“Yes,” he said, “I know it.”
“But——”
“How did I know? Her husband followed me down from the Hill to-night. He demanded that I return with him.”
“Then she married, after——”
“She was married,” he said, “when I met her.”
“Oh!” She snapped shut the great fan, twisting its tortoise-shell handle between her lithe fingers. “When was that?”
“Before I knew you.” He sank down into his chair, staring forward as if he were a judge considering a decision. “I was twenty-two years old, teaching school in the mountains and studying law with old Judge McLaurin, when I met Dell Martin. She had been married to Boyce against her will, as plenty of the girls in the hills are married. She was lonely and wretched, and lovelier than a wild rose. I was young and reckless. I fell in love with her and I made her love me. Boyce found it out. He drew me into a fight and I won it. He shot me then. Dell came to nurse me and I wouldn’t let her go. Boyce wouldn’t get a divorce and she couldn’t, but she stayed with me. We had two years of utter happiness. I’d have gone through hell to win them.”
A stick of the tortoise-shell handle of the fan broke in Rhoda’s hands. “But you left her?”
“No,” he said. “She left me. She saw before I did that it couldn’t go on. She saw in me the ambition that I thought I had buried in my love for her. She knew that if I stayed with her, I’d never be anything but a miserable shyster, living from hand to mouth, despising myself and all I did, coming perhaps in time to hate her because she had been the cause of my degradation. She went to Judge McLaurin, and asked him to tell her the truth. He told her, old Covenanter that he was. Then she went up the mountain to Boyce and asked him if he wanted her to come back to him. She knew that it was the only action I’d consider final. He told her to come. She told me that she was leaving me. I pleaded with her all that night, but she went with the dawn. I couldn’t hold her. I went up Pisgah with her till we came to the trail to Boyce’s cabin. We could see the wood smoke curling up above the masses of shining green leaves and pink clusters of the laurel. ‘You’re going away from me,’ she said, ‘far away, and you’ll climb a higher mountain than Pisgah.’ I begged her to come with me, but she shook her head. ‘I’m giving you up for your sake,’ she told me. ‘But you need me,’ I pleaded. ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘But some day I shall, and then I’ll call you. And no matter where you are, you’ll come, won’t you, Burt?’ I promised her that I would. The last I saw of her was as she climbed the trail to Boyce’s cabin. From that day to this”—he touched the crumpled little white letter—“she has sent me no word.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it,” Rhoda said, her voice not quite steady, “that a woman may live with a man through long years and never really know him at all?”