"Is dem sums?" she asked.
With the pencil end between her teeth, Jane looked up and nodded.
"Well," Aunt Timmie sighed, "he"s done done a sum now dat beats "em all holler! I got to set down, honey; mah bones is jest cussin" wid misery."
Aunt Timmie, as may have been mentioned, never betrayed a secret except to the one confidant she implicitly trusted. This was Jane. And Jane would not breathe her trust but to the one person with whom she knew all things were safe. This was Ann. And Ann would have gone smilingly and willingly to the rack rather than whisper a word, except to Bob. And thus it was that, in the last resort, the stream from Uncle Zack"s spring of secrets trickled through many silent places to pour itself into Bob"s casual reservoirs.
Jane sat, pale and sometimes trembling, as Aunt Timmie unfolded the story of Zack"s concoction, colored here and there with promptings of the old woman"s own imagination. She heard each detail, and saw with shocking vividness the shot fired into the back of a man"s head, and saw him fall across his threshold. Creepy feelings touched her body at this sickening reminder of a day she had stooped to awaken her father, and found that he had fallen in an everlasting, rather than a drunken, sleep. She shivered. The old woman finished, wiped her face and again mournfully rocked her body to and fro.
"When did it happen?" Jane whispered.
"I reckon sometime yistiddy; but it couldn" a-been so ve"y long ago, noway!"
Without another word Jane pushed back the sums and pa.s.sed swiftly stableward across the lawn. There was no one at the stables, but she took down her bridle and walked past the long row of box-stalls, finally entering when she came to a horse she knew. Understanding something of her need, he took the bit in his mouth before she had even pressed it--a little act of kindness which, from that time forward, made her his staunch friend.
"Now if you won"t swell up when I try to tighten the girth," she pleaded, on the verge of tears.
She had forgotten to whistle for Mac.
CHAPTER XXIX
A PARALYSING DISCOVERY
Jane did not go fast to Arden, for the sun was too blistering hot to torture a horse by frantic riding. But her mind was frantic, and tortured, with the uncertainty of what might be before her. Was Dale there? Had he not, indeed, fled into the mountains as any of his people would have done? Had he been arrested? Question after question surged through her brain, finding no answers and pa.s.sing on.
The Colonel was not in his accustomed place on the honeysuckled end of the porch, nor was Zack about, so she dismounted alone and tied the lathery beast. Perhaps they were at Bradford"s cottage, comforting little Mesmie. Perhaps they were--but she tried not to think of that!
Never had the world seemed so deserted. Nothing was astir. The edge of a lace curtain, drawn outward by the pa.s.sing of someone through one of the library French windows, hung over the sill, deadly white and deadly still. The leaves were still, the air was still. Above her head, where recently she had watched two piping orioles flutter about their weaving, hung now the silent, pendant nest. No pipe, no bird, no motion. It seemed as though here were the stage of Perrault"s fairytale; only "twas a Prince within who had p.r.i.c.ked his destiny with a leaden bullet, and a Princess rode to wake him.
Alertly, but with a heavy dread at her heart, she crossed the porch and tiptoed to the open window. Dale was there, bent over the mahogany table, reading; as far from the world as he was from his mad act; as far from them both as he was from her. She went quietly in to him.
"Dale!"
He did not stir.
"Dale!" she again cried in a low voice, shaking him by the shoulder. He looked slowly up.
"Dale, what does this mean?" she hurriedly began. "Why have you killed that man?"
He remembered the Colonel"s unpleasant interview, and burned with a deep rage, growling:
"Leave me alone. I"ve got to read."
"Are you asleep?" she incredulously exclaimed. "Do you realize you"ve killed Tusk Potter, and any moment they may be after you?"
As he again looked up there was a storm of irritation in his face.
"They won"t be after me if people keep their mouths shut! What do I care who I killed? Leave me alone! I"ve got to study!"
Stunned, she stared stupidly down at him, for here was a new trait--or, at least, one he had not shown her. Many times she had been utterly shocked, thoroughly enraged by evidences of his abnormal selfishness, but she was unprepared for this atrocious abandonment. It aroused her to a quick anger and, s.n.a.t.c.hing the book from the table, she dashed it to the floor.
"Look at me!" she cried.
He was looking at her, as he had never done. The deep-set eyes were deeper, and their pupils venomously bright. She saw the fury being mustered there, but without flinching looked straight back at him.
"Tell me why you killed that man?" she demanded.
His hands were clenched, and for the first time she began to fear her influence might be waning.
"I killed him "cause he was in the way," he growled again.
"But are you mad to go about killing people because they"re in your way?
Don"t you know--"
"I know all I want to know," he almost screamed at her. "I know that time"s flyin", "n" I got to study! Go out "n" leave me. He was in the way, I tell you! It was natural to get rid of him."
He picked up the book and began to open it, but instantly she had again flung it away, saying with a degree of ferocity that made him stare in open-mouthed wonderment:
"If you touch that again, _I"ll_ kill _you_!"
It had been her only means of stirring him, and for more than a minute they remained, as two wax figures, glaring into each other"s faces.
Beneath this spell he was rigid, but her young breast rose with quick pulsations. The room was quiet with that oppressive stillness which comes in storms, when the elements seem to draw breathlessly aside in expectation of a crashing bolt of lightning. Now he took a deep breath and relaxed. She had won, and immediately leaned nearer, never taking her fixed look from his face.
"This is what comes," she said more calmly, "from imitating Nature. You once said that we differ from it in no way; that our eyes conceive, our minds quicken, and our hands destroy, just as it does;--that we in ourselves are the entire law of the cycles gathered into one piece of temporal clay. And I let you say it uncontradicted, because in a sense it was poetic, and because I never dreamed such a philosophy would lead to this. But I feared all the while that with such theories you were more unalterably becoming a merciless egoist, yet pinned my faith somehow to an unseen force to spare you. Now it has failed me. Wait,"
she commanded, thinking he was about to speak. "That Nature-G.o.d you copy might have been one of the beautiful influences in your life, had you not chosen his cruel and wicked side--the side that asks no one"s pardon, that lives by the survival of the fittest. Oh, you have seen things so distortedly!--you, whom I had hoped to be proud of, are a shameless sacrifice upon the altar to this G.o.d, Nature! Her reward is the brand of outcast; you are catalogued in her museum as a vicious failure, even with all you"ve accomplished! I shall leave you now, and doubt if I ever teach you again."
He had sat beneath this tirade until she uttered the last sentence, when with a heartrending groan of anguish he sprang up and caught her by the wrists.
"For the love of Christ," he began in a husky voice, but she pa.s.sionately interrupted him.
"You dare not speak of Christ! You do not know Him! You have no right to call His name! Let go of me!"
"Oh, hear me, hear me," he implored her, releasing one of her wrists and taking the other hand in both his own; alternately stroking it and almost crushing it. His body was twisting and writhing as a tree might in a terrific wind storm, and his eyes were glistening and dry--Oh, so dry, she thought They reminded her of pieces of hot gla.s.s. "Hear me," he was saying.
At the final Judgment, some poor soul will stand and face its Creator with just this sort of cry;--some soul which has grievously sinned will bend, and writhe, and implore with hot, gla.s.sy eyes, to be heard. Jane felt this in all its varicolored meaning. Until now she had been speaking as the teacher, as the humanitarian. But with his torture-stricken eyes pouring their prayer into her own, with the storm bending his powerful frame before its fury, she felt the old pity, the old interest, rise up in his defense.
"Hear me, hear me," he was murmuring, until her softening att.i.tude touched somewhere upon the receiver of his subliminal mind. Then he responded, and bent eagerly over her.
"I"d rather die a thousand times than have you turn your back," he whispered. It was a magic whisper, made magnetic by that fascinating dilation and contraction of his pupils; but the great body still swayed awkwardly. The storm was still there. "You know what life is to me," he was saying. "You know how I"m fightin" to get my share of learnin"; an"
how much I"ve got to do! You--just you, Miss Jane, can take me on! If you quit, how will I end? Just drift "round! I know! Do you want my hand--my left hand? I"ll cut it off if that"ll show you how I feel! I"d cut off the other, but it can write!" There was just at that instant a glorious pride in his voice. Now it was again mystical as he continued: "Don"t blame me too hard! You know how I was raised! You know yourself what a puny price we put on life! And you know how we do whenever someone stands in our way! Didn"t I have a better right to sweep my road clear than most of my folks, who don"t know half the time what they"re killin" about? You know our people, an" you know that when Granny put Pap"s gun in my hands, an" smeared his blood on me, an" made me swear to get those fellers, I did right to get "em--"cause I was brought up to do those things, an" didn"t know anything else! But after you got to teachin" me, I said a thousand times to myself I"d never kill anybody again--an" I wouldn"t have, if that varmint Potter hadn"t yelled your name in public, an" said what he"d tried to do!"
"I didn"t know that," her cheeks were flaming. "I hadn"t heard about that!"
"Well, he did. Ask Bob! He yelled it from a field, an" shot his pistol in the air, and said he"d do it yet. Don"t you reckon I knew this country warn"t big enough for him an" the school?"
Her cheeks burned hotter with this added humiliation that he had intended, not chivalrously to defend her, but only to keep her for his own advancement.