(From _The Midland_)
If I had had a less positive sense of revulsion for him, I might have
been able to treat him with more contempt, certainly with more
indifference. It was a part of Con Darton's power that those who knew
him should waver in their judgments of him, should in turn reproach
themselves for their hardness of heart and then grow angry at their own
lack of assuredness. Perhaps it was the disquieted gray eyes in the lean
leathery face, or the thin-lipped mouth that I had seen close so foxly
after some sanctimonious speech, or the voice which, when not savage
with recrimination, could take on a sustained and calculated intonation
of appeal,--perhaps these things aroused my interest as well as my
disgust. Certain it is that other men of a like feather, sly, irascible,
gone to seed in a disorderly Illinois town, I should have avoided. I
made the excuse of Lisbeth, and it was true that her welfare, first as
his daughter and later as the wife of my friend, was very dear to my
heart. Yet that could not explain the hypnotism the man had for me,
befogging, as it sometimes did, an honest estimate.
There were, of course, moments of certainty. I recalled village
anecdotes of bitter wrangles among the Dartons with Con always coming
out best. They were a quarreling pack of sentimentalists. From all
accounts Miss Etta must have been at that time a rugged girl of
twenty-eight, of striking, if ungentle, appearance; and only the
unsteadied sensibilities and the too-ready acrimony could have
foreshadowed the large blatant woman she was to become, a woman who
alternated between a generous flow of emotion on the one hand and an
unimaginative hardness on the other. Only Lin Darton could have given
promise then of the middle-class, semi-prosperous business man who was
to justify the Darton tradition. But from all that I could gather of
those younger days, before Con's marriage to Selma Perkins, he was the
cock of the walk, holding the reins over them all by virtue of his
shrewdness, apparently understanding the robust, over-blooded strains of
their temperament and not unwilling to sound these at his pleasure.
My own experience dates back to the first time that he stood out for me
a vivid picture in that sagging barn-like old farmhouse behind the elms.
I was ten years old then, and I was already beginning to think highly of
my father's profession, which that winter had sent him into a nest of
small asthma-ridden towns. It was my privilege to trot by his side,
carrying his worn black medicine case and endeavoring vainly to keep
pace with his long jerky strides. On this particular occasion he had
been summoned suddenly to the Dartons'; and, being unable to leave
promptly, had sent me ahead postehaste with instructions, and an
envelope of white pills to be taken "only in case of extreme pain."
Arriving at the farmhouse, the peaked façade of which, built to suggest
an unbegotten third story, looked more hideous than ever among the bare
branches, I knocked with reddened knuckles at the door. There was no
response; at last, my half-frozen hand smarting with the contact of the
wood, I pushed open the door and went in.
It was very still inside--a strange unnatural stillness. Even Grega and
Martie, the two little plain-faced girls, were not to be seen; the drab,
rose-patterned carpet muffled my footsteps, which, for some inexplicable
reason, I made as light as possible. The room, faded, and scrubbed to
the point of painfulness, gave only two signs of disorder, a crumpled
book of verse open on the table and a Bible lying face down on the worn,
orange-colored sofa. But there was something vaguely uncanny about the
whole house; the very air seemed thin, like the atmosphere of
approaching death. An unnameable terror took hold of me. I waited,
fearing to call out. A door shut upstairs. There were footsteps, and the
sound of voices,--a man's and a woman's--whispering. Then more
footsteps. This time some one was taking no trouble to walk lightly.
"Quietly now," the woman's voice cautioned.
"Ye said it was a boy?" This was Mr. Darton's voice, unmistakable now.
"I didn't say," the woman's whisper floated down to me as a door creaked
open. "But it _is_--a girl. You must be ver--"
Her words were cut off by the report of a door banging shut. There was
the sibilant sound of a breath being drawn in and, at the same moment,
Mr. Darton's voice again.
"What the hell made ye think I'd want to see another _girl_ for?" he
growled.
A pause followed, the emptier for the preceding stridor of his voice.
Then--"You c'n get along now--we ain't got no more call fur neighbors."
With that he came stamping down the stairs and slouched into the front
room, where, upon his catching sight of me, a frightened look crossed
his face, followed, almost instantly, by a queer expression, a mixture
of relief and cunning that gave his face a grotesqueness that I can
recall to this very day.
"Well, boy," he said in that low drawl and wavelike inflection of the
voice that I was to learn to know so well, "yer father sent ye, did he?"
I proffered the note and the pills, and he frowned at them a second
before pocketing them.
"Come--_he-re_." He seemed to pull at the words, giving each a retarded
emphasis. As I approached, he drew me towards him, where he had sunk on
the dingy, orange-fringed sofa. "N-ow, y're a nice young fellow--a bit
scrawny, though. Ye--gotta horse?"