The sobbing in the little room was the only sound that came from one of
the grimmest battle-fields from which the soul of a woman ever emerged
alive.
To the first rush of cowardly tears Mary had yielded utterly. She had
fallen across the high-puffed feather mattress of the bed, shivering in
humble gratitude at her escape from the horror of blindness. The grip
of his claw-like fingers on her throat came back to her now in sickening
waves. The blood was still trickling from the wound which his nails had
made when she tore them loose in her first mad fight for breath.
She lifted her body and breathed deeply to make sure her throat was
free. God in heaven! Could she ever forget the hideous sinking of body
and soul down into the depths of the black abyss! She had seen the face
of Death and it was horrible. Life, warm and throbbing, was sweet. She
loved it. She hated Death.
Yes--she was a coward. She knew it now, and didn't care.
She sprang to her feet with sudden fear. He might attack her again to
make sure that her soul had been completely crushed.
She crept to the door and felt its edges.
“Yes, thank God, there's a place for the bar!” She shivered.
She ran her trembling fingers carefully along the rough logs and found
it in the corner. She slipped it cautiously into the iron sockets,
staggered to the bed and dropped in grateful assurance of safety for the
moment. She buried her face in the pillow to fight back the sobs. How
great her fall! She could crawl on her hands and knees to Jane Anderson
now and beg for protection. The last shred of pretense was gone. The
bankrupt soul stood naked and shivering, the last rag torn from pride.
What a miserable fight she had made, too, when put to the test! Ella had
at least proved herself worthy to live. The scrub-woman had risen in the
strength of desperation and killed the beast who had maimed her. She had
only sunk a limp mass of shivering, helpless cowardice and fled from the
room whining and pleading for mercy.
She could never respect herself again. The scene came back in vivid
flashes. His eyes, glowing like two balls of blue fire, froze the blood
in her veins--his voice the rasping cold steel of a file. And this
coarse, ugly beast had held her in the spell of love. She had clung to
him, kissed him in rapture and yielded herself to him soul and body. And
he had gripped her delicate throat and choked her into insensibility,
dropping her limp form from his hands like a strangled rat. She could
remember the half-conscious moment that preceded the total darkness as
she felt his grip relax.
He would choke and beat her again, too. He had said it in the sneering
laughter at the door.
“A good little wife now and it's all right!”
And if you're not obedient to my whims I'll choke you until you are!
That was precisely what he meant. That he was capable of any depth of
degradation, and that he meant to drag her with him, there could be no
longer the shadow of a doubt.
She could not endure another scene like that. She sprang to her feet
again, shivering with terror. She could hear the hum of the conversation
in the next room. He was persuading his mother to join in his criminal
career. He was busy with his oily tongue transforming the simple,
ignorant, lonely old woman into an avaricious fiend who would receive
his blood-stained booty and rejoice in it.
He was laughing again. She put her trembling hands over her ears to shut
out the sound. He had laughed at her shame and cowardice. It made her
flesh creep to hear it.
She would escape. The mountain road was dark and narrow and crooked. She
would lose her way in the night, perhaps. No matter. She could keep
warm by walking. At dawn she would find her way to a cabin and ask
protection. If she could reach Asheville, a telegram would bring
her father. She wouldn't lose a minute. Her hat and coat were in the
living-room. She would go bareheaded and without a coat. In the morning
she could borrow one from the woman at the Mount Mitchell house.
She crept cautiously along the walls of the room searching for a door or
window. There must be a way out. She made the round without discovering
an opening of any kind. There must be a window of some kind high up for
ventilation. There was no glass in it, of course. It was closed by a
board shutter--if she could reach it.
She began at the door, found the corner of the room and stretched her
arms upward until they touched the low, rough joist. Over every foot of
its surface she ran her fingers, carefully feeling for a window. There
was none!
She found an open crack and peered through. The stars were shining cold
and clear in the December sky. The twinkling heavens reminded her that
it was Christmas Eve. The dawn she hoped to see in the woods, if she
could escape, would be Christmas morning. There was no time for idle
tears of self-pity.
The one thought that beat in every throb of her heart now was to escape
from her cell and put a thousand miles between her body and the beast
who had strangled her. She might break through the roof! As a rule the
shed-rooms of these rude mountain cabins were covered with split boards
lightly nailed to narrow strips eighteen inches apart. If there were
no ceiling, or if the ceiling were not nailed down and she should
move carefully, she might break through near the eaves and drop to the
ground. The cabin was not more than nine feet in height.
She raised herself on the footrail of the bed and felt the ceiling.
There could be no mistake. It was there. She pressed gently at first and
then with all her might against each board. They were nailed hard and
fast.
She sank to the bed again in despair. She had barred herself in a prison
cell. There was no escape except by the door through which the beast had
driven her. And he would probably draw the couch against it and sleep
there.
And then came the crushing conviction that such flight would be of no
avail in a struggle with a man of Jim's character. His laughing words of
triumph rang through her soul now in all their full, sinister meaning.
“The world ain't big enough for you to get away from me, Kiddo!”
It wasn't big enough. She knew it with tragic and terrible certainty. In
his blind, brutal way he loved her with a savage passion that would halt
at nothing. He would follow her to the ends of the earth and kill any
living thing that stood in his way. And when he found her at last he
would kill her.
How could she have been so blind! There was no longer any mystery about
his personality. The slender hands and feet, which she had thought
beautiful in her infatuation, were merely the hands and feet of a thief.
The strength of jaw and neck and shoulders had made him the most daring
of all thieves--a burglar.
His strange moods were no longer strange. He laughed for joy at the wild
mountain gorges and crags because he saw safety for the hiding-place of
priceless jewels he meant to steal.
There could be no escape in divorce from such a brute. He was happy in
her cowardly submission. He would laugh at the idea of divorce. Should
she dare to betray the secrets of his life of crime, he would kill her
as he would grind a snake under his heel.
A single clause from the marriage ceremony kept ringing its
knell--“until DEATH DO US PART!”
She knelt at last and prayed for Death.
“Oh, dear God, let me die, let me die!”
Suicide was a crime unthinkable to her pious mind. Only God now could
save her in his infinite mercy.
She lay for a long time on the floor where she had fallen in utter
despair. The tears that brought relief at first had ceased to flow.
She had beaten her bleeding wings against every barrier, and they were
beyond her strength.
Out of the first stupor of complete surrender, her senses slowly
emerged. She felt the bare boards of the floor and wondered vaguely why
she was there.
The hum of voices again came to her ears. She lay still and listened.
A single terrible sentence she caught. He spoke it with such malignant
power she could see through the darkness the flames of hell leaping in
his eyes.
“Nobody's going to ask you HOW you got it--all they want to know is HAVE
you got it!”
She laughed hysterically at the idea of reformation that had stirred her
to such desperate appeal in the first shock of discovery. As well dream
of reforming the Devil as the man who expressed his philosophy of
life in that sentence! Blood dripped from every word, the blood of the
innocent and the helpless who might consciously or unconsciously stand
in his way. The man who had made up his mind to get rich quick, no
matter what the cost to others, would commit murder without the quiver
of an eyelid. If she had ever had a doubt of this fact, she could have
none after her experience of tonight.
She wondered vaguely of the effects he was producing on his ignorant
old mother. Her words were too low and indistinct to be heard. But she
feared the worst. The temptation of the gold he was showing her would be
more than she could resist.
She staggered to her feet and fell limp across the bed. The iron walls
of a life prison closed about her crushed soul. The one door that could
open was Death and only God's hand could lift its bars.