A PARALYSING DISCOVERY
Jane did not go fast to Arden, for the sun was too blistering hot to
torture a horse by frantic riding. But her mind was frantic, and
tortured, with the uncertainty of what might be before her. Was Dale
there? Had he not, indeed, fled into the mountains as any of his people
would have done? Had he been arrested? Question after question surged
through her brain, finding no answers and passing on.
The Colonel was not in his accustomed place on the honeysuckled end of
the porch, nor was Zack about, so she dismounted alone and tied the
lathery beast. Perhaps they were at Bradford's cottage, comforting
little Mesmie. Perhaps they were--but she tried not to think of that!
Never had the world seemed so deserted. Nothing was astir. The edge of a
lace curtain, drawn outward by the passing of someone through one of the
library French windows, hung over the sill, deadly white and deadly
still. The leaves were still, the air was still. Above her head, where
recently she had watched two piping orioles flutter about their weaving,
hung now the silent, pendant nest. No pipe, no bird, no motion. It
seemed as though here were the stage of Perrault's fairytale; only
'twas a Prince within who had pricked his destiny with a leaden bullet,
and a Princess rode to wake him.
Alertly, but with a heavy dread at her heart, she crossed the porch and
tiptoed to the open window. Dale was there, bent over the mahogany
table, reading; as far from the world as he was from his mad act; as far
from them both as he was from her. She went quietly in to him.
"Dale!"
He did not stir.
"Dale!" she again cried in a low voice, shaking him by the shoulder. He
looked slowly up.
"Dale, what does this mean?" she hurriedly began. "Why have you killed
that man?"
He remembered the Colonel's unpleasant interview, and burned with a deep
rage, growling:
"Leave me alone. I've got to read."
"Are you asleep?" she incredulously exclaimed. "Do you realize you've
killed Tusk Potter, and any moment they may be after you?"
As he again looked up there was a storm of irritation in his face.
"They won't be after me if people keep their mouths shut! What do I care
who I killed? Leave me alone! I've got to study!"
Stunned, she stared stupidly down at him, for here was a new trait--or,
at least, one he had not shown her. Many times she had been utterly
shocked, thoroughly enraged by evidences of his abnormal selfishness,
but she was unprepared for this atrocious abandonment. It aroused her
to a quick anger and, snatching the book from the table, she dashed it
to the floor.
"Look at me!" she cried.
He was looking at her, as he had never done. The deep-set eyes were
deeper, and their pupils venomously bright. She saw the fury being
mustered there, but without flinching looked straight back at him.
"Tell me why you killed that man?" she demanded.
His hands were clenched, and for the first time she began to fear her
influence might be waning.
"I killed him 'cause he was in the way," he growled again.
"But are you mad to go about killing people because they're in your way?
Don't you know--"
"I know all I want to know," he almost screamed at her. "I know that
time's flyin', 'n' I got to study! Go out 'n' leave me. He was in the
way, I tell you! It was natural to get rid of him."
He picked up the book and began to open it, but instantly she had again
flung it away, saying with a degree of ferocity that made him stare in
open-mouthed wonderment:
"If you touch that again, _I'll_ kill _you_!"
It had been her only means of stirring him, and for more than a minute
they remained, as two wax figures, glaring into each other's faces.
Beneath this spell he was rigid, but her young breast rose with quick
pulsations. The room was quiet with that oppressive stillness which
comes in storms, when the elements seem to draw breathlessly aside in
expectation of a crashing bolt of lightning. Now he took a deep breath
and relaxed. She had won, and immediately leaned nearer, never taking
her fixed look from his face.
"This is what comes," she said more calmly, "from imitating Nature. You
once said that we differ from it in no way; that our eyes conceive, our
minds quicken, and our hands destroy, just as it does;--that we in
ourselves are the entire law of the cycles gathered into one piece of
temporal clay. And I let you say it uncontradicted, because in a sense
it was poetic, and because I never dreamed such a philosophy would lead
to this. But I feared all the while that with such theories you were
more unalterably becoming a merciless egoist, yet pinned my faith
somehow to an unseen force to spare you. Now it has failed me. Wait,"
she commanded, thinking he was about to speak. "That Nature-god you copy
might have been one of the beautiful influences in your life, had you
not chosen his cruel and wicked side--the side that asks no one's
pardon, that lives by the survival of the fittest. Oh, you have seen
things so distortedly!--you, whom I had hoped to be proud of, are a
shameless sacrifice upon the altar to this god, Nature! Her reward is
the brand of outcast; you are catalogued in her museum as a vicious
failure, even with all you've accomplished! I shall leave you now, and
doubt if I ever teach you again."
He had sat beneath this tirade until she uttered the last sentence, when
with a heartrending groan of anguish he sprang up and caught her by the
wrists.
"For the love of Christ," he began in a husky voice, but she
passionately interrupted him.
"You dare not speak of Christ! You do not know Him! You have no right to
call His name! Let go of me!"
"Oh, hear me, hear me," he implored her, releasing one of her wrists and
taking the other hand in both his own; alternately stroking it and
almost crushing it. His body was twisting and writhing as a tree might
in a terrific wind storm, and his eyes were glistening and dry--Oh, so
dry, she thought They reminded her of pieces of hot glass. "Hear me," he
was saying.
At the final Judgment, some poor soul will stand and face its Creator
with just this sort of cry;--some soul which has grievously sinned will
bend, and writhe, and implore with hot, glassy eyes, to be heard. Jane
felt this in all its varicolored meaning. Until now she had been
speaking as the teacher, as the humanitarian. But with his
torture-stricken eyes pouring their prayer into her own, with the storm
bending his powerful frame before its fury, she felt the old pity, the
old interest, rise up in his defense.
"Hear me, hear me," he was murmuring, until her softening attitude
touched somewhere upon the receiver of his subliminal mind. Then he
responded, and bent eagerly over her.
"I'd rather die a thousand times than have you turn your back," he
whispered. It was a magic whisper, made magnetic by that fascinating
dilation and contraction of his pupils; but the great body still swayed
awkwardly. The storm was still there. "You know what life is to me," he
was saying. "You know how I'm fightin' to get my share of learnin'; an'
how much I've got to do! You--just you, Miss Jane, can take me on! If
you quit, how will I end? Just drift 'round! I know! Do you want my
hand--my left hand? I'll cut it off if that'll show you how I feel! I'd
cut off the other, but it can write!" There was just at that instant a
glorious pride in his voice. Now it was again mystical as he continued:
"Don't blame me too hard! You know how I was raised! You know yourself
what a puny price we put on life! And you know how we do whenever
someone stands in our way! Didn't I have a better right to sweep my road
clear than most of my folks, who don't know half the time what they're
killin' about? You know our people, an' you know that when Granny put
Pap's gun in my hands, an' smeared his blood on me, an' made me swear to
get those fellers, I did right to get 'em--'cause I was brought up to do
those things, an' didn't know anything else! But after you got to
teachin' me, I said a thousand times to myself I'd never kill anybody
again--an' I wouldn't have, if that varmint Potter hadn't yelled your
name in public, an' said what he'd tried to do!"
"I didn't know that," her cheeks were flaming. "I hadn't heard about
that!"
"Well, he did. Ask Bob! He yelled it from a field, an' shot his pistol
in the air, and said he'd do it yet. Don't you reckon I knew this
country warn't big enough for him an' the school?"
Her cheeks burned hotter with this added humiliation that he had
intended, not chivalrously to defend her, but only to keep her for his
own advancement.
He had never let go her hand, nor stopped the anguished moving of his
body.
"I didn't want over much to kill him," he was again saying. "As I laid
there behind a log, watchin' him foolin' around, I almost wanted to
creep away. An' when he turned his back to go in the cabin, my finger'd
hardly pull the trigger--it reminded me so much of that time I laid my
sights on the back of old Bill Whitly's head--"
"What?" she screamed, springing back in a perfect agony of horror.
"What?"
He stared at her, amazed and even frightened by this new, this terribly
new, ring in her voice. She was raising her hands slowly to her throat,
and shrinking away--shrinking back against the wall as though he were
some loathsome thing upon which she had suddenly and unexpectedly come.
"What's the matter?" he cried, forgetting his own feelings in this new
alarm.
"Did--you--kill--Bill--Whitly?"
"Yes," he answered, not understanding. "Why?"
The room was sickeningly quiet, except for her breathing. He could have
almost sworn her eyes were crackling and snapping as they stared at him.
"Why?" she repeated. "Can you ask any one of my name in the mountains,
why?"
"I never thought," he whispered in a terrified voice, "you belonged to
_those_ Whitlys!" And as he looked more closely at her face the truth
slowly crept into his brain. Passionately his hands went out to her, as
he took a trembling step forward: "My Gawd, my Gawd, Miss Jane! Don't
tell me that I done _that_! Don't tell me it war _yoh_ Pappy!"
The telephone was on the wall of this room. Keeping the long table
between them, she crossed quickly and turned the little crank.
Recognizing the town operator's voice she frantically called:
"Miss Gregget, this is Jane Whitly!--well, never mind the name!--this is
Colonel May's house!" She was numb, and fearful of those passionate
hands which might any instant drag her from the instrument. "Tell the
sheriff to come quick!" she screamed. "Dale Dawson has killed Tusk
Potter!"
With this she sprang about, her back to the wall and at bay, to receive
the infuriated mountaineer's charge. But he had not moved. He stood just
where she had left him; looking at her, now again swaying his body in
that tense, sullen motion. And suddenly she began to laugh, leaning
forward in a crouching attitude, her hands clenched close to her knees.
"You didn't think, when you laid my Pappy across our door sill, that
he'd be avenged by a girl, did you!"
He only looked at her, staring in a dull, hopeless sort of way that
would have struck pity into the heart of anyone not so blinded by
passion.
"You didn't think, did ye," she taunted, with direful malice darting
from her eyes, and assuming the mountain dialect so her words would
carry a sharper sting, "that Dale Dawson could be headed off, did ye!
Yo' sorry life of ignorance never went so fur as ter reckon that poh,
ole Bill Whitly, shot down from behind, 'd be so sure in gittin'
vengeance, did ye! Ye thought my Pappy war the last of his line, jest as
you're the last of yourn!" Her laugh now became quite uncontrollable,
but between gasps she still fired taunts at him. "Didn't reckon yo' god
Natur' could raise some-un weaker'n ye ter crush ye out! Didn't reckin
hit war likely the last Dawson 'd be fetched down by the last
Whitly--'n' her a gal!"
As she descended to this, he arose. The next time she looked at him
through laughter and blinding tears, he was standing straight and still,
gazing calmly back at her. There was no motion to his body now, and his
hands were hanging inertly open at his sides. Slowly he crossed to her
and, with a dignity that was commanding, said:
"There'll be one left on my side, and that'll just balance your's. It's
the one who patched up that truce--that truce what ain't been broke by
any one of us, till now! But she's blind, an' maybe don't count for
much!"
Ah, the blind sister! She had forgotten her. The blind sister; that
physically helpless one whose spiritual strength had put into motion
this big, hulking frame of purpose, with its absorbing brain, to square
his shoulders before the world and succeed! A softness, a womanly
tenderness, came knocking at the door of Jane's heart, but she would not
hear. Dale looked down at her resentful face; but he felt no awe of her
now--this was the kind he understood!
"The mountains are so full of Whitlys, that I never thought of placin'
you as Bill's girl--I don't remember even knowin' that he had a girl!
Why'd you take me in school?"
"How did I know who killed him!" she answered, in a hard, dry voice.
Intently they stood, staring deep into each other's eyes;--these two
products of a feud whose bitterness had long outlived the cause which
gave it birth. His face was not two feet away, and the pupils which
clung now eagerly to her own were charged with a force that held her
almost hypnotized. Through them she began to see another being, another
soul, a transfigured man. Their dilations seemed to be drawing aside and
again closing the curtains, letting her peep into the secrets behind his
mobile face. Her cheeks were burning more furiously than ever, drying up
the recent tears to faint, tell-tale stains; and her lips were parted,
showing teeth still set with anger. But her eyes--those eyes which were
seeing new things in him--they, by a dewy radiance she did not know was
there, contradicted much of the storm and passion.