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Wilmer came. He was late, and Lucy said wearily, “I've got a headache to-night. Do you mind if we stay out here in the cool?”
He didn't, and his confident familiar planning took the place of Martin Eckles' more exciting narratives.
The next day, past noon, the proprietor of the Greenstream hotel left an excited group of men to stop Calvin as he drove in from Sugarloaf Valley.
He cried: “Eckles has been shot and killed. First they found the horse and buggy by the road, and then Martin Eckles. He had fallen out. One bullet did it.”
“That's too bad,” Calvin replied evenly. “Lawlessness ought to be put down.” He had known Solon Entreken all his life. The level gaze of two men encountered and held.
Then: “I'll never say anything against that,” the other pronounced. “It's mighty strange who could have shot Eckles and got clear away. That's what he did, in spite of hell and the sheriff.”
Turning, after inevitable exclamations, toward home, Calvin found Lucy sitting moodily on the porch.
“I've got a right ugly piece of news,” he told her, masking the painful interest with which he followed her expression. “Martin Eckles was killed yesterday; shot out of the buggy.”
She grew pale, her breast rose in a sudden gasp and her hands were clenched.
“Oh!” she whispered, horrified.
But there was nothing in her manner beyond the natural detestation of such brutality; nothing, he saw, hidden.
“He wanted me to go away with him,” she swept on; “and get married in Stanwick. Martin wanted me to see the world. He said I ought to, and not stay here all my life.”
The misery that settled over her, the hopelessness dulling her youth filled him with a passionate resentment at the fate that made her what she was and seemingly condemned her to eternal denial. His love for her—Lucy, Hannah, Hannah, Lucy—was intolerably keen. He went to her, bending with a riven hand on the arm of her chair.
“Do you want Wilmer?” he demanded. “Do you love him truly? Is he enough?”
“I don't know.” Slow tears wet her cheeks. “I can't say. I ought to; he's good and faithful, and with some of me that's enough. But there's another part; I can't explain it except to say it's a kind of excitement for the life Mr. Eckles told us about, all those lights and restaurants and theaters. Sometimes I think I'll die, I want it so much; then it comes over me how ungrateful I am to you and Aunt Ettie, and I hate myself for the way I treat Wilmer.”
“Do you love him?” he insisted.
“Perhaps not like you mean.”
All that had been so long obscured in his mind and heart slowly cleared to understanding—Lucy Braley, Richmond's wife; Phebe; Hannah; and again Lucy, Lucy Vibard had this common hunger for life, for brightness; they were as helpless in its grasp as he had been to hold Hannah. Phebe's return, Martin Eckles—were only incidents in a great inner need. In itself it wasn't wicked; circumstance had made it seem wrong; Phebe's greenish hair, the mark of so much spoiled, Hannah's unhappy death—were the result of aspirations; they fretted and bruised, even killed themselves, like gay young animals, innocent animals, in a dark lonely enclosure.
They were really finer than the satisfied women who faded to ugliness in the solitary homes of the Greenstream mountains; not better, for example, than Ettie—it might be that they weren't so good, not so high in heaven; but they were finer in the manner of blooded horses rebelling against the plow traces. They were more elegant, slimmer, with a greater fire. That too was the secret of their memorable power over him; he wanted a companion different from a kitchen drudge; when he returned home at evening, he wanted a wife cool and sweet in crisp white with a yellow ribbon about her waist, and store slippers. He loved Lucy's superiority—it was above ordinary things. “Like a star,” Calvin Stammark told himself.
He, with everything else that had combated their desire, depriving them of the very necessities for his adoration, had been to blame.
“Lucy,” he said, bending over her and speaking rapidly, “let's you and me go and learn all this life together. Let's run away from Greenstream and Wilmer Deakon and even Ettie, what we ought to hold by, and see every theater in the country. I've got enough money——”
The radiance of the gesture by which she interrupted his speech filled him with pounding joy.
“Oh, shall we!” she cried; and then hugged him wildly, her warm young arms about his neck.
“Of course we will,” he reassured her; “and right away, to-morrow. You and me.”
He felt her lips against his, and then more cautiously she took up the immediate planning of their purpose. It would be ridiculously easy; they would drive to Stanwick in the buggy.
“The hotels and all,” she continued with shining eyes; “and nobody will think it's queer. I'll be your daughter, like always.”
Calvin turned abruptly from her and faced the valley saturated with slumberous sunlight. Lucy hesitated for a moment and then fled lightly into the house. After a little he heard her singing on the upper floor. People wouldn't think it was queer because she would be his daughter, “like always.”
Yet he wasn't old beyond hope, past love—as strong and nearly as springy as a hickory sapling. He had waited half his life for this. Calvin slowly smiled in bitterness and self-contempt; a pretty figure for a young girl to admire, he thought, losing the sense of mere physical fitness. Anyhow Lucy was supremely happy and safe, and he had accomplished it. He was glad that he had been so industrious and successful. Lucy could have almost anything she wanted—pretty clothes and rings with real jewels, necklaces hung with better than Scotch pebbles.
Perhaps when she had seen the world—its bigness and noise and confusion—after her longing was answered, she would turn back to him. Already he was oppressed by a feeling of strangeness, of loss at leaving the high valleys of home.