She walked from him, toward the second ruined pile that fronted the
bay. The steps to the gaping entrance had rotted away and they were
forced to mount an insecure side piece. The interior, as Woolfolk had
seen, was composed of one high room, while, above, a narrow, open
second story hung like a ledge. On both sides were long counters with
mounting sets of shelves behind them.
"This was the store," Millie told him. "It was a great estate."
A dim and moldering fragment of cotton stuff was hanging from a
forgotten bolt; above, some tinware was eaten with rust; a scale had
crushed in the floor and lay broken on the earth beneath; and a
ledger, its leaves a single, sodden film of grey, was still open on a
counter. A precarious stair mounted to the flooring above, and Millie
Stope made her way upward, followed by Woolfolk.
There, in the double gloom of the clouds and a small dormer window
obscured by cobwebs, she sank on a broken box. The decayed walls shook
perilously in the blasts of the wind. Below they could see the empty
floor, and through the doorway the somber, gleaming greenery without.
All the patient expostulation that John Woolfolk had prepared
disappeared in a sudden tyranny of emotion, of hunger for the slender,
weary figure before him. Seating himself at her side, he burst into a
torrential expression of passionate desire that mounted with the tide
of his eager words. He caught her hands, held them in a painful grip,
and gazed down into her still, frightened face. He stopped abruptly,
was silent for a tempestuous moment, and then baldly repeated the fact
of his love.
Millie Stope said:
"I know so little about the love you mean." Her voice trailed to
silence; and in a lull of the storm they heard the thin patter of rats
on the floor below, the stir of bats among the rafters.
"It's quickly learned," he assured her. "Millie, do you feel any
response at all in your heart--the slightest return of my longing?"
"I don't know," she answered, turning toward him a troubled scrutiny.
"Perhaps in another surrounding, with things different, I might care
for you very much----"
"I am going to take you into that other surrounding," he announced.
She ignored his interruption. "But we shall never have a chance to
learn." She silenced his attempted protest with a cool, flexible palm
against his mouth. "Life," she continued, "is so dreadfully in the
dark. One is lost at the beginning. There are maps to take you safely
to the Guianas, but none for souls. Perhaps religions are----Again I
don't know. I have found nothing secure--only a whirlpool into which I
will not drag others."
"I will drag you out," he asserted.
She smiled at him, in a momentary tenderness, and continued: "When I
was young I never doubted that I would conquer life. I pictured myself
rising in triumph over circumstance, as a gull leaves the sea.... When
I was young.... If I was afraid of the dark then I thought, of course,
I would outgrow it; but it has grown deeper than my courage. The night
is terrible now." A shiver passed over her.
"You are ill," he insisted, "but you shall be cured."
"Perhaps, a year ago, something might have been done, with assistance;
yes--with you. Then, whatever is, hadn't materialized. Why did you
delay?" she cried in a sudden suffering.
"You'll go with me tonight," he declared stoutly.
"In this?" She indicated the wind beating with the blows of a great
fist against the swaying sides of the demolished store. "Have you seen
the sea? Do you remember what happened on the day I went with you when
it was so beautiful and still?"
John Woolfolk realized, wakened to a renewed mental clearness by
the threatening of all that he desired, that--as Millie had
intimated--life was too complicated to be solved by a simple
longing; love was not the all-powerful magician of conventional
acceptance; there were other, no less profound, depths.
He resolutely abandoned his mere inchoate wanting, and considered the
elements of the position that were known to him. There was, in the
first place, that old, lamentable dereliction of Lichfield Stope's,
and its aftermath in his daughter. Millie had just recalled to
Woolfolk the duration, the activity, of its poison. Here there was no
possibility of escape by mere removal; the stain was within; and it
must be thoroughly cleansed before she could cope successfully,
happily, with life. In this, he was forced to acknowledge, he could
help her but little; it was an affair of spirit; and spiritual
values--though they might be supported from without--had their growth
and decrease strictly in the individual they animated.
Still, he argued, a normal existence, a sense of security, would
accomplish a great deal; and that in turn hung upon the elimination of
the second, unknown element--the reason for her backward glances, her
sudden, loud banalities, yesterday's mechanical repudiation of his
offered assistance and the implied wish for him to go. He said
gravely:
"I have been impatient, but you came so sharply into my empty
existence that I was upset. If you are ill you can cure yourself.
Never forget your mother's 'brave heart.' But there is something
objective, immediate, threatening you. Tell me what it is, Millie, and
together we will overcome and put it away from you for ever."
She gazed panic-stricken into the empty gloom below. "No! no!" she
exclaimed, rising. "You don't know. I won't drag you down. You must go
away at once, tonight, even in the storm."
"What is it?" he demanded.
She stood rigidly erect with her eyes shut and hands clasped at her
sides. Then she slid down upon the box, lifting to him a white mask of
fright.
"It's Nicholas," she said, hardly above her breath.
A sudden relief swept over John Woolfolk. In his mind he dismissed as
negligible the heavy man fumbling beneath his soiled apron. He
wondered how the other could have got such a grip on Millie Stope's
imagination.
The mystery that had enveloped her was fast disappearing, leaving them
without an obstacle to the happiness he proposed. Woolfolk said
curtly:
"Has Nicholas been annoying you?"
She shivered, with clasped straining hands.
"He says he's crazy about me," she told him in a shuddering voice that
contracted his heart. "He says that I must--must marry him, or----"
Her period trailed abruptly out to silence.
Woolfolk grew animated with determination, an immediate purpose.
"Where would Nicholas be at this hour?" he asked.
She rose hastily, clinging to his arm. "You mustn't," she exclaimed,
yet not loudly. "You don't know! He is watching--something frightful
would happen."
"Nothing 'frightful,'" he returned tolerantly, preparing to descend.
"Only unfortunate for Nicholas."
"You mustn't," she repeated desperately, her sheer weight hanging from
her hands clasped about his neck. "Nicholas is not--not human. There's
something funny about him. I don't mean funny, I----"
He unclasped her fingers and quietly forced her back to the seat on
the box. Then he took a place at her side.
"Now," he asked reasonably, "what is this about Nicholas?"
She glanced down into the desolate cavern of the store; the ghostly
remnant of cotton goods fluttered in a draft like a torn and grimy
cobweb; the lower floor was palpably bare.
"He came in April," she commenced in a voice without any life. "The
woman we had had for years was dead; and when Nicholas asked for work
we were glad to take him. He wanted the smallest possible wages and
was willing to do everything; he even cooked quite nicely. At first he
was jumpy--he had asked if many strangers went by; but then when no
one appeared he got easier.... He got easier and began to do extra
things for me. I thanked him--until I understood. Then I asked father
to send him away, but he was afraid; and, before I could get up my
courage to do it, Nicholas spoke----
"He said he was crazy about me, and would I please try and be good to
him. He had always wanted to marry, he went on, and live right, but
things had gone against him. I told him that he was impertinent and
that he would have to go at once; but he cried and begged me not to
say that, not to get him 'started.'"
That, John Woolfolk recalled, was precisely what the man had said to
him.
"I went back to father and told him why he must send Nicholas off, but
father nearly suffocated. He turned almost black. Then I got
frightened and locked myself in my room, while Nicholas sat out on the
stair and sobbed all night. It was ghastly! In the morning I had to go
down, and he went about his duties as usual.
"That evening he spoke again, on the porch, twisting his hands exactly
as if he were making bread. He repeated that he wanted me to be nice
to him. He said something wrong would happen if I pushed him to it.
"I think if he had threatened to kill me it would have been more
possible than his hints and sobs. The thing went along for a month,
then six weeks, and nothing more happened. I started again and again
to tell them at the store, two miles back in the pines, but I could
never get away from Nicholas; he was always at my shoulder, muttering
and twisting his hands.
"At last I found something." She hesitated, glancing once more down
through the empty gloom, while her fingers swiftly fumbled in the band
of her waist.
"I was cleaning his room--it simply had to be done--and had out a
bureau drawer, when I saw this underneath. He was not in the house,
and I took one look at it, then put the things back as near as
possible as they were. I was so frightened that I slipped it in my
dress--had no chance to return it."
He took from her unresisting hand a folded rectangle of coarse grey
paper; and, opening it, found a small handbill with the crudely
reproduced photograph of a man's head with a long, drooping nose,
sleepy eyes in thick folds of flesh, and a lax under-lip with a fixed,
dull smile: