BACK HOME
Late the next afternoon Jinnie left the train at Mottville station,
her fiddle box in one hand, and a suitcase in the other. She stood a
moment watching the train as it disappeared. It had carried her from
the man she loved, brought her away from Bellaire, the city of her
hopes. One bitter fact reared itself above all others. The world of
which Theodore King had been the integral part was dead to her. What
was she to do without him, without Bobbie to pet and love? But a
feeling of thanksgiving pervaded her when she remembered she still had
Lafe's smile, the baby to croon over, and dear, stoical Peggy. They
would live with her in the old home. It was preferable to staying in
Bellaire, where her heart would be tortured daily. Rather the brooding
hills, the singing pines, and all the wildness of nature, which was
akin to the struggle within her, and perhaps in the future she might
gather up the broken threads of her life.
She shook as if attacked with ague as she came within sight of the
gaunt farmhouse, and the broken windows and hanging doors gave her a
sense of everlasting decay.
Below her in the valley lay the blue lake, a shining spread of water,
quiet and silent, here and there upon it the shadow of a floating,
fluffy cloud. She listened to the nagging chatter of the squirrels,
mingled with the fluttering of the forest birds high above her head.
As she stood on the hill, the only human being in all the wilderness
about, in fancy she seemed to be at the very top of the world.
She heard the old familiar voices of the mourning pines, and
remembered their soothing magic, and a stinging reproach swept over
her at the thought of her forgetfulness of them. They had been friends
when no other friends were near. Along with the flood of memories came
Matty's ghastly ghost stories and her past belief that her mother's
spirit hovered near her.
She went through the lane leading to the house and paused under the
trees. Presently she placed her violin box and suitcase on the grass
and lay down beside them. In the eaves of the house a dove cooed his
late afternoon love to his mate, and Jinnie, because she was very
young and very much in love, brought Theodore before her with that
lingering retrospection that takes possession in such sensuous
moments. She could feel again the hot tremor of his hands as they
clung to hers, and she bent her head in shame at the acute,
electrifying sensations. He belonged to another woman; he no longer
belonged to her. She must conquer her love for him, and at that moment
every desire to study, every thought of work seemed insipid and
useless. The whole majestic beauty of the scene, her sudden coming
into a great deal of money, did not add to her happiness. She would
gladly give it all up to be again with her loves of yesterday. But
that could not be! The future lay in a hard, straight line before her.
She was striving against a ceaseless, resisting force,--the force of
her whole passionate nature.
With their usual reluctance, the things of night at length crept
forth. Jinnie felt some of them as they touched her hands, her face,
and moved on. One of the countless birds fluttered low, as if
frightened at the advancing dark, brushed her cheek, then winged on
and up and was lost in the tree above her. Somewhere deep in the gloom
shrouding the little graveyard came the ghostly flutter of an owl.
Jinnie was flat on her back, and how long she lay thus she could never
afterward remember, but it was until the stars appeared and the moon
formed queer fantastic pictures, like frost upon a window pane. In
solemn review passed the days,--from that awful night when she had
left her father dead upon the floor in the house nearby to the present
moment. She glanced at the windows. They looked back at her like
square, darkening eyes.
She wondered dully how that wee star away off there could blink so
peacefully in its nightly course when just below it beat a heart that
hurt like hers. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again,
long black fingers were drawing dark pictures across the sky. A drop
of rain fell upon her face, but still she did not move. Then, like
rows of soldiers, the low clouds drew slowly together, and the stars
softly wept themselves out.
Suddenly, from the other side of the lake, the thunder rolled up, and
with the distant boom came the thought of Lafe's infinite faith, and
the memory fell upon Jinnie like a benediction from God's dark sky.
She arose from the grass, took the fiddle box and bag, and walked to
the porch. She went in through the broken door. It was dark, too dark
to see much, and from the leather case she took a box of matches and a
candle. Memories crowded down upon her thick and fast. In the kitchen,
which was bare, she could mark the place where Matty used to sit and
where her own chair had been.
The long stairs that led from the basement to the upper floor yawned
black in the gloom. Candle and fiddle in hand, Jinnie mounted them and
halted before the unopened door. Somehow it seemed as if she would
find before the grate the long, thin body of her dead father, and she
distinctly remembered the spindle fire-flames falling in golden yellow
licks upon his face. In her imagination she could again see the
flake-like ashes, thrown out from the smoldering fire, rise grey to
the ceiling, then descend silently over him like a pale shroud.
After this hesitation, she slowly turned the handle of the door and
walked in. The only things remaining in the room were a broken table
and chair. She placed the violin on the floor and the candle on the
table. Then with a shudder Jinnie drew from her blouse an unopened
letter, studying it long in the flickering light. It had been written
in this very room three years before, and within its sealed pages lay
the whole secret which now none but the dead knew.
It took no effort on her part to bring back to her memory Jordan
Morse's handsome face and his rock-grey eyes, eyes like Bobbie's. He
and Bobbie had gone away together. She touched the corner of the
envelope to the candle, watching it roll over in a brown curl as it
burned.
"He's happy now," she murmured. "He's got his baby and Lafe's
angels."
Then she gathered up the handful of ashes, opened the window, and
threw them out. The hands of the night wind snatched them as they fell
and carried them swiftly away through the rain.
On her way to the attic stairs, she stood a minute before the window,
awe-stricken. From the north the great storm was advancing, and from
among the hills rolled the distant roar of thunder. It brought to her
mind the night when Peggy had gone into the life-valley and brought
back Lafe's baby; and she remembered, too, with a sob, Blind Bobbie,
and how she missed him. Ah, it was a lonely, haunted little spirit
that crept up the dark narrow stairs to the garret!
Only that the room seemed lower and more stuffy, it, too, was much the
same as she had left it. She brushed aside some silvery cobwebs,
raised the window, and sat down on a dilapidated trunk. On the floor
at her feet, almost covered with dust, was the old fairy book about
the famous kings. She picked it up mechanically. On the first page was
the man in the red suit, with the overhanging nose and fat body,--he
whom she at one time believed to be related to Theodore.
Again she was overwhelmed with her misery. Theodore belonged to
another woman, and Jinnie, alone with her past and an uncertain
future, sat staring dry-eyed into the stormy night.