Chapter 9

Lavinia grew restless and descended to her room, where she procured a fan. Returning, she was partly startled by a pale still figure in the gloom of a passage. She saw that it was Gheta, and spoke; but the other moved away without reply and quickly vanished. Above, Lavinia halted at the strange spectacle--clearly drawn against the luminous depths of space--of Mochales and her husband rigidly facing each other.

“I must admit,” Orsi said in an exasperated voice, “that I don't understand.”

Lavinia saw that he was holding something in a half-extended hand. Moving closer, she identified the object as the necklace he had given Gheta.

“What is it that you don't understand, Cesare?” she asked.

“Some infernal joke or foolishness!”

“It is no joke, signore,” Mochales responded; “and it is better,--perhaps, for your wife to leave us.”

Orsi turned to Lavinia.

“He gives me back this necklace of Gheta's,” he explained; “he says that he has every right. It appears that Gheta is going to marry him, and he already objects to presents from her brother-in-law.”

“But what stuff!” Lavinia pronounced.

A swift surprise overtook her at Cesare's announcement--Gheta and Mochales to marry! She was certain that the arrangement had not existed that morning. A fleet inchoate sorrow numbed her heart and fled.

“Orsi has been only truthful enough to suit his own purpose,” Mochales stated, “Signora, please----” He indicated the descent from the belvedere.

She moved closer to him, smiling appealingly.

“What is it all about?” she queried.

“Forgive me; it is impossible to answer.”

“Cesare?” She addressed her husband.

“Why, this--this donkey hints that there was something improper in my present. It seems that I have been annoying Gheta by my attentions, flattering her with pearls.”

“Did Gheta tell you that?” Lavinia demanded. A growing resentment took possession of her. “Because if she did, she lied!”

“Ah!” Mochales whispered sharply.

“They're both mad,” Orsi told her, “and should be dipped in the bay.”

Never had Abrego y Mochales appeared handsomer; never more like fine bronze. That latter fact struck her forcibly. His face was no more mutable than a mask of metal. Its stark rigidity sent a cold tremor to her heart.

“And,” she went on impetuously, “since Gheta said that, I'll tell you really about this necklace: Cesare gave it to her because he was sorry for her; because he thought that perhaps he had misled her. He spoke of it to me first.”

“No, signora,” the Spaniard responded deliberately; “it is not your sister who lies.”

Cesare Orsi exclaimed angrily. He took a hasty step; but Lavinia, quicker, moved between the two men.

“This is impossible,” she declared, “and must stop immediately! It is childish!”

There was now a metallic ring in Mochales' voice that disturbed her even more than his words. The bull-fighter, completely immobile, seemed a little inhuman; he was without a visible stir of emotion, but Orsi looked more puzzled and angry every moment.

“This,” he ejaculated, “in my own house--infamous!”

“Signor Mochales,” Lavinia reiterated, “what I have told you is absolutely so.”

“Your sister, signora, has said something different.... She did not want to tell me, but I persisted--I saw that something was wrong--and forced it from her.”

“Enough!” Orsi commanded. “One can see plainly that you have been duped; some things may be overlooked.... You have talked enough.”

Mochales moved easily forward.

“You pudding!” he said in a low even voice. “Do you talk to me--Abrego y Mochales?”

A dark tide of passion, visible even in the night, flooded Orsi's countenance.

“Leave!” he insisted, “Or I'll have you flung into the bay.”

A deep silence followed, in which Lavinia could hear the stir of the water against the walls below. A sharp fear entered her heart, a new dread of the Spaniard. He was completely outside the circle of impulses which she understood and to which she reacted. He was not a part of her world; he coldly menaced the foundations of all right and security. Her worship of romance died miserably. In a way, she thought, she was responsible for the present horrible situation; it was the result of the feeling she had had for Mochales. Lavinia was certain that if Gheta had not known of it the Spaniard would have been quickly dropped by the elder. She was suddenly conscious of the perfume he always bore; that, curiously, lent him a strange additional oppression.

“Mochales,” he said in a species of strained wonderment, “threatened ... thrown into the bay! Mochales--the Flower of Spain! And by a helpless mound of fat, a tub of entrails----”

“Cesare!” Lavinia cried in an energy of desperation. “Come! Don't listen to him.”

Orsi released her grasp.

“I believe you are at the Grand Hotel?” he addressed the other man.

“Until I hear from you.”

“To-morrow----”

All the heat had apparently evaporated from their words; they spoke with a perfunctory politeness. Cesare Orsi said:

“I will order the launch.”

In a few minutes the palpitations of the steam died in the direction of Naples.

VII

Lavinia followed her husband to their rooms, where he sat smoking one of his long black cigars. He was pale; his brow was wet and his collar wilted. She stood beside him and he patted her arm.

“Everything is in order,” he assured her.

A species of blundering tenderness for him possessed her; an unexpected throb of her being startled and robbed her of words. He mistook her continued silence.

“All I have is yours,” he explained; “it is your right. I can see now that--that my money was all I had to offer you. The only thing of value I possess. I should have realized that a girl, charming like yourself, couldn't care for a mound of fat.” Her tenderness rose till it choked in her throat, blurred what she had to say.

“Cesare,” she told him, “Gheta was right; at one time I was in love with Mochales.” He turned with a startled exclamation; but she silenced him. “He was, it seemed, all that a girl might admire--dark and mysterious and handsome. He was romantic. I demanded nothing else then; now something has happened that I don't altogether understand, but it has changed everything for me. Cesare, your money never made any difference in my feeling for you--it didn't before and it doesn't to-night--” She hesitated and blushed painfully, awkwardly.

The cigar fell from his hand and he rose, eagerly facing her.

“Lavinia,” he asked, “is it possible--do you mean that you care the least about me?”

“It must be that, Cesare, because I am so terribly afraid.”

Later he admitted ruefully:

“But no man should resemble, as I do, a great oyster. I shall pay very dearly for my laziness.”

“You are not going to fight Mochales!” she protested. “It would be insanity.”

“Insanity,” he agreed promptly. “Yet I can't permit myself to be the target for vile tongues.”

Lavinia abruptly left him and hurried to her sister's room. The door was locked; she knocked, but got no response.

“Gheta,” she called, low and urgently, “open at once! Your plans have gone dreadfully wrong. Gheta!” she said more sharply into the answering silence. “Cesare has had a terrific argument with Mochales, and worse may follow. Open!” There was still no answer, and suddenly she beat upon the door with her fists. “Liar!” she cried thinly through the wood. “Liar! You bitter old stick! I'll make you eat that necklace, pearl for pearl, sorrow for sorrow!”

A feeling of impotence overwhelmed her at the implacable stillness that succeeded her hysterical outburst. She stood with a pounding heart, and clasped straining fingers.

Abrego y Mochales could kill Cesare without the slightest shadow of a question. There was, she recognized, something essentially feminine in the saturnine bullfighter; his pride had been severely assaulted; and therefore he would be--in his own, less subtle manner--as dangerous as Gheta. Cesare's self-esteem, too, had been wounded in its most vulnerable place--he had been insulted before her. But, even if the latter refused to proceed, Mochales, she knew, would force an acute conclusion. There was nothing to be got from her sister and she slowly returned to her chamber, from which she could hear Orsi's heavy footfalls.

She mechanically removed the square emerald that hung from a platinum thread about her neck, took off her rings, and proceeded to the small iron safe where valuables were kept. As she swung open the door a sheet of paper slipped forward from an upper compartment. It bore a printed address ... in the Strada San Lucia. She saw that it was the blackmailing letter Cesare had received from the Neapolitan secret society, demanding two thousand lire. She recalled what he had said at the time--if she had an enemy her gown could be spoiled in the foyer of the opera; a man ruined at his club.... Even murders were ascribed to it.

She held the letter, gazing fixedly at the address, mentally repeating again and again the significance of its contents. She thought of showing it to Cesare, suggesting----But she realized that, bound by a conventional honor, he would absolutely refuse to listen to her.

Almost subconsciously she folded the sheet and hid it in her dress. Kneeling before the safe she procured a long red envelope. It contained the sum of money her father had given her at the wedding. It was her dot--a comparatively small amount, he had said at the time with an apologetic smile; but it was absolutely, unquestionably her own. This, when she locked the safe, remained outside.

When she had hidden the letter and envelope in her dressing table Cesare stood in the doorway. He was still pale, but composed, and held himself with simple dignity.

“Some men,” he said, “are not so happy, even for an hour.”

A sudden passionate necessity to save him swept over her.

In the morning Orsi remained at the villa, but he sent the launch in early with an urgent summons for the Cavaliere Nelli. Later, when he asked for Lavinia, he was told that she had gone to Naples; and when the boat returned, Nelli--a military figure, with hair and mustache like yellowish white silk--assisted her to the wall. She was closely veiled against the sparkling flood of light and bay, and hurried directly to her room.

There she knelt on a praying chair before a small alcoved altar with tall wax tapers, and remained a long while. She was disturbed by a sudden ringing report below; it was Cesare practising with a dueling pistol. Lavinia remembered, from laughing comments in Florence, that her husband was an atrocious shot. The sound was repeated at irregular intervals through an unbearably long morning.

Gheta, she learned, had refused the morning chocolate and, with her maid, had collected and packed all her effects. Lavinia had no desire to see her. The situation now was past Gheta's mending.

After luncheon Lavinia remained in her room, Nelli departed for Naples and Cesare joined her. It was evident that he was greatly disturbed; but he spoke to her evenly. He was possessed by an impotent rage at his unwieldy body and clumsy hand. This alternated with an evident wonderment at the position in which he found himself and a great tenderness for Lavinia.

At dusk they were in Lavinia's room waiting for a message from Naples. Lavinia was leaning across the marble ledge of her window, gazing over the dim blue sweep of water to the distant flowering lights. She heard sudden footsteps and, half turning, saw her husband tearing open an envelope.

“Lavinia!” he cried. “There has been an accident in the elevator of the Grand Hotel, and Mochales--is dead!” She hung upon the ledge now for support. “The attendant, a new man, started the car too soon and caught Mochales----” She sank down upon her knees in an attitude of prayer, and Cesare Orsi stood reverently bowed.

“The will of God!” he muttered.

A long slow shiver passed over Lavinia, and he bent and lifted her in his arms.

TOL'ABLE DAVID

I

He was the younger of two brothers, in his sixteenth year; and he had his father's eyes--a tender and idyllic blue. There, however, the obvious resemblance ended. The elder's azure gaze was set in a face scarred and riven by hardship, debauch and disease; he had been--before he had inevitably returned to the mountains where he was born--a brakeman in the lowest stratum of the corruption of small cities on big railroads; and his thin stooped body, his gaunt head and uncertain hands, all bore the stamp of ruinous years. But in the midst of this his eyes, like David's, retained their singularly tranquil color of sweetness and innocence.

David was the youngest, the freshest thing imaginable; he was overtall and gawky, his cheeks were as delicately rosy as apple blossoms, and his smile was an epitome of ingenuous interest and frank wonder. It was as if some quality of especial fineness, lingering unspotted in Hunter Kinemon, had found complete expression in his son David. A great deal of this certainly was due to his mother, a thick solid woman, who retained more than a trace of girlish beauty when she stood back, flushed from the heat of cooking, or, her bright eyes snapping, tramped with heavy pails from the milking shed on a winter morning.

Both the Kinemon boys were engaging. Allen, almost twenty-one, was, of course, the more conspicuous; he was called the strongest youth in Greenstream County. He had his mother's brown eyes; a deep bony box of a chest; rippling shoulders; and a broad peaceful countenance. He drove the Crabapple stage, between Crabapple, the village just over the back mountain, and Beaulings, in West Virginia. It was twenty-six miles from point to point, a way that crossed a towering range, hung above a far veil of unbroken spruce, forded swift glittering streams, and followed a road that passed rare isolated dwellings, dominating rocky and precarious patches and hills of cultivation. One night Allen slept in Beaulings; the next he was home, rising at four o'clock in order to take his stage out of Crabapple at seven sharp.

It was a splendid job, and brought them thirty-five dollars a month; not in mere trade at the store, but actual money. This, together with Hunter Kinemon's position, tending the rich bottom farm of State Senator Gait, gave them a position of ease and comfort in Greenstream. They were a very highly esteemed family.

Gait's farm was in grazing; it extended in deep green pastures and sparkling water between two high mountainous walls drawn across east and west. In the morning the rising sun cast long delicate shadows on one side; at evening the shadow troops lengthened across the emerald valley from the other. The farmhouse occupied a fenced clearing on the eastern rise, with a gray huddle of barn and sheds below, a garden patch of innumerable bean poles, and an incessant stir of snowy chickens. Beyond, the cattle moved in sleek chestnut-brown and orange herds; and farther out flocks of sheep shifted like gray-white clouds on a green-blue sky.

It was, Mrs. Kinemon occasionally complained, powerful lonely, with the store two miles up the road, Crabapple over a heft of a rise, and no personable neighbors; and she kept a loaded rifle in an angle of the kitchen when the men were all out in a distant pasturage. But David liked it extremely well; he liked riding an old horse after the steers, the all-night sap boilings in spring groves, the rough path across a rib of the mountain to school.

Nevertheless, he was glad when studying was over for the year. It finished early in May, on account of upland planting, and left David with a great many weeks filled only with work that seem to him unadulterated play. Even that didn't last all the time; there were hours when he could fish for trout, plentiful in cool rocky pools; or shoot gray squirrels in the towering maples. Then, of evenings, he could listen to Allen's thrilling tales of the road, of the gambling and fighting among the lumbermen in Beaulings, or of strange people that had taken passage in the Crabapple stage--drummers, for the most part, with impressive diamond rings and the doggonedest lies imaginable. But they couldn't fool Allen, however believing he might seem.... The Kinemons were listening to such a recital by their eldest son now.

They were gathered in a room of very general purpose. It had a rough board floor and crumbling plaster walls, and held a large scarred cherry bed with high posts and a gayly quilted cover; a long couch, covered with yellow untanned sheepskins; a primitive telephone; some painted wooden chairs; a wardrobe, lurching insecurely forward; and an empty iron stove with a pipe let into an original open hearth with a wide rugged stone. Beyond, a door opened into the kitchen, and back of the bed a raw unguarded flight of steps led up to the peaked space where Allen and David slept.

Hunter Kinemon was extended on the couch, his home-knitted socks comfortably free of shoes, smoking a sandstone pipe with a reed stem. Mrs. Kinemon was seated in a rocking-chair with a stained and torn red plush cushion, that moved with a thin complaint on a fixed base. Allen was over against the stove, his corduroy trousers thrust into greased laced boots, and a black cotton shirt open on a chest and throat like pink marble. And David supported his lanky length, in a careless and dust-colored garb, with a capacious hand on the oak beam of the mantel.

It was May, school had stopped, and a door was open on a warm still dusk. Allen's tale had come to an end; he was pinching the ear of a diminutive dog--like a fat white sausage with wire-thin legs and a rat tail--that never left him. The smoke from the elder Kinemon's pipe rose in a tranquil cloud. Mrs. Kinemon rocked vigorously, with a prolonged wail of the chair springs. “I got to put some tallow to that chair,” Kinemon proclaimed.

“The house on Elbow Barren's took,” Allen told him suddenly--“the one just off the road. I saw smoke in the chimney this evening.”

A revival of interest, a speculation, followed this announcement.

“Any women'll get to the church,” Mr. Kinemon asserted. “I wonder? Did a person say who were they?”

“I asked; but they're strange to Crabapple. I heard this though: there weren't any women to them--just men--father and sons like. I drew up right slow going by; but nobody passed out a word. It's a middling bad farm place--rocks and berry bushes. I wouldn't reckon much would be content there.”

David walked out through the open doorway and stood on the small covered portico, that with a bench on each side, hung to the face of the dwelling. The stars were brightening in the sky above the confining mountain walls; there was a tremendous shrilling of frogs; the faint clamor of a sheep bell. He was absolutely, irresponsibly happy. He wished the time would hurry when he'd be big and strong like Allen, and get out into the absorbing stir of the world.

II

He was dimly roused by Allen's departure in the beginning brightness of the following morning. The road over which the stage ran drew by the rim of the farm; and later David saw the rigid three-seated surrey, the leather mail bags strapped in the rear, trotted by under the swinging whip of his brother. He heard the faint sharp bark of Rocket, Allen's dog, braced at his side.

David spent the day with his father, repairing the fencing of the middle field, swinging a mall and digging post holes; and at evening his arms ached. But he assured himself he was not tired; any brother of Allen's couldn't give in before such insignificant effort. When Hunter Kinemon turned back toward house and supper David made a wide circle, ostensibly to see whether there was rock salt enough out for the cattle, but in reality to express his superabundant youth, staying qualities and unquenchable vivid interest in every foot of the valley.

He saw the meanest kind of old fox, and marked what he thought might be its hole; his flashing gaze caught the obscure distant retreat of ground hogs; he threw a contemptuous clod at the woolly-brained sheep; and with a bent willow shoot neatly looped a trout out upon the grassy bank. As a consequence of all this he was late for supper, and sat at the table with his mother, who never took her place until the men--yes, and boys of her family--had satisfied their appetites. The dark came on and she lighted a lamp swinging under a tin reflector from the ceiling. The kitchen was an addition, and had a sloping shed roof, board sides, a polished stove, and a long table with a red cloth.

His father, David learned, attacking a plateful of brown chicken swimming with greens and gravy, was having another bad spell. He had the familiar sharp pain through his back and his arms hurt him.

“He can't be drove to a doctor,” the woman told David, speaking, in her concern, as if to an equal in age and comprehension.

David had grown accustomed to the elder's periods of suffering; they came, twisted his father's face into deep lines, departed, and things were exactly as before--or very nearly the same. The boy saw that Hunter Kinemon couldn't support labor that only two or three years before he would have finished without conscious effort. David resolutely ignored this; he felt that it must be a cause of shame, unhappiness, to his father; and he never mentioned it to Allen. Kinemon lay very still on the couch; his pipe, beside him on the floor, had spilled its live core, burning into a length of rag carpet. His face, hung with shadows like the marks of a sooty finger, was glistening with fine sweat. Not a whisper of complaint passed his dry lips. When his wife approached he attempted to smooth out his corrugated countenance. His eyes, as tenderly blue as flowers, gazed at her with a faint masking of humor.

“This is worse'n usual,” she said sharply. “And I ain't going to have you fill yourself with any more of that patent trash. You don't spare me by not letting on. I can tell as soon as you're miserable. David can fetch the doctor from Crabapple to-night if you don't look better.”

“But I am,” he assured her. “It's just a comeback of an old ache. There was a power of heavy work to that fence.”

“You'll have to get more to help you,” she continued. “That Galt'll let you kill yourself and not turn a hand. He can afford a dozen. I don't mind housing and cooking for them. David's only tol'able for lifting, too, while he's growing.”

“Why,” David protested, “it ain't just nothing what I do. I could do twice as much. I don't believe Allen could helt more'n me when he was sixteen. It ain't just nothing at all.”

He was disturbed by this assault upon his manhood; if his muscles were still a little stringy it was surprising what he could accomplish with them. He would show her to-morrow.

“And,” he added impetuously, “I can shoot better than Allen right now. You ask him if I can't. You ask him what I did with that cranky twenty-two last Sunday up on the mountain.”

His clear gaze sought her, his lean face quivered with anxiety to impress, convince her of his virility, skill. His jaw was as sharp as the blade of a hatchet. She studied him with a new surprised concern.

“David!” she exclaimed. “For a minute you had the look of a man. A real steady look, like your father. Don't you grow up too fast, David,” she directed him, in an irrepressible maternal solicitude. “I want a boy--something young--round a while yet.”

Hunter Kinemon sat erect and reached for his pipe. The visible strain of his countenance had been largely relaxed. When his wife had left the room for a moment he admitted to David:

“That was a hard one. I thought she had me that time.”

The elder's voice was light, steady. The boy gazed at him with intense admiration. He felt instinctively that nothing mortal could shake the other's courage. And, on top of his mother's complimentary surprise, his father had confided in him, made an admission that, David realized, must be kept from fretting women. He couldn't have revealed more to Allen himself.