Read Ebook: The Broken Gate: A Novel by Hough Emerson Bracker M Leone Illustrator

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Ebook has 1648 lines and 80981 words, and 33 pages

"Wait, Don! Come back!" called out Aurora Lane. "Don't get into trouble here--come--come away!"

She plucked at the sleeve of his coat to draw him back. It was too late. The half-wit, cracking his knuckles now yet more loudly, and knocking his fists together, had wholly lost his amiable smile. Something primordial was going on, deep down in his rudimentary brain.

As for Eph Adamson, he also stood scowling and silent, a sudden wave of resentment filling his soul at seeing the happiness of these two.

"No, you don't--just you leave him be!" called out Eph Adamson, as the young man pushed the half-wit back from him, his own blue eyes now beginning to glint. "Leave him alone, unless you want to fight. He can lick you anyways, whoever you are. Do you want to fight?"

"No, why should I? I don't know you."

Don Lane turned toward the stranger, still frowning and somewhat wondering, but in no terror whatever.

"I don't know you neither, nor what you're doin' here, but you've got to fight or 'pologize," said Eph Adamson, arriving at this conclusion through certain mental processes of his own not apparent. "You got to have our consent to cross this here courtyard. This is my son John, and you shan't insult him."

"Get on away--step back," said Don Lane. "I guess it's all right, but let my mother and myself alone--we're just going home."

A sudden wave of rage and wonder, mingled, filled the soul of drunken Eph Adamson as his venom rose to the boiling point.

And now there came a pause, an icy pause--icy it was, out there in the glare of the hot summer sun. These four who stood in view of all the village might have been statues for the time, so motionless, so tense was each.

Not many actually heard the words of old Eph Adamson--words wrung out of the bitterness of his own soul perhaps, but words intolerable none the less. None had heard the words of Aurora Lane and the young man as they had spoken previous to this. None guessed who the stranger was or might be--none but drunken Eph Adamson. But all could see what now happened.

For one instant the young man stood almost like a statue. Then with one sudden thrust of his fist he smote the old man full in the mouth, so swift and hard a blow that Adamson dropped prostrate, and for the time motionless.

A sudden, instantaneous, electric buzz, a murmur, ran all around the square. A sound of shuffling feet and falling boxes might have been heard as men here and there rose eagerly, their necks craned out toward this swiftly made arena.

They saw the half-wit boy now advance upon Don Lane with a roar or bawl of rage, his arms swinging flail-like. All expected to see the newcomer turn and run. Not so. He simply stood for a half instant, sidestepped, and again swung in close upon his foe. Old Silas Kneebone described the affair many a time afterwards, at a time when Spring Valley knew more about Don Lane.

"You see, the eejit, he gets up again, hollering, and he goes in again at Dewdonny, bound for to knock his head off. But Dewdonny, he ducks down like a regular prize-fighter--I hear tell, at colleges, them athaletes they have to learn all them sort of things--and he put up a fight like a regular old hand. But all the time he keeps hollering to the crowd, 'Take him away! Take him away! Keep him off, I say! I don't want to hit him!'

"Well, folks begun to laugh at Dewdonny then--before they knowed who he was--thinking he was afraid of that eejit; yet it didn't seem like he was, neither, for he didn't run away. At last he hits the eejit fair a second time, and he knocks him down flat. Folks then begun to allow he could hit him whenever he wanted to, and knock him down whenever he pleased.

"Now, the eejit, he gets up and begins to beller like a calf. He puts his hand on his face where Dewdonny Lane had done hit him the last time or two and he hollers out, 'Pa, he hit me!'

"But his pa could only set up on the grass and shake his head. I reckon old Eph was soberer then than he had been five minutes sooner. Say, that boy had a punch like the kick of a full growed mule!

"Of course, you all know what happened then. It was then that old Man Tarbush come in, seeing the boy had both of them two licked. He got up his own nerve after that. So now he goes over there to the courthouse ground, through the gate where they all was, and he lays his hand on Dewdonny Lane and then on the eejit.

"'I arrest you both for disturbing of the peace,' says he then. 'Come on now, in the name of the law.'

"'The law be damned!' says Dewdonny Lane then. 'Go take this man to jail. Are you crazy--what do you mean by arresting me when I'm just walking home with my mother? This wasn't my fault. I didn't want to hit him.

"'Come on, Mom!' says he, and before Tarbush could help hisself he'd took 'Rory Lane by the arm again and off they went, and right soon they was in their house--them two, the milliner and her boy.

"And Joel Tarbush he heard him call her 'Mom' right there--that's how it all begun to git out.

"That's right--this was the town milliner and the boy she sent away, that never died none at all nohow.--'Rory Lane, and her boy we all thought was dead. And we'd never knowed it nor dreamed it till he spoke, right there in the public square! 'My mother!' says he. Can you beat that?

"Then 'Rory Lane turns around and fronts the whole lot of them. Says she: 'Yes, it's true! This is my son, Dewdonny Lane,' says she. She said it cold.

"That was before we knowed all about how she had put him through college, and that this was his first visit home, and the first time he'd ever seen her--his own mother! I heard as how he'd thought all his life he was a orphan, and someone on the inside that very week--just when he'd finished in college--had wrote him that he wasn't no orphan, but had a mother living right here! So here he comes, hot foot--and didn't he spill the beans!

"She'd tried her durnedest to keep it all covered up--and you must say she'd made one big fight of it, fer it's hard fer a woman to keep her eyes and her hands off of her own flesh and blood, even if it ain't legal. But, somehow, it's hard to keep that sort of thing covered up, for a woman. It all comes out, time'n again--ain't it the truth? How she done it for twenty years is a miracle. But law! What's twenty years, come to forgettin' things like what she done?"

AURORA LANE

While the doughty town marshal, endowed now with a courage long foreign to his nature, was leading away his sobbing prisoner, followed by the prisoner's dazed yet angered parent, these other two, mother and son, continued rapidly on their way toward the home of Aurora Lane. The young man walked in silence, his enthusiasm stilled, although he held his mother's hand tight and close as it lay upon his arm. His face, frowning and stern, seemed suddenly grown strangely older.

They arrived at the corner of the tawny grassplot of the courthouse yard, crossed the street once more, and turned in at the long shady lane of maples which made off from that corner of the square. Here, just in the neutral strip between business and residence property, opposite a wagon-making and blacksmith shop, and adjoining the humble abode of a day-laborer, they came to a little gate which swung upon a decrepit hinge. It made in upon a strip of narrow brick walk, swept scrupulously clean, lined with well-kept tulips; a walk which in turn arrived at the foot of a short and narrow stair leading up to the porch of the green-shuttered house itself.

It was a small place of some half-dozen rooms, and it served now, as it had for these twenty years, as home and workshop alike for its tenant. Aurora Lane had lived here so long that most folk thought she owned the place. As a matter of fact, she owned only a vast sheaf of receipted bills for rent paid to Nels Jorgens, the wagon-maker across the street. In all these twenty years her rent had been paid promptly, as were all her other bills.

Aurora Lane was a milliner, who sometimes did dress-making as well--the only milliner in Spring Valley--and had held that honor for many years. A tiny sign above the door announced her calling. A certain hat, red of brim and pronounced of plume, which for unknown years had reposed in the front window of the place--the sort of hat which proved bread-winning among farmers' wives and in the families of villagers of moderate income--likewise announced that here one might find millinery.

When she first had moved into these quarters so many years ago, scarce more than a young girl, endeavoring to make a living in the world, the maples had not been quite so wide, the grass along the sidewalk not quite so dusty.

It was here that for twenty years Aurora Lane had made her fight against the world. It had been the dream, the fierce, flaming ambition of all her life, that her son, her son beloved, her son born out of holy wedlock, might after all have some chance in life.

It was for this that she aided in his disappearance in his infancy, studiously giving out to all--without doubt even to the unknown father of the boy--the word that the child had died, still in its infancy, in a distant state, among relatives of her own. She herself, caught in the shallows of poverty and unable to travel, had not seen him in all these years--had not dared to see him--had in all the dulled but not dead agony of a mother's yearning postponed her sweet dream of a mother's love, and with unmeasurable bravery held her secret all these awful years. Schooling here and there, at length the long term in college, had kept the boy altogether a stranger to his native town, a stranger even to his own mother. He did not know his own past, nor hers. He did not dream how life had been made smooth for him, nor at what fearful cost. Shielded about always by a mother's love, he had not known he had a mother.

This was as his mother had wished. As for him, in some way he received the requisite funds. He wondered only that he knew so little of his own people, half orphan though he was. He had been told that his father, long since dead, had left a certain sum for the purpose of his education, although further of his own history he knew nothing. That he was not of honorable birth he never once had dreamed. And now he had heard this charge for the first time--heard it made publicly, openly, before all the world, on this which was to have been the happiest day in all his life.

But if Don Lane knew little about himself, there lacked not knowledge of his story, actual or potential, here in Spring Valley, once his presence called up the past to Spring Valley's languid mind. There had not yet been excitement enough for one day. Everyone, male and female, surging here and there in swift gossiping, now called up the bitter story so long hid in Aurora Lane's bosom.

As for Aurora, she had before this well won her fight of all these years. She was known as the town milliner, a woman honorable in her business transactions and prompt with all her bills. Socially she had no place. She was not invited to any home, any table. The best people of the town, the banker's wife, the families of the leading merchants, bought bonnets of her. Ministers--while yet new in their pulpits--had been known to call upon her sometimes--one had even offered to kneel and pray with her in her workroom, promising her salvation even yet, and telling her the story of the thief upon the cross. Once Aurora Lane went to church and sat far back, unseen, but she did so no longer now, had not for many years, feeling that she dared not appear in the church--the church which had not ratified her nuptial night!

She had her place, definite and yet indefinite, accepted and yet rejected, here in this village. But gradually, dumbly, doggedly she had fought on; and she had won. Long since, Spring Valley had ceased openly to call up her story. If once she had been wearer of the scarlet letter, the color thereof had faded these years back. She was the town milliner, a young woman under suspicion always, but no man could bring true word against her character. She had sinned--once--no more. If she had known opportunity for other sins than her first one, she held her peace. Human nature were here as it is elsewhere--women as keen; men as lewd. But the triumph of Aurora Lane might now have been called complete. She had "lived it down."

This long and terrible battle of one woman against so many strangely enough had not wholly embittered her life, so strong and sweet and true and normal had it originally been. She still could smile--smile in two fashions. One was a pleasant, sunny and open smile for those who came in the surface affairs of life. The other was deeper, a slow, wry smile, very wise, and yet perhaps charitable, after all. Aurora Lane knew!

But all these years she had worked on with but one purpose--to bring up her boy and to keep her boy in ignorance of his birth. He had never known--not in all these years! It had been her dream, her prayer, that he might never know.

And now he knew--he must know.

In this room were odds and ends of furniture, a few pictures not ill-chosen--pictures not in crude colors, but good blacks and whites. Woman or girl, Aurora Lane had had her own longings for the great things, the beautiful things of life, for the wide world which she never was to see. Her taste for good things was instinctive, perhaps hereditary. Had she herself not been an orphan, perhaps she had not dared the attempt to orphan her own son. There were books and magazines upon the table, mixed in with odds and ends of scraps of work sometimes brought hither; the margin between her personal and her professional life being a very vague matter.

Back of this central room, through the open door, showed the small white bed in the tiny sleeping room. At the side of this was the yet more tiny kitchen where Aurora Lane all these years had cooked for herself and washed for herself and drawn wood and water for herself. She had no servant, or at least usually had not. Daily she wrought a woman's miracles in economy. Year by year she had, in some inscrutable fashion, been able to keep up appearances, and to pay her bills, and to send money to her son--her son whom she had not seen in twenty years--her son for whom her eyes and her heart ached every hour of every day. She sewed. She made hats. What wonder if the scarlet of the hat in the window had faded somewhat--and what wonder if the scarlet of the letter on her bosom had faded even more?... Because it had all been for him, her son, her first-born. And he must never, never know! He must have his chance in the world. Though the woman should fail, at least the man must not.

So it was thus that, heavy-hearted enough now, she brought him to see the place where his mother had lived these twenty years. And now he knew about it, must know. It took all her courage--the last drop of her splendid, unflinching woman-courage.

"Come in, Don," she said. "Welcome home!"

He looked about him, still frowning with what was on his mind.

"Home?" said he.

"Don!" she said softly.

He laid a hand on her head, his lips trembling. He knew he was postponing, evading. She shrank back in some conviction also of postponing, evading. All her soul was honest. She hated deceit--though all her life she had been engaged in this glorious deceit which now was about to end.

"Tough sometimes, yes," she said, smiling up at him. "But don't you like it?"

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