“Yes, it’s enough—plenty for you to ’a’ believed about me. I wouldn’t ’a’ believed that much about you.” The humor of this remark seemed to appeal to her, for she smiled a little. Then she got up. “But it’s all right, Bart. I ain’t mad. If that’s all, I guess I’ll go back to bed. You tell maw I couldn’t put them roastin’-ears on—my head feels so.”
He caught her to his breast and kissed her several times, with something like a prayer in his eyes, and with a strong, but sternly controlled passion that left him trembling and staggering like a drunken man when she was gone.
After Lavinia and Diller were gone that night Bart sat out on the kitchen steps, smoking his pipe. He stooped forward, his elbows resting on his knees. His right hand held the pipe, and the left supported his right arm. His eyes looked straight before him into the purple twilight. The wind had gone down, but now and then a little gust of perfume came around the corner from the wild clover, still in delicate pink blossom on the north side of the house. The stars came out, one by one, in the deep blue spaces above, and shrill mournful outcries came from winged things in the green depths of the ferns. Already the torches of the salmon-spearers were beginning to flare out from the shadow of the cliffs across the bay. Mr. Vaiden was not at home, but Mrs. Vaiden was walking about heavily in the kitchen, finishing the evening work.
Mrs. Vaiden was not quite easy in her mind. She really liked Bart Winn, but, to be unnecessarily and disagreeably truthful, she liked even better his noble donation claim, which he was now selling off in town lots. Time and time again during the past month she had cautioned Lavinia to not “go galivantin’ ’round with that Diller so much;” and on numerous occasions she had affirmed that “she’d bet Laviny would fool along till she let Bart Winn slip through her fingers, after all.” Still, it had been an unconfessed satisfaction to her to observe Mr. Diller’s frank admiration for her daughter—to feel that Lavinia could “have her pick o’ the best any day.” She knew how this rankled in some of the neighbors’ breasts. She wished now that she had been more strict. She said to herself, as she went out to the spring-house: “I wish I’d ’a’ set my foot right down on his goin’ a step with her. An’ there I started it myself, a-sendin’ her off to that c’noe race with him, just to tantalize Mis’ Bentley an’ her troop o’ girls. But land knows I never dreamt o’ its goin’ on this way. What’s a newspaper fello’ compared to a donation claim, I’d like to know?”
At nine o’clock she went to the door and said, in that tone of conciliatory tenderness which comes from a remorseful conscience: “Well, Bart, I guess I’ll go to bed. I’m tired. You goin’ to set up for Laviny?”
“Yes,” said Bart; “good-night.”
“Well, good-night, Bart.” She stood holding a lighted candle in one hand, protecting its flame from the night air with the other. “I reckon they’ll be home by ten.”
“I reckon so.”
At the top of the stairs Mrs. Vaiden remembered that the parlor windows were open, and she went back to close them. The wind was rising again, and as she opened the parlor door it puffed through the open windows and sent the curtains streaming out into the room; then it went whistling on through the house, banging the doors.
After a while quiet came upon the house. Bart sat smoking silently. The Vaidens lived on a hill above the town, and usually he liked to watch the chains of electric lights curving around the bay; but to-night he watched the torches only. Suddenly he flung his pipe down with a passionate movement and stood up, reaching inside the door for his hat. But he sat down again as suddenly, shaking himself like a dog, as if to fling off something that was upon him. “No; I’m damned if I will!” he said in his throat. “I won’t watch her! She said it wa’n’t so, an’ I believe her.” But he did not smoke again, and he breathed more heavily as the moments ticked by and she did not come. At half-past ten Mrs. Vaiden came down in a calico wrapper and a worsted shawl.