Chapter 11

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_ CHAPTER XI

It would have been hard for her to have explained just why it was so, but Dryad Anderson had been sitting there in the unlighted front room of the little once-white cottage before Judge Maynard's boxlike place on the hill, watching hour after hour for that light to blink out at her from the dark window of Denny Bolton's house on the opposite slope. Ever since it had grown dark enough for that signal to be seen, which had called across to her so many nights, she had been waiting before the table in front of the window--waiting even while she told herself that it could not appear. It was not Saturday night; there was no real reason why she should be watching, unless--unless it was hope that held her there.

Only in the last few hours since twilight had she admitted to herself the possibility that such a hope lurked behind her vigil. Before then, when the thought had first come to her that Denny might cry out to her through the night, with that half-shuttered light, she had stifled it with a savageness that left her shaking, panting and dizzy from its bewildering intensity.

Time after time she told herself that it would go unheeded by her, no matter how long or how insistently it beckoned, if by the hundredth chance it should flare up beyond the shadows, but as minutes dragged interminably by into equally interminable hours, the strained fierceness of that whispered promise grew less and less knifelike in its hardness--less and less assured.

Somehow, ever since the first light of that gray day had discovered her sitting there in almost the same position in which she now sat, eyes straining out across the valley, pointed chin cupped in her palms, that fearful, almost insane passion which had held each nerve and fiber of her taut as tight-stretched wire through the entire sleepless night, had begun to give way to something even less easy to endure.

All the terror which had checked her that evening when she swung the door open and stood poised on the threshold, a low laugh of sheerest delight in the costume she had worn across for him to see ready to burst from parted lips--all the horror that had held her incapable of motion until Denny had swung around and found her there, and lifted his arms and attempted to speak, had given way, in the first hours that followed, to a flaming scorn, a searing contempt for him and for his weakness that had lost him his fight.

All through that night which followed her panic flight from the huge, heavy-footed figure that had groped out for her, called to her, and dropped asprawl her own small cloak in the doorway, Denny Bolton's blood-soiled face and drunkenly reckless laugh had been with her, feeding that rage which scorched her eyes beneath their lids--that burned her throat and choked her.

Little drops of blood oozed out upon her lips--strangely brilliant crimson drops against that colorless background--where her teeth sank deep in the agony of disillusionment that made each pulse-beat a sledge-hammer blow within her brain. Her small palms were etched blue under the clenched fingers where the nails bit the flesh. And yet--and yet, for all the agony of it which made her lift her blanched face from time to time throughout the night--a face so terribly strained that it was almost distorted--and set her gasping chokingly that she hated him, hated him for a man who couldn't fight and keep on fighting, even when the odds were great--when the light of that new, dreary day had come streaking in across her half-bowed head, something else began to take the place of all that bitterness and scorn.

And throughout the day she had still been struggling against it, struggling with all the tense fierceness of which her spirit was capable--her spirit that was far too big for the slim body that housed it. Yet that thought could not be shaken off. She couldn't forget it, couldn't wipe out the recollection of that great, gaping wound that had dripped blood from his chin. She tried to close her eyes and shut it out as she went from task to task that day, and it would not fade.

Somehow it wasn't that man at all whom she remembered as the afternoon dragged by to its close; it wasn't the big-shouldered body nervelessly asprawl upon the floor that filled her memory. Instead a picture of an awkward, half-grown boy flashed up before her--a big, ungainly, terribly embarrassed boy who turned from watching the mad flight of a rabbit through the brush to smile at her reassuringly, even though his face was torn raw from her own nails.

That was the point at which the tide of her chaotic thoughts began to waver and turn. Long before she realized what she was doing she had fallen to wondering, with a solicitude that made moist and misty once more her tip-tilted eyes and softened the thin line of her lips, whether or not that bruise had been washed out, cleansed and cleanly bandaged.

When she did realize what that thought meant, it had been too long with her to be routed. She was too tired to combat it, anyway, too tired with the reaction of that long, throbbing night to do more than wonder at herself. Twilight came and the gray mist that had been over the hills for hours dissolved into rain. With the first hint of darkness that the storm brought with it she began to watch--to peer out of the window whenever her busy footsteps carried her past it, at the bleak place across the hollow. Before it was fairly night she began to understand that she was not merely watching for the light, but hoping, praying wordlessly that it might shine. And when her work was finished she had taken her place there, her slim body in its scant black skirt and little white blouse hunched boyishly forward as always across the table.

Even that girl who, after the hours which had been almost cataclysmic for her, could scarcely have been expected to be able to comprehend it clearly yet--even she read the meaning of the slackened cords of her body, of her loosened lips and wet eyes. As long as she could she had fed the flame within her soul--fed it with every bitter thought and harsh judgment which her brain could evolve--and yet that flame had slackened and smouldered and finally died out entirely. Self-shame, self-scorn even, could not rekindle it.

Her lips were no longer white and straight and feverish with contempt; they were damp and full again, and curved and half-open with compassion. The ache was still there in her breast--a great gnawing pain which it seemed at that moment time could never remove, but it was no longer the wild hatred which made her pant with a desire to make him suffer, too, just as she had suffered that night through. The pain was just as great, but it was pity now--only pity and an unaccountable yearning to draw that bruised face down against her and croon over it.

In spite of the numbness, in spite of the lassitude which that burnt-out passion had left behind in brain and body, she knew what it meant. She understood. She had hated his weakness; she still hated his lack of manhood which had made him fail her. That hatred would be a long time dying now--if it ever did perish. But she couldn't hate him! She looked that fact in the face, dumb at first at the awakening. She couldn't hate him--not the man he was! There was a distinction--a difference very clear to her woman-brain. She could despise his cowardice; she could despise herself for caring still--but the caring still went on. Half-vaguely she realized it, but she knew the change had come. The girlishness was gone from it forever. She had to care now as a woman always cares--not for the thing he was, but in spite of it.

"I ought to hate him," she told herself once, aloud. "I know I ought to hate him, and yet--and yet I don't believe I can. Why, I--I can't even hate myself, as I did a little while back, because I still care!"

It was a habit that had grown out of her long loneliness--those half-whispered conversations with herself. And now only one conviction remained. Again and again she told herself that she could not go to meet him that night--could not go, even if he should call to her. And that, too, she put into whispered words.

"Even if he lights the window, I can't--I couldn't! Oh, not tonight! He won't--he won't think of it. But I couldn't let him touch me--until--until I've had a little time to forget!"

But she was watching still--watching with small, gold-crowned head nodding heavily, eyes half-veiled with sinking lids--when that half-shaded window in the dark house glowed suddenly yellow with the light behind it. She was still hoping, praying dumbly that it might be, when Young Denny lifted the black-chimneyed lamp from its bracket on the kitchen wall that night, after he had stood and listened with a smile on his lips to Old Jerry's hurried departure, and carried it into the front room which he scarcely ever entered except upon that errand.

At first she did not believe. She thought it was only a trick of her brain, so tired now that it was as little capable of connected thought as her worn-out body was of motion. Hardly breathing she stared until she saw the great blot of his body silhouetted against the pane for a moment as he crowded between the lamp, staring across at her, she knew.

She rose then, rose slowly and very cautiously as though she feared her slightest move might make it vanish. Young Denny's bobbing lantern, swinging in one hand as he crossed before the house and plunged into the thicket that lay between them, was all that convinced her--made her believe that she had seen aright.

"I can't go--I can't!" she breathed. And then, lifting her head, vehemently, as if he could hear:

"I want to--oh, you know I want to! But I can't come to you tonight--not until I've had a little longer--to think."

Almost before she had finished speaking another voice answered, a soft, dreamy voice that came so abruptly in the quiet house that it made her wheel like a startled wild thing. She had forgotten him for the time--that little, stooped figure at its bench in the back room workshop. For hours she had not given him a thought, and he had made not so much as a motion to make her remember his presence. She could not even remember when his sing-song, unending monologue had ceased, but she realized then that he had been more silent that night than ever before.

Earlier in the evening when she had lighted his lamp for him and set out his lump of moist clay, and helped him to his place on the high stool, she had thought to notice some difference in him.

Usually John Anderson was possessed of one or two unvarying moods. Either he plunged contentedly into his task of reproducing the multitude of small white figures around the walls, or else he merely sat and stared up at her hopelessly, vacantly, until she put the clay herself into his hands. Tonight it had been different, for when she had placed the damp mass between his limp fingers he had laid it aside again, raised astonishingly clear eyes to hers and shaken his head.

"After a little--after a little while," he had said. "I--I want to think a little first."

It had amazed her for a moment. At any other time it would have frightened her, but tonight as she stroked his bowed head, she told herself that it was nothing more than a new vagary of his anchorless mind.

But that same strangely clear, almost sane glow which had puzzled her then was still there when she turned. It was even brighter than before, and the slow words which had startled her, for all their dreamy softness, seemed very sane as well.

"You have to go," John Anderson answered her faltering, half-audible whisper. "You have to go--but you'll be back soon. Oh, so soon! And I'll be safe till you come!"

Dryad flashed forward a step, both hands half-raised to her throat as he spoke, almost believing that the miracle for which she had ceased even to hope had come that night. And then she understood--she knew that the bent figure which had already turned back to its bench had only repeated her words, parrotlike; she knew that he had only pieced together a recollection of the absence which her vigil before the window had meant on a former occasion and repeated her own words of that other night.

And yet her brain clamored that there was more behind it all than mere witless repetition. John Anderson was smiling at her, too, smiling like a benevolent wraith. She saw that his pile of clay was still untouched, but there was no hint of petulant perplexity in his face, nothing of the terrified impotence which the inactivity of his fingers had always heralded before. He was just smiling--vaguely to be sure and a little uncertainly--but smiling in utter contentment and satisfaction, for all that.

Very slowly--wonderingly, she crossed to him and put both arms about his white head and drew it against her.

"I think you knew," she said to him, unsteadily. "I think you are able to understand better than I can myself. And I know, too, now. I do have to go--I must go to him. But he need not even know, until I tell him some day--that I was with him tonight."

The old man pulled away from her clasp, gently but very insistently. And he nodded--nodded as though he had understood. She paused and looked back at him from the doorway, just as she had always hesitated. He was following her with his eyes. Again he shook his head, just as positively as he might have, had he been the man he might have been.

"Some day," he reiterated, serenely, "some day! And she'll know then--some day I'll tell her--that I was with her tonight."

She had forgotten the rain. It was coming down heavily, and it was dark, too--very, very dark. She stopped a while, as long as she dared, and waited with the rain beating cold upon her uncovered head and bare throat until her eyes saw the path a little more clearly. It took her a long time to feel her way forward that night. And even when she came within sight of Denny's lantern, even when she was near enough to see him through the thicket ahead of her, in the little patch of light, she had not decided what she meant to do.

But with that first glimpse of him squatting there in the small cleared space it came to her what her course should be. She realized that if it was an impossibility for her to go to him, she could at least let him know she had been there--let him know that he had not been entirely alone while he waited. She even smiled to herself--smiled with wistful, half-sad, elfen tenderness as she, too, huddled down without a sound, there in the wet bushes opposite him, and decided how she would tell him.

Denny Bolton never quite knew how long he waited in the rain before he was certain that there was no use waiting longer. More than half the night had dragged by when he reached finally into the pockets of his coat and searched for a scrap of paper. Watching from her place in the thicket near him, she recognized the small white card which he discovered--she even reached out one hand instinctively for her invitation from the Judge, which she had told him had never arrived and for which she had hunted in vain throughout the following days.

With an unaccountable gladness because he knew straining at her throat, she watched him draw the lantern nearer and read again the words it bore before he turned it over and wrote, laboriously, with the thick pencil that he used to check logs back in the hills, some message across its back.

It was a message to her, she knew; and she knew, too, that he was going now. Deliberately she reached out then and found a rotten branch beside her. Young Denny's head shot up as it cracked between her hands--shot swiftly erect while he stared hard at that wall of darkness which hid her. And swiftly as she fled, like some noiseless night creature of the woods, his sudden, plunging rush almost discovered her.

Back in the safety of the blackness she stood and saw him bend over the place where she had been crouching; she saw him put his hand upon the patch of dead ferns which her body had crushed flat, and knew that he found it still warm. She even held up her face, as though she were giving him her lips--she reached out her arms to him--when she saw him rise from an examination of her foot-prints in the mold, smiling his slow, infinitely grave smile as he nodded his head over what he had seen.

Back over the path she had come she followed the dancing point of his lantern, sometimes almost upon him, sometimes lagging far behind when he stopped and strained his ears for her. All recollection of the night before was gone from her mind, wiped out as utterly as though it had never existed. Nothing but a great gladness possessed her, a joy that amounted almost to mischievous glee whenever he stood still a moment and listened.

Not until she had waited many minutes after he stooped and slipped the card beneath the door did she come out from the cover of the woods. But she raced forward madly then, and flung the door open, and stooped for it where it lay white against the floor.

All the mischievous glee went from her face in that next moment. Bit by bit it faded before the advance of that same strained whiteness that had marred it, hours before. All the wistfulness that made her face so childlike, all the hunger that made the hurt in her breast came back while she read, over and over, the words which Denny had written for her across the back of her card, until she could repeat them without looking at it. And even then she only half-understood what they meant. Once she opened the door and peered out into the blackness, searching for the lantern that had disappeared.

"Why--why he's gone! He came to tell me that he was going away," she murmured, dully. And then, still more dully:

"And I didn't tell him I was sorry. I've let him go without even telling him how sorry I was--for the hurt upon his chin!"

Perhaps it was the silence that made her turn; perhaps she simply turned with no thought or reason at all, but she faced slowly about at that moment, just in time to see John Anderson nod and smile happily at something he alone could see--just in time to hear him sigh softly once, before his arms went slack upon his work-bench and his head drooped forward above them.

The bit of a card fluttered to the floor as both her tight-clenched fists lifted toward her throat. The softest of pitying little moans came quavering from her lips. She needed no explanation of what that suddenly limp body meant! And she understood better now, too, that untouched lump of clay upon the boards beside his bowed head. John Anderson's long task was finished. He had known it was finished, and had been merely resting tonight--resting content before he started upon that long journey, before he followed that face, tumbled of hair and uplifted of lip, which seemed always to be calling to him.

The slim-bodied girl whose face was so like what that other woman's face had been went slowly across to him where he sat. After a while she slipped her arm about his wasted shoulders, just as she had done so often on other nights. A racking sob shook her when she first tried to speak--and she tried again.

"You kept faith, didn't you, dear?" she whispered to him. "Oh, but you kept faith with her--right--right up to the end. Please God--please God, I may get my chance back again--to try to keep it, too. You've gone to her--and--and I'm glad! You waited a long time, dear, and you were very patient. But, oh, you've left me--you've left me all alone!"

The tears came then. Great, searing drops that had been hopelessly dammed back the night before rolled down her thin cheeks. She stooped and touched the silvered head with her lips before she groped her way into the other room and found her chair at the table.

"He knew I was there with him," she tried to whisper. "He knew I was, I know! But I wish I could tell him I'm sorry. Oh, I wish I could!"

And Old Jerry found her so, head pillowed upon her outstretched arms, her hair in a marvelous shimmering mass across her little shoulders when he came the next morning, almost before the day was fairly begun, to tell her all the things there were for him to tell. _

Read next: Chapter 12

Read previous: Chapter 10

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