Once to Every Man

“A world-beater,” he was screaming above the tumult. “I’ll make a world-beater of you in a year!”

And The Pilgrim, still smiling vaguely, shook his head a little.

“Maybe,” he answered faintly. “Maybe I’ll come back. I don’t know–yet. But now–now I reckon I’d better be going along home!”

CHAPTER XIX

It was a white night–a night so brilliant that the village lights far below in the hollow all but lost their own identity in the radiance of that huge, pale moon; so white that the yellow flare of the single lamp in its bracket, in the back kitchen of the old Bolton place on the hill seemed shabbily dull by contrast.

Standing at the window in the dark front room of the house, peering out from under cupped palms that hid her eyes, Dryad could almost pick out each separate picket of the straggling old fence that bounded the garden of the little drab cottage across from her. In that searching light she could even make out great patches where the rotting sheathing of the house had been torn away, leaving the framework beneath naked and gaunt and bare.

It was scarcely two months since the day when she had gone herself to Judge Maynard with her offer to sell that unkempt acre or so which he had fought so long and bitterly to force into the market. And it had been a strange one, too–that interview. His acceptance had been quick–instantaneously eager–but the girl was still marvelling a little over his attitude throughout that transaction, whenever her mind turned back to it.

When she mentioned the mortgage which Young Denny had secured only a few days before, he had seemed to understand almost immediately why she had spoken of it, without the explanation which she meant to give.

Once again she found him a different Judge Maynard from all the others she had known, and he had in the years since she could remember, been many different men to her imagination. It puzzled her almost as much as did his opinion upon the value of the old place, which, somehow, she could not bring herself to believe was worth all that he insisted upon paying. But then, too, she did not know either that the town’s great man had been riding a-tilt at his own soul, for several days on end, and just as Old Jerry had done, was seizing upon the first opportunity to salve the wounds resultant.

And yet this was the first day that the girl had seen him so much as inspect his long-coveted property; the first time she had known him to set foot within the sagging gate since he had placed in her hands that sum of money which was greater than any she had ever seen before. Under his directions men had commenced clearing away the rank shrubbery that afternoon–commenced to tear down the house itself.

Time after time since morning she had entered the front room to stand and peer out across the valley at this new activity which the Judge himself was directing with an oddly suppressed lack of his usual violent gestures. There was something akin to apology in his every move.

It brought a little homesick ache into the girl’s throat; it set her lips to curving–made her eyes go damp with pity and tenderness for the little white-haired figure bending over his bench. He had clung so bravely, so stubbornly, to that battered bit of a house; to his garden which he had never realized had long since ceased to be anything but a plot of waist-high bushes and weeds. Once when she recollected those countless rows of poignantly wistful faces on the shelves of that back-room workshop she wondered if she had not been disloyal, after all. And she had argued it out with herself aloud as she went from task to task in that afternoon’s gathering twilight.

“But it was because of her that he stayed,” she reassured herself. “It was because of her that he kept it, all these years. And–and so he couldn’t mind–not very much, I think, now that they don’t need it any longer, if I sold it so that I could keep this place–for him!”

They had been long, those hours of waiting. Not a minute of those entire two days since Old Jerry’s departure but had dragged by on laggard feet. And yet now, with nightfall of that third day she became jealous of every passing minute. She hated to have them pass; dreaded to watch the creeping hands of the clock on the kitchen wall as they drew up, little by little, upon that hour which meant the arrival of the night train in the village.

One moment she wondered if he would come–wondered and touched dry lips with the tip of her tongue. And the very next, when somehow she was so very, very sure that there was no room for doubt, she even wondered whether or not he would be glad–glad to find her there. The gaunt skeleton of a framework showing through the torn sides of John Anderson’s cottage almost unnerved her whenever that thought came, and sent her out again into the lighted back room.

“What if he isn’t?” she whispered, over and over again. “Why, I–I never thought of that before, did I? I just thought I had to be here when he came. But what if he–isn’t glad?”

An hour earlier, when the thought had first come to her, she had carried a big, square package out to the table before the kitchen window and untied with fluttering fingers the string that bound it. The little scarlet blouse and shimmering skirt, alive with tinsel that glinted under the light, still lay there beside the thin-heeled slippers and filmy silk stockings. She bent over them, patting them lovingly with a slim hand, her eyes velvety dark while she considered.

“Oh, you’re pretty–pretty–pretty!” she said in a childishly hushed voice, “the prettiest things in the world!”

The next instant she straightened to scan soberly the old shiny black skirt she was wearing, and the darned stockings and cracked shoes.

“And–and you would help, I think,” she went on musing. “I know you would, but then–then it wouldn’t be me. It would be easy for any one to care for you–almost too easy. I–I think I’ll wear them for him–some other time, maybe–if he wants me to.”

But she turned the very next moment and crossed to the mirror on the wall–that square bit of glass before which Young Denny had stood and stared back into his own eyes and laughed. Oblivious to everything else she was critically scanning her own small reflection–great, tip-tilted eyes, violet in the shadow, and then cheeks and pointed chin–until, even in spite of her preoccupation, she became aware of the hungry tremulousness of the mouth of that reflected image–until the hoarse shriek of an engine’s whistle leaped across the valley and brought her up sharp, her breath going in one long, quavering gasp between wide lips.

It was that moment toward which she had been straining every hour of those two days; the one from which she had been shrinking every minute of those last two hours since dark. She hesitated a second, head thrown to one side, listening; she darted into that dark front room and pressed her face to the cold pane, and again that warning note came shrilling across the quiet from the far side of town.

There in the darkness, a hand on either side of the frame holding her leaning weight, she stood and waited. Below her the house roofs lay like patches of jet against the moon-brightness. She stood and watched its whole length, and no darker figure crept into relief against its lighter streak of background. Minutes after she knew that he had had time to come, and more, she still clung there, staring wide-eyed, villageward.

It wasn’t a recollection of that half dismantled wreck of a house under the opposite ridge that finally drew her dry-lipped gaze from the road; she did not even think of it that moment. It was simply because she couldn’t watch any longer–not even for a minute or two–that her eyes finally fluttered that way. But when she did turn there was a bigger, darker blot there against the leaning picket fence–a big-shouldered figure that had moved slowly forward until it stood full in front of the sagging gate.

And even as she watched Denny Bolton swung around from a long contemplation of that half-torn-down building to peer up at his own dark place on the hill–to peer straight back into the eyes of the girl whom he could not even see.

She saw the bewilderment in that big body’s poise; even at that distance she sensed his dumb, numbed uncomprehension. From bare white throat to the mass of tumbled hair that clustered across her forehead the blood came storming up into her face; and with the coming of that which set the pulses pounding in her temples and brought an unaccountable ache to her throat, all the doubt which had squired her that day slipped away.

Before he had had time to turn back again she had flown on mad feet into the kitchen, swept the lamp from its bracket on the wall with heedless haste and raced back to that front window. And she placed it there behind a half-drawn shade–that old signal which they had agreed upon without one spoken word, years back.

Crouching in the semi-gloom behind the lamp she watched.

He stepped forward a pace and stopped; lifted one hand slowly, as though he did not believe what he saw. Bareheaded he waited an instant after that arm went back to his side. When he swung around and disappeared into the head of the path that led from the gate into the black shadow of the thicket in the valley’s pit she lifted both arms, too, and stood poised there a moment, slender and straight and vividly unwavering as the lamp-flame itself, before she wheeled and ran.

It was dark in the thick of the underbrush; dark and velvety quiet, save for the little moon-lit patch of a clearing where he waited. He stood there in the middle of that spot of light and heard her coming long before she reached him–long before he could see her he heard her scurrying feet and the whip of bushes against her skirt.

But when she burst through the fringe of brush he had no time to move or speak, or more than lift his arms before her swift rush carried her to him. When her hands flashed up about his neck and her damp mouth went searching softly across his face and he strained her nearer and even nearer to him, he felt her slim body quivering just as it had trembled that other night when she had raced across the valley to him–the night when Judge Maynard’s invitation had failed to come. After a time he made out the words that were tumbling from her lips, all incoherent with half hysterical bits of sobs, and he realized, too, that her words were like that of that other night.

“Denny–Denny,” she murmured, her small, gold-crowned head buried in his shoulder. “I’m here–I’ve come–just as soon as I could; Oh, I’ve been afraid! I knew you’d come, too–I knew you would tonight! I was sure of it–even when I was sure that you wouldn’t.”

For a long time he was silent, because dry lips refused to frame the words he would have spoken. Minutes he stood and held her against him until the rise and fall of her narrow shoulders grew quieter, before he lifted one hand and held her damp face away, that he might look into it. And gazing back at him, in spite of all the wordless wonder of her which she saw glowing in his eyes, she read, too, the grave perplexity of him.

“Why–you–you must have known I’d come,” he said, his voice ponderously grave. “I–I told you so. I left word for you that I would be back–as soon as I could come.”

He felt her slim body slacken–saw the lightning change flash over her face which always heralded that bewildering swift change of mood. It wiped out all the tenseness of lip and line.

There in the white light in spite of the shadows of her lashes which turned violet eyes to great pools of satin shadow, he caught the flare of mischief behind half-closed lids, before she tilted her head back and laughed softly, with utter joyous abandon straight up into his face.

“He–he didn’t deliver it,” she stated naively. “It wasn’t his fault entirely, though, Denny–although I did give him lots of chances, at first anyway. I almost made him tell–but he–he’s stubborn.”

She stopped and laughed again–giggled shamelessly as she remembered. But her eyes grew grave once more.

“I think he didn’t quite approve of my attitude,” she explained to him as he bent over her. “He thought I wasn’t–sorry enough–to deserve it at first. And then–and then I never gave him any opportunity to speak. I would have stopped him if he had tried. You–you see, I just wanted to–wait.”

Head bowed she paused a moment before she continued.

“But–but I sent him to you–two days ago, Denny. I sent something that I asked him to give you–when–when it was over. Didn’t you–get it?”

He fumbled in the pocket of his smooth black suit after she had disengaged herself and dropped to the ground at his feet. With her ankles curled up under her she sat in a boyish heap watching him, until he drew out the bit of a spangled crimson bow and held it out before him in the palm of one big hand. Then he swung down to the ground beside her.

“I thought it must have been Old Jerry who brought it. I didn’t see him, and no one could remember his name or knew where he had gone when they thought to look for him. They–they just described him to me.”

He turned the bow of silk over, touching it almost reverently.

“Some one gave it to me,” he continued slowly. “I don’t know exactly how or when. It–it was just put into my hand–when I needed it most. I wasn’t sure Old Jerry had brought it, but I knew it came from you, knew it when I didn’t–know–much–else!”

She was very, very quiet, content merely in his nearness. Even then she didn’t understand it–the reason for his going that night, weeks before–for the papers which had told her a little had told her nothing of his brain’s own reason. The question was on her lips when her narrow fingers, searching the shadow for his, found that bandaged wrist and knuckles. Almost fiercely she drew that hand up into the light. From the white cloth her gaze went to the discolored, bruised patches on face and chin–the same place where that long, ugly cut had been which dripped blood on the floor the night she had run from him in the dark–went to his face, and back again, limpid with pity. And she lifted it impulsively and tucked it under her chin, and held it there with small hands that trembled a little.

“Then–then if you haven’t seen Old Jerry–why–why you–he couldn’t have told you anything at all yet, about me.”

The words trailed off softly and left the statement hanging interrogatively in midair.

Denny nodded his head in the direction of John Anderson’s house that had been.

“About that?” he asked.