Read Ebook: The Cottage of Delight: A Novel by Harben Will N Will Nathaniel

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Ebook has 1123 lines and 68080 words, and 23 pages

"You'll do nothing!" The child smiled fearlessly. "Your bark is worse than your bite, brother John. But I'm going. I'll come back, though. I'll be over to clean up and cook something for you. You won't come back to our old shack, I know."

When she had left he went into the cottage, but he did not light the gas again. The darkness seemed more suitable to his mood. He sat down on the edge of his and Tilly's bed. His massive hand sank into her pillow. It was past his supper hour, but he had no desire to eat. The sheer thought of the kitchen where his young wife had worked, somehow suggested her death. A little round metal clock on the mantel was ticking sharply. He got up and wound it, as usual, at that hour. He went into the sitting-room. Here he sat down, lurched forward in unconscious weakness, and then, swearing impatiently, he steadied himself. He remained there only a minute. Rising, he went into the dining-room, felt about, as a blind man might, for a chair, and sank into it. Crossing his arms on the table, he rested his head on them. Had he been a weaker man he might have pitied himself. He had always contended that a man who could not bear pain and adversity had a "yellow streak" in him. He had once had a painful operation performed without an anesthetic, and he now told himself that he simply must master the things within and without him which had combined to overthrow him. He ground his teeth together. He clenched his fingers till the nails of some of them broke.

The iron latch of the gate clicked. A heavy step grated on the gravel walk. He sat up straight and listened. The cast-iron door-bell rang. There was a pause, then a step sounded in the hall. Some one was entering unbidden and stalking into the house.

"Oh, John--Johnny, my boy! Where are you?" It was Cavanaugh's voice filled with fluttering grief, tenderness, dismay.

"Here I am!" John did not rise. "Here, in the dining-room."

"But the light--the light. Why don't you--"

Cavanaugh broke off as he stood in the doorway. He paused there for a moment, as if wondering what state a light would reveal the crouched form of his friend to be in.

"I know. It's town talk, a delicious tidbit for women and loafers," John sneered. "Well, well, it is done, Sam. It has happened, and that is all there is to it."

"I hurried over to see you and talk with you," Cavanaugh went on. "I don't know what step you want to take."

"Don't! don't! my boy!" Cavanaugh cried, huskily. "You are breaking my heart. I wanted you with me. I saw how you two loved one another, and I thought I was acting right. I--I couldn't pull the bad conduct of others between you and that sweet little girl. I am not satisfied to let it rest as it is, either. You may not want to take any steps, but it is my duty to try to do something."

"Something? What the hell could you or any one do?"

"Well, I'll tell you what struck me, my dear boy. I'm going up to Cranston to-night and see how the land lies. I don't intend to rest idle and know no more than I've picked up in the wild talk of men on the streets up-town and a stupid negro cab-driver. This is a serious matter, and I have a big duty to perform."

"It won't do any good," John groaned, softly, and he shook his head. "I've been thinking it all over. I began to get my eyes open as soon as we got here. I've been a fool--a boy, a blind boy, at that, and what has happened to-day is not such a great surprise. You needn't go up there and beg for me, Sam. Say what you will, I am not worthy of her--that's the whole damned truth in a nutshell."

"Not worthy of her?" Cavanaugh protested. "How ridiculous, my boy!"

Cavanaugh's sympathies were wrung dry. He sat blinking as if every word from his prot?g? were a blow well aimed at him. Once he started to speak, but his voice broke and he desisted, sitting with his arms grimly folded, his legs awkwardly crossed, a broad, dust-coated shoe poised in mid-air.

"Good?" John sniffed. "Sam, don't talk to me of a God--yours or any other man's. When you have been where I am now, you'll know more about God than you do. God? God? God? You say he is everywhere. He's here to-night, isn't he? Here in this room? There in the kitchen where she left the dishes unwashed? Here where she left the door unlocked and ran away, disgusted with me for leading her into such a mess."

"Hush, hush, my boy!" entreated Cavanaugh, a dry sob rasping his throat. "Don't say any more! It is almost time for my train. I'm going up there to-night and see what can be done. Tilly will talk to me. What could she say here to these strangers? Now, don't go to work to-morrow. Things will move along all right for one day without us, and you won't feel like working, anyhow. I'll get back to-morrow night at ten o'clock. Wait for me here."

The grim silence which now brooded over John gave consent, and Cavanaugh rose and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Don't give up," he said. "I'm sure I'll bring back good news. God will see to that."

"I'll wait for you, Sam," John consented, "but it won't be as you hope. There is no God to see to anything. God didn't help my father, did he? Neither will he help me. The whole thing is blind chance. 'Lead us not into temptation'! What a pitiful prayer! My mother, you say, was led in when she was not more than a girl. Were the designing men on her track God's agents, and is my fate, and my young wife's, a part of some plan laid in heaven?"

"Wait, wait!" Cavanaugh reached down and took John's inert hand and pressed it. "I'll see you to-morrow night."

John slept but little that night. There must have been a deep undercurrent of sentiment in his make-up, despite his practical type of mind, for the sight of everything Tilly had touched gave him infinite pain. He waked frequently through the night, and even while sleeping was tossed and torn by innumerable tantalizing dreams. He was awake at sunup, and again the lonely mental spectator of the clouded panorama of the day before.

There was a sound of pans and pots being handled in the kitchen, and he got up and went to the kitchen door. It was Dora making a fire in the range. She glanced up, saw him, smiled sheepishly, and lowered her head.

"There is nobody over home," she explained, apologetically. "They went off last night to be gone two days--another trip to Atlanta with old Roly-poly and some more. Aunt Jane was sick, but she dressed and went, all the same. I came over to cook your breakfast, wash the dishes, and do up the house. Why shouldn't I? There is nothing to do at home."

He said nothing, but as he turned away a faint sense of gratitude seemed to enter the aching void within him. A little later she called him to the dining-room. He had eaten no supper the night before, and his physical being demanded nourishment. He sat down and the child waited on him. The coffee was good and bracing, the eggs and steak were prepared to his taste, the toast brown and crisp.

Somehow he now regarded Dora with pity. How frail, wan, and anemic she looked! How thin and bloodless her hands and cheeks! She had the making of a good woman in her, but she, too, was losing her chance. How sad! How pitiful!

"You work too hard," he suddenly said, and he wondered if that touch of refined consideration for another had come from his contact with his wife. "You are too little and young. Sit down yourself and eat."

She shrugged her peaked shoulders and laughed. "I'm not hungry. I'm not a bit hungry here lately. The only thing I care for is syrup and bread, and they say too much of that as a regular diet will get you down in the long run."

He stared, his impulse toward her betterment oozing out of him. The whistles of the factories reminded him that he was not to work that day--that he was not to return at dark to Tilly, as had been his wont, and he rose and went back to the bedroom. What was to take place? Why, the day would drag by and Cavanaugh would return with some verdict or other--some report that would settle his fate forever.

Leaving Dora at work in the kitchen, he went outside. Desiring not to meet any one, he made his way to the nearest wooded hillside beyond his mother's house and the bleak, white-capped cemetery. From that coign of vantage he saw the town stretched out beneath him. He found a great moss-grown boulder and half lay, half sat on it. The sun climbed higher and higher; the din of the town and its industries beat in his ears, the buzz of a planing-mill, the clang of hammered iron. He ought not to have attempted to pass that particular day in absolute solitude and inactivity, but he knew naught of his own psychology. He watched for the coming and going of trains, telling himself again and again that Cavanaugh's return would decide his fate forever. What would he be informed? How could he face the thing that he had told Cavanaugh actually was to happen--that Tilly and he were to be parted forever?

At noon he crept down the hill, keeping himself hidden till the way was clear, then he hastened across the open to the cottage. The child, still there, had given it a semblance of order, and his lunch was on the table. She refused to sit with him, though he asked her in a tone that was full of consideration and that odd, abashed tenderness for her which seemed to be rooting in the loam of pained humility which filled him.

"I want to know, brother John," she said, her deep-sunken eyes staring earnestly--"I want to know if you think she is coming back?"

He gulped down his hot coffee, and as he replaced his cup in his saucer he said, with a touch of his old fatalistic recklessness: "I don't know. I think not. Sam is up there to-day to--to see about it. He will be back to-night. I don't know. I'm leaving it all to him, and--and to--her."

Later, as he sat and smoked in the parlor he tried to read the daily newspaper that had been left at his door, but even the boldest head-lines foiled to catch and rivet his attention. Taking a hammer and nails, he went into the back yard to repair a fence; but he had scarcely started to lift the first plank into place when the incongruity of the thing clutched him as in a vise. What was he doing? Why was he thinking of a thing so inconsequential as that? And for whom was he putting the fence to rights? With an oath born of sheer bleak agony, he threw the hammer from him and dropped the nails and plank to the ground. He had loved the place; he and Tilly had called it their "Cottage of Delight"; he had thought he would keep it in order, and even improve it, but all that was gone. He went back to the hillside. He watched the afternoon melt away, saw the sun go down into a bed of crimson and pink and the filmy cloud-curtains being drawn about the molten sleeper.

It was growing dark when he went back to the cottage. Dora was in the kitchen, preparing his supper. He was vaguely angered by her attention to him. He appreciated her doglike fidelity, but it made him impatient, for she was too small, young, and weak to do all that she was doing.

"You must go home," he blurted out, standing in the doorway and surveying her. "I'm able to look out for myself. I'm not hungry, anyway, now, for you have filled me up to the neck."

She smiled wistfully. There was a smudge of soot on her nose which gave her face a grotesque look. Her bare legs and feet were dust-coated and scrawny.

"I want to be here when Mr. Cavanaugh comes back," she contended, almost defiantly, a shadow of rigid doggedness in her eyes.

"But you can't," he retorted with irritation. "It will be late at night and you should be in bed."

"You can't sit up around here," he said, firmly. "You've got to go home."

She said nothing. He thought he had offended her and was sorry for it, but when supper was over he prevailed upon her to go. "Poor little rat!" he mused, as he stood at the gate and watched her vanish in the night. "She's never had a chance, and she'll never have one. Huh! Sam's God and old Whaley's is busy counting the hairs of her head and no harm will ever come to her--oh no, none at all!"

John paced back and forth in the little front yard. Eight o'clock came; nine; ten, and a little later he heard the whistle of the south-bound train as it drew near the town. The last street-car for the night would be leaving the Square in a few minutes. Cavanaugh would take it. He seldom rode in a cab, and time was too valuable for him to walk to-night.

The minutes passed. Presently he heard the rumble of the little car as it crossed an elevated trestle a half-mile away, then he saw its lighted windows flitting through the pines and oaks which bordered its tracks. It paused at the terminus. John heard the driver ordering his horse around to the other end, and he retreated into the house. Sam should not catch him there watching as if life or death hung on his report. It was one thing to feel a thing, and another to show it like weak women who weep openly for the dead, or men who cry out in pain like spoiled children. He went into the parlor and sat down. The outer night was very still, so still that he heard Cavanaugh's heavy tread when he was yet some distance away. Thump, thump, thump! John found himself counting the steps.

Cavanaugh was at the gate now. He was noiselessly opening and closing it as if fearful of waking some one asleep in the house.

"Is that you, Sam?" John called out from the parlor.

"Yes, yes, my boy, it is me. I--I thought you might be in bed," and the contractor now tiptoed into the hall and stood in the parlor doorway.

"Oh no, I thought I'd wait up," John replied. "Like a fool, I didn't work to-day, and you see I'm not so tired as I usually am. Come in. Got a match? I'll light the gas. I didn't light it because it is warm to-night and I was smoking. Did you bring any cigars with you? I've hung on to my pipe all day and wouldn't mind a change."

"No, I plumb forgot," Cavanaugh answered. "I had to hurry to get my train. I didn't go about any of the stores, either--too many idle gossipmongers hanging about. Don't light up for me. I--I-- We can talk just as well without that. I really ought to be at home. I just thought I'd stop by and--and--"

He went no farther. John heard him feeling about for a chair and saw his dim bulk sink into it. There was no doubting the man's agitation, and why was he agitated? John thought he knew, and bared his mental breast to the hot iron of revelation.

"You say you didn't go out to the work to-day?" Cavanaugh said, irrelevantly enough to explain his mien and mood.

"No, I ought to have gone, but I didn't. I was a fool to hang around here like this, eating my head off and making a smoke-house of my lungs. It is the first day off I've had for a long time."

This remark was followed by silence. Cavanaugh broke it with a slowly released sigh. "I may as well tell you what I did," he faltered.

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