A slow, exhausted deliberation of mind and act took the place of his late panic. He smoothed the sheet where he had grasped her hand in the futile endeavor to instil into her some of his warmth. He gazed at her for a moment, at the shadows like pools of ink poured into the caverns of her eyes, at a glint of teeth no whiter than the rest, at the dark plait of her hair lying sinuously over the pillow. Then he went to the door:
“Mrs. Caley,” he pronounced. The woman appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. “Mrs. Caley,” he repeated, “Lettice is dead.”
She started forward with a convulsive gasp, and he turned aside and walked heavily out onto the porch. He stood for a moment gazing absently into the darkened valley, at the few lights of Greenstream village, the stars like clusters of silver grapes on high, ultra-blue arbors. The whippoorwills throbbed from beyond the stream, the stream itself whispered in a pervasive monotone. The first George Gordon Makimmon, resting on the porch of his new house isolated in the alien wild, had heard the whippoorwills and the stream. Gordon’s father had heard them just as he, the present Makimmon, heard them sounding in the night. But no other Makimmon would ever listen to the persistent birds, the eternal whisper of the water, because he, the last, had killed his wife ... he had killed their child.
He trod down the creaking steps to the soft, fragrant sod, and made his way to where a thread of light outlined the stable door. Sim was seated on a box, the lantern at his feet casting a pale flicker over his riven face and the horse muzzling the trough. Gordon sat down upon the broken chair.
“She’s dead,” he said, after a minute. Simeon Caley made no immediate reply, and he repeated in exactly the same manner:
“She’s dead.”
A sudden bitterness of contempt flamed in the other’s ineffable blue eyes. “God damn you to hell!” he exclaimed; “now you got the money and nothing to hinder you.”
His resentment vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He rose and picked up the lantern, and with their puny illumination they went out together into the dark.
THREE