"I heared from a feller that got it from another feller," Blatch began smilingly, "that Huldy Spiller an" Creed Bonbright was wedded and gone to Texas. I reckon hit"s true, becaze the man that told me was aimin" to buy the Bonbright farm."
Judith did not cry out. She hoped her colour did not change very much, for Blatch"s eyes were on her face. After a while she managed to say in a fairly steady voice,
"Does Wade know? Have ye sent any word to him?"
"No," drawled Blatch. "Unc" Jep aimed to break off with me, and he left you the only one o" the family that dared speak with me. Mebbe you would like to write an" tell Wade?"
"I don"t know," sighed Judith hopelessly. "What"s the use?"
"Farewell," said Blatch, using a common mountain form of adieu. "I reckon Unc" Jep won"t want to see me standin" around talkin" to ye. You tell Wade," significantly. "The sooner he gets Huldy out of his head the better for him. No use cryin" over spilt milk. They"s as good fish in the sea as ever come out of it."
He looked long at her downcast face.
"Jude, the man that told me that about Bonbright," he said, speaking apparently on sudden impulse, ""lowed that the feller had left you--give ye the mitten. You"re a fool ef ye let that be said, when his betters is wantin" ye."
Without another word, without a glance, he turned and slouched swiftly away down the path behind the fringe of bushes by the creek side.
The baptising was over. Judith, crossing the stream, saw her uncle"s waggon, Beck and Pete already hitched to it, being loaded with Jim Cal and his tribe. Andy and Jeff were horseback with the Lusk girls. She hurried forward to join them and make ready for departure when, to her dismay, she encountered Drane at the foot of the slope coming toward her.
"Wasn"t that thar Blatchley Turrentine?" inquired the elder.
The girl nodded.
"I didn"t see him in the church," Drane pursued.
"I reckon he wasn"t there," a.s.sented Judith lifelessly, making as though to pa.s.s on.
"He jest came here to have speech with you, did he?" inquired the man, nervously, brushing his sandy whiskers with unquiet fingers.
"I reckon he did," acknowledged Judith without coquetry, without interest.
"Jude!" burst out the widower, "I promised you I never would again ax you to wed; but I"m obliged to know ef you"re studyin" about takin" that feller."
"No," said Judith, resenting nothing, "I never did aim to wed Blatch Turrentine, and I never will."
The elder stood directly in her path, blocking the way and staring down at her miserably for a long minute.
"That"s what you always used to tell me," he remarked finally with a heavy sigh. "Back in them days when you let me hope that I"d see you settin" by my fireside with my children on your knees, you always talked thataway about Blatch--I reckon you talked thataway of me to him."
Judith"s pale cheek slowly crimsoned. She looked upon the ground. "I"m mighty sorry," she said slowly.
Elihu Drane"s faded eyes lighted with fresh fires. He caught the hand that hung by her side.
"Oh, Jude--do you mean it?" he cried. "Do you care? You don"t know how the chaps all love ye and want ye. That old woman I"ve got doin" for "em ain"t fittin" to raise "em. Everybody tells me I"ve got to marry and give "em a mother, but I cain"t seem to find n.o.body but you. If you feel thataway--if you"ll----"
Judith drew her hand away with finality, but her eyes were full of pitying kindness. She knew now what she had done to this man. By the revealing lamp of her own suffering she read his. Back in the old days she had counted him only one more triumph in her maiden progress.
"No," she said gravely, "I ain"t studyin" about marryin" anybody. I"m mighty sorry that I done thataway. I"m sorry, and ashamed; but I have to say no again, Elder Drane. There ain"t never goin" to be no other answer."
"Hit"s that feller Bonbright," declared the elder sternly as he stood aside to let her pa.s.s. "Good Lord, why ain"t the man got sense enough to come back and claim his own!"
Chapter XXII
Ebb-Tide
Life closed in on Judith after that with an iron hand. She missed sorely the children"s demands upon her, their play and prattle and movement about the place. Huldah was gone. Wade was gone. She could get no news of Creed. The things to love and hate and be jealous of seemed to have dropped out of her existence, so that the heart recoiled upon itself, the spirit wrestled blindly in darkness with an angel which was but its own self in other guise.
Day by day she turned from side to side for an exit from the fiery path she trod, and cried out to Heaven that she could not bear it--she could not stand it--there must be some way other than this!
The Lusk girls and the Turrentine twins were to have a double wedding.
The preparations for this event were torture to Judith. Everybody, it seemed, could be happy but her own poor self. Even the fact that Jeff and Andy were changed, kinder to her, more considerate, better men in every way, had its own sting. If this could have been so before, the wreck of her world need not have come about.
Blatch kept rigorously to his own side of the Gulch, yet once in a while Judith met him on the highroad; and then, while he approached her with the carefullest efforts toward pleasing, he showed the effects of anxiety, the hard life, and the fact that he had begun to drink heavily--a thing he had never done before.
Spring would terminate his lease of the Turrentine farm, and then he must seek other quarters for his illicit traffic. His situation was doubled in danger by the fact that it could not be disguised how his uncle had turned upon him. Now that one did not, supposably, incur the displeasure of the Turrentines by giving information concerning Blatch and his still, the enterprise was a much safer one, and he trembled in hourly terror of its being undertaken by some needy soul. This terror gave a certain ferocity to his manner. Also the man who had come in with him to take Jim Cal"s place in the partnership was a more undesirable a.s.sociate even than Buck Shalliday.
Judith watched all these things with an idle lack of interest that was strangely foreign to her vivid human temperament. As time pa.s.sed and she could hear nothing from Creed Bonbright, nor of him beyond what Blatch had told her, and the connection she made between it and Iley"s report of Huldah"s marriage, the inaction of her woman"s lot was almost more than she could endure. Of an evening after her milking was over she would stand at the draw-bars under the wide, blue, twilight sky, and stare with her great, black, pa.s.sionate eyes into the autumn dusk, and her whole being went forth with such an intensity of longing that it seemed some part of it must find Creed, wherever he was, and speak for her to him.
After Iley"s announcement in September Judith never approached her nor talked to her again, though the shrew was growing strangely mild and disciplined since Jim Cal had broken with Blatch Turrentine and was become a partner in his father"s affairs--a husband who is out of the good books of other people is a scold-maker with the type of woman Jim Cal had married. To go near Pendrilla and Cliantha was to be overwhelmed instantly with the joyous details of their wedding preparations. Judith flinched from bringing her troubles before such happy eyes. She had but Aunt Nancy.
It was bitter hard times at the little cabin on The Edge. Doss Provine had begun actively looking for a "second," and his courting operations sorely interfered with the making of the small crop. Nancy took the field behind the plough; but her efforts came late and availed little. There was scarcely food for their mouths; she was continually hara.s.sed by anxiety concerning Pony, who had got to running with a bad crowd in Hepzibah. And finally the thing happened which had not been since Big Turkey Track was a mountain and Nancy Card was born in that small cabin.
At her wit"s end, she took Little Buck and Breezy and went away to visit a married daughter whose husband worked in a machine-shop in a valley settlement, leaving Doss Provine to stay with his kin for the time. There was plenty at her daughter"s table, and a warm welcome awaiting her and the children; besides, the man of the house had promised to find a job for her spoiled boy, and give him the masculine oversight and discipline he needed. At Hepzibah she gathered up that rather astonished young man, exerting for once the real authority that was in her, and with him set out on this formidable journey.
Just once old Jephthah went past that closed door. Just once he looked on the little front yard spilling over its rived palings with autumn blossoms. And he came home so out of joint with life, in so altogether impossible a mood, that it was fairly unsafe to mention as innocent a matter as the time of day to him. Up to now perhaps he had not known what a very large place in his life those almost daily quarrels with his old sweetheart filled. Now the restlessness which had come with the trouble over Creed Bonbright was renewed; he wandered about aimlessly, with a good word for nothing and n.o.body, and opined darkly that his liver was out of order.
"Aunt Nancy told me one time that she would almost be willin" to wed you to get a chance to give you a good course of spring medicine for that thar liver," remarked Judith casually. And then she looked up with a wan little smile, to find an expression in her uncle"s eyes that set her wondering.
Oh, dear Heaven--was it like that? Would she grieve for Creed all her life long, till she was an old, old woman? She declared it should not be so. Love would never be within her reach--within the reach of her utmost efforts--and escape her, leave her an empty husk to be blown by the wind of years to the dust pile of death. One day in this mood she broke down and talked to the Lusk girls.
"He said he"d sh.o.r.e come back," she concluded hopelessly. "Well, anyhow, he named things that would be done when he come back. I call that a promise. I keep thinking he"ll come back."
Pendrilla sat, her great china-blue eyes fixed on Judith"s tense, pale, working face, and the big tears of pure emotional enjoyment began to slip down her pink cheeks. In the glow of Judith"s splendid, fiery nature, the two pale little sisters warmed themselves like timid children at a chance hearth. As the full, vibrant voice faltered into silence, Cliantha went forward and took her favourite position on her knees beside Judith, her arms raised and slipped around the taller girl"s waist.
"Oh," she began, with a sort of frightened a.s.surance. "Ef my lover had gone from me thataway, and I didn"t know whar he was at, an" couldn"t git no news to him nor from him, I know mighty well and good what _I"d_ do."
"What?" whispered Judith, young lioness that she was, reduced to taking counsel from this mouse, "what would you do, Clianthy?"
"I"d make me a dumb supper and call him," a.s.serted the Lusk girl with tremulous resolution.
"A dumb supper!" echoed Judith, and then again, on a different key, "a dumb supper. I never studied about such as that."
She brooded a moment on the thought, and the girls said nothing, watching her breathlessly.
"Do you reckon hit"d do me any good?" she questioned then, half-heartedly. "Why, dumb suppers always seemed to me jest happy foolishness for light-hearted gals that had sweethearts."