His miscellaneous labors at the minister's filled nearly a week of
unremitting labor. But, upon the advent of Sunday, mundane affairs were
suspended in the general confusion of preparation for church. It had
rained during the night, the day was cool and fragrant and clear, and
Gordon determined to evade the morning's services, and plunge aimlessly
into the pleasant fields. He kept in the background until the cavalcade
had started, headed by the minister--the circuit rider had driven off
earlier in his cart to an outlying chapel--and his wife. It was inviting
on the deserted veranda, and Gordon lingered while the village emptied
into the churches, the open.
Finally he sauntered over the street, past the Courthouse, by Pompey
Hollidew's residence. It was, unlike the surrounding dwellings, built of
brick; there was no porch, only three stone steps descending from the main
entrance, and no flowers. The path was overgrown with weeds, the front
shutters were indifferently flung back, half opened, closed. The door
stood wide open, and, as he passed, Gordon gathered the impression of a
dark heap on the hall floor. He dismissed an idle curiosity; and then, for
no discoverable reason, halted, turned back, for a second glance.
Even from the path he saw extending from the heap an arm, a gnarled hand.
It was Pompey Hollidew himself, cold, still, on the floor. Gordon entered,
looking outside for assistance: no one was in sight. Pompey Hollidew wore
the familiar, greenish-black coat, the thread-bare trousers and faded,
yellow shirt. The battered derby had rolled a short distance across the
floor. The dead man's face was a congested, olive shade, with purple
smudges beneath the up-rolled eyes, and lips like dried leaves. His end,
it was apparent, had been as sudden as it was natural.
Old Pompey ... dead! Gordon straightened up. Simultaneously two ideas
flashed into his mind--Lettice and Hollidew's gold. Then they grew
coherent, explicable. Lettice and the gold were one; she was the gold, the
gold was Lettice. He recalled now, appositely, what Bartamon had told him
but a few days before ... Hollidew would consent to make no will; there
were no other children. The money would automatically go, principally, to
Lettice, without question or contest. If he had but considered before,
acted with ordinary sense ... the girl had been in love with him; he
might have had it all. He gazed cautiously, but with no determined plan of
action, out over the street--it lay deserted in the ambient sunlight.
He quickly left the house, the old man sprawling grotesquely across the
bare hall, forcing himself to walk with an assumed, deliberate ease over
the plank walk, past Simmons' corner. As he progressed a plan formulated
in his mind, a plan obvious, promising immediate, practicable
results ... Lettice had told him that she would remain for two weeks at
the farm. It was evident that she was still there. His gait quickened; if
he could reach her now, before any one else.... He wished that he had
closed the door upon the old man's body; any one passing as he had passed
could see the corpse; a wagon would be sent for the girl.
He commenced, outside the village, to run, pounding over the dusty way
with long-drawn, painful gasps, his chest oppressed by the now
unaccustomed exercise, the rapid motion. When he came in sight of the
farmhouse that was his objective, he stopped and endeavored to remove all
traces of his haste; he rubbed off his shoes, fingered his necktie, mopped
his brow.
There was a woman on the porch; it proved to be Mrs. Caley, folded in a
shawl, pale and gaunt. Suddenly the possibility occurred to him that
Lettice had driven into church. But she was in the garden patch beyond,
Mrs. Caley said. Gordon strolled around the corner of the house as
hastily, as slowly, as he dared.
He saw her immediately. She wore a blue linen skirt, a white waist, and
her sleeves were rolled up. The sun glinted on her uncovered hair, blazed
in the bright tin basin into which she was dropping scarlet peppers. She
appeared younger than he had remembered her; her arms were youthful and
softly dimpled; her brow seemed again the calm, guileless brow of a girl;
her eyes, as she raised them in greeting, were serene.
"I wanted to explain to you," he began obliquely, "about that--that
falling asleep. It's been worrying me. You see, I hadn't had any rest for
three or four nights, I had been bothering about my affairs, and about
something more important still."
Bean poles, covered with bright green verdure, made a background of young
summer for her own promise of early maturity. She placed the basin on the
ground, and stood with her arms hanging loosely, gazing at him
expectantly, frankly.
"The most important thing in my life," he added, then paused. "I thought
for a while that I had better go away without saying anything to you, and
more particularly since I have lost everything." He could hear, coming
over the road, the regular hoof-beats of a trotting horse, and he had the
feeling that it must be a messenger from the village, dispatched in
search of Lettice with the news of her father's death. For a moment the
horse seemed to be stopping; he was afraid that his opportunity had been
lost; but, after all, the hoof-beats passed, diminished over the road.
Then, "Since I have lost everything," he repeated.
"Please tell me more," she demanded, "I don't understand--"
"But," he continued, in the manner he had hastily adopted, "when the time
came I couldn't; I couldn't go away and leave you. I thought, perhaps, you
might be different from others; I thought, perhaps, you might like a man
for what he was, and not for what he had. I would come to you, I decided,
and tell you all this, tell you that I could work, yes, and would, and
make enough--" He paused in order to observe the effect of his speech upon
her. She was gazing clear-eyed at him, in a sort of shining expectancy, a
grave, eager comprehension, appealing, incongruous, to her girlhood.
"But why?" she queried.
"Because I'm in love with you: I want to marry you."
Her gaze did not falter, but her color changed swiftly, a rosy tide swept
over her cheeks, and died away, leaving her pale. Her lips trembled. A
palpable, radiant content settled upon her.
"Thank you," she told him seriously; "it will make me very happy to marry
you, Gordon."
With a fleeting, backward glance he moved closer to her, his arm fell
about her waist, he pressed a hasty, ill-directed kiss upon her chin.
"Will you marry me now?" he asked eagerly. "You see, others wouldn't
understand, you remember what your father said about the Makimmon breed?
They would repeat that I had nothing, or even that I was marrying you for
old Pompey's money. You know better than that, you know he wouldn't give
us a penny."
"It wouldn't matter now what any one said," she returned serenely.
"But it would be so much easier--we could slip off quietly somewhere, and
come back married, all the fuss avoided, all the say so's and say no's
shut up right at the beginning."
"When do you want to be--be married?"
"Right away! now! to-day!"
"Oh ... oh, Gordon, but we couldn't! I haven't even a white dress here. I
might go into Greenstream, be ready to-morrow--"
"No, no, no, I'm afraid it must be now or never; something would take you
from me. I knew it, I was afraid of it, from the first ... I'll shoot
myself."
She started toward him in an excess of tender pity. "Do you care as much
as that?" She laid her palms upon his shoulders, lifting her face to his:
"Then we will do what you say, we will go, yes, we will go immediately.
You can hitch up the buggy, while I get a little thing or two. I have my
beads, and the bracelets that were mother's ... I wish my white organdie
was here. You mustn't think I'm silly! You see--marriage, for a girl ... I
thought it would all be so different. But, Gordon dear, we won't let you
be unhappy."
He wished silently to God that she would get the stuff in the house, that
they would get started. At any minute now word would come of the old man's
death, there would be delay, Lettice would learn that he had lied again
and again to her. With a gesture of impatience he dislodged her hands from
his shoulders. "Where's Sim?" he demanded.
"In the long field. I'll show you the stable; it won't take me a minute to
get ready."
He hitched, in an incredibly short space of time, a tall, ungainly roan
horse into the buggy; his practised hands connected the straps, settled
the headstall, the collar, as if by magic. He stood in a fever of
uneasiness at the harnessed head. Lettice was longer than she had
indicated.
When, at last, she appeared, she carried a neatly pinned paper bundle, and
a fragrant mass of hastily pulled roses. Bright blue glass beads hung over
the soft contours of her virginal breasts, the bracelets that had been
her mother's--enamelled in black on old, reddish gold--encircled her
smooth wrists.
He would have hurried her at once into the buggy, but she stopped him, and
stood facing him with level, solemn eyes:
"I give myself to you, Gordon," she said, "gladly and gladly, and I will
go wherever you go, and try all my life to be what you would like." As she
repeated her simple words, erect and brave, with her arms filled with
roses, for a fleeting second he was again conscious of the vague menace
that had towered darkly at her back on the night when she had laid in his
grasp that other rose ... the rose that had faded.
"Let's get along," he urged. The whip swung out across the roan's ears,
and the horse started forward with a vicious rush. The dewy fragrance of
the flowers trailed out behind the buggy, mingling with the swirling dust,
then both settled into the empty road, under the burning brightness of the
sun, the insensate beauty of the azure sky.