Virtue had not been rewarded. This much was clear and plain to the
consciousness of Nelia Carline. Looking at herself in the glass
disclosed no special reason why she should be unhappy and suffering. She
was a pretty girl; everybody said that, and envy said she was too
pretty. It seemed that poor folks had no right to be good-looking,
anyhow.
If poor folks weren't good-looking, then wealthy young men, with nothing
better to do, wouldn't go around looking among poor folks for pretty
girls. Augustus Carline had, apparently, done that. Carline had a
fortune that had been increased during three generations, and now he
didn't have to work. That was bad in Gage, Illinois. It had never done
any one any good, that kind of living. One of the fruits of the matter
was when Nelia Crele's pretty face attracted his attention. She lived in
a shack up the Bottoms near St. Genevieve, and he tried to flirt with
her, but she wouldn't flirt.
In some surprise, startled by his rebuff, he withdrew from the scene
with a memory that would not forget. The scene was a wheat field near
the Turkey bayou, where he was hunting wild ducks with a shotgun. She
had been gathering forty pounds of hickory nuts to eke out a meagre food
supply.
Poor she might be; ill clad was her strong young figure; her face showed
the strain of years of effort; her eyes had the fire of experience in
suffering; and she stood, a supple girl of heightened beauty while the
hunter, sure of his welcome, walked up to her, and, as both her hands
held the awkward bushel basket, ventured to tickle her under the chin.
She dropped the basket and before it reached the ground she caught the
rash youth broad-handed from cheek to back of the ear, and he stumbled
over a pile of wheat sheaves and fell headlong. As he had dropped his
shotgun, she picked it up and with her thumb on the safety, her finger
on the trigger, and her left hand on the breech, showed him how a $125
shotgun looks in the hands of one who could and would use it on any
further provocation.
He took his departure, and she carried the gun and hickory nuts home
with her. Thus began the inauspicious acquaintance of Nelia Crele and
Augustus Carline. The shotgun was very useful to the young woman. She
killed gray and fox squirrels, wild turkeys, geese and ducks, several
saleable fur-bearers, and other game in her neighbourhood. She told no
one how she obtained the weapon, merely saying she had found it; and
Augustus Carline did not pass any remarks on the subject.
By and by, however, when the tang of the slap and the passion of the
moment had left him, he knew that he had been foolish and cowardly. He
had some good parts, and he was sorry that he had been precipitate in
his attentions. After that encounter, he found the girls he met at
dances lacked a certain appearance, a kindling of the eye, a complexion,
and, a figure.
He ventured again into the river bottoms across from St. Genevieve and
fortune favoured him while tricking her. He apologized and gave his
name.
Nelia was poor, abjectly poor. Her father was no 'count, and her mother
was abject in suffering. One brother had gone West, a whisky criminal; a
sister had gone wrong, with the inheritance of moral obliquity. Nelia
had, somehow, become possessed with a hate and horror of wrong. She had
pictured to herself a home, happiness, and a life of plenty, but she
held herself at the highest price a woman demands.
That price Augustus Carline was only too willing to pay. He had found a
girl of high spirits, of great good looks, of a most amusing quickness
of wit and vigour of mentality. He married her, to the scandal of
everybody, and carried her from her poverty to the fine old French-days
mansion in Gage.
There he installed her with everything he thought she needed,
and--pursued his usual futile life. Too late she learned that he was
weak, insignificant, and, like her own father, no 'count. Augustus
Carline was a brute, a creature of appetites and desires, who by no
chance rose to the heights of his wife's mental demands.
Nelia Carline regarded the tragedy of her life with impatience. She
studied the looking glass to see wherein she had failed to measure up to
her duty; she ransacked her mind, and compared it with all the women she
met by virtue of her place as Gus Carline's wife. Those women had not
proved to be what she had expected grand dames of society to be.
"I want to talk learning," she told herself, "and they talk hairpins and
dirty dishes and Bill-don't-behave!"
Now one of those women, a kind of a grass widow, Mrs. Plosell, had
attracted Gus Carline, and when he came home from her house, he was
always drunk. When Nelia remonstrated, he was ugly. He had thrown her
down and gone back to the grass widow's the night before. Nelia
considered that grim fact, and, having made up her mind, acted.
In her years of poverty she had learned many things, and now she put
into service certain practical ideas. She had certain rights, under the
law, since she had taken the name of Augustus Carline. There were, too,
moral rights, and she preferred to exercise her moral rights.
Part of the Carline fortune was in unregistered stocks and bonds, and
when Gus Carline returned from the widow's one day he found that Nelia
was in great good humour, more attractive than he had ever known her,
and so very pleasant during the two days of his headache that he was
willing to do anything she asked.
She asked him to have a good time with her, and put down on the table
before him a filled punch bowl and two glasses. He had never known the
refinements of intoxicating liquors. Now he found them in his own home,
and for a while forgot all else.
He sang, danced, laughed and, in due course, signed a number of papers,
receipts, bills and checks to settle up some accounts. These were sort
of hit-or-miss, between-the-acts affairs, to which he paid little
attention.
To Nelia, however, they represented a rite as valid as any solemn court
procedure could be, for to her river-trained instinct there was no moral
question as to the justice of her claim upon a part of Carline's
fortune. Her later experience, her reading, had taught her that society
and the law also held with the principle, if not the manner of her
primitive method, for obtaining her rights to separate support.
When Carline awakened, Nelia was gone. Nelia had departed that morning,
one of the servants said. The girl did not know where she had gone. She
had taken a box of books, two trunks, two suitcases and was dressed up,
departing in the automobile, which she drove herself.
He had a feeling of alarm, which he banished as unworthy. Finally toward
night he went down to the post office where he found several letters.
One seared his consciousness;
Gus:
Don't bother to look for me. I'm gone, and I'm going to stay gone.
You have shown yourself to be a mere soak, a creature of appetite
and vice, and with no redeeming mental traits whatever. I hate you,
and worse yet, I despise you. Get a divorce get another woman--the
widow is about your calibre. But, I give you fair warning, leave me
alone. I'm sick of men.
Nelia.