by B. M. Bower
“Manley didn’t come?” Val was standing beside the rig, near Kent. Her white-clothed figure was indistinct, and her face obscured in the dark. Her voice was quiet—lifelessly quiet. “Is he sick?”
“Well—of course has nerves was all upset—”
“Oh! Then he is sick?”
“Well—nothing dangerous, but—he wasn’t feelin’ well, so I thought I’d come out and take you back with me.”
“Oh!”
“Man was awful worried; you mustn’t think he wasn’t. He was pretty near crazy, for a while.”
“Oh, yes, certainly.”
“Get in and ride. And you mustn’t worry none about Man, nor feel hurt that he didn’t come. He felt so bad—”
“I’ll walk, thank you; it’s only a few steps. And I’m not worried at all. I quite understand.”
The team started on slowly, and Mrs. Hawley turned in the seat so that she could continue talking without interruption to the two who walked behind. But it was Kent who answered her at intervals, when she asked a direct question or appeared to be waiting for some comment. Betweenwhiles he was wondering if Val did, after all, understand. She knew so little of the West and its ways, and her faith in Manley was so firm and unquestioning, that he felt sure she was only hurt at what looked very much like an indifference to her welfare. He suspected shrewdly that she was thinking what she would have done in Manley’s place, and was trying to reconcile Mrs. Hawley’s assurances that Manley was not actually sick or disabled with the blunt fact that he had stayed in town and permitted others to come out to see if she were alive or dead.
And Kent had another problem to solve. Should he tell her the truth? He had never ceased to feel, in some measure, responsible for her position. And she was sure to discover the truth before long; not even her innocence and her ignorance of life could shield her from that knowledge. He let a question or two of Arline’s go unanswered while he struggled for a decision, but when they reached the house, only one point was dearly settled in his mind. Instead of riding as far as he might, and then walking across the prairie to the Wishbone, he intended to go on to town with them—“to see her through with it.”
CHAPTER XI
VAL’S AWAKENING
Val stood just inside the door of the hotel parlor and glanced swiftly around at the place of unpleasant memory.
“No, I must see Manley before I can tell you whether we shall want to stay or not,” she replied to Arline’s insistence that she “go right up to a room” and lie down. “I feel quite well, and you must not bother about me at all. If Mr. Burnett will be good enough to send Manley to me—I must see him first of all.” It was Val in her most unapproachable mood, and Arline subsided before it.
“Well, then, I’ll go and send word to Man, and see about some supper for us. I feel as if I could eat ten-penny nails!” She went out into the hall, hesitated a moment, and then boldly invaded the “office.”
“Say! have you got Man rounded up yit?” she demanded of her husband. “And how is he, anyhow? That girl ain’t got the first idea of what ails him—how anybody with the brains and education she’s got can be so thick-headed gits me. Jim told me Man’s been packing a bottle or two home with him every trip he’s made for the last month—and she don’t know a thing about it. I’d like to know what ’n time they learn folks back East, anyhow; to put their eyes and their sense in their pockets, I guess, and go along blind as bats. Where’s Kent at? Did he go after him? She won’t do nothing till she sees Man—”
At that moment Kent came in, and his disgust needed no words. He answered Mrs. Hawley’s inquiring look with a shake of the head.
“I can’t do anything with him,” he said morosely. “He’s so full he don’t know he’s got a wife, hardly. You better go and tell her, Mrs. Hawley. Somebody’s got to.”
“Oh, my heavens!” Arline clutched at the doorknob for moral support. “I could no more face them yellow eyes of hern when they blaze up—you go tell her yourself, if you want her told. I’ve got to see about some supper for us. I ain’t had a bite since dinner, and Min’s off gadding somewheres—” She hurried away, mentally washing her hands of the affair. “Women’s got to learn some time what men is,” she soliloquized, “and I guess she ain’t no better than any of the rest of us, that she can’t learn to take her medicine—but I ain’t goin’ to be the one to tell her what kinda fellow she’s tied to. My stunt’ll be helpin’ her pick up the pieces and make the best of it after she’s told.”
She stopped, just inside the dining room, and listened until she heard Kent cross the hall from the office and open the parlor door. “Gee! It’s like a hangin’,” she sighed. “If she wasn’t so plumb innocent—” She started for the door which opened into the parlor from the dining room, strongly tempted to eavesdrop. She did yield so far as to put her ear to the keyhole, but the silence within impressed her strangely, and she retreated to the kitchen and closed the door tightly behind her as the most practical method of bidding Satan begone.
The silence in the parlor lasted while Kent, standing with his back against the door, faced Val and meditated swiftly upon the manner of his telling.
“Well?” she demanded at last. “I am still waiting to see Manley. I am not quite a child, Mr. Burnett. I know something is the matter, and you—if you have any pity, or any feeling of friendship, you will tell me the truth. Don’t you suppose I know that Arline was—lying to me all the time about Manley? You helped her to lie. So did that other man. I waited until I reached town, where I could do something, and now you must tell me the truth. Manley is badly hurt, or he is dead. Tell me which it is, and take me to him.” She spoke fast, as if she was afraid she might not be able to finish, though her voice was even and low, it was also flat and toneless with her effort to seem perfectly calm and self-controlled.
Kent looked at her, forgot all about leading up to the truth by easy stages, as he had intended to do, and gave it to her straight. “He ain’t either one,” he said. “He’s drunk!”
Val stared at him. “Drunk!” He could see how even her lips shrank from the word. She threw up her head. “That,” she declared icily, “I know to be impossible!”
“Oh, do you? Let me tell you that’s never impossible with a man, not when there’s whisky handy.”
“Manley is not that sort of a man. When he left me, three years ago, he promised me never to frequent places where liquor is sold. He never had touched liquor; he never was tempted to touch it. But, just to be doubly sure, he promised me, on his honor. He has never broken that promise; I know, because he told me so.” She made the explanation scornfully, as if her pride and her belief in Manley almost forbade the indignity of explaining. “I don’t know why you should come here and insult me,” she added, with a lofty charity for his sin.
“I don’t see how it can insult you,” he contended. “You’re got a different way of looking at things, but that won’t help you to dodge facts. Man’s drunk. I said it, and I mean it. It ain’t the first time, nor the second. He was drunk the day you came, and couldn’t meet the train. That’s why I met you. I ought to’ve told you, I guess, but I hated to make you feel bad. So I went to work and sobered him up, and sent him over to get married. I’ve always been kinda sorry for that. It was a low-down trick to play on you, and that’s a fact. You ought to’ve had a chance to draw outa the game, but I didn’t think about it at the time. Man and I have always been pretty good friends, and I was thinking of his side of the case. I thought he’d straighten up after he got married; he wasn’t such a hard drinker—only he’d go on a toot when he got into town, like lots of men. I didn’t think it had such a strong hold on him. And I knew he thought a lot of you, and if you went back on him it’d hit him pretty hard. Man ain’t a bad fellow, only for that. And he’s liable to do better when he finds out you know about it. A man will do ’most anything for a woman he thinks a lot of.”
“Indeed!” Val was sitting now upon the red plush chair. Her face was perfectly colorless, her m
anner frozen. The word seemed to speak itself, without having any relation whatever to her thoughts and her emotions.
Kent waited. It seemed to him that she took it harder than she would have taken the news that Manley was dead. He had no means of gauging the horror of a young woman who has all her life been familiar with such terms as “the demon rum,” and who has been taught that “intemperance is the doorway to perdition”; a young woman whose life has been sheltered jealously from all contact with the ugly things of the world, and who believes that she might better die than marry a drunkard. He watched her unobtrusively.
“Anyway, it was worrying over you that made him get off wrong today,” he ventured at last, as a sort of palliative. “They say he was going to start home right in the face of the fire, and when they wouldn’t let him, he headed straight for a saloon and commenced to pour whisky down him. He thought sure you—he thought the fire would—”
“I see,” Val interrupted stonily. “For the very doubtful honor of shaking the hand of a politician, he left me alone to face as best I might the possibility of burning alive; and when it seemed likely that the possibility had become a certainty, he must celebrate his bereavement by becoming a beast. Is that what you would have me believe of my husband?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Kent admitted reluctantly. “Only I wouldn’t have put it just that way, maybe.”
“Indeed! And how would you pit it, then?”
Kent leaned harder against the door, and looked at her curiously. Women, it seemed to him, were always going to extremes; they were either too soft and meek, or else they were too hard and unmerciful.
“How would you put it? I am rather curious to know your point of view.”
“Well, I know men better than you do, Mrs. Fleetwood. I know they can do some things that look pretty rotten on the surface, and yet be fairly decent underneath. You don’t know how a habit like that gets a fellow just where he’s weakest. Man ain’t a beast. He’s selfish and careless, and he gives way too easy, but he thinks the world of you. Jim says he cried like a baby when he came into the saloon, and acted like a crazy man. You don’t want to be too hard on him. I’ve an idea this will learn him a lesson. If you take him the right way, Mrs. Fleetwood, the chances are he’ll quit drinking.”
Val smiled. Kent thought he had never before seen a smile like that, and hoped he never would see another. There was in it neither mercy nor mirth, but only the hard judgment of a woman who does not understand.
“Will you bring him to me here, Mr. Burnett? I do not feel quite equal to invading a saloon and begging him, on my knees, to come—after the conventional manner of drunkards’ wives. But I should like to see him.”
Kent stared. “He ain’t in any shape to argue with,” he remonstrated. “You better wait a while.”
She rested her chin upon her hands, folded upon the high chair back, and gazed at him with her tawny eyes, that somehow reminded Kent of a lioness in a cage. He thought swiftly that a lioness would have as much mercy as she had in that mood.
“Mr. Burnett,” she began quietly, when Kent’s nerves were beginning to feel the strain of her silent stare, “I want to see Manley as he is now. I will tell you why. You aren’t a woman, and you never will understand, but I shall tell you; I want to tell somebody.
“I was raised well—that sounds queer, but modesty forbids more. At any rate, my mother was very careful about me. She believed in a girl marrying and becoming a good wife to a good man, and to that end she taught me and trained me. A woman must give her all—her life, her past, present, and future—to the man she marries. For three years I thought how unworthy I was to be Manley’s wife. Unworthy, do you hear? I slept with his letters under my pillow.” The self-contempt in her tone! “I studied the things I thought would make me a better companion out here in the wilderness. I practiced hours and hours every day upon my violin, because Manley had admired my playing, and I thought it would please him to have me play in the firelight on winter evenings, when the blizzards were howling about the house! I learned to cook, to wash clothes, to iron, to sweep, and to scrub, and to make my own clothes, because Manley’s wife would live where she could not hire servants to do these things. I lived a beautiful, picturesque dream of domestic happiness.
“I left my friends, my home, all the things I had been accustomed to all my life, and I came out here to live that dream!” She laughed bitterly.
“You can easily guess how much of it has come true, Mr. Burnett. But you don’t know what it costs a girl to come down from the clouds and find that reality is hard and ugly—from dreaming of a cozy little nest of a home, and the love and care of—of Manley, to the reality—to carrying water and chopping wood and being left alone, day after day, and to find that his love only meant—Oh, you don’t know how a woman clings to her ideals! You don’t know how I have dung to mine. They have become rather tattered, and I have had to mend them often, but I have clung to them, even though they do not resemble much the dreams I brought with me to this horrible country.
“But if it’s true, what you tell me—if Manley himself is another disillusionment—if beyond his selfishness and his carelessness he is a drunken brute whom I can’t even respect, then I’m done with my ideals. I want to see him just as he is. I want to see him once without the halo I have kept shining all these months. I’ve got my life to live—but I want to face facts and live facts. I can’t go on dreaming and making believe, after this.” She stopped and looked at him speculatively, absolutely without emotion.
“Just before I left home,” she went on in the same calm quiet, “a girl showed me some verses written by a very wicked man. At least, they say he is very wicked—at any rate, he is in jail. I thought the verses horrible and brutal; but now I think the man must be very wise. I remember a few lines, and they seem to me to mean Manley.
“For each man kills the thing he loves— Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word; The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.
“I don’t remember all of it, but there was another line or two:
“The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.
“I wish I had that poem now—I think I could understand it. I think—”
“I think you’ve got talking hysterics, if there is such a thing,” Kent interrupted harshly. “You don’t know half what you’re saying. You’ve had a hard day, and you’re all tired out, and everything looks outa focus. I know—I’ve seen men like that sometimes when some trouble hit ’em hard and unexpected. What you want is sleep; not poetry about killing people. A man, in the shape you are in, takes to whisky. You’re taking to graveyard poetry—and, if you ask me, that’s worse than whisky. You ain’t normal. What you want to do is go straight to bed. When you wake up in the morning you won’t feel so bad. You won’t have half as many troubles as you’ve got now.”
“I knew you wouldn’t understand it,” Val remarked coldly, still staring at him with her chin on her hands.
“You won’t yourself, tomorrow morning,” Kent declared unsympathetically, and called Mrs. Hawley from the kitchen. “You better put Mrs. Fleetwood to bed,” he advised gruffly. “And if you’ve got anything that’ll make her sleep, give her a dose of it. She’s so tired she can’t see straight.” He was nearly to the outside door when Val recovered her speech.
“You men are all alike,” she said contemptuously. “You give orders and you consider yourselves above all the laws of morality or decency; in reality you are beneath them. We shouldn’t expect anything of the lower animals! How I despise men!”
“Now you’re talking,” grinned Kent, quite unmoved. “Whack us in a bunch all you like—but don’t make one poor devil take it all. Men as a class are used to it and can stand it.” He was laughing as he left the room, but his amusement lasted only until the door was closed behind him. “Lord!” he exclaimed, and drew a deep breath. “I’d sure hate to have that little woman say all them things about me!” and glanced invo
luntarily over his shoulder to where a crack of light showed under the faded green shade of one of the parlor windows.
He crossed the street and entered the saloon where Manley was still drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an armchair, waving an empty glass in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. He leered up at Kent.
“Wife’s all righ’,” he informed him solemnly. “Knew she would be—fine guards’s got out there. ’Sall righ’—somebody shaid sho. Have a drink.”
Kent glowered down at him, made a swift, mental decision, and pipped him by the shoulder. “You come with me,” he commanded. “I’ve got something important I want to tell you. Come on—if you can walk.”
“’Course I c’n walk all righ’. Shertainly I can walk. Wha’s makes you think I can’t walk? Want to inshult me? ’Sall my friends here—no secrets from my friends. Wha’s want tell me? Shay it here.”
Kent was a big man; that is to say, he was tall, well-muscled and active. But so was Manley. Kent tried the power of persuasion, leaving force as a last, doubtful result. In fifteen minutes or thereabouts he had succeeded in getting Manley outside the door, and there he balked.
“Wha’s matter wish you?” he complained, pulling back. “C’m on back ’n’ have drink. Wha’s wanna tell me?”
“You wait. I’ll tell you all about it in a minute. I’ve got something to show you, and I don’t want the bunch to get next. Savvy?”
He had a sickening sense that the subterfuge would not have deceived a five-year-old child, but it was accepted without question.
He led Manley stumbling up the street, evading a direct statement as to his destination, pulled him off the board walk, and took him across a vacant lot well sprinkled with old shoes and tin cans. Here Manley fell down, and Kent’s patience was well tested before he got him up and going again.
