Among the men of John's trade it was deemed an effeminate thing for a
laboring-man to allow his marriage to cut into his duties to his daily
work. And as Cavanaugh already had a job waiting, which was the erection
of a fine brick residence on a near-by plantation, John joined him,
ready for work, on the day following the one of his arrival home. This
left Tilly all alone in the cottage. At first she was so absorbed by the
changes she was making about the house--the moving of this article or
that and the rehanging of the cheap pictures and curtains, that she had
little time for self-analysis or a study of her environment.
However, after the first three days had passed and there was now nothing
in the cottage to be done except to prepare her husband's supper,
breakfast, and lunch for his dinner-pail, the time began to drag on her
hands. She sat on the little porch nearly all the time, for the outside
view was more soothing than the cramped interior of the rather dark
little house. Across the vacant lots, and above the dim roofs of the
neighboring negro shanties, she saw the smoke from the town's
cotton-factories, woolen-mills and iron-foundries, the steam-whistles of
which were John's signals for early rising and her own best guide to the
approach of nightfall and her husband's longed-for return. Above the
trees, an eighth of a mile away, could be seen the roof of Mrs. Trott's
house. John had reluctantly pointed it out one evening as they stood at
the gate, and every day now she looked at it as the physical symbol of a
mystery which was growing more and more inexplicable. She had come to
feel that there was something about John's mother which he himself did
not fully understand and from which he shrank in morbid and manly
sensitiveness.
Cavanaugh had called one evening, and as the three friends sat on the
porch, the weather being warm, he had explained that his wife was still
confined to her bed and was deeply regretting her inability to come over
and see Tilly. But neither did the contractor help Tilly to solve the
brooding enigma. On the contrary, his very reticence seemed to deepen
it, for he had the disturbed air of a man avoiding some disagreeable
fact. How could it be, Tilly began to ask herself, that a man so genial
as John should have absolutely no women friends in the town of his
birth, and why was it that even his men friends should so persistently
shun his residence and show so little interest in his bride? There was
Joe Tilsbury, she recalled. What a contrast, what an inexplicable
contrast! Joe's friends had given the wife he had brought home a
far-reaching welcome, afternoon receptions, quilting-bees, dances,
straw-rides, surprise-parties, and even the jovial jokers of the
village, in grotesque costumes, had serenaded the couple with tin pans
and cow-horns. Tilly herself had taken part in the courtesies to the
wife of a man far beneath John in point of position and attainments.
What could it mean? What?
Four days after the departure of her daughter, Mrs. Whaley received the
third letter from Tilly, and Whaley found her one morning at her churn
with that letter on her knee, the dasher inactive in a steadily extended
hand.
"Who's that from?" he inquired. "Oh, I see! She writes powerful often,
don't she? Well, how does she like it?"
Mrs. Whaley was silent, her eyes on the milk-coated hole in the
churn-lid through which the worn dasher was wont to glide up and down.
Noting her mood, Whaley gruffly took up the letter and, adjusting his
black-rimmed nose-glasses, he read it.
"What do you think of it?" she asked, when he put it down.
"I don't know as I think anything much about it," was his response.
"House, house, house! That is all there is in it--tables here and chairs
there, a new organ, cook-stove that runs by gas, and water on tap within
arm's-length--to say nothing of milk left on the front-door step, as
well as a block of ice in summer-time every morning. All that, I say,
but not one word about the big union-tabernacle-tent revival that
Cavanaugh said was to open there this week? I'd walk ten miles through
the broiling sun to meet that preacher and hear him rip the hide off of
the ungodly down there. That town is just big enough to be full of hell,
'blind-tiger' joints, and houses full of shamefaced strumpets that are
fined in city court and allowed to keep on even by the law in their
devilish occupation."
Mrs. Whaley was never known to sigh. Sighs are born of elements which
she had suppressed till they had died a natural death, but there was
something in her very uncommunicating manner that provoked her husband's
lingering at her side.
"You don't say what you think," he said, restoring his glasses to their
tin case and snapping its lid down.
She raised her eyes and fixed them on his. "It is not what she says,
but what it seems to me she ought to say and don't that seems strange to
me," was her reply. "Why, there is no mention at all about any of John's
kin--not one single word about his mother--not one single word about any
woman stepping in even for a minute. I don't care anything about your
tabernacles or your whisky-joints--what seems strange to me is that
Tilly don't seem to have made a single acquaintance since she got there.
She writes, you see, about Cavanaugh coming over and why his wife
didn't, as if that was something to tell. She writes about John being
away in the country all day, and, as far as I can gather, she is at home
all by herself from dawn till nightfall. There is something powerfully
odd about all that. I don't know what it is, but it is there."
"I know one thing about John Trott that I didn't know when he was here,"
Whaley pursued, tapping his thumb with the case of his glasses, "and I
tell you if I had known it he would have had to change before he took a
daughter of mine to live under a roof with him. I got it straight that
he's been heard to say that he didn't believe in a God or the Bible, and
that folks were silly fools that did. I heard it this morning and I made
it my business to trace it down. He said it, and I'm here to say that I
don't want to be the granddaddy of the children of an atheist. The wrath
of an offended God would fall on them and on me. Tilly was put in my
care. The Catholics damned the soul of my son when he went over to those
idol-worshipers through the wiles of a present-day Eve, and here I stood
stock-still and let an avowed atheist take away my daughter. Do you
think I'm going to stand it? Man-killing is said to be wrong, but
killing human snakes is not, and a man that will lead an innocent
Christian girl away from the smiles of God deserves death, let the law
of the land be what it may. I've got a good pistol. I've got a steady
finger and a firm arm. I tell you to look out. I don't know what may
happen. Our Lord said Himself that He came not to bring peace, but a
sword, and I'll be at war with atheism against my own flesh and blood
till I die."
"You wouldn't be as foolish as that," Mrs. Whaley faltered, for once
daring to oppose her spouse. "Even if he is an infidel he may get over
it under--under Tilly's influence."
"Get over it, a dog's hind foot!" Whaley sniffed, his great nostrils
fluttering, his harsh face rigid. "No wife ever does. They go with their
husbands and so do the children, and children's children, all the way
down, if the flow of hell's poison is not stopped, and I'll stop it."
On the day that dialogue was taking place Sam Cavanaugh was seated by
the bedside of his wife. "Yes, I went by there," he was saying. "John
had bought some fine peaches from a mountain wagon and wanted Tilly to
have them to put up in jars. She was out in the little yard. I saw her
clean across the old circus-grounds. She was walking back and forth, and
I'll admit she looked lonely. You were right about what you said that
time. I begin to see my mistake. As awkward as it would have been, maybe
I ought to have had a straight talk with John, if nobody else. It looks
to me like he is slowly opening his eyes now, but doesn't know how to
fetch up the subject when we are together. He comes a little later in
the morning and starts for home on the dot. I've seen him on the
scaffold, looking off over the fields in the very saddest sort of way.
He is becoming different. He never curses the men now when they make a
bobble or are slow with mortar or brick, and he has lost interest in
plans and figures. They have all noticed it. Some seem to understand,
while others don't. They all respect him too much to tattle among
themselves about his private matters. They love him. They all love John
Trott--rough as he is, they all love him; and as for me--as for me--my
God! my heart aches! I feel like I've made a mistake, but I can't feel
that I am much to blame, for I was going by my best lights. They love
each other, those two do, with all their souls. How could I burst it up
with a nasty revelation like I'd 'a' had to make?"