For a year or more it was like that, and then the day came which, with
dawn, found John Anderson changed into a gray-haired, white-faced man,
whose eyes always seemed to be looking beyond one, and who spoke but
seldom, even when he was spoken to. During the month that followed
that night hardly a person in the village heard a word pass his lips,
except, perhaps, those members of the church societies who had
volunteered to help care for the baby.
He locked himself up in the small shop which occupied the back room of
the house and day after day he worked there alone in a deadly quiet,
strangely mechanical fashion. Sometimes far into the night they heard
the tap-tap of his mallet as he chipped away, bit by bit, on a slender
shaft of white marble, until more than one man in those days shook his
head dubiously and vouchsafed his neighbor the information that John
Anderson "wa'n't quite right."
A month passed during which the steady chip-chip scarcely ever ceased;
and yet, when the work was finally finished and set up over the fresh
little mound in the grounds behind the church, and they came to stand
before it, they found nothing ready for them to say. For once the
tongues of the hillsfolk were sobered into silence.
It was like her--that slim little white statue--so like her in its
pallor and frailty of feature and limb that they only gasped and then
fell to whispering behind their hands at the resemblance. And somehow,
too, as they stared, their faces failed to harden as they had always
hardened before, whenever they rebuked her slim, elfish untidiness,
for upon the face of stone, which was the face of his wife, John
Anderson's chisel had left a fleeting, poignantly wistful smile that
seemed touched with the glory of the Virgin Mother herself.
They merely stood and stared--the townsfolk--and yet they only half
understood, for when it was noised about the street a few days later
that John Anderson had given up forever his occupation of chiseling
tombstones for the bleak Boltonwood cemetery--an occupation which at
least had yielded him a bare living--and had locked himself up in that
back room to "putter with lumps of clay," he was instantly convicted
of being queer in the eyes of the entire thrifty community, even
without his senseless antagonism of the Judge in the years that
followed to clinch the verdict.
After the first few weeks that followed that night the village saw
less and less of the man who went on living alone in the small white
cottage with only the child to keep him company--the girl-child whom
he had named Dryad, perhaps in a blind, groping hunger for beauty,
perhaps in sheer revolt against the myriad Janes and Anns and Marthas
about him. His hair was snow white before she was half grown; he was
an old man, wrinkled of face and vacant of eye, who bent always over
the bench in his back-room shop too engrossed with his work even to
note that, day by day, her face and slim body and tumbled yellow hair
grew more and more like the face which was always smiling up at him
from the shaping clay or marble.
Months passed before he opened his lips again for speech. Then he
began to talk; he began to murmur little, disjointed intimate phrases
of endearment to the stone face growing under his fingers--phrases
that were more than half unintelligible to strange ears--until as the
habit grew there came long periods, days at a time, when he carried on
an uncannily one-sided conversation with the empty air before him, or,
as the villagers often hinted, with some one whom his eyes alone could
see.
But as the years went by even this novelty lost its spice with long
familiarity. The cottage at the edge of town went from straggling
neglect to utter ruin, but John Anderson still clung to it with a
senseless stubbornness over which they often shook their heads in
pity--in heartfelt commiseration for the Judge who had to endure this
eyesore at his very doors, in spite of all his shrewdness or the
reputed size of his balance at the County National.
But if time had dimmed their interest in the father, it had only
served to whet their keen curiosity over the girl, who, in the
intervening eighteen years, had changed from a half-starved, half-clad
child that flashed through the thickets like a wild thing, into a long
slender-limbed creature with wide, duskily violet eyes and shimmering,
tumbled hair--a creature of swift, passionate moods who, if they could
only have known it, was startlingly like the wild things for which he
had named her.
They were not given to the reading of heathen mythology, the people of
Boltonwood, and so they could not know. But with every passing day
they did realize that Dryad Anderson's fiercely wistful little face
was growing more and more like that of the little statue in the
grounds behind the church--the stone face of John Anderson's frail
bride of a year--long since turned a dull, nondescript gray by the sun
and weather.
She had the same trick of smiling with her eyes when there was no
mirth lurking in the corners of her full lips, the same full-throated
little laugh that carried the faintest hint of mockery in its thrill.
Year by year her slim body lost its unformed boyishness in a new soft
roundness which her long outgrown skirt and too scant little waist
failed completely to conceal. And the hillsfolk were given to shaking
their heads over her now, just as the generation before had done, for
to cap it all--the last straw upon the back of their toleration--Dryad
Anderson had "took up" with Denny Bolton, Young Denny, the last of his
name. Nothing more was needed to damn her forever in the eyes of the
hills people, although they could not have explained just why, even if
they had tried.
And Young Denny, waiting there in the thickening dusk before his own
dark place, smiled gravely back at that single blinking light in the
window of the cottage squatting under the hill--he smiled with
whimsical gentleness, a man's smile that softened somehow the hard
lines of jaw and lip. It was more than three years now since the first
night when he had stood and watched for it to flash out across the
valley before he had turned and gone to set a lamp in the dark front
windows behind him in answer to it.
He could never remember just how they had agreed upon that signal--there
had never been any mutual agreement--but every Saturday night since
that first one, three years back, he had come in from his week's work,
ploughing or planting or teaming back in the timber and waited for
it to call to him, just at dusk, across the valley.
His hand went tentatively to his chin, absently caressing his lean
cheeks as he remembered that day. Late in the afternoon he had found a
rabbit caught fast in a snare which he had set deep in the thicket,
and the little animal had squealed in terror, just as rabbits always
squeal, when he leaned and took it from the trap. And when he had
straightened to his feet with it clutched fast in his arms, to look
for a club with which to end its struggles quickly, his eyes had
lifted to encounter the stormy eyes of the girl who had flashed up
before him as silently as a shadow from the empty air.
Her two small brown fists were tight clenched against her breast; she
was breathing in short irregular gasps as if she had been running
hard.
At first Denny Bolton had been too amazed to do more than stare
blankly into her blazing eyes; then before that burning glare his face
began to redden consciously and his gaze dropped, wavering from her
face to the little blouse so long outgrown that it strained far open
across the girl's round throat, doubly white by contrast below the
brown line where the clear tan ended.
His glance went down from the fierce little face to the tight skirt,
shiny from long wear and so short that the hem hung high above her
slim ankles; and from there down to the cracked, broken shoes,
string-laced and sized too large for her fine drawn feet. They were
old and patched--the stockings--so thickly darned that there was
little of the original fabric left, but for all the patches there were
still wide gashes in them, fresh torn by the thorns, through which the
flesh beneath showed very white.
Her face colored, too, as Young Denny's uncomfortable scrutiny passed
over her. It flamed painfully from throat to hair and then went very
white. She tried vainly with one hand to close the gap at her throat,
while the other struggled to settle the dingy old skirt a little lower
on her childish hips. But her hot eyes clung unwaveringly to the boy's
face. Suddenly she lifted one hand and pointed a quivering finger at
the furry mass palpitating in his arms.
"What are you going to do with it?" she demanded.
Young Denny started at the question. The uncompromising directness of
the words startled him even more than had her first swift, silent
coming. Involuntarily, spasmodically his arms closed until the rabbit
squealed again in an ecstasy of terror.
"Why, I--I reckon to eat him!" he blurted at last, and then his face
grew hotter than ever at the baldness of the answer.
It was hard to follow the change that flashed over her face as she
became conscious of his blundering, clumsy embarrassment. It came too
quickly for that, but the angry light faded from her eyes and her
lips began to curve in the faintest of quizzical smiles. She even
forgot the too short skirt and gaping blouse to raise both hands
toward him in coaxing coquetry.
"Please let him go," she wheedled softly. "Please let him go--for
me!"
Young Denny backed away a step from her upturned face and outstretched
hands, grinning a little as he slowly shook his head. It bewildered
him--puzzled him--this swift change to supplication.
"Can't," he refused laconically. "I--I got to have him to eat."
His voice was calmly final and for no other reason than to learn what
she would do next, because already the boy knew that the soft creature
throbbing against him was to have its freedom again. No one, at least
since he could remember, had ever before smiled and asked Denny Bolton
to "do it--for me." For one flashing instant he saw her eyes flare at
his candid refusal; then they cleared again with that same miraculous
swiftness. Once more the corners of her lips lifted pleadingly, arched
with guileful, provocative sweetness.
"Please," she begged, even more softly, "please--because I ask you
to!"
Once more Young Denny shook his head.
Standing there before his dark house, still smiling vaguely at the
light across the valley his fingers tentatively caressed his lean
cheeks where her fingernails had bit deep through the skin that day.
He never remembered how it had happened--it all came too swiftly for
recollection--but even before he had finished shaking his head the
tempting smile had been wiped from her lips, her little face working
convulsively with rage, before she sprang at him--sprang with lithe,
lightning, tigerlike ferocity that sent him staggering back before
her.
Her hands found his face and tore deep through the skin before he
could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before
he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away
from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a
desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of
red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She
swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her
throat as she struggled for breath.
"There--there!" she gasped at him voicelessly. "There," she whispered
through her white lips, "now will you let him go?"
And Denny Bolton had stood that afternoon in wondering silence, gazing
back into her twitching, distorted face without a word while the blood
oozed from the deep cuts in his cheeks and dripped noisily upon the
dry leaves. Once he turned and followed with his eyes the mad flight
of the rabbit through the underbrush; and then turned slowly back to
her.
"Why, he's gone already," he stated with a gentle gravity that was
almost ponderous. And with a deliberation which he meant more to
comfort than to conciliate: "I--I aimed to let him go, myself, right
from the first time you asked me--after a while!"
She cried over him that afternoon--cried not as he had known other
girls to cry, but with long noiseless gasps that shook her thin
shoulders terribly. Her eyes swam with great drops that hung from her
lashes and went rolling silently down her small face while she washed
out the cuts with one sleeve ruthlessly wrenched from her blouse and
soaked in the brook nearby.
But in almost the same breath while she crooned pityingly over him she
bade him--commanded him with a swift, fierce passionate vehemence--to
tell her that it did not hurt--did not hurt very much! And before she
would let him go that day she made him promise to come back--she
promised herself to set a light in the front window of the shabby
little cottage to tell him that she had found the plaster--that there
was enough left to close the cuts.
There had never been any spoken agreement between them, but since that
night, three years ago, Denny Bolton had learned to watch each week
end, just at dusk, for the signal to appear. From the first their very
loneliness had drawn them together--a childish, starved desire for
companionship; and as time passed they only clung the closer, each to
the other, as jealously fearful as a marooned man and woman might have
been of any harm which might come to the one and leave the other
utterly, desolately alone.
Winter and summer Denny Bolton went every Saturday night, close to
nightfall, and waited for her to come, except that now, in the last
few weeks since the first rumor of the Judge's big barn-raising and
masquerade had gone forth, no matter how early he started or how much
haste he made, he always found Dryad Anderson there before him. For
weeks no other topic had passed the girl's lips, and with each
recurring visit to the small clearing hidden back in the thicket near
the brook the boy's wonder grew.
Almost from the first day she had decided upon the costume which she
would wear. Night after night she sat and made plans in a tumultuous,
bubbling flood of anticipation which he could scarcely follow, for it
was only after long argument that he had sheepishly surrendered and
agreed to "dress up" at all; she sat with a picture torn from an old
magazine across her knees--a color-plate of a dancing girl which she
meant to copy for herself--poring over it with shining eyes, her
breath coming and going softly between childishly curved lips as she
devoured every detail of its construction.
It was a thing of brilliantly contrasting colors--the picture which
she planned to copy--a sleeveless waist of dullest crimson and a much
bespangled skirt of clinging, shimmering black. And that skirt hung
clear to the ankles, swinging just high enough to disclose the gleam
of silken stockings and satiny, pointed slippers, with heels of
absurdly small girth.
The boy only half understood the feverish hunger which glowed in Dryad
Anderson's face, piquantly, wistfully earnest in the dull yellow
lantern light as she leaned forward, ticking off each item and its
probable cost upon her fingers, and waited doubtfully for him to mock
at the expense; and yet, at that, he understood far better than any
one else could ever have hoped to comprehend, for Young Denny knew too
what it was to wait--to wait for something that was drearily slow in
the coming.
One other thing marked Judge Maynard's proffered hospitality as
totally different from all the other half-similar affairs which
Boltonwood had ever known. There were to be invitations--written,
mailed invitations--instead of the usual placards tacked up in the
village post-office as they always were whenever any public
entertainment was imminent, or the haphazard invitations which were
passed along by word of mouth and which somehow they always forgot to
pass on to the boy who lived alone in the dark house on the hill.
There were to be formal, mailed invitations, and Young Denny found it
hard waiting that night for Old Jerry, who had never been so late
before.
The cool red of the horizon behind him faded to a dusky gray and the
dusk thickened from twilight to dark while he stood there waiting,
leaning heavily upon the pike-pole, shifting more and more uneasily
from one tired foot to the other. He had turned at last to go and set
a light in answer to the one which was calling insistently to him from
the blackness before the Judge's place when the shrill squeal of
complaining axles drifted up to him from far down the long hill road.
Old Jerry came with exasperating slowness that night. The plodding
ascent of the fat white mare and creaking buggy was nerve-rackingly
deliberate. Young Denny shifted the shaft of his pike-pole to the
other hand to wipe his damp palm against the checkered coat as the rig
loomed up ahead of him in the darkness. Old Jerry was complaining to
himself bitterly in a whining, cracked falsetto.
"'Tain't reg'lar," the boy heard him whimpering. "'Tain't accordin' to
law--not the way I figger it, it ain't. The Gov'mint don't expect
nobody to work 'til this hour!"
The buggy came to a standstill, with the little, weazened old man
leaning far out from the torn leather seat, shading his eyes with one
unsteady hand while he peered into the shadows searching for the
big-shouldered figure that stepped hesitatingly nearer the wheel.
There was something birdlike in the brilliancy of the beady little
eyes; something of sparrowlike pertness in the tilt of the old man's
head, perked far over to one side.
"Still a-waitin', be ye?" he exclaimed peevishly. "Well, it's lucky
you ain't been kept a-standin' there a whole sight longer--half the
night, mebby! You would a-been, only for my havin' an orig'nal system
for peddlin' them letters that's all my own. It's system does it--but
it ain't right, just the same. The Gov'mint don't expect nobody to
work more'n eight hours to a stretch, and look at me, two hours late
and I ain't home yet! I'd complain, too--I'd complain to the
authorities at Washington, only--only"--his thin, high-pitched voice
dropped suddenly to a furtively conciliating whisper--"only a-course I
don't want to make no trouble for the Judge."
Denny Bolton cleared his throat and shuffled his feet uneasily, but
this hint for haste was utterly wasted upon Old Jerry. The latter
failed completely to note the strained intensity of the face that was
upturned before him and went on grumbling as he leaned over to fumble
in the box beneath the seat. And the tirade continued in an unbroken,
half-muffled stream until he straightened laboriously again, the boy's
usual weekly packet of papers and catalogues in one hand.
"No," he emphasized deliberately, "I wouldn't really go so fur's
that--I ain't figgerin' on makin' no complaint--not this time. I got
too much regard for the Judge to try to get him into any hot water.
But there wa'n't no real use nor reason in his postin' all them
invitations to once. He could a-begun back a stretch and kinda run 'em
in easy, a little to a time, instead of lumpin' 'em this way, and that
would a-give me----"
Young Denny reached out and took the bundle from the extended,
unsteady old hand. His own hands were shaking a little as he broke the
string and fluttered swiftly through the half dozen papers and
pamphlets. Old Jerry never skipped a breath at the interruption.
"But that finishes up the day--that's about the last of it." The
thin voice became heavily tinged with pride. "There ain't nobody in
the township but what's got his card to that barn-raising by
now--delivered right on the nail! That's my system." And then,
judiciously: "I guess it's a-goin' to be a real fancy affair, too,
at that. Must be it'll cost him more'n a little mite before he gits
done feedin' 'em. They was a powerful lot of them invitations."
Slowly Denny Bolton's head lifted. He stood and stared into Old
Jerry's peaked, wrinkled face as if he had only half heard the
rambling complaint, a strange, bewildered light growing in his eyes.
Then his gaze dropped once more, and a second time, far more slowly,
his fingers went through the packet of advertisements. Old Jerry was
leaning over to unwind the reins from the whipstock when the boy's
hand reached out and stopped him.
"Ain't there--wasn't there anything more for me--tonight?" Young Denny
inquired gravely.
Jerry paused impatiently. No other question ever caused him quite such
keen irritation, for he felt that it was a slur at his reliability.
"More!" he petulantly echoed the question. "More? Why, you got your
paper, ain't you? Was you expectin' sunthin' else? Wasn't looking for
a letter, now was you?"
Denny backed slowly away from the wheel. Dumbly he stood and licked
his lips. He cleared his throat again and swallowed hard before he
answered.
"No," he faltered at last, with the same level gravity. "No, I wasn't
exactly expectin' a letter. But I kind of thought--I--I was just
hopin'----"
His grave voice trailed heavily off into silence. Eyes still numbly
bewildered he turned, leaning forward a little, to gaze out across the
valley at the great square silhouette of Judge Maynard's house on the
opposite ridge, while Old Jerry wheeled the protesting buggy and
started deliberately down the hill. Just once more the latter paused;
he drew the fat gray mare to a standstill and leaned a last time far
out from the seat.
"A-course I didn't mean nothin' when I spoke about complainin' against
the Judge," he called back. "You know that, don't you, Denny? You know
I was just jokin', don't you?" A vaguely worried, appealing strain
crept into the cracked accents. "An' a-course you wouldn't say nothin'
about my speakin' like that. I think a whole heap too much of the
Judge to even try to git him into trouble--and--and then the Judge--he
might--you understand that I was only jokin', don't you, Denny?"
Young Denny nodded his head silently in reply. Long after the shrill
falsetto grumbling had ceased to drift back up the hill to him he
stood there motionless. After a while the fingers that still clutched
the bundle of circulars opened loosely and when he did finally wheel
to cross slowly to the kitchen door the papers and catalogues lay
unheeded, scattered on the ground where they had fallen.
He stopped once at the threshold to prop his pike-pole against the
house corner before he passed aimlessly inside, leaving the door wide
open behind him. And he stood a long time in the middle of the dark
room, staring dully at the cold, fireless stove. Never before had he
given it more than a passing thought--he had accepted it silently as
he accepted all other conditions over which he had no control--but
now as he stood and stared, it came over him, bit by bit, that he was
tired--so utterly weary that the task of cooking his own supper that
night had suddenly become a task greater than he could even attempt.
The very thought of the half-cooked food sickened him--nauseated him.
Motionless there in the dark he dragged one big hand across his dry
lips and slowly shook his head.
"They didn't want me," he muttered hoarsely. "It wasn't because they
forgot me before; they didn't want me--not even for the strength of my
shoulders."
With heavy, shuffling steps he crossed and dropped loosely into a
chair beside the bare board table that stood in front of one dingy
window. A long time he sat silent, his lean chin propped in his rough
palms, eyes burning straight ahead of him into vacancy. Then, little
by little, his great shoulders in the vividly checkered coat began to
sag--they slumped downward-until his head was bowed and his face lay
hidden in the long arms crooked limply asprawl across the table-top.
Once more he spoke aloud, hours later.
"They didn't want me," he repeated dully. "Not even for the work I
could do!"