CHAPTER XV
The young man settled back, and stuffed tobacco into a battered pipe. Then, with a lightness of tone which was assumed as a defense against her mischievous teasing, he began:
"Very well, Drennie. When you were twelve, which is at best an unimpressive age for the female of the species, I was eighteen, and all the world knows that at eighteen a man is very mature and important. You wore pigtails then, and it took a prophet's eye to foresee how wonderfully you were going to emerge from your chrysalis."
The idolatry of his eyes told how wonderful she seemed to him now.
"Yet, I fell in love with you, and I said to myself, 'I'll wait for her.' However, I didn't want to wait eternally. For eight years, I have danced willing attendance—following you through nursery, younger-set and débutante stages. In short, with no wish to trumpet too loudly my own virtues, I've been your Fidus Achates." His voice dropped from its pitch of antic whimsey, and became for a moment grave, as he added: "And, because of my love for you, I've lived a life almost as clean as your own."
"One's Fidus Achates, if I remember anything of my Latin, which I don't"—the girl spoke in that voice which the man loved best, because it had left off bantering, and become grave with such softness and depth of timbre as might have trembled in the reed pipes of a Sylvan Pan—"is one's really-truly friend. Everything that you claim for yourself is admitted—and many other things that you haven't claimed. Now, suppose you give me three minutes to make an accusation on other charges. They're not very grave faults, perhaps, by the standards of your world and mine, but to me, personally, they seem important."
Wilfred nodded, and said, gravely:
"I am waiting."
"In the first place, you are one of those men whose fortunes are listed in the top schedule—the swollen fortunes. Socialists would put you in the predatory class."
"Drennie," he groaned, "do you keep your heaven locked behind a gate of the Needle's Eye? It's not my fault that I'm rich. It was wished on me. If you are serious, I'm willing to become poor as Job's turkey. Show me the way to strip myself, and I'll stand shortly before you begging alms."
"To what end?" she questioned. "Poverty would be quite inconvenient. I shouldn't care for it. But hasn't it ever occurred to you that the man who wears the strongest and brightest mail, and who by his own confession is possessed of an alert brain, ought occasionally to be seen in the lists?"
"In short, your charge is that I am a shirker—and, since it's the same thing, a coward?"
Adrienne did not at once answer him, but she straightened out for an uninterrupted run before the wind, and by the tiny moss-green flecks, which moments of great seriousness brought to the depths of her eyes, he knew that she meant to speak the unveiled truth.
"Besides your own holdings in a lot of railways and things, you handle your mother's and sisters' property, don't you?"
He nodded.
"In a fashion, I do. I sign the necessary papers when the lawyers call me up, and ask me to come down-town."
"You are a director in the Metropole Trust Company?"
"Guilty."
"In the Consolidated Seacoast?"
"I believe so."
"In a half-dozen other things equally important?"
"Good Lord, Drennie, how can I answer all those questions off-hand? I don't carry a note-book in my yachting flannels."
Her voice was so serious that he wondered if it were not, also, a little contemptuous.
"Do you have to consult a note-book to answer those questions?"
"Those directorate jobs are purely honorary," he defended. "If I butted in with fool suggestions, they'd quite properly kick me out."
"With your friends, who are also share-holders, you could assume control of the Morning Intelligence, couldn't you?"
"I guess I could assume control, but what would I do with it?"
"Do you know the reputation of that newspaper?"
"I guess it's all right. It's conservative and newsy. I read it every morning when I'm in town. It fits in very nicely between the grapefruit and the bacon-and-eggs."
"It is, also, powerful," she added, "and is said to be absolutely servile to corporate interests."
"Drennie, you talk like an anarchist. You are rich yourself, you know."
"And, against each of those other concerns, various charges have been made."
"Well, what do you want me to do?"
"It's not what I want you to do," she informed him; "it's what I'd like to see you want to do."
"Name it! I'll want to do it forthwith."
"I think, when you are one of a handful of the richest men in New York; when, for instance, you could dictate the policy of a great newspaper, yet know it only as the course that follows your grapefruit, you are a shirker and a drone, and are not playing the game." Her hand tightened on the tiller. "I think, if I were a man riding on to the polo field, I'd either try like the devil to drive the ball down between the posts, or I'd come inside, and take off my boots and colors. I wouldn't hover in lady-like futility around the edge of the scrimmage."
She knew that to Horton, who played polo like a fiend incarnate, the figure would be effective, and she whipped out her words with something very close to scorn.
"Duck your head!" she commanded shortly. "I'm coming about."
Possibly, she had thrown more of herself into her philippic than she had realized. Possibly, some of her emphasis imparted itself to her touch on the tiller, and jerked the sloop too violently into a sudden puff as it careened. At all events, the boat swung sidewise, trembled for an instant like a wounded gull, and then slapped its spread of canvas prone upon the water with a vicious report.
"Jump!" yelled the man, and, as he shouted, the girl disappeared over- side, perilously near the sheet. He knew the danger of coming up under a wet sail, and, diving from the high side, he swam with racing strokes toward the point where she had gone down. When Adrienne's head did not reappear, his alarm grew, and he plunged under water where the shadow of the overturned boat made everything cloudy and obscure to his wide- open eyes. He stroked his way back and forth through the purple fog that he found down there, until his lungs seemed on the point of bursting. Then, he paused at the surface, shaking the water from his face, and gazing anxiously about. The dark head was not visible, and once more, with a fury of growing terror, he plunged downward, and began searching the shadows. This time, he remained until his chest was aching with an absolute torture. If she had swallowed water under that canvas barrier this attempt would be the last that could avail. Then, just as it seemed that he was spending the last fraction of the last ounce of endurance, his aching eyes made out a vague shape, also swimming, and his hand touched another hand. She was safe, and together they came out of the opaqueness into water as translucent as sapphires, and rose to the surface.
"Where were you?" she inquired.
"I was looking for you—under the sail," he panted.
Adrienne laughed.
"I'm quite all right," she assured him. "I came up under the boat at first, but I got out easily enough, and went back to look for you."
They swam together to the capsized hull, and the girl thrust up one strong, slender hand to the stem, while with the other she wiped the water from her smiling eyes. The man also laid hold on the support, and hung there, filling his cramped lungs. Then, for just an instant, his hand closed over hers.
"There's my hand on it, Drennie," he said. "We start back to New York to-morrow, don't we? Well, when I get there, I put on overalls, and go to work. When I propose next, I'll have something to show."
A motor-boat had seen their plight, and was racing madly to their rescue, with a yard-high swirl of water thrown up from its nose and a fusillade of explosions trailing in its wake.
* * * * *
Christmas came to Misery wrapped in a drab mantle of desolation. The mountains were like gigantic cones of raw and sticky chocolate, except where the snow lay patched upon their cheerless slopes. The skies were low and leaden, and across their gray stretches a spirit of squalid melancholy rode with the tarnished sun. Windowless cabins, with tight- closed doors, became cavernous dens untouched by the cleansing power of daylight. In their vitiated atmosphere, their humanity grew stolidly sullen. Nowhere was a hint of the season's cheer. The mountains knew only of such celebration as snuggling close to the jug of moonshine, and drinking out the day. Mountain children, who had never heard of Kris Kingle, knew of an ancient tradition that at Christmas midnight the cattle in the barns and fields knelt down, as they had knelt around the manger, and that along the ragged slopes of the hills the elder bushes ceased to rattle dead stalks, and burst into white sprays of momentary bloom.
Christmas itself was a week distant, and, at the cabin of the Widow Miller, Sally was sitting alone before the logs. She laid down the slate and spelling-book, over which her forehead had been strenuously puckered, and gazed somewhat mournfully into the blaze. Sally had a secret. It was a secret which she based on a faint hope. If Samson should come back to Misery, he would come back full of new notions. No man had ever yet returned from that outside world unaltered. No man ever would. A terrible premonition said he would not come at all, but, if he did—if he did—she must know how to read and write. Maybe, when she had learned a little more, she might even go to school for a term or two. She had not confided her secret. The widow would not have understood. The book and slate came out of their dusty cranny in the logs beside the fireplace only when the widow had withdrawn to her bed, and the freckled boy was dreaming of being old enough to kill Hollmans.
The cramped and distorted chirography on the slate was discouraging. It was all proving very hard work. The girl gazed for a time at something she saw in the embers, and then a faint smile came to her lips. By next Christmas, she would surprise Samson with a letter. It should be well written, and every "hain't" should be an "isn't." Of course, until then Samson would not write to her, because he would not know that she could read the letter—indeed, as yet the deciphering of "hand-write" was beyond her abilities.
She rose and replaced the slate and primer. Then, she took tenderly from its corner the rifle, which the boy had confided to her keeping, and unwrapped its greasy covering. She drew the cartridges from chamber and magazine, oiled the rifling, polished the lock, and reloaded the piece.
"Thar now," she said, softly, "I reckon ther old rifle-gun's ready."
As she sat there alone in the shuck-bottomed chair, the corners of the room wavered in huge shadows, and the smoke-blackened cavern of the fireplace, glaring like a volcano pit, threw her face into relief. She made a very lovely and pathetic picture. Her slender knees were drawn close together, and from her slim waist she bent forward, nursing the inanimate thing which she valued and tended, because Samson valued it. Her violet eyes held the heart-touching wistfulness of utter loneliness, and her lips drooped. This small girl, dreaming her dreams of hope against hope, with the vast isolation of the hills about her, was a little monument of unflinching loyalty and simple courage, and, as she sat, she patted the rifle with as soft a touch as though she had been dandling Samson's child—and her own—on her knee. There was no speck of rust in the unused muzzle, no hitch in the easily sliding mechanism of the breechblock. The hero's weapon was in readiness to his hand, as the bow of Ulysses awaited the coming of the wanderer.
Then, with sudden interruption to her reflections, came a rattling on the cabin door. She sat up and listened. Night visitors were rare at the Widow Miller's. Sally waited, holding her breath, until the sound was repeated.
"Who is hit?" she demanded in a low voice.
"Hit's me—Tam'rack!" came the reply, very low and cautious, and somewhat shamefaced.
"What does ye want?"
"Let me in, Sally," whined the kinsman, desperately. "They're atter me. They won't think to come hyar."
Sally had not seen her cousin since Samson had forbidden his coming to the house. Since Samson's departure, the troublesome kinsman, too, had been somewhere "down below," holding his railroad job. But the call for protection was imperative. She set the gun out of sight against the mantle-shelf, and, walking over unwillingly, opened the door.
The mud-spattered man came in, glancing about him half-furtively, and went to the fireplace. There, he held his hands to the blaze.
"Hit's cold outdoors," he said.
"What manner of deviltry hev ye been into now, Tam'rack?" inquired the girl. "Kain't ye never keep outen trouble?"
The self-confessed refugee did not at once reply. When he did, it was to ask:
"Is the widder asleep?"
Sally saw from his blood-shot eyes that he had been drinking heavily. She did not resume her seat, but stood holding him with her eyes. In them, the man read contempt, and an angry flush mounted to his sallow cheek-bones.
"I reckon ye knows," went on the girl in the same steady voice, "thet Samson meant what he said when he warned ye ter stay away from hyar. I reckon ye knows I wouldn't never hev opened thet door, ef hit wasn't fer ye bein' in trouble."
The mountaineer straightened up, his eyes burning with the craftiness of drink, and the smoldering of resentment.
"I reckon I knows thet. Thet's why I said they was atter me. I hain't in no trouble, Sally. I jest come hyar ter see ye, thet's all."
Now, it was the girl's eyes that flashed anger. With quick steps, she reached the door, and threw it open. Her hand trembled as she pointed out into the night, and the gusty winter's breath caught and whipped her calico skirts about her ankles.
"You kin go!" she ordered, passionately. "Don't ye never cross this doorstep ag'in. Begone quick!"
But Tamarack only laughed with easy insolence.
"Sally," he drawled. "Thar's a-goin' ter be a dancin' party Christmas night over ter the Forks. I 'lowed I'd like ter hev ye go over thar with me."
Her voice was trembling with white-hot indignation.
"Didn't ye hear Samson say ye wasn't never ter speak ter me?"
"Ter hell with Samson!" he ripped out, furiously. "Nobody hain't pesterin' 'bout him. I don't allow Samson, ner no other man, ter dictate ter me who I keeps company with. I likes ye, Sally. Ye're the purtiest gal in the mountings, an'——"
"Will ye git out, or hev I got ter drive ye?" interrupted the girl.
Her face paled, and her lips drew themselves into a taut line.
"Will ye go ter the party with me, Sally?" He came insolently over, and stood waiting, ignoring her dismissal with the ease of braggart effrontery. She, in turn, stood rigid, wordless, pointing his way across the doorstep. Slowly, the drunken face lost its leering grin. The eyes blackened into a truculent and venomous scowl. He stepped over, and stood towering above the slight figure, which did not give back a step before his advance. With an oath, he caught her savagely in his arms, and crushed her to him, while his unshaven, whiskey-soaked lips were pressed clingingly against her own indignant ones. Too astonished for struggle, the girl felt herself grow faint in his loathsome embrace, while to her ears came his panted words:
"I'll show ye. I wants ye, an' I'll git ye."
Adroitly, with a regained power of resistance and a lithe twist, she slipped out of his grasp, hammering at his face futilely with her clenched fists.
"I—I've got a notion ter kill ye!" she cried, brokenly. "Ef Samson was hyar, ye wouldn't dare—" What else she might have said was shut off in stormy, breathless gasps of humiliation and anger.
"Well," replied Tamarack, with drawling confidence, "ef Samson was hyar, I'd show him, too—damn him! But Samson hain't hyar. He won't never be hyar no more." His voice became deeply scornful, as he added: "He's done cut an' run. He's down thar below, consortin' with furriners, an' he hain't thinkin' nothin' 'bout you. You hain't good enough fer Samson, Sally. I tells ye he's done left ye fer all time."
Sally had backed away from the man, until she stood trembling near the hearth. As he spoke, Tamarack was slowly and step by step following her up. In his eyes glittered the same light that one sees in those of a cat which is watching a mouse already caught and crippled.
She half-reeled, and stood leaning against the rough stones of the fireplace. Her head was bowed, and her bosom heaving with emotion. She felt her knees weakening under her, and feared they would no longer support her. But, as her cousin ended, with a laugh, she turned her back to the wall, and stood with her downstretched hands groping against the logs. Then, she saw the evil glint in Tamarack's blood-shot eyes. He took one slow step forward, and held out his arms.
"Will ye come ter me?" he commanded, "or shall I come an' git ye?" The girl's fingers at that instant fell against something cooling and metallic. It was Samson's rifle.
With a sudden cry of restored confidence and a dangerous up-leaping of light in her eyes, she seized and cocked it.