In all that hill town's history no period had ever before been so
filled with sensation as was that one which opened with the flight of
Judge Maynard's yellow-wheeled buckboard along the main street of
Boltonwood to herald the passing of the last of the line of men who
had given the village its name.
One by one, in bewildering succession, climax after climax had piled
itself upon those which already had left the white-haired circle of
regulars about the Tavern stove breathless with fruitless argument and
footless conjecture.
Old Jerry's desertion from the ranks of the old guard over which the
Judge had ruled with a more than despotic tongue, bursting with
bomblike suddenness in their midst that very same night which had seen
Young Denny's dramatic departure, had complicated matters to an
inconceivable degree. For, after all, he was the one member of the
circle to whom they had all been unconsciously looking for a
comprehensive answer to the question which the Judge's crafty
exhibition of the boy's bruised face had created.
He enjoyed what none of the others could claim an absolutely
incontestable excuse for visiting the old, weatherbeaten farmhouse on
the hill above town--and in his official capacity they felt, too, that
he might venture a few tentative inquiries at least, which, coming
from any one else, might have savored of indelicacy.
Not but what the circle had enjoyed Judge Maynard's masterly recital,
for it had held them as one man. But they were hungry also for
facts--facts which could convince as well as entertain. Even the Judge
himself had planned upon Old Jerry's co-operation; he had had it in
mind to be patronizingly lenient that night; that is, after that first
rebuke which was to leave him the undisputed master of the situation.
To reach the really great heights of which the evening's triumph was
capable the old mail carrier's collaboration had been almost
indispensable. They had been waiting with hungry impatience for him.
And then Old Jerry had appeared--he made his entrance and his
exit--and departing had left them gasping for breath.
Old Jerry had not waited to view the effect of his mad defiance of the
town's great man. It is doubtful if he had given that side of the
issue one passing thought, but his triumphant withdrawal from the
field had robbed the situation of not one bit of its decisiveness.
Quiet followed his going, a stillness so profound that they heard him
cackling to himself in insane glee as he went down the steps. And that
hush had endured while they waited in a delicious state of tingling
suspense for the first furious sentences which should preface his
lifelong banishment from the circle itself.
For years they had whispered, "Just wait, he'll come to it--he'll go
just like the rest." And so Young Denny's final weakening had not been
so unexpected as it might have been. And more than once, too, when the
Judge's harsh censure of him who had always been his stanchest
supporter had left Old Jerry cringing in his place beside the stove,
they had all felt the justice if not a premonition of final
retribution to come. It was the debonaire dare-deviltry of Old Jerry's
defiance rather than its unexpectedness which had proved its greatest
sensation. That day's one supreme moment--the only one which had not
suffered from too acute anticipation--came while they waited for the
Judge's denial, that denial which was never spoken.
The town's great man had slumped back in his chair in a kind of
stunned trance while the apoplectic purple of his earlier wrath faded
from his face. He did open his mouth, but not in any effort to speak.
It was only to lick his thick lips and gurgle noisily in his fat
throat. He tried to rise, too, and failed in his first attempt--and
tried again.
They had all realized what it was that made his knees wabble as he
crossed to the door; they understood what had drained his face of all
its color. Every man of them knew why the latch rattled under his
shaking figure. The Judge had been afraid, not merely morally
frightened, but abjectly, utterly terrified in the flesh--afraid of
the threat in the insolent bearing of the little, shriveled man who
had passed out into the night a moment before.
It could have been funny. It might have been sublimest farce-comedy,
had they not lacked the perspective necessary for its appreciation.
But it was enough that they realized that the demagogue had come
crashing down--enough that, watching his furtive disappearance that
night, they learned how pitiful a coward a blusterer really can be.
Old Jerry's own actions in those days which followed had furnished
rich food for conjecture. The fact that it had been the little
mail-carrier himself who had ridden in the carriage beside the slim
girl with the tumbled hair, at the head of the dreary procession that
toiled slowly up to the bleak cemetery behind the church, had, indeed,
been worthy of some discussion. The spendthrift prodigality of the
white roses which rumor whispered he had gone to place the next day
over the new mound of raw earth had not gone unspoken. Even the
resemblance of the girl who John Anderson had named Dryad in his
hunger for the beautiful--even the likeness of her face with its
straight little nose and wistfully curved lips, to the features of
that small, rain-stained statue of the white and gold slip of a woman
who had been his wife, came in for its share of the discussion, too.
But all those topics which were touched upon in the nights that
followed were, at best, of only secondary importance. Inevitably the
circle about the stove swung back to a consideration of that first
day's major climax, until the very discord of opinion which hitherto
had been the chief joy of those nightly sessions bade fair to prove
their total disruption.
For the circle of regulars were leaderless now; there was no longer a
master mind to hold in check the flood of argument and rebuttal, or
preserve a unity of disagreement. Where before they had been
accustomed to take up each new development and pursue it until it
reached a state either too lucid for further consideration or an
insolvable problem that dead-locked conversation, a half dozen
different arguments sprang up each night, splitting the circle into
wrangling factions which trebled the din of voices and multiplied
ten-fold the new note of bitter personalities which had taken the
place of former incontrovertible logic.
Judge Maynard's iron discipline was gone, and the old guard faced a
quite probable dissolution in the first week or two which followed his
going. More from habit than anything else they had waited that next
night for him to come and clear his throat pompously and open the
evening's activities. And the Judge failed to appear, failed just as
signally as had Old Jerry.
And yet it was not the absence of the former which had left them
leaderless. Not one of them had realized it the night before--but that
second night they knew!
By his very rebellion Old Jerry had won the thing which years of
faithful service had failed to bring. He had dethroned the despot, and
the honors were his by right of conquest.
The circle knew that the Judge would never return; after one hour of
fruitless waiting that was a certainty. But night after night they
continued to gather, stubbornly, persistently hopeful that Old Jerry
would come back. And in the meantime they almost forgot, at times,
Young Denny who had gone the way of his fathers as they had so truly
prophesied; they only touched a little uncomfortably upon the problem
of the slim, yellow-haired girl alone in the battered cottage at the
edge of the town, while they reviewed with startlingly fertile detail
and a lingering relish that came very close to being hero-worship,
his last brief remarks which had left the Judge a wreck of his former
magnificence.
If Old Jerry realized all this that had come to pass he gave no
outward sign of such knowledge. He even forgot to pause impressively
upon the top step of the post-office those days, as he always had
formerly, before he made his straight-backed descent with the pouches
slung over one shoulder. There were mornings when he came perilously
near to ignoring altogether the double line which, with a new
deference, greeted his daily passage to the waiting buggy, and yet
there was not one who dared so much as to whisper that there was
anything in his air of preoccupation that savored of studiously
planned forethought. But it is doubtful if he did realize the change
that had taken place, at least in that first week or two, for Old
Jerry had much of a strictly private nature to occupy his mind.
He was never quite able to remember the things he had said that
morning to the girl with the too-white face and tumbled hair, huddled
in the half-light at the table before the window, or to recall in any
sort of a connected, coherent sequence his own actions in those first
few days which followed it.
It aggravated him for a day or two, this inability to piece out the
details; it brought a peevish frown to his thin face and a higher,
even more querulous note to his shrill falsetto voice, which, while
they hardly understood it, nevertheless resulted in an even
profounder hush in those respectful ranks. He couldn't even
revisualize it clearly enough for his own private edification--for the
joy of seeing himself as others had seen him.
Nothing remained but a picture of Dryad Anderson's face--the face that
had tried so hard to smile--which she had lifted to him that first
morning when he entered the front room of the little drab cottage at
the edge of town. That was limned upon his brain in startlingly
perfect detail still--that and one other thing. The memory of John
Anderson's pitifully wasted form huddled slack upon the high stool,
arms outstretched and silvered head bowed in a posture of utter
weariness, remained with him, too, clinging in spite of every effort
to dislodge it.
That whole week had not served to wipe it out. Day after day, as Old
Jerry drove his route with the reins taut in his nervous hands, it
floated up before him. And even when he wound the lines about the
whipstock, letting the old mare take her own pace, and leaned back,
eyes closed, against the worn cushions, the interior of that back-room
shop with its simple, terribly inert occupant and countless rows of
tiny white statues, all so white and strangely alike, crept in under
the lids.
Old Jerry's mail route suffered that week; his original "system" of
mail distribution, of which he had always been so jealously proud,
went from bad to very, very bad, and from that to an impossible worse;
and yet, while it became a veritable lottery for the hillsfolk who
were dependent upon him whether they would receive the packet of mail
which really belonged to a two-mile distant neighbor or none at all,
in one respect the rural service improved immensely, and the
improvement--and strangely enough, too--was as directly a result of
that stubborn image of John Anderson's bowed head which persisted in
haunting the mind of the servant of the Gov'mint as was the alarming
growth of his lack of dependability.
Day by day Old Jerry grew less and less prone to let the leisurely
white mare take her own pace. Instead, he sat stiffly erect a great
portion of the time, driving with one eye cocked calculatingly upon
the course of the sun, and his mind running far ahead of him, to the
end of the day's route, when he would have to turn in at the
cross-road that toiled up the grade to the wind-racked old Bolton
place on the hill north of town.
They had always had a forbidding aspect--Young Denny's black,
unpainted farmhouse and dilapidated outbuildings--even when he had
been certain that just as surely as he reached the crest he would find
the boy's big body silhouetted against the skyline, waiting for him,
they had not been any too prepossessing. Now they never served to
awake in him anything but actual dread and distrust.
Old Jerry laid it to the lonesomeness of the place--to the bleak
blindness of the shaded windows and the untenanted silence--but he
took good care that no loitering on his part would be to blame for his
arrival at the house after dusk.
No one, not even he himself, knew how strong the temptation was that
week to make tentative advances of peace to the members of the circle
of Tavern regulars, for the more he dwelt upon it the finer the
dramatic possibilities of the thing seemed. But he had misread in the
hushed respect of his former intimates a chill and uncompromising
disapproval, and he had to fall back upon a one-sided conversation
with himself as the next best thing.
"I wa'n't brought up to believe in ghosts," he averred to himself more
than once. "Ghosts naturally is superstition--and that ain't accordin'
to religion, not any way you look at it. But allowing that there could
be ghosts--just for the sake of argument allowing that there is--now
what would there be to hinder him from just kinda settlin' down up
there, as you might say? It's nice and quiet, ain't it? Sort of out of
the way--and more or less comfortable, too?"
At that point in the mumbled monologue the white-haired driver of the
buggy usually paused for a moment, tilting his head, birdlike, to one
side, wrapped in thought. There were those shelves lined with
countless white figures which also had to be considered.
"He must've worked mighty steady," he told himself time and again in a
voice that was small with awe. "He must hev almost enjoyed workin' at
'em, to hev finished so many! And he kept at it nearly all the time, I
reckon. And now, that's what I'm a-gettin' at! Now I want to ask how
do we know he's a-goin' to quit now--how do we know that? We don't
know it! And Godfrey 'Lisha, what better place would he want than that
back kitchen up there? Ain't there a table right there by the window,
all a-waitin' for him--an'--an'----"
Invariably he broke off there, to peer furtively at the sun, before he
whipped up his horse.
"Git along!" he admonished her earnestly, then, "Git along--you!
Nobody believes in ghosts--leastwise, I don't. But they ain't no sense
nor reason in just a-killin' time on the road, neither. And I ain't
one to tempt Providence--not to any great nor damagin' extent, I
ain't!"
And yet in spite of all the uneasiness which the combination of the
dark house and the persistent image of the little, worn-out
stone-cutter kept alive in him, in so far as Young Denny's team of
horses was concerned, and the scanty rest of the stock which the boy
had left in his care, Old Jerry kept strictly to the letter of his
agreement. At the most it meant no more than a little readjustment of
his daily schedule, which he high-handedly rearranged to suit his
better convenience.
But all the rest which he had promised so fervidly to carry out--the
message which he had meant to deliver the very next morning after the
boy's departure and the explanation of Young Denny's bruised face,
even a diplomatic tender of the damp wad of bills which Denny had
pushed in his hand--had somehow been allowed to wait. For it had
proved to be anything but the admirably simple thing it had seemed to
the old man when he had volubly acquiesced to the plan.
He had forgotten it that first morning. With the well-planned opening
sentence fairly trembling upon his tongue-tip when he opened the door,
the whole thing had been swept utterly from his mind. And in the press
of events that followed he never so much as thought of it again for
days. When the memory of it did return, a week later, somehow he found
it almost impossible to introduce the subject--at least impossible to
introduce it gracefully.
That was one of the reasons for his failure to execute the mission
entrusted to him. The other reason, which was far weightier, so far as
Old Jerry was concerned, was even harder to define. He blamed it
directly to the attitude of the girl with the tumbled yellow hair and
blue eyes, which were never quite the same shade of purple. More than
a small proportion of the remarks which he had prepared beforehand to
deliver to her had consisted of reproof--not too harsh, but for all
that a trifle severe, maybe--of her hasty and utterly unfair judgment
of Young Denny. That, he had assured himself, was only just and
merited, and could only prove, eventually, to have been for the best.
But she never gave him a chance to deliver it. One moment of sadness
on her part would have been sufficient excuse. If he could have
surprised her just once gazing at him from moist, questioning eyes, he
felt that that would have been enough proof of contrition and humble
meekness of spirit on her part. But he never did.
Instead Old Jerry had never seen so astounding a change take place in
any human being as that which came over her day by day. By the end of
that first week the pallor had gone entirely from her cheeks. The deep
dark circles which had rimmed the wet eyes which she had lifted to him
that first morning disappeared so entirely that it was hard to
remember that they had ever been there at all. Even the lithely
slender body seemed fuller, rounder. To every outward appearance at
least Old Jerry had to confess to himself that he had never seen a
more supremely contented, thoroughly happy creature than Dryad
Anderson was at that week's end.
And it irritated him; it almost angered him at times. Remembering his
own travail of spirit, the self-inflicted agony of mind which he had
undergone that day when he had first looked square into the eyes of
his own soul and acknowledge his years of guilty unfairness to the
lonely boy on the hill, he shut his lips tight upon the message he
might have delivered and waited, stubbornly, for her to show some sign
of repentance.
For a day or two a mental contemplation of this necessarily severe
course brought him moments of comparative peace of mind. It justified
in a measure, at least, his own remissness, and yet even that
mind-state at times was rudely shaken. At each day's end, after he had
made his reluctant ascent of the hill which led up to Young Denny's
unlighted house, and a far speedier, none too dignified return, the
little driver of the squealing buggy made it a point to turn off and
stop for a moment or two before the gate of John Anderson's cottage.
At first the girl's real need of him prompted this daily detour; then,
when the actual need no longer existed, he excused the visit on the
plea of her lonesomeness and his promise to Denny to look after her.
His own loneliness--for he had never been so lonely before in all his
lonely life--and the other and real reason for this habit, he never
allowed himself to scrutinize too closely. But each day he sat a
little forward on the buggy seat as soon as he had turned the last
sharp curve in the road and stared eagerly ahead through the afternoon
dusk until he made out her slim figure leaning against the fence
waiting for him. And every afternoon, after he had pulled the
shuffling horse to a standstill, he bent down from his vantage point
on the high seat to scan her upturned face minutely, almost craftily
at times, for some tell-tale trace of tears on her long lashes, or a
possible quiver of her lips, or a suspicious droop in her boyish
shoulders. And he never discovered either the one or the other.
It was at such moments that his peace of mind suffered, for no sane
man could ever have read, by any stretching of the imagination,
anything akin to sorrow or sadness in the low laugh with which she
invariably met his scrutiny. It fairly bubbled joy. Each day Old Jerry
found her only happy--offensively happy--and where he had been
secretly watching her for one betraying sign he became uneasily
conscious after a time that very often she, too, seemed to be scanning
his own face as if she were trying to penetrate into the inner tumult
of perplexities behind his seamed forehead. Some days he was almost
certain that there was a calculating light in her steady eyes--a hint
of half-hidden delight in something he couldn't understand--and it
worried him. It bothered him almost as much as did the unvaried
formula with which she greeted him every afternoon.
"Have you any news for me today?" she always asked him. "Surely you've
something new to tell me this afternoon--now, haven't you?"
The tone in which she made the query was never anything but disarming;
it was quite childishly wheedling and innocently eager, he thought.
But reiterated from day to day it wore on his nerves after a while.
Added to the something he sometimes thought he caught glimmering in
her tip-tilted eyes, it made him more than a little uncomfortable. He
fell back upon a quibble to dodge the issue.
"Was you expectin' a letter?" he always countered.
This daily veiled tilt of wits might have gone on indefinitely had not
a new development presented itself which threw an entirely different
aspect upon the whole affair.
A fortnight had elapsed since Denny Bolton's mysterious departure from
the village when it happened. As usual, after the day's duties were
completed with his hurried return from the Bolton homestead, Old Jerry
turned off at the crossroads to stop for a moment before the cottage
squatting in its acre of desolate garden. He didn't even straighten up
in his seat that afternoon to gaze ahead of him, so certain he had
grown that she would be waiting for him, a hint of laughter in her
eyes and the same disturbing question on her lips, and not until the
fat animal between the shafts had stopped of her own accord before the
straggling fence did he realize that the girl was not there. Then her
absence smote him full.
It frightened him. Right from the first he was conscious of impending
disaster born quite entirely of the knowledge of his own guilt. The
front door of the house was open and after fruitless minutes of
panicky pondering he clambered down and advanced uncertainly toward
it. His shadow across the threshold heralded his reluctant coming, and
Dryad turned from the half-filled box upon the table over which she
had been bending and nodded to him almost before he caught sight of
her.
That little, intimately brief inclination of the head was her only
greeting. With hands grasping each side of the door-frame Old Jerry
stood there and gazed about the room. It had never been anything but
bare and empty looking--now with the few larger pieces of furniture
which it had contained all stacked in one corner and the smaller
articles already stored away in a half-dozen boxes, the last of which
was holding the girl's absorbed attention, it would have been barnlike
had it not been so small. From where he stood Old Jerry could see
through into the smaller back-room workshop. Even its shelves were
empty,--entirely stripped of their rows of tiny white woman-figures.
He paled as he grasped the ominous import of it; he tried to speak
unconcernedly, but his voice was none too steady.
"So you're a-house-cleanin', be you?" he asked jauntily. "Ain't you
commencin' a little early?"
He was uncomfortably conscious of that interrogative gleam in Dryad's
glance--that amused glimmer which he couldn't quite fathom--when she
turned her head. She was smiling, too, a little--smiling with her lips
as well as with her eyes.
"No-o-o," she stated with preoccupied lack of emphasis, as she bent
again over the box. "No--I'm packing up."
Old Jerry had known that that would be her answer. He had been certain
of it. The other interpretation--the only other possible one which
could be put upon the dismantled room--had been nothing more or less
than a momentary and desperate grasping at a straw.
For a while he was very, very quiet, wondering just what it was in her
mind which made her so cheerfully indifferent to his presence. She
filled that last box while he stood there in the doorway, stood off to
survey her work critically, and then picked up a hammer that lay on
the table and prepared to nail down the lid.
"I've hit my finger four times today," she apprised him between strokes
as she drove the first nail home. "Four times this afternoon--and always
the same finger, too!"
The very irrelevancy of the statement, coupled with her calm serenity,
was appalling to the old man. She didn't so much as lift her eyes when
she told him, but when the lid was fastened she whirled suddenly with
that impetuosity which always startled him more than a little, her
hands tightly clasped in front of her, and fairly beamed at him.
"There, that finishes everything--everything but the pots and pans,"
she cried. "And I'll need them a little longer, anyway, won't I? But
maybe I won't take them with me, either--they're pretty old and worn
out. What do you think?"
Old Jerry cleared his throat. He ignored her question.
"Ain't--ain't this a trifle sudden," he faltered--"jest a trifle?"
She shook her head again and laughed softly, as if from sheer joyous
excitement.
"No," she said. "No, I've been planning it for days and days--oh, for
more than a week!"
Then she seemed to catch for the first time the dreariness of his
whole attitude--the dejection of his spare angular body and
sparrowlike, anxious face.
"You're sorry I'm going," she accused him then, and she leaned toward
him a little, eyes quizzically half closed. "I knew you'd be sorry!"
And then, swiftly, "Aren't you?"
Old Jerry scraped first one foot and then the other.
"I reckon I be," he admitted faintly. "Kinda surprised, too. I--I
wa'n't exactly calculating on anything like this. It--it's kinda
thrown me off my reckonin'! Are you--are you figurin' on goin' right
away?"
Dryad spun about and threw her head far on one side to scan the whole
bare room.
"Tomorrow, maybe," she decided, when she turned back to him. "Or the
next day at the very latest. You see, everything is about ready now,
and there isn't any reason for me to stay, on and on, here--is
there?"
A little tired note crept into the last words, edging the question
with a suggestion of wistfulness. It was something not so very
different from that for which Old Jerry had been stubbornly waiting
throughout those entire two weeks, but he failed to catch it at that
moment. He had heard nothing but her statement that she meant to
remain at least another day. It made it possible for him to breathe
deeply once again.
Much could happen in twenty-four hours. She might even change her
mind, he desperately assured himself--women were always doing
something like that, wern't they? But even if she did go it was a
reprieve; it gave him one last opportunity. Now, for the present, all
he wanted was to get away--to get away by himself and think! On
heavily dragging feet he turned to go back down the rotting
boardwalk.
"I--I'll drop in on you tomorrow," he suggested, pausing at the steps.
"I'll stop in on my way 'round--to--to say good-by."
The girl stood in the doorway smiling down at him. He couldn't meet
her eyes. As it was he felt that their gaze went through and through
him. And so he did not see her half lift her arms to him in a sudden
quite wonderful gesture of contrite and remorseful reassurance. He did
not hear the first of the impulsive torrent of words which she barely
smothered behind lips that trembled a little. His head was bowed so
that he did not see her eyes, and if he could but have seen them and
nothing else, he would have understood, without the words or the
gesture.
Instead he stood there, plucking undecidedly at his sleeve.
"Because I--I wouldn't like to hev you go--without seein' you again,"
he went on slowly--"without a chance to tell you something--er--to
tell you good-by."
He didn't wait for her answer. At the far bend in the road, when he
looked back, she was still there in the doorway watching him.
He was not quite certain, but he thought she threw up one thin white
arm to him as he passed out of sight.