The Able McLaughlins

by Margaret Wilson

  He gave her no encouragement.

  “After all, he was Aunt Libby’s baby!” she sighed.

  “After all!” he sneered. He meant to silence her. She spoke again.

  “Aunt Libby was always kind to me, Wully!” He wouldn’t answer her. He knew what was coming.

  She said timidly;

  “I doubt we ought to go back and get him. If he’s dying, Wully! And Auntie waiting there for him!”

  He said never a word.

  “He may be dead before she sees him, if we don’t.”

  “We won’t!” he almost shouted. That should have settled matters.

  “But what’ll you tell her? She’ll ask. She’ll find out you wouldn’t. You won’t can say you saw him dying, and didn’t bring him home!”

  That was true. He had begun to think of that. Libby Keith would leave no detail of that death undiscovered.

  “Will you say you went away and left him there to die?”

  What else could he say? He certainly wouldn’t tell that for one long rejoicing moment he had stood looking into the eyes that so terribly besought him—those eyes that were dying prayers, ultimate beseechings—and had turned victoriously away. He wouldn’t say that he had told the men who were seeking a ride home for that snake, that he had too heavy a load for so essential a favor. He wouldn’t tell how shortly he had answered them, and how hatefully turned on his heel and departed.

  “Wully!” she said, after a little, with conviction, “we ought to go back and get him! We can’t treat Auntie this way!”

  “Can’t we!” he exclaimed bitterly. “Giddup!” he cried to his horses.

  He felt her wretchedness. He hardened his heart against her sentimentality. Presently she said imploringly;

  “We can’t do this, Wully. We must go back!”

  “I will not!” He spoke passionately.

  When she spoke again, it was to warn him.

  “If you don’t go back, I will!”

  “No you won’t!” he cried.

  She was silent for several minutes then. He felt her bending down to see if the baby was covered. Then she sat still. She was hesitating. Then after a minute, before he could realize what was going on, she had climbed over the side of the wagon, her foot was on the hub, then, skirts and cloak and all, she had alighted, backwards, stumblingly, from the wagon. By the time he had pulled up the horses, she was the length of the wagon from him. Ignoring him, defying him, she was calling to him over her shoulder;

  “He made me do evil once. You made me do evil once. But nobody can make me do it again!” Down the road she ran. “I’m going back to him!” she cried.

  He had never been really angry with her before. Sometimes at first, before the baby had been born, he had grown very weary of her importunity, her determination to make him tell his mother the truth. But of late she had not done that. She had been so satisfactory—so lovely. Now his rage burst forth against her.

  “Go back to him, then, if you like him so well!” He hurled the words after her, and drove on.

  Even before he heard her cry of protest, he regretted his bitter taunt. Furious with himself, with her, he hurried west. Already he had begun to see the mistake of his sweet refusal. It would inevitably become known that he had seen Peter’s straits, and had refused him so slight a kindness. The whole neighborhood would be asking the reason. He vowed to himself that he would not take that carcass into the wagon with his wife if all the world had to know the reason of his hatred. Such things were expected of no man. He was only human. He couldn’t do a thing like that! And his wife had defied him! She had left him! Ah, and he had taunted her so unjustly, so brutally! But he had never imagined himself saying so cruel a thing to her. He had never imagined her defying him in such a fashion. That was what she thought of him, then. He made her do wrong once! Classing him with that damned— That was all the gratitude she felt for his saving of her! But then, of course, it was an awful thing he had just done. He thought of himself lying sick on the sidewalk, waiting for a chance to get home. He hardened his heart. But he had been a decent man. No violator of women! He would never do it.

  He turned and looked after his deserting wife. He could see her hurrying away from him. He had an idea of shouting to her to come back—of commanding her to come back. But he knew she wouldn’t heed him. He ought never to have said so hateful a thing to her. As if she could want to go back to that— He remembered how she had sat sobbing on the doorstep when he first went to her. He was glad to think of Peter Keith dying there, lonely, shrunken, filthy. He looked again after his wife. She went steadily eastward, running towards the town. But he had the baby. She would be coming back after a while!

  He drove on, raging against her, trying to justify himself. He went so far that he could scarcely see her now. He might have gone on home, if there had not appeared on the horizon a team, coming towards him. Its approach was intolerable. Somebody who might know them was coming nearer. Somebody would see Wully McLaughlin riding westward, and presently overtake his wife running east! He turned around abruptly.

  Facing east, he could just see her. He would quickly overtake her, and order her to get in and come home with him at once. He would never let her go to that livery stable full of drunks alone. He was getting near her.

  Then a strange thing happened. He saw her stop and suddenly turn around, and come half running towards him as fast as she had run away. He kept his face hard, unrelenting. He saw when she came near that she was crying softly. She climbed quickly up when he stopped.

  “I doubt he’s not dying,” she wept. “I can’t do it! He’s too strong, Wully! He’s tricky!”

  She cuddled against him.

  “Don’t cry!” he had to say.

  “I won’t look at him!” she sobbed. “You know I don’t want to go back to him! You oughtn’t to have said that! You know I don’t like him! If you want to know how much I hate him, I’ll tell you! It was me that shot him that time. It wasn’t his foot I was aiming at, either!” She wept unrestrainedly.

  “You shot him!” Wully gasped.

  “He would come back! What could I do! There was no place to hide. I shot at him!”

  She had shot him! She had been as desperate as that. He was horrified anew. She bent down to feel the baby’s hands, to cover him more securely. She wanted to say something else, but she couldn’t speak plainly because of her sobs. Yet she managed to urge the horses eastward.

  “I’ll never look at him!” she cried passionately. “You needn’t think I like him! You oughtn’t to have said that!”

  “I know it, Chirstie! I oughtn’t to have said such a thing. But you oughtn’t to have jumped out and run away that way.”

  “Yes, I ought!” she retorted, swallowing, choking. “I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t my place to do it. But my husband wouldn’t do his part! Wully, if you hurry now, hurry enough, they’ll just think you’ve been unloading. You won’t need to explain! I won’t have you doing such a mean thing. I’ve got enough bad things to tell without that! Hurry!”

  CHAPTER XXII

  THEY had passed the bridge on their burdened way home. They had come to the place at which Chirstie had so astonishingly defied him. They had ridden together in a silence broken only by the refreshed wee Johnnie’s cooing, as he bounced back and forth in his mother’s lap. Wully looked covertly at his wife from time to time, in awe. She wasn’t thinking now what a nice baby Peter Keith had been. Never once had she turned her face towards what was in the wagon-box, to see if it was indeed dying. Returning to town, she had instructed him, woman-like, to be sure that Peter had no weapons concealed, no way of hurting a benefactor. And Wully had unloaded his lumber raging. Caught, he was, trapped. Having to do this unspeakable thing to satisfy the sentimentality of a woman, and to save his secret from desecration. Grimly he had made sure from the doctor that there was no chance of Peter living to reveal what Wully had so well kept hidden. Coldly he had ordered the men at the stable to wash the blood from that face, from
that matted beard, as if Peter was their cousin, and not his. Grudgingly he had helped them deposit the bony thing in the wagon. Covered to his head, still as a bag of meal, Peter lay there when Wully McLaughlin drove to the hotel to get his wife. And she had never once turned her head towards him.

  And now, when Wully looked at her from the corner of his eyes, his own anger, his bitter hatred seemed a small thing before hers. Her face was as white as marble, and as hard, one might have thought. Her mouth was screwed tight in loathing. She sat perfectly still, looking straight ahead, tragically. She wasn’t thinking of Aunt Libby now. Wully was almost afraid of her . . . afraid certainly to offer her comfort.

  They rode west. The sun was high now, and shone dazzlingly over the brown stretches. The horses felt the stimulus of the frosty morning. Wee Johnnie jumped about, chuckling out his absurd little meaningless words. Three miles they went; four miles. From time to time Wully turned to assure himself that his enemy lay still. He would let him die there, without lifting a finger to lengthen his life by a second. The sight of that shape under the old brown blanket inflamed his hatred. He looked, and turned quickly away, remembering always that second time Peter had dared to lay violent hands on his wife. It was that second time he could never forgive, that second time.

  The baby grew restless. He complained fretfully of his mother’s lack of attention. Wully gave him, almost mechanically, the ends of the lines to play with. They pleased him, for a while. Then he turned again to his mother, unable to fathom her sternness. Never before had her hands touched him so coldly. Looking right ahead of her, she would pull that little shawl tightly around him again, after he had succeeded in working his bare arms out of it, tucking him in without a kiss or any coaxing. His eyes studied her face, and found there no thought for him. He stood up in her lap. He put his arms around her neck, and stroked the forbidden feather. She failed even to reprove him. He seized the chance—he put the curling thing into his mouth, and chewed the end of it experimentally. He spit it out in disgust. He sat down again in her lap, and began playing with the frogs on her new coat. He fingered the interesting fringe. He squirmed about more vigorously than ever. He called to her. He put his hands up to her face. She bent down and kissed him, but not as she usually gathered him against herself with warmth. The caress was hard and preoccupied, and he whispered a little. He tried pat-a-caking, to get her to smile upon him. That, too, failed. Wully handed him the whip, and he shook it so fiercely that they had both hastily to rescue their faces from the blows he might have inflicted. Still his mother looked straight ahead.

  They came then to a low place. The horses could go only very slowly. The baby adjusted himself to the new motion of the wagon. There was a splashing of mud that made him giggle delightedly. It would have been a choice morning for any baby whose mother wasn’t sitting frozen. Wee Johnnie made the best of it. He kicked, and giggled, and squirmed about.

  The horses failed of their own accord to take their proper pace again. Wully had to speak to them. He slapped them lightly with the lines.

  “Get up, Nellie!” he exclaimed. “What’s the matter of you?”

  Wee Johnnie moved his arms exactly as Wully had done.

  “Get up, Nellie!” he said. “What’s the matter of you?”

  He said all that, plainly, if not perfectly, and before he knew what was happening, his mother had seized him, and was hugging him up against her, in the good old way, kissing him.

  “Get up, Nellie!” he cooed. “What’s the matter of you!”

  She had been so surprised, so delighted with her son’s first sentence that she had turned, even kissing him, to Wully, no joy complete unless he shared it.

  “Did you hear that!” she cried triumphantly, her face blossoming towards him. “Say it again, Lammie!”

  And almost before Wully could smile in return, he stopped. He turned around. He thought he heard a groan from his load. He couldn’t even smile at her with that man possibly spying upon them. He looked—and from the end of the wagon that man had lifted his head a little, like a snake, and had seen the smile that Chirstie had turned upon her husband. And Wully—when he saw that face—it was the last thing in the world that he intended doing—but some way, in spite of himself, he achieved generosity—the spoil, it may have been, of ancestral struggle. At the terrible sight of that face, he pitied his enemy. That coward, in his damned way, had loved Chirstie. And in his tormented sunken dying he had seen all the sweet intimacy from which he had been shut out and had sunk back, felled by the blow of that revelation. Wully had foregone revenge. He had forborne running a sword less sharp through his fallen enemy than Chirstie’s wifely smile had been. In a flash Wully saw himself sitting there by the woman, loved, living, not dying, full of strength and generations, while that man, loathed and rejected, was already burning in hell.

  The poor devil!

  He pulled the horses up suddenly, and gave his wife the lines. He climbed back to lift his cousin into a position less painful. Through holes in the old blanket, straws from beneath were scratching the ghastly face. There was a farmhouse not so far down the road.

  “I’ll stop there and buy him a pillow,” Wully resolved.