Chapter 10

"I like that," she replied, "I understand it. I've wanted to murder; but it would have been silly, I would have had to pay too dearly for a passing rage." There was a menace in her even voice, a cold echo like that from a closed, empty room, that oppressed Gordon unpleasantly.

"I guess you're not as dangerous as that," he responded, more lightly. He wondered, unable to decide, if she were consciously pressing her body against him, or if it were merely the jolting of the buggy? They were passing through the valley that led into Greenstream; the sun was lowering behind them, the shadows creeping out. They dropped from the rough, minor forms into the bigger sweep--it was like a great, green bed half filled with a gold flood. Gordon's horse walked, and, in their slow progress, the stream of light flowing between the ranges changed to a stream of shadow. A miraculous pink rose opened in the east and scattered its glowing petals across the sky. The buggy wound, like an infinitesimal toy, over the darkening road.

He passed his dwelling, a long, irregular roof against the veiled surface of the stream; a light shone from the kitchen window. The streets of the village, folded in warm dusk, were empty; the white columns of the Courthouse glimmered behind the shafts of the trees on the lawn. Supper was in progress at Peterman's hotel; as Gordon and Meta Beggs left the buggy they heard the rattle of dishes within. She walked a few steps, then stopped, was about to speak, but she saw that Gordon had followed her, and turned and led the way to the steps giving to the gallery above.

Gordon Makimmon followed her without reason, without plan, almost subconsciously. He walked close behind her to where she opened the door to her room: it was grey within, a dim curtain swelled faintly with an unfelt air.

"Black," he repeated stupidly, "size eight and a half."

She stepped into the room, and faced him; her lips were parted over a glimmer of teeth. He took her roughly in his arms, and she turned up her face.

"For the stockings," she said, as he kissed her.

He kissed her again, and she murmured, faintly, "Two pairs."

It enraged him that she was so collected; her body, pressed against him from knee to shoulder, was without a tremor, her breast was tranquil. She might have been, from her unstudied, total detachment, a fine, flexible statue in his straining embrace, under his eager lips. Suddenly, with no apparent effort, she released herself.

She removed the hat with the blue feather, calmly laid it on the indistinct bed, and moved to the mirror of a small bureau, where her hands glided over her smooth hair.

"Men are so--elementary," she observed, "and all alike. I wish I could feel what you do," she turned to Gordon, "just once."

"What are you made of?" he demanded tensely; "stone?"

"I often wonder."

She crossed the room to the gallery, where she glanced swiftly about. "You must leave, and I'll go down to supper. Next Sunday I am going to walk ... in the morning."

"If you go out by the priest's," he suggested, "and turn to the right, you will find a pretty stream; further down there's an old mill."

She drew back, waiting for him to descend to the ground below.

Simmons' clerk was standing on the platform before the store, and Gordon drew up. "How's Buckley?" he inquired.

"Bad," the other answered laconically. "They sent to Stenton for help. His head's cracked. It's funny," he commented, "with a hundred people around nobody saw that stone thrown 'tall."

"It don't do sometimes to see this and that," Gordon explained, tightening the reins.

He unhitched the horse in his shedlike stable by the aid of a hand lantern. He was reluctant to go into the house, and he prolonged the unbuckling of the familiar straps, the measuring of feed, beyond all necessity. Outside, he thought he heard General Jackson by the stream, and he stood whistling softly, but only the first notes of the whippoorwills responded. "The night's just come down all at once," he said. Finally, with a rigid assumption of indifference covering an uneasy heart, he went in.

Lettice was asleep by the lamp in the sitting room. She looked younger than ever, but there were shadows under her eyes, her mouth was a little drawn as if by the memory of pain. A shawl, he saw, had slipped from her shoulders, and he walked clumsily on the tips of his shoes and rearranged it. Then he sat down and waited for her to wake.

The flame of the lamp was like a section of an orange; it cast a warm, low radiance through the room. His gaze rested on the photograph of Lettice's mother in her coffin. He imagined that paper effigy of inanimate clay moved, turned its dull head to regard him. "I'm getting old," he told himself contemptuously, repressing an involuntary start of surprise. His heart rested like a lump of lead in his breast; it oppressed him so that his breathing grew labored. His mind returned to Meta Beggs: coldness like hers was not natural, it was not right. He thought again, as men have vainly of such women since the dawning of consciousness, that it would be stirring to fire her indifference, to ignite a passion in response to his own desire. The memory of her slender, full body, her cool lips, tormented him.

Lettice woke abruptly.

"Gordon!" she cried, in an odd, muffled voice; "you're always late; your supper is always spoiled."

"I had my supper," he hurriedly fabricated, "at Peterman's. It's nice in here, Lettice, with you and all the things around. It has a comfortable look. You're right pretty, Lettice, too."

The unexpected compliment brought a flush to her cheeks. "I'm not pretty now," she replied; "I'm all pulled out." General Jackson ambled into the room, sat between them. "Let's hear the General sing," she proposed.

Gordon wound the phonograph, and the distant, metallic voice repeated the undeniable fact that Rip Van Winkle had been unaware of the select pleasures of Coney Island. The dog whimpered, then raised his head in a despairing bay.

A time might come in a man's life, Gordon Makimmon realized, when this peaceful interior would spell complete happiness.

XI

On Sunday he strolled soon after breakfast in the direction of the priest's. Merlier was standing at the door to his house. Gordon noted that the other was growing heavier, folds dropped from the corners of his shaven lips, his eyes had retreated in fatty pouches. His gaze was still searchingly keen, but the priest was wearing out. Gordon stopped in response to his silent nod.

"You ought to let up on yourself a little," he advised.

"Why?" the other briefly queried.

"'Why?', so's you will last longer."

To this the priest made no reply. A short, awkward silence followed during which Gordon grew restive. "If I looked so glum about Greenstream," he continued, "I'd move out." It was as though he had not spoken. "I'd go back where I came from," he persisted sharply. The priest's lips moved, formed words:

"'Che discese da Fiesole ab antico.'"

His imperturbable manner offered Gordon not the slightest opening; and he continued uncomfortably on his way. There was a quality about that thick, black-clad figure which cast a shadow over the cloudless day, it blunted the anticipated pleasure of his meeting with Meta Beggs. There was about Merlier a smell of death like the smell of sooty smoke.

The stream lay shining along its wooded course; the range greenly aflame with new foliage rose into radiant space; flickers hammered on resonant, dead wood. Gordon banished the somber memory of the priest. He was conscious of a sudden excitement, a keenness of response to living like a renewal of youth. He wished that Meta Beggs would appear; his direction to her had been vague; she might easily go astray and miss him. But he saw her, after what seemed an interminable period, leaving the road and crossing the strip of sod that bordered the stream. She had on a white dress that clung to her figure, and a broad, flapping straw hat wound with white. She saw him and waved. The brush rose thickly along the water, but there was a footway at its edge, with occasional, broader reaches of rough sod. In one of the latter she stooped, made a swift movement with the hem of her skirt.

"See," she smiled; "I said you would like me in them."

He attempted to catch her in his arms, but she eluded him. "Please," she protested coolly, "don't be tiresome.... We must talk."

He followed her by the devious edge of the stream to the ruined mill. He could see the blurring impress of the black silk stockings through the web of her dress; the dress had shrunk from repeated washing, and drew tightly across her shoulders. She walked lightly and well, and sat with a graceful sweep on a fallen, moldering beam. Beyond them the broad expanse of the mill pond was paved with still shadows; a dust of minute insects swept above the clouded surface. The water ran slowly over the dam, everywhere cushioned with deep moss, and fell with an eternal splatter on the rocks below.

Gordon rolled a cigarette from the muslin bag of Green Goose. "Why do you still smoke that grass?" she demanded curiously. "You could get the best cigars from Cuba." He explained, and she regarded him impatiently. "Can't you realize what possibilities you have!"

"I might, with assistance."

"If you once saw the world! I've been reading about Paris, the avenues and cafes and theaters. Why, in the cafes there they drink only champagne and dance all night. The women come with their lovers in little closed carriages, and go back to little closed rooms hung in brocade. They never wear anything but evening clothes, for they are never out but at night--satin gowns with trains and bare shoulders."

He endeavored to picture himself in such a city, amid such a life, with Meta Beggs. He felt that she would be entirely in place in the little carriages, drinking champagne. "That's where they eat frogs," he remarked inanely. In the tensity of her feeling, the bitterness of her longing, her envy, she cursed him for a dull fool. Then, recovering her composure with a struggle:

"I would make a man drunk with pleasure in a place like that. He would be proud of me, and all the other men would hate him; they would all want me."

"Some would come pretty near getting you, too," he replied with a flash of penetration; "those with the fastest horses or longest pockets."

"I would be true to whoever took me there," she declared; "out of gratitude."

He drew a deep breath. "What would you say," he inquired, leaning toward her, "to a trip to--to Richmond? We could be gone the best part of a week."

She laughed scornfully. "Do you think I am as cheap as that--to be bought over Sunday?" She rose, and stood before him, sharply outlined against the foliage, the water, the momentary, flittering insects, taunting, provocative, sensual.

"Five years ago," he told her, "if you had tried this foolery, I would have choked you, and thrown what was left in the dam."

"And now--" she jeered fearlessly.

"It's different," he admitted moodily.

It was. Somewhere the lash had been lost from the whip of his desire. He was still eager, tormented by the wish to feel her disdainful mouth against his. The recrudescence of spring burned in his veins; but, at the same time, there was a new reluctance upon his flesh. The inanimate, obese mask of the priest, Lettice's sleeping countenance faintly stamped with pain, hovered in his consciousness. "It's different," he repeated.

"You are losing your hold on pleasure," she observed critically aloof.

He leaned forward, and grasped her wrist, and, with a slight motion, forced her upon her knees. "If you are pleasure I'm not," he challenged.

"You are hurting my arm," she said coldly. His grip tightened, and a small grimace crossed her lips. "Let go," she demanded; and then a swift passion shrilled her voice. "Let go, you are crushing my wrist. Damn you to hell! if you spoil my wrist I'll kill you."

For a moment, as he held her, she reminded Gordon of a venomous snake; he had never seen such a lithe, wicked hatred in any other human being. "You are a gentle object," he satirized her, loosening his hold.

She rose slowly and stood fingering her wrist. The emotion died from her countenance. "You see," she explained, "my body is all I have to take me out of this," she motioned to the slumbering water, the towering range, "and I can't afford to have it spoiled. You wouldn't like me if I were lame or crooked. Men don't. The religious squashes can say all they like about the soul, but a woman's body is the only really important thing to her. No one bothers about your soul, but they judge your figure across the street."

"Yours hasn't done you much good."

"It will," she returned somberly, "it must--real lace and wine and ease." She came very close to him; he could feel the faint jarring of her heart, the moisture of her breath. "And you could get them for me. I would make you mad with sensation."

He kissed her again and again, crushing her to him. She abandoned herself to his arms, but she was as untouched, as impersonal, as a stuffed woman of cool satin. In the end he voluntarily released her.

"You wouldn't take fire from a pine knot," he said unsteadily.

Her deft hands rearranged her hat. "Some day a man will murder me," she replied in level tones; "perhaps I'll get a thrill from that." Her voice grew as cutting as a surgeon's polished knife. "Please don't think I'm the kind of woman men take out in the woods and kiss. You may have discovered that I don't like kissing. I'm going to be honester still--last year, when you were mending the minister's ice house, and hadn't a dollar, I wasn't the smallest bit interested in you; and this year I am.--Not on account of the money itself," she was careful to add, "but because of you and the money together. Don't you see--it changed you; it's perfectly right that it should, and that I should recognize it."

"That sounds fair enough," he agreed. "Now the question is, what are we going to do together, you and me and the money?"

"Would you do what I wanted?" she asked at his shoulder.

"Would you?"

"Yes."

"We might try Richmond."

"Don't fool yourself," she returned hardily; "I know all about those trial trips. Any man I go with has got to go far: I don't intend to be left at some pokey little way station with everything gone and nothing accomplished."

"But," he objected, "a man who went with you could never come back."

"Back to this wilderness," she scoffed; "any one should thank God for being taken out of it."

"I've always lived here, my father too, and his before him; and back of that we came from mountains. We're mountain blood; I don't know if we could get used to anything else, live down yonder."

"I'd civilize you," she promised him.

"Perhaps--" he assented slowly.

Suddenly from beyond the ruin came the stir of a horse moving in harness, the sound stopped and the voices of men grew audible. Instinctively Gordon and Meta Beggs drew behind a standing fragment of wall. Gordon could see, through the displaced, rotting boards, a buggy and two men standing at the side of the road. One, he recognized, was Valentine Simmons; he easily made out the small, alert figure. The other, with his back to the mill, held outspread a sheet of paper. There was something familiar about the carriage of the head, a glimpse of beard, a cigar from which were expelled copious volumes of smoke. Gordon vainly racked his memory for a clue to the latter, elusive personality. He heard Simmons say:

"... by the South Fork entrance ... through the valley."

The stranger partially turned, and Gordon instantly recalled where he had seen him before--it was the man he had driven from Stenton with the surprising foreknowledge of the County, who had been met by Pompey Hollidew. He replied to Simmons, "Exactly ... timber sidings at the principal depots."

They were, evidently, discussing a projected road. Gordon subconsciously exclaimed, half aloud, "Railroad!" A swift illumination bathed in complete comprehension the whole affair--the connection, of Simmons, old Pompey's options and the stranger. This railroad, the coming of which would increase enormously the timber values of Greenstream County, had been the covert reason for Simmons' desire to purchase the options held by the Hollidew estate; it had been, during Pompey Hollidew's life, the reason for the acquisition of such extended timber interests. Hollidew, Simmons and Company had joined in a conspiracy to purchase them throughout the county at a nominal sum and reap the benefits of the large enhancement. The death of the former had interrupted that satisfactory scheme; now Valentine Simmons had conceived the plan of gathering all the profit to himself. And, Gordon admitted, he had nearly succeeded ... nearly. A slow smile crossed Gordon Makimmon's features as he realized what a pleasant conversation he would have with Simmons at the latter's expense. He had never conceived the possibility of getting the astute storekeeper into such a satisfactory, retaliatory position. He would extract the last penny of profit and enjoyment from the other's surprise.

The men beyond re-entered the buggy and drove toward the village.

"What is it?" Meta Beggs asked; "you look pleased."

"Oh, I fell on a little scheme," he replied evasively; "a trifle ... worth a hundred thousand or more to me."

Her eyes widened with avidity. "I didn't know the whole, God forsaken place was worth a thousand," she remarked. "A hundred thousand," the mere repetition of that sum brought a new shine into her gaze, instinctively drew her closer to Gordon's side.

"Just that alone would be enough--" she said, and paused.

He ignored this opening in the anticipated pleasure of his coming interview with Valentine Simmons.

A palpable annoyance took possession of her at Gordon's absorption. "It must be near dinner at Peterman's," she remarked; "on Sunday you've got to be on time."

In response to her suggestion he turned toward the road. They walked back silently until they were opposite the priest's. "I'd better go on alone," she decided. Her hands clung to his shoulders and she sought his lips. "Soon again," she murmured. "Don't desert me; I am entirely alone except for you."

She left him and swiftly crossed the green to the road.

XII

Gordon carefully explained the entire circumstance of the timber to Lettice. "I just happened to be by the stream," he continued, "and overheard them. Your father and Simmons evidently had arranged the thing, and Simmons was going to crowd you out of all the gain."

"You see to it," she returned listlessly; "you have my name on that paper, the power of something or other." She was seated on the porch of their dwelling. A low-drifting mass of formless grey cloud filled the narrow opening of the ranges, drooping in nebulous veils of suspended moisture down to the vivid green of the valley. The mountains seemed to dissolve into the nothingness above; the stream was unusually noisy.

"I might see him this evening," he observed; "and I could find out how Buck was resting."

"However did he come to get hurt?"

"I never knew rightly, there we were all standing with Buckley a-talking, when the stone flew out of the crowd and hit him on the head. Nobody saw who did it."

"I wish you hadn't been there, Gordon. You always seem to be around, to get talked about, when anything happens."

He saw that she was irritable, in a mood for complaint, and he rose. "You mean Mrs. Caley talks wherever I am," he corrected. He left the porch and walked over the road to the village. The store, he knew, would be closed; but Valentine Simmons, an indefatigable church worker, almost invariably after the service pleasantly passed the remainder of Sunday in the contemplation and balancing of his long and satisfactory accounts and assets.

He was, as Gordon had anticipated, in the enclosed office bent over his ledgers. The door to the store was unlocked. Simmons rose, and briefly acknowledged Gordon's presence.

"I was sorry Buckley got hurt," the latter opened; "it wasn't any direct fault of mine. We were having words. I don't deny but that it might have gone further with us, but some one else stepped in."

"So I was informed. Buckley will probably live ... that is all the Stenton doctor will say; a piece of his skull has been removed. I am not prepared to discuss it right now ... painful to me."

"Certainly. But I didn't come to discuss that. I want to talk to you about the timber--those options of Lettice's."

"She doesn't agree to the deal?" Simmons queried sharply.

"Whatever I say is good enough for Lettice," Gordon replied.

An expression of relief settled over the other. "The papers will be ready this week," he said. "I have taken all that, and some expense, off you. You will make a nice thing out of it."

"I will," Gordon assented heartily. "And that reminds me--I saw an old acquaintance of Pompey Hollidew's in Greenstream to-day. I don't know his name; I drove him up in the stage, and Pompey greeted him like a long-lost dollar."

A veiled, alert curiosity was plain on Simmons's smooth, pinkish countenance.

"I wonder if you know him too?--a man with a beard, a great hand for maps and cigars."

"Well?" Valentine Simmons temporized.

"Could he have anything to do with those timber options of the old man's, with your offer for them?"

"Well?" Simmons repeated. His face was now absolutely blank; he sat turned from his ledgers, facing Gordon, without a tremor.

"It's no use, Simmons," Gordon Makimmon admitted; "I was out by the old mill this morning. I saw you both, heard something that was said. That railroad will do a lot for values around here, but mostly for timber."

Instantly, and with no wasted regrets over lost opportunities, Simmons changed his tactics to meet existing conditions. "Your wife's estate controls about three thousand acres of timber," he pronounced. "What will you take for them?"

"How much do you control?" Gordon asked.

"About twenty-five hundred at present."

Gordon paused, then, "Lettice will take thirty dollars an acre."

"Why!" the other protested, "Pompey bought them for little or nothing. You're after over two hundred per cent. increase."

"What do you figure to get out of yours?"

"That doesn't concern us now. I've had to put this through--a tremendous thing for Greenstream, a lasting benefit--entirely by myself. I will have to guarantee a wicked profit outside; I stand alone to lose a big sum. I'll give you ten dollars for the options."

Gordon rose. "I'll see the railroad people myself," he observed; "and find out what I can do there."

"Hold on," Simmons waved him back to his chair. "If there's too much talk the thing will get out. You know these thick skulls around here--at the whisper of transportation you couldn't cut a sapling with a gold axe. It took managing to interest the Tennessee and Northern; they are going through to Buffalo; a Greenstream branch is only a side issue to them." He paused, thinking. "There's no good," he resumed, "in you and me getting into each other. The best thing we can do is to control all the good stuff, agree on a price, and divide the take."

Gordon carefully considered this new proposal. It seemed to him palpably fair. "All the papers would have to be made together," he added; "what's for one's for the other."

Now that the deal was fully exposed Valentine Simmons was impatient of small precautions. "Can't you see how the plan lays?" he demanded irritably. "We'll draw up a partnership. Don't get full and talk," he added discontentedly. It was evident that he keenly resented the absence of Pompey Hollidew from the transaction.

"A thing like this," he informed the other, "ain't put through in a week. It will be two or three years yet before the company will be ready for construction."