In the extension of his commercial activity Martin Eckles kept his
room at the Greenstream hotel and employed a horse and buggy for his
excursions throughout the county. It had become his habit to sit through
the evenings with the Stammarks where his flood of conversation never
lessened. Lucy scarcely added a phrase to the sum of talk. She rocked in
her chair with a slight endless motion, her dreaming gaze fixed on the
dim valley.
Wilmer Deakon, on the occasion of his first encounter with Eckles at the
Stammarks', acknowledged the other's phrase and stood waiting for Lucy
to proceed with him to the parlor. But Lucy was apparently unaware of
this; she sat calm and remote in her crisp white skirts, while Wilmer
fidgeted at the door.
Soon, however, she said: “For goodness' sake, Wilmer, whatever's the
matter with you? Can't you find a chair that suits you? You make a
person nervous.”
At the same time she rose ungraciously and followed him into the house.
Wilmer came out, Calvin thought, in an astonishingly short time.
Courting was nothing like it had been in his day. The young man
muttered an unintelligible sentence that, from its connection, might be
interpreted as a good night, and strode back to the barn and his horse.
Martin Eckles smiled: “The love birds must have been a little ruffled.”
And Calvin, with a strong impression of having heard such a thing
before, was vaguely uneasy. Eckles sat for a long space; Lucy didn't
appear, and at last the visitor rose reluctantly. But Lucy had not gone
to bed; she came out on the porch and dropped with a flounce into a
chair beside Calvin.
“Wilmer's pestering me to get married right away,” she told him; “before
ever the house is built. He seems to think I ought to be just crazy to
take him and go to that lonely Sugarloaf place.”
“It's what you promised for,” Calvin reminded her; “nothing's turned up
you didn't know about.”
“If I did!” she exclaimed irritably. “What else is a girl to do, I'd
like to ask? It's just going from one stove to another, here. Only it'll
be worse in my case--you and Aunt Ettie have been lovely to me. I hate
to cook!” she cried. “And it makes me sick to put my hands in greasy
dishwater! I suppose that's wicked but I can't help it. When I told
Wilmer that to-night he acted like I'd denied communion. I can't help it
if the whippoorwills make me shiver, can I? Or if I want to see a person
go by once in a while. I--I don't want to be bad--or to hurt you or
Wilmer. Oh, I'll settle down, there's nothing else to do; I'll marry him
and get old before my time, like the others.”
Calvin Stammark leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and stared at
her in shocked amazement--Hannah in every accent and feeling. The old
sense of danger and helplessness flooded him. He thought of Phebe with
her dyed hair and cigarette-stained lips, her stories of the stage and
life; he thought of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. Now Lucy----
“Do you remember anything about your mother,” he asked, “and before you
came here?”
“Only that we were dreadfully unhappy,” she replied. “There was a
boarding house with actresses washing their stockings in the rooms and
a landlady they were all afraid of. There was beer in the wash-stand
pitcher. But that wouldn't happen to me,” she asserted; “I'd be
different. I might be an actress, but in dramas where my hair would be
down and everybody love me.”
“You're going to marry Wilmer Deakon and be a proper happy wife!”
he declared, bringing his fist down on a hard palm. “Get this other
nonsense out of your head!”
Suddenly he was trembling at the old catastrophe reopened by Lucy. His
love for her, and his dread, choked him. She added nothing more, but
sat rigid and pale and rebellious. Before long she went in, but Calvin
stayed facing the darkness, the menace of the lonely valley. Except for
the lumbermen it would be worse in the Sugarloaf cutting.
Damn the frogs!
Martin Eckles appeared in the buggy the following evening and offered
to carry Lucy for a short drive to a near-by farm; with an air of
indifference she accepted. Wilmer didn't call, and Calvin sat in silent
perplexity with Ettie. The buggy returned later than they had allowed,
and Lucy went up to bed without stopping on the porch.
The next morning Ettie, with something in her hand, came out to Calvin
at the stable shed.
“I found this in Lucy's room,” she said simply.
It was Martin Eckles' gold ring, set with the insignia in rubies,
suspended in a loop of ribbon.
A cold angry certitude formed in his being. What a criminal fool he had
been! What a blind booby! His only remark, however, brought a puzzled
expression to Ettie's troubled countenance. Calvin Stammark exclaimed,
“Phebe Braley.” He was silent for a little, his frowning gaze fixed
beyond any visible object, then he added: “Put that back where you found
it and forget everything.”
Ettie laid a hand on his sleeve. “Now, Calvin,” she begged, her voice
low and strained, “promise me----”
“Forget everything!” he repeated harshly.
His face was dark, forbidding, the lines deeply bitten about a somber
mouth, his eyes were like blue ice. He walked into Greenstream, where he
saw the proprietor of the small single hotel; then, back in his room, he
unwrapped from oiled leather a heavy blued revolver; and soon after he
saddled his horse and was clattering in a sharp trot in the opposite
direction from the village.
It was dark when, having returned, he dismounted and swung the saddle
from the horse to its tree. Familiar details kept him a long while, his
hands were steady but slow, automatic in movement. He went in through
the kitchen past Ettie to his room, and after a little he re-wrapped the
revolver and laid it back in its accustomed place. Supper, in spite of
Lucy's sharp comment, was set by the stove, and Ettie was solicitous
of his every possible need. He ate methodically what was offered, and
afterward filled and lit his pipe. It soon went out. Once, on the porch,
he leaned toward Lucy and awkwardly touched her shoulder.
X
Wilmer came. He was late, and Lucy said wearily, “I've got a headache
to-night. Do you mind if we stay out here in the cool?”
He didn't, and his confident familiar planning took the place of Martin
Eckles' more exciting narratives.
The next day, past noon, the proprietor of the Greenstream hotel left
an excited group of men to stop Calvin as he drove in from Sugarloaf
Valley.
He cried: “Eckles has been shot and killed. First they found the horse
and buggy by the road, and then Martin Eckles. He had fallen out. One
bullet did it.”
“That's too bad,” Calvin replied evenly. “Lawlessness ought to be put
down.” He had known Solon Entreken all his life. The level gaze of two
men encountered and held.
Then: “I'll never say anything against that,” the other pronounced.
“It's mighty strange who could have shot Eckles and got clear away.
That's what he did, in spite of hell and the sheriff.”
Turning, after inevitable exclamations, toward home, Calvin found Lucy
sitting moodily on the porch.
“I've got a right ugly piece of news,” he told her, masking the painful
interest with which he followed her expression. “Martin Eckles was
killed yesterday; shot out of the buggy.”
She grew pale, her breast rose in a sudden gasp and her hands were
clenched.
“Oh!” she whispered, horrified.
But there was nothing in her manner beyond the natural detestation of
such brutality; nothing, he saw, hidden.
“He wanted me to go away with him,” she swept on; “and get married in
Stanwick. Martin wanted me to see the world. He said I ought to, and not
stay here all my life.”
The misery that settled over her, the hopelessness dulling her youth
filled him with a passionate resentment at the fate that made her what
she was and seemingly condemned her to eternal denial. His love for
her--Lucy, Hannah, Hannah, Lucy--was intolerably keen. He went to her,
bending with a riven hand on the arm of her chair.
“Do you want Wilmer?” he demanded. “Do you love him truly? Is he
enough?”
“I don't know.” Slow tears wet her cheeks. “I can't say. I ought to;
he's good and faithful, and with some of me that's enough. But there's
another part; I can't explain it except to say it's a kind of excitement
for the life Mr. Eckles told us about, all those lights and restaurants
and theaters. Sometimes I think I'll die, I want it so much; then it
comes over me how ungrateful I am to you and Aunt Ettie, and I hate
myself for the way I treat Wilmer.”
“Do you love him?” he insisted.
“Perhaps not like you mean.”
All that had been so long obscured in his mind and heart slowly cleared
to understanding--Lucy Braley, Richmond's wife; Phebe; Hannah; and again
Lucy, Lucy Vibard had this common hunger for life, for brightness; they
were as helpless in its grasp as he had been to hold Hannah. Phebe's
return, Martin Eckles--were only incidents in a great inner need. In
itself it wasn't wicked; circumstance had made it seem wrong; Phebe's
greenish hair, the mark of so much spoiled, Hannah's unhappy death--were
the result of aspirations; they fretted and bruised, even killed
themselves, like gay young animals, innocent animals, in a dark lonely
enclosure.
They were really finer than the satisfied women who faded to ugliness
in the solitary homes of the Greenstream mountains; not better, for
example, than Ettie--it might be that they weren't so good, not so high
in heaven; but they were finer in the manner of blooded horses rebelling
against the plow traces. They were more elegant, slimmer, with a greater
fire. That too was the secret of their memorable power over him; he
wanted a companion different from a kitchen drudge; when he returned
home at evening, he wanted a wife cool and sweet in crisp white with
a yellow ribbon about her waist, and store slippers. He loved Lucy's
superiority--it was above ordinary things. “Like a star,” Calvin
Stammark told himself.
He, with everything else that had combated their desire, depriving them
of the very necessities for his adoration, had been to blame.
“Lucy,” he said, bending over her and speaking rapidly, “let's you and
me go and learn all this life together. Let's run away from Greenstream
and Wilmer Deakon and even Ettie, what we ought to hold by, and see
every theater in the country. I've got enough money----”
The radiance of the gesture by which she interrupted his speech filled
him with pounding joy.
“Oh, shall we!” she cried; and then hugged him wildly, her warm young
arms about his neck.
“Of course we will,” he reassured her; “and right away, to-morrow. You
and me.”
He felt her lips against his, and then more cautiously she took up the
immediate planning of their purpose. It would be ridiculously easy; they
would drive to Stanwick in the buggy.
“The hotels and all,” she continued with shining eyes; “and nobody will
think it's queer. I'll be your daughter, like always.”
Calvin turned abruptly from her and faced the valley saturated with
slumberous sunlight. Lucy hesitated for a moment and then fled lightly
into the house. After a little he heard her singing on the upper floor.
People wouldn't think it was queer because she would be his daughter,
“like always.”
Yet he wasn't old beyond hope, past love--as strong and nearly as
springy as a hickory sapling. He had waited half his life for this.
Calvin slowly smiled in bitterness and self-contempt; a pretty figure
for a young girl to admire, he thought, losing the sense of mere
physical fitness. Anyhow Lucy was supremely happy and safe, and he
had accomplished it. He was glad that he had been so industrious and
successful. Lucy could have almost anything she wanted--pretty clothes
and rings with real jewels, necklaces hung with better than Scotch
pebbles.
Perhaps when she had seen the world--its bigness and noise and
confusion--after her longing was answered, she would turn back to him.
Already he was oppressed by a feeling of strangeness, of loss at leaving
the high valleys of home.