A few minutes later, with her flabby carpet-bag on her sharp hip, Jane
fared forth on the mountain road, which led farther eastward. She walked
slowly and with increased effort, for the high altitude seemed to affect
her respiration, and, light as it was, the carpet-bag became cumbersome
and she had to pause frequently to rest.
"Yes, if I'm going to do it, I'll have to plunge in and do it, and be
done with the matter," she kept saying. "I reckon it isn't the first
time such a thing has been heard of." She passed several humble mountain
houses, built of logs, on the way, but stopped at none of them. The sun
was near the zenith when she came to a double log-cabin standing back on
a plot of newly cleared land a hundred yards from the rocky road. A
tall, plain-looking girl, with a hard, unsympathetic face, stood in the
doorway, and she stepped down to the ground and quieted a snarling dog
which was chained to a stake driven into the earth.
"I reckon you are Nettie Boyd, ain't you?" Jane said.
"I used to be," the young woman answered. "I married a Lawson--Sam
Lawson--awhile back."
"Oh yes, I forgot that. I'd heard it, too, of course, but it slipped my
memory. I'm a Hemingway, from over in Murray County--Jane Hemingway. I
used to be acquainted with your pa. Is he handy?"
"Yes, he was here just a minute ago," Ann Boyd's daughter answered.
"He's around at his hay-stack pulling down some roughness for the cow.
Go in and take a seat and I'll call him. Lay your bonnet on the bed and
make yourself at home."
Jane went into the cabin, the walls of which were unlined, being only
the bare logs with the bark on them. The cracks where the logs failed to
fit closely together were filled with the red clay from the hills
around. There was not a picture in sight, not an ornament on the crude
board shelf over the rugged mud-and-stone fireplace. From wooden pegs
driven in auger-holes in the walls hung the young bride's meagre finery,
in company with what was evidently her husband's best suit of clothes
and hat. Beneath them, on the floor, stood a pair of new woman's shoes,
dwarfed by contrast to a heavier and larger masculine pair. Jane sat
down, rolling her bonnet in her stiff fingers. The chair she sat on was
evidently of home make, for the rockers were unevenly sawed, and, on the
unplaned boards of the floor, it had a joggling, noisy motion when in
use. There were two beds in the room, made of rough, pine planks. The
coverings of the beds were not in order and the pillows were soiled.
"If she'd 'a' stayed on with Ann she would 'a' made a better
house-keeper than that," Jane mused. "She's a sight, too, with her hair
uncombed and dress so untidy so soon after the honeymoon. I can see now
that her and Ann never would get on together. Anybody could take one
look at that girl and see she's selfish. I wonder what that fellow ever
saw in her?"
There was a sound of voices outside. With a start, Jane drew herself
erect. The carpet-bag on her knees threatened to fall, and she lowered
it to the floor. Her ordeal was before her.
"Why, howdy do?"
Joe Boyd, in tattered shirt, trousers patched upon patches, and gaping
shoes through which his bare toes showed, stood in the doorway. That the
old beau and the once most popular young man of the country-side could
stand looking like that before her, even after the lapse of all those
trying years, and not feel abashed, was one of the inexplicable things
that rushed through Jane Hemingway's benumbed brain. That she, herself,
could be looking at the very husk of the ideal of manhood she had held
all those years and not cry out in actual pain over the pitiful
evidences of his collapse from his high estate was another thing she
marvelled over. Joe Boyd! Could it actually be he? Could those gaunt,
talon-nailed members, with their parchment-like skin, be the hands she
used to think so shapely? Could those splaying feet be the feet that had
tripped more lightly in the Virginia Reel than those of any other man
for miles around? Could those furtive, harsh-glancing eyes be the deep,
dreamy ones in which she had once seen the mirage of her every girlish
hope? Could that rasping tone come from the voice whose never
diminishing echo had rung in her ears through all those years of hiding
her secret from the man she had married out of "spite," through all her
long tooth-in-flesh fight with the rival who had temporarily won and
held him?
She rose and gave him her hand, and the two stood facing each other, she
speechless, he thoroughly at his indolent ease.
"Well, I reckon, Jane, old girl," he laughed, as he wiped a trickling
stream of tobacco-juice from the corner of his sagging mouth, "that you
are the very last human being I ever expected to lay eyes on again. I
swear I wouldn't 'a' known you from Adam's cat if Nettie hadn't told me
who it was. My, how thin you look, and all bent over!"
"Yes, I'm changed, and you are too, Joe," she said, as, with a stiff
hand beneath her, she sought the chair again.
"Yes"--he went to the doorway and spat voluminously out into the yard,
and came back swinging a chair as lightly in his hand as if it had been
a baseball bat with which he was playing--"yes, I reckon I am altered
considerable; a body's more apt to see changes in others than in
himself. I was just thinking the other day about them old times. La me!
how much fun we all did have, but it didn't last--it didn't last."
He sat down, leaning forward and clasping his dry-palmed hands with a
sound like the rubbing together of two pieces of paper. There was an
awkward silence. Nettie Lawson came to the door and glanced in
inquiringly, and then went away. They heard her calling her chickens
some distance from the cabin.
"No, I wouldn't have recognized you if I'd met you alone in the big
road," he said, "nor you wouldn't me, I reckon."
"Joe"--she was looking about the room--"somehow I had an idea that you
were in--in a little better circumstances than--than you seem to be in
now."
"Well, that wouldn't be hard to imagine, anyway," he said, with an
intonation like a sigh, if it wasn't one. "If a body couldn't imagine a
better fix for a man to be in than I am in, they'd better quit. Lord,
Lord, I reckon I ought to be dead ashamed to meet you in this condition
when you knew me away back in them palmy days, but, Jane, I really
believe I've sunk below that sort of a feeling. You know I used to cut a
wide swath when I had plenty of money and friends, but what's the use of
crying over spilt milk? This is all there is left of me. I managed to
marry Nettie off to a feller good enough in his way. I thought he was a
fine catch, but I don't know. I was under the impression that his folks
had some money to give him to sorter start the two out, but it seems
they didn't have, and was looking for a stake themselves. Since they
married he just stays round here, contented and about as shiftless as
anybody could be. I thought, for instance, that he never got in debt,
but a store-keeper in town told me the other day that he owed him for
the very duds he was married in."
"That's bad, that's powerful bad," Jane said, sympathetically. Then a
fixed look took possession of her eyes, and her fingers tightened on her
bonnet in her lap, as she plunged towards the thing with which she was
burdened. "Joe," she continued, "I've come all the way over the mountain
in my delicate health to see you about a particular matter. God knows
it's the hardest thing I ever contemplated, but there is no other way
out of it."
"Well, I think I know what you are going to say," he answered, avoiding
her eyes.
"You do, Joe?" she exclaimed. "Oh no, surely, you can't know that."
"Well, I think I can make a good guess," he said, awkwardly twirling his
fingers round and round. "You see, I always make a habit, when I happen
to meet anybody from over your way, of asking about old acquaintances,
and I heard some time back that you was in deep trouble. They said you
had some high-priced doctoring to do in Atlanta, and that you was going
from old friend to old friend for what little help they could give. I'm
going to see what I can do towards it myself, since you've taken such a
long trip, though, Jane, to tell you the truth, I haven't actually seen
a ten-cent piece in a month. I've gone without tobacco when I thought
the desire for it would run me distracted. So--"
"I didn't come for help--Lord, Lord, I only wish it was that, Joe. I've
already had the operation, and I'm recovering. I've come over here, Joe,
to make an awful confession."
"A--a--what?" he said.
There was a pause. Jane Hemingway unrolled her bonnet and put it on,
pulling the hood down over her line of vision.
"Joe, I've come to tell you that I've been a bad woman; I've been a bad,
sinning woman since away back there when you married Ann. Things you
used to say to me, I reckon, turned my silly head. You remember when you
took me to camp-meeting that night, and we sat through meeting out in
the buggy under the trees. I reckon, if it was all to do over you
wouldn't have said so much. I reckon you wouldn't if you'd known you
were planting a seed that was going to fructify and bear the fruit of
hate and enmity that would never rot; but, for all I know, you may have
been saying the same things to other girls who knew better how to take
them than I did."
"Oh, Jane, I was a fool them days," Joe Boyd broke in, with an actual
flush of shame in his tanned face.
"Well, never mind about that," Jane went on, with a fresher
determination under his own admission. "I reckon I let it take too
strong a hold on me. I never could give up easy, and when you got to
going with Ann, and she was so much prettier and more sprightly than me,
it worked against my nature. It hardened me, I reckon. I married soon
after you did, but I won't tell about that; he's dead and gone. I had my
child--that was all, except--except my hate for Ann. I couldn't stand to
see you and her so happy together, and you both were making money and I
was losing what I had. Then, Joe, we all heard about--we all learned
Ann's secret."
"Don't--for the love of mercy--don't fetch that up!" Boyd groaned.
"But I _have_ to, Joe," Jane persisted, softly. "At first I was the
happiest woman that the devil ever delighted by flashing a lying promise
with his fire on a wall. I thought you were going to scorn her, but I
saw that day I met you at the meeting-house that you were inclined to
condone the past, and that drove me wild; so I--" Jane choked up and
paused.
"I remember that day," Joe Boyd said, with a deep breath. "I'll never
forget it as long as I live, for what you said dropped me back into the
bottomless pit of despair. I'd been trying to think she'd been straight
with me _since_ we married, but when you--"
"What I told you that morning, Joe, was a cold, deliberate lie!"
"A--a--" he stammered. "No, no, you don't mean that--you can't mean--"
"Every--single--thing--I--told--you--that--day--was--a--lie!" Jane said,
with an emphatic pause between each word.
"I can't understand. I don't see--really, Jane, you can't mean that what
you said about Chester's going there day after day when my back was
turned, and that you saw them together in the woods below your house
that day when I was--"
"Everything I told you was a lie from the devil, out of the very fumes
of hell," Jane said, pulling off her bonnet and looking him squarely in
the face. "A lie--a lie, Joe."
"Oh, my God!" Boyd cried. "And I, all these years I have--"
"You've been believing what I said. But I'm not through yet. I've been
in a dark room fasting and praying for a month to overcome my evil
inclination not to speak the truth, and I finally conquered, so I'm
going to tell the whole thing. Joe, Ann Boyd is the best woman God ever
let live. She was as true as steel to you from the day she married till
now. I have been after her day and night, never giving her a moment's
rest from my persecutions, and how do you reckon she retaliated? She
paid me back by actually saving my worthless life and trying to keep me
from knowing who did it. She did something else. She did me the greatest
favor one woman could possibly do another. I don't intend to say what
that particular thing was, but she must have the credit. Now I'm
through. I'm going back home."
Boyd drew his ill-clad feet towards him. He spread out his two arms wide
and held them so, steadily. "Look at me--just look at me," he said.
"Woman, before you go back, take one good look at me. You come to me--a
mere frazil of what I once was--when there is no hope of ever regaining
my youth and self-respect--and tell me--oh, my God!--tell me that I
believed _you_ instead of _her_! She said, with tears in her eyes, on
her knees before me, that that first mistake was all, and I told her she
lied _in her throat_, and left her, dragging from her clinging arms the
child of her breast, bringing it up and raising it to what you see she
is. And now you come literally peeping into my open coffin and telling
_this_ to my dead face. Great God, woman, before Heaven I feel like
striking you where you set, soaked in repentance though you are. All
these misspent years I've been your cowardly tool, and her--her--"
"I deserve it--talk on!" Jane Hemingway said, as she rose and clutched
her carpet-bag and held it tremblingly.
But Joe Boyd's innate gentleness had been one of the qualities many
women loved, and even before the cowering creature who had wrecked his
life he melted in manly pity.
"No," he said, stretching out his hand with something like one of his
old gestures--"no, I'm going too far, Jane. We are all obedient to
natural laws, as Ann used to say. Your laws have made you do just as you
have, and so have mine. Away back there in the joy-time of youth my laws
made me say too much to you. As you say, I planted the seed. I did; I
planted the seed that bore all the fruit; I planted it when I kissed
you, Jane, and said them things to you that night which I forgot the
next day. Ann could have made something out of me better than this. As
long as I had her to manage me, I did well. You see what I am now."
"Yes, I see; and I'm as sorry as I know how to be." Jane sighed as she
passed out into the open sunlight. "I'm going home, Joe. I may never lay
eyes on you again in this life. If you can say anything to make me feel
better, I'd be thankful."
"There isn't anything, except what I said just now about our natural
laws, Jane," he said, as he stood shading his eyes from the glare of the
sun. "Sometimes I think that nobody hain't to blame for nothing they do,
and that all of this temporary muddle is just the different ways human
beings have of struggling on to a better world beyond this."
"I thought maybe you might, in so many words, say plain out that you'd
forgive me, Joe." She had turned her face towards the road she was to
travel, and her once harsh lip was quivering like that of a weeping
child.
"The natural law would come in there, too," Boyd sighed. "Forgiveness,
of the right sort, don't spring to the heart in such a case as this like
a flash of powder in the pan. If I'm to forgive, I will in due time, I
reckon; but right now, Jane, I feel too weak and tired, even for
that--too weak and heartsick and undone."
"Well, I'm going to pray for it, Joe," she said, as she started away.
"Good-bye. May the Lord above bless you."
"Good-bye, Jane; do the best you can," he said, "and I'll try to do the
same."