into Tom's office slouched "Little" Jim Bartleton by the front way, and into it, by back stairs, came Saul at the same time.
Until a short time back no one had thought much about Little Jim. He had not been a positive personality until recently, when he had taken to drink and developed a mean streak. Always he had been fearless, but that elicited no comment in a land where cowards are few. His most recent friendships had all been among the Carrs, and no insult to his own people had been uttered in his hearing which he had not capped with one more scathing.
Just where his grievance lay had been his own secret. For Saul's purpose, it sufficed that it existed and was dominant.
"Son," questioned Tom Carr in his suave voice, "I see plenty of reasons why a feller should disgust Boone Wellver, but he's yore kin. Why does ye hate him so?"
The answer came, prefaced with a string of oaths:
"I hain't nuver named this hyar ter nairy man afore now, but I aimed ter wed an', ter git me money enough, I sot me up a small still-house nigh ter whar he dwells at."
Spurts of hatred shot out of the speaker's dark eyes; eyes which in kindlier moods were lighted by intelligence.
"Ef I'd been left alone I could of got me enough money ter do what I wanted ter do … ther gal was ready ter hev me. But, damn his law-an'-order, hypocritical piety! he hed ter nose out my still an' warn me thet without I quit he'd tip me off ter ther revenuer."
"Some folks," put in Tom, "moutn't even hev warned ye."
"Thet's jest ther p'int," panted the boy. "He told ther revenuer fust-off an' then warned me atterwards. Ef hit hedn't of been fer a right gay piece of luck, ther raiders would of come afore I got ther still hid away – an' I'd be sulterin' in jail right now. I've done swore ter kill him."
"An' ther gal, son," prompted Tom gently.
The black face went even blacker.
"I reckon," he said savagely, "she don't aim ter wait fer me no longer. I owes thet ter Boone Wellver, too."
"An' so ye're willin' – ?"
"Plumb willin' an' anxious! I've done held my counsel. He don't suspicion how I feels… I knows every path an' by-way over thar. I knows every step he takes when he's at home. Thar hain't no fashion I could fail."
"An' ye knows, too, how ter keep yore mouth shut?"
"I hain't nuver told nuthin' yit."
The two conspirators looked at each other and nodded. Here was an agent who could move without suspicion and act out of his own ardour of hatred. Decidedly he was a discovery.
So the hireling was instructed and given a leave of absence to go and "set up with ther gal in Leslie County." But he did not go to Leslie County. He went, instead, by a roundabout road to the state capital, and one evening knocked on the door of Boone Wellver's hotel room.
When the messenger arrived, Boone was sitting alone with a brooding face, while in his hand he held a telegram which had fallen like an unwarned bolt on his lascerated soreness of spirit.
Two hours ago he had received and read it. In it Victor McCalloway had said: "Deeply regret not seeing you for farewell. Called suddenly for indefinite absence. Luck and prosperity to you always."
Luck and prosperity! Boone just now was hoping at best to fend off despair and a total disintegration of a hard-built structure of ideals. To McCalloway his thoughts had turned for the succour of a steadying calm – and that one ally was no longer in reach. Boone had read the words with a numbed heart, for now out of the confusion of tempest-smother that beat about him he had lost even the solace of the bell-buoy's strong note.
This misfortune, be assured himself, at least exhausted the possibilities of perverse circumstance to hurt him. Misfortune's box of tricks were empty now!
Tonight Colonel Wallifarro was entertaining at dinner. Anne would be smiling as they congratulated her. A little while ago he had been at just such a dinner, marvelling greatly at the good fortune that had brought to him such progress. Now it stood for the emptiness of effort.
Tonight he wanted the hills – not calm and star-lit, but rocking to hurricane fury and thundering with flood. No voice of all their voices could be too wild or ruthless for his temper.
Boone was in a dangerous mood. He sat there with no eye to censor him, and more than once he winced, biting back an outcry. His strongly thewed shoulders heaved and flinched with thoughts that fell on quivering brain-nerves like the merciless lashing of an invisible scourge. He tried to analyze himself and his relation to affairs outside himself, but his psychological attuning was pitched only to such an agony as cries for outlet. Everything that he was, he bitterly reflected, was a summary of acquired ethics designed to bury and hide his natural heritages. He was a tamed and performing wild animal, and just now the only assuagement that tempted him was the instinct to be wild again – to lash out and punish some one for his hurting.
The star that had led him had gone out, but one could not punish a star. Even in his frenzied wretchedness he could not even want to punish his star.
But her world – to which he had climbed with a dominant ambition – that was different. That smugly superior world had betrayed him.
The young features hardened, and the eyes kindled into the lightning-play that leads men, but it was such a leadership as animates the chief who dances around the war fires and no longer of him who smokes the pipe of sane counsel.
Just now it would take little to send the pedestal of acquired thought down in ruin. Just now an enemy would not have been safe within the reach of his blow.
Yet with a pale, expiring flicker, struggling through darkness, there remained a half realization that this was all a delirium which he must combat and overcome.
"I reckon," he said aloud, with that self-pity which is not good for a man, "I've been as deep down in hell today as a man can go." Then he started as a knock came on his door, and into the room stepped Jim Bartleton of Marlin Town.
"Saul Fulton's done come back," he announced curtly, "an' Tom Carr's done tuck him in. I'm one of the men thet's been hired ter kill ye."
Of course, the tale of the still and the threatened raid was of a piece with all of Jim Bartleton's hatred; of a piece, too, with his seeming degeneration. Boone Wellver, facing the animosities of enemies who fought with ancient guile, had sought to meet that condition. "Little" Jim was one of several, wholly faithful to him, who had undertaken to insinuate themselves into the confidence of the conspirators.
The same Commonwealth's attorney who had prosecuted Asa Gregory had gone to his own house for dinner, and now he sat before his library fire in slippers and faded smoking jacket. On the floor near him lay an afternoon paper, but the day's chief news he had garnered more directly by personal contact. Over there in the Assembly was being waged a battle which interested him deeply. So inured had he become to high tides of political struggle that it did not occur to him to reflect upon the frequency with which, in his native State, bitter campaign followed upon bitter campaign. A Democrat and a Republican were at grips for the United States senatorship. Each of them had been a governor of Kentucky and the legislature, where senators were still made, hung in grimly unyielding deadlock. All that afternoon until its adjournment the lawyer had sat in the visitors' gallery of the house or laboured in the lobby. Now he sought brief relaxation after his own fashion. He sat upright in his armchair with a clarionet pressed to his lips and his cheeks ballooned, playing "Trouble in the Land."