Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  IV

  The figure of a woman who held her hooded shawl under her chin, stole with steps often checked through the limp, dew-laden grass of the woods-pasture and slipped on the rotting logs. But she caught herself from tumbling, and safely gained the border of Gillespie’s corn field. There she sat down trembling on the stone doorstep of the spring-house, and waited rather than rested in the shelter of the chestnut boughs that overhung the roof. She was aware of the spring gurgling under the stone on its way into the sunshine, from the crocks of cream-covered milk and of butter in the cool dark of the hut; she sensed the thick August heat of the sun already smiting its honeyed odors from the corn; she heard the scamper of the squirrels preying upon the ripening ears, and whisking in and out of the woods or dropping into the field from the tips of the boughs overhanging the nearer rows; but it all came blurred to her consciousness.

  She was recognizably Gillespie’s sister, but her eyes and hair were black. She was wondering how she could get to speak with him when Jane was not by. He would send the girl away at a sign from her, but she could not have that; the thing must be kept from the girl but not seem to be kept.

  She let her arms rest on her knees; her helpless hands hung heavy from them; her head was bowed, and her whole body drooped under the burden of her heart, as if it physically dragged her down. Jane would be coming soon with the morning’s milk to pour into the crocks; she heard a step; the girl was coming; but she must rest a moment.

  “What are you doing here, Nancy?” her brother’s voice asked.

  “Oh, is it you, David? Oh, blessed be the name of the Lord! Maybe He’s going to be good to me, after all. David, is he gone?”

  “He’s gone, Nancy.”

  “In anger?”

  “He’s gone; I don’t care whether he’s gone in anger or not.”

  “Did he tell you he saw me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you promise him not to tell on him? To Jane? To any one?”

  “No.” Gillespie stood holding a bucket of milk in his hand; she sat gathering her shawl under her chin as if she were still coming through the suncleft shadows of the woods pasture.

  “Oh, David!”

  “What do you want me to do, Nancy?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. I haven’t slept all night.”

  “You mustn’t give way like this. Don’t you see any duty for you in this matter?”

  “Duty? Oh, David!” Her heart forboded the impossible demand upon it.

  Gillespie set his bucket of milk down beside the spring. “Nancy,” he said, “a woman cannot have two husbands. It’s a crime against the State. It’s a sin against God.”

  “But I haven’t got two husbands! What do you mean, David? Didn’t I believe he was dead? Didn’t you? Oh, David, what — Do you think I’ve done wrong? You let me do it!”

  “I don’t think you’ve done wrong; but look out you don’t do it. You are doing it, now. I can’t let you do it. I can’t let you live in sin!”

  “In sin? Me?”

  “You. Every minute you live now with Laban you live in sin. Your first husband, that was dead, is alive. He can’t claim you unless you allow it; but neither can your second husband, now. If you live on with Laban a day longer — an hour — a minute — you live in deadly sin. I thought of it all night but I had not thought it out till this minute when I first saw you sitting there and I knew how miserable you were, and my heart seemed to bleed at the sight of you.”

  “You may well say that, David,” the woman answered with a certain pride in the vastness of her calamity. “If it was another woman I couldn’t bear to think of it. Why does He do it? Why does He set such traps for us?”

  “Nancy!” her brother called sternly.

  “Oh, yes, it’s easy enough for you! But if Rachel was here, she’d see it different.”

  “Woman!” her brother said, “don’t try to hide behind the dead in your sin.”

  “It’s no sin! I was as innocent as the babe unborn when I married Laban — as innocent as he was, poor boy, when he would have me; and we all thought he was dead. Oh, why couldn’t he have been dead?”

  “This is murder you have in your heart now, Nancy,” the old man said, with who knows what awful pleasure in his casuistry, so pitilessly unerring. “If the life of that wicked man could buy you safety in your sin you could wish it taken.”

  “Oh, oh, oh! What shall I do, what shall I do.” She wailed out the words with her head fallen forward on her knees, and her loose hair dripping over them.

  “Do? Go home, and bring your little one, and come to me. I will deal with Laban when he gets back tonight.”

  She started erect. “And let him think I’ve left him? And the neighbors, let them think we’ve quarreled, and I couldn’t live with him?”

  “It won’t matter what the world thinks,” Gillespie said, and he spoke of the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its judgments supremely dreaded. “Besides,” he faltered, “no one is knowing but ourselves to his coming back. It can seem as if he left you.”

  “And I live such a lie as that? Is this you, David?”

  It was she who rose highest now, as literally she did, in standing on the stone where she had crouched, above the level of his footing.

  “I — I say it to spare you, Nancy. I don’t wish it. But I wish to make it easy — or a little bit easier — something you can bear better.”

  “Oh, I know, David, I know! You would save me if you could. But maybe — maybe it ain’t what we think it is. Maybe he was outlawed by staying away so long?”

  Neither of them named Dylks, but each knew whom the other meant, throughout their talk.

  “A lawyer might let you think so till he got all your money.”

  “Matthew Braile wouldn’t.”

  “That infidel?”

  She drooped again. “Oh, well, I must do it. I must do it. I’ll go and get ready and I’ll come to you. What will Jane think?”

  “I’ll take care of what Jane thinks. When do you expect Laban back?”

  “Not before sundown. I’ll not come till I see him.”

  “We’ll be ready for you.” He moved now to open the spring-house door; she turned and was lost to him in the lights and shadows of the woods-pasture. On its further border her cabin stood, and from it came the sound of a pitiful wail; at the back door a little child stood, staying itself by the slats let into grooves in the jambs. She had left it in its low cradle asleep, and it must have waked and clambered out and crept to the barrier and been crying for her there; its small face was soaked with tears.

  She ran forward with long leaps out of the cornfield and caught it to her neck and mumbled its wet cheeks with hungry kisses. “Oh, my honey, my honey! Did it think its mother had left—”

  She stopped at the word with a pang, and began to go about the rude place that was the simple home where after years of hell she had found an earthly heaven. Often she stopped, and wondered at herself. It seemed impossible she could be thinking it, be doing it, but she was thinking and doing it, and at sundown, when she knew by the eager shadow of a man in the doorway, pausing to listen if the baby were awake, all had been thought and done.

  V

  The emotional frenzies, recurring through the day, were past, and she could speak steadily to the man, in the absence of greeting which often emphasizes the self-forgetfulness of love as well as marks the formlessness of common life: “Your supper’s waitin’ for you, Laban; I’ve had mine; you must be hungry. It’s out in the shed; it’s cooler there. Go round; baby’s asleep.”

  The man obeyed, and she heard him drop the bucket into the well, and lift it by the groaning sweep, and pour the water into the basin, and then splash himself, with murmurs of comfort, presently muffled in the towel. Her hearing followed him through his supper, and she knew he was obediently eating it, and patiently waiting for her to account for whatever
was unwonted in her greeting. She loved him most of all for his boylike submission to her will and every caprice of it, but now she hardly knew how to deny his tacit question as he ventured in from the shed.

  “Don’t come near me, Laban,” she said with a stony quiet. “Don’t touch me. I ain’t your wife, any more.”

  He could not speak at first; then it was like him to ask, “Why — why — What have I done, Nancy?”

  “You, you poor soul?” she answered. “Nothing but good, all your days! He’s come back.”

  He knew whom she meant, but he had to ask, “Joseph Dylks? Why I thought he was—”

  “Don’t say it! It’s murder! I don’t want you to have his blood on you too. Oh, if he was only dead! Yes, yes! I have a right to wish it! Oh, God be merciful to me, a sinner!”

  “When — when — how did you know it, Nancy?”

  “Yesterday morning or day before — just after you left. I reckon he was waitin’ for you to go. I’m glad you went first.” The man looked up at the rifle resting on the pegs above the fireplace. “Laban, don’t!” she cried. “I looked at it when he was walkin’ away, and I know what you’re thinkin’.”

  “What is he goin’ to do?” the man asked from his daze.

  “Nothing. He said he wouldn’t do nothing if I didn’t. If he hadn’t said it I might believe it!”

  Laban shifted his weight where he stood from one foot to the other.

  “He passed the night at David’s. He’s passed two nights there.”

  “Was it the snorting man?”

  “I reckon.”

  “I heard about him at the Cross Roads. Why didn’t David tell us yesterday?”

  “Maybe he hadn’t thought it out. David thinks slow. He likes to be sure before he speaks. He was sure enough this morning!” the woman ended bitterly.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said it was living in sin for us to keep together if he was alive.”

  Laban pondered it. “I reckon if we come together without knowing he was alive, it ain’t no sin.”

  “Yes, it is!” she shrieked.

  “We was married just like anybody; we didn’t make no secret of it; we’ve lived together four years. Are you goin’ to unlive them years by stoppin’ now?”

  “Don’t you s’pose I been over all that a million times? My mind’s sore workin’ with it; there ain’t a thought in me that don’t ache from it. But David’s right. We’ve got to part. I put your things in this poke here,” she said, and she gave him a bag made from an old pillow tick, with a few clothes lumping it half full. “I’ll carry the baby, Laban.” She pulled back from him with the child in her arms. “Or no, you can carry her; you’ll have to leave her, too, and you’ve got a right to all the good you can get of her now. Don’t touch anything. I’ll stay at David’s, tonight, but I’ll come back in the morning, and then I’ll see what I’ll do — stay, or go and live with David. Come!”

  “And what about Joey?” Laban asked, half turning with the child when they were outside.

  “I declare I forgot about Joey! I’ll see, to-morrow. It seems as if my very soul was tired now.

  “Joey will just think we’ve gone over to David’s for a minute; he’ll go to bed when he comes; he’ll have had his supper at Peter Hingston’s, anyway.”

  As they walked away, she said, “You’re a good man, Laban Billings, to feel the way you always do about Joey. You’ve been a true father to him; I wonder what his own father’d have been.”

  “No truer father to him than I’ve been a husband to you, Nancy,” the man said, and as they walked along together, so far apart, his speech came to him, and he began to plead their case with her as before an adverse judge. Worn as she was with the arguments for and against them after the long day of iteration, she could not refuse to let him plead. She scarcely answered him, but he knew when they reached Gillespie’s cabin that she had seen them in the fierce light of her conscience, where there was no shadow of turning.

  David was alone; Jane, he said, had gone to the Reverdys, and was going with the woman to the Temple.

  Nancy did not seem to hear him. She took the sleeping baby from its father’s arms. “Laban has come with me to say good-by before you, David. I hope you’ll be satisfied.”

  “I hope your conscience will be satisfied, Nancy. It doesn’t matter about me. Laban, do you see this thing like I do?”

  “I see it like Nancy does.”

  “God will bless your effort for righteousness. Your path is dark before you now, but His light will shine upon it.”

  The old man paused helplessly, and Nancy asked “Does Jane know?”

  “Not yet. And I will confess I’m not certain what to do, about her, and about the neighbors. This is a cross to me, too, Nancy. I have lived a proud life here; there has never been talk about me or mine. Now when you and Laban are parted, there will be talk.”

  “There’s no need to be,” Laban said; “not at once. They want me back at the Cross Roads, the Wilkinses do. I can go now as well as in the morning. I forgot to tell you,” he added to his wife. “It was drove out of my mind.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame you,” she answered.

  “I can have work there all the fall.”

  David Gillespie rubbed his forehead, and said tremulously: “I don’t know what to say. I suppose I am weak. It’ll be one kind of a lie. But, Laban — I thank you—”

  “I can come back here Sundays and see Nancy and the baby,” Laban suggested.

  The old man’s voice shook. “You’ll be making it harder for yourself,” was all he could say.

  “But perhaps — perhaps there’ll be light — that light you said — by and by—”

  “Let us pray that there’ll be no light from the Pit. I am a sinful man, Laban, to let you do this thing. I ought to have strength for all of us. But I am older now, I’m not what I was — the day has tried me, Nancy.”

  “Good-by, then, Laban,” the woman said. “And don’t you think hard of David. I don’t. And I’m not sure I’ll ever let you come. Say good-by as if it was for life.” She turned to her brother. “We can kiss, I reckon?”

  “Oh, I reckon,” he lamented, and went indoors.

  Laban opened his arms as if to take her in them; but she interposed the baby.

  “Kiss her first. Me last. Just once. Now, go! I won’t be weak with you like David is. And don’t you be afraid for me. I can get along. I’m not a man!” She went into the cabin, with her baby over her shoulder; but in a little while she came back without it, and stared after the figure of Laban losing itself in the night. Then she sat down on the doorstep and cried; it seemed as if she never could stop; but the tears helped her.

  When she lifted her head she caught the sounds of singing from the village below the upland where the cabin stood. It was the tune that carried, not the words, but she knew them from the tune; as well as if she were in the Temple with them she knew what the people were singing. While she followed the lines helplessly, almost singing them herself, she was startled by the presence of a boy, who had come silently round the cabin in his bare feet and stood beside her.

  “Oh!” she cried out.

  “Why, did I scare you, mom?” he asked tenderly. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “No, Joey. I didn’t know any one was there; that’s all. I didn’t expect you. Why ain’t you at home in bed? You must be tired enough, poor boy.”

  “Oh, no, I ain’t tired. Mr. Hingston is real good to me; he lets me rest plenty; and he says I’ll make a first rate miller. I helped to dress the burrs this morning — the millstones, you know,” the boy explained, proud of the technicality. “Oh, I tell you I just like it there,” he said, and he laughed out his joy in it.

  “You always was a glad boy, Joey,” his mother said ruefully.

  “Well, you wouldn’t thought so if you seen me over at our house. It seemed like there was somebody dead; I dasn’t hardly go in, it was so dark and still. Whyn’t you there? Didn’t pop come home?”<
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  “Yes, but he had to go back to the Cross Roads; he’s got work there all the fall.”

  “Well! We do seem to be gittin’ along!” He laughed again. “I reckon you come over here because it seemed kind o’ lonesome. Goin’ to stay all night with Uncle?”

  “Yes. You won’t mind being there alone?”

  “Oh, no! Not much, I reckon.”

  “You can stay here too, if you want to—”

  “Oh, no! Mom,” he confessed shyly, “I brung Benny Hingston with me. I thought you’d let him stay all night with me.”

  “Why, certainly, Joey—”

  “He’s just behind the house; I wanted to ask first—”

  “You know you can always bring Benny. There’s plenty of room for both of you in your bed. But now when you go back with him be careful of the lamp. I put a fresh piece of rag in and there’s plenty of grease. You can blow up a coal on the hearth. I covered the fire; only be careful.”

  “Oh, we’ll be careful. Benny’s about the carefullest boy the’ is in Leatherwood. Oh, I do like being in the mill with Mr. Hingston.” He laughed out his joy again, and then he asked doubtfully, “Mom?”

  “Yes, Joey.”

  “Benny and me was wonderin’ — we’d go straight back home, and not light any lamp at all — if you’d let us go to the Temple. There’s a big meetin’ there to-night.” The mother hesitated, and the boy urged, “They say that strange man — well, some calls him the Snorter and some the Exhorter — is goin’ to preach.” The mother was still silent, and the boy faltered on: “He dresses like the people do Over-the-Mountains, and he wears his hair down his back—”

  The mother gasped. “I don’t like your being out late, Joey. I’d feel better if you and Benny was safe in bed.”