Read Ebook: Roland Whately: A Novel by Waugh Alec

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Ebook has 93 lines and 5685 words, and 2 pages

Down at the toll-gate, nearly a mile from Justine's home in the direction of the village, a small and select company of loungers spent that evening. The toll-gate, kept by Jim Hardesty and his wife, Matilda, was at the junction of the big gravel pike which led to the county seat and the slim, shady lane that passed Justine's cottage. Here of evenings the "hired hands" of the neighborhood gathered to gossip, tell lies, and "talk ugly" about the farmers by whom they were employed. On the night of the wedding there were five or six slouchy, sweat-smelling rustics lounging on the porch. The wedding formed the only topic of conversation.

They talked of Justine's good looks and how "they'd liked to be in Jud's boots"; and of the days when old "Cap" Van lived and the bride of the night had not had to teach school; of the days when she rode horses of her own, and went to the city to make purchases instead of to the humble village as now; they talked of her kindly in their rough way. They discussed Jud with enthusiasm. Everybody liked him. His two years at college had not "swelled his head." He was "jest the feller fer Justine Van, an' she got him, too, 'g'inst ever' girl in the township--an' ever' one of 'em had set their caps fer him, too, you bet." The loungers agreed it was "too bad that Jud and Justine was so derned pore, but mebbe they'd make out somehow er 'nother."

They laughed about 'Gene Crawley's affection for Justine Van.

'Gene Crawley! A "hand" over at Martin Grimes' place--a plain, every-day hired man, working for eighteen dollars a month for the meanest, stingiest farmer in Clay Township! He was not any better than the rest of the hands on the place, "'s fer as learnin' an' manners wuz concerned. Hadn't no more license to be skylarkin' 'round after Justine Van 'n he had after Queen Willimeny. 'S if she'd notice sech a derned cuss as him; allus cussin' an' drinkin' an' fightin'. No 'spectabull girl would want to be saw with him."

About nine o'clock a dark figure approached the toll-gate afoot. It was a man, and he came from the night somewhere to the east, probably from the village of Glenville. There was no mistaking his identity. The heavy, swift tread told the watchers that it was 'Gene Crawley long before he came within the radius of light that shot through the open doorway. Someone in the crowd called out:

"H' are ye, 'Gene! Thought you'd be up to the weddin'."

'Gene did not reply. He strode up to the porch and threw himself into a vacant chair near the window. The light from within shone fairly upon his dark, sullen face, his scowling brow, and his flushed, unshaven cheeks. An ugly gleam was in his black eyes. He had been drinking, but he was not intoxicated. His hickory shirt, dirty and almost buttonless, was open at the throat as if it had been torn that its wearer might save himself from choking. He wore no coat, and his faded, patched blue overalls were pushed into the tops of his heavy boots. An old straw hat lay where he had cast it behind his chair. The black, coarse hair, rumpled and unkempt, grew low on his scowling forehead. His face was hard and deeply marked, not unlike that of an Indian. The jaw was firm, the chin square and defiant, the mouth broad and cruel, the nose large and straight, the eyes coal-black and set far apart, beneath heavy brows. The arm which rested on the sill was bare to the elbow; it was rugged, with cords of muscle that looked like ropes interlaced. A glimpse of the arm revealed, as if he stood stark naked, the strength of this young Samson. He was a huge, unwieldy man, a little above medium height; he might have weighed one hundred and seventy pounds; but with his square shoulders, broad chest, and an unusually erect carriage for an overworked farm-boy, he looked larger than he really was.

"You ain't got your Sunday-go-to-meetin' close on, 'Gene," commented Jim Hardesty, tilting back in his chair and spitting tobacco juice half way across the road.

"Didn' y' git a bid to the weddin'?" asked Harve Crose, with mock sympathy.

A flush of anger and humiliation reddened the face of Grimes' hired man, but it was gone in a second.

"No; I didn' git no bid," he answered, a trifle hoarsely. "Guess they didn' want me. I ain't good 'nough, 'pears like."

"Seems to me she'd orter ast you, 'Gene. You be'n kinder hangin' 'round an' teasin' her to have you, an' seems no more'n right fer her to have give you a bid to the weddin'," said Doc Ramsey, meaningly. "She'd orter done that, jest to show you why she wouldn' have you, don't y' see?"

Crawley's only reply was a baleful glare.

"How does it feel to be cut out by another feller, 'Gene?" asked Crose tauntingly.

"I'd never let a feller like Jud Sherrod beat my time," added Joe Perkins.

"Course, Jud's been to college and learned how to spoon with the girls, so I guess it's no wonder he ketched Justine. She's jest like all girls, I reckon. Smooth cuss kin ketch 'em all, b'gosh. Never seed it fail yit. Trouble with you, 'Gene, is 'at you--"

'Gene sprang to his feet with an oath so ugly that the jesters shrank back. For several minutes he tramped up and down the porch like a caged animal, cursing hoarsely to himself, his broad shoulders hunched forward as if he were bent on crushing everything before them. Finally he came to a standstill in front of the expectant crowd. The devil was in his face.

"Don't none o' you fellers ever say anything more to me about this. Ef you do I'll break somebody's neck. It's none o' your business how I feel, an' I won't have no more of it. Do y' hear me?" he snarled.

"I on'y ast fer information--" began Crose, apologetically.

"Well, I'll give you some, dang ye! You say I'm cut out, eh! Mebbe I am--mebbe I am! But you'll see--you'll see! I'll make him sorry fer it! He's whupped me this time, but I'll win yet! D' y' hear? I'll win yet!"

His face was almost white under the coat of tan, his eyes glowed, his voice was low and intense. The loungers waited in suspense.

"He thinks he's won! But I'll show him--I'll show him! She's like all women! She kin be won ag'in--she kin love more'n once! You say he's cut me out! Mebbe he has--mebbe he has! But this ain't a marker to the way I'll cut him out. I'll take her away from him, I will, so he'p me God! D' y' hear that? She'll shake him fer me some day, sure 's there's a hell, an' then! Then where'll he be? She'll be mine! Fair 'r foul, I'll have her! I won't give up tell I take her 'way from him! An' she'll come, too; she'll come! She'll leave him, jest like other women have done, an' then who'll be cut out? Answer, damn ye! Who'll be cut out?"

He was facing them and his lips were almost as white as the gleaming teeth beneath them. For a moment no one dared to reply. At last Doc Ramsey scrambled to his feet.

"Consarn ye, 'Gene Crawley!" he exclaimed. "You cain't stan' up there an' say that 'bout Justine Van! She's a good girl, an' you're a dern hound fer talkin' like thet! They ain't a bad drop o' blood in her body--they ain't a wrong thought in her head, an' you know it. You kin lick me, I know, but dern ef you kin say them things to me. She won't look at you no more'n she'd look at that dog o' Jim's over yander."

'Gene Crawley's arm struck out and Doc Ramsey crashed to the floor of the porch. He lay motionless for a long time. The dealer of the blow stood over him like a wild beast waiting for its prey to move. Not another man in the group lifted a hand against him.

At last he stooped and picked up his hat.

"That's what you'll all git ef you open your heads," he grated. "What I said about her goes!"

He fixed his hat roughly on his head and swung away in the darkness.

In the open door of the cottage down the lane Jud and Justine stood side by side, her hand in his, long after the last guest had departed. It was near midnight and behind them the lamps flickered and sputtered with the last gasps of waning life. Silhouetted in the long, bright frame of the doorway, the silent lovers presented a picture of a new life begun, youth on the threshold of a new world.

His arm drew her to his breast and her fluttering hands went slowly, gently to his cheeks. He bent and kissed the upturned lips.

Then the door closed and the picture was gone.

Across the road, beside the great oak that sent its branches almost to the little gateway, a man fell away from the fence, upon which, with murder in his heart, he had been leaning. His hands were clasped to his eyes, his strong figure writhed convulsively in the damp grass; his breath came almost in sobs. At last, taking his hands from his hot eyes, he raised his head and looked again toward the cottage. One by one the bright windows, grew dark, until at last the house was as black as the night about it. Then he sprang to his feet, clutching blindly at the darkness, uttering inarticulate moans and curses. For the first time in his life he knew a sense of loneliness and despair.

He turned his back to the cottage and fled across the meadow.

JUD AND JUSTINE.

Dudley Sherrod was the only son of John Sherrod, who had died about four years before the marriage. Up to the day of his death he was considered the wealthiest farmer in Clay Township. On that day he was a pauper; his lands were no longer his own; his wife and his son were penniless. In an upstairs room of the great old farmhouse, built by his grandfather when the country was new, he blew out his brains, unable to face the ruin that fate had brought to his door.

His father had been a member of the Legislature, and the boy had spent two years in the city, attending a medical college. When the diploma came he went back to the old home and hung out his shingle in quaint little Glenville. In less than a year he brought a bride to the farm--Cora Bloodgood, the daughter of a banker in the capital city of his State. Before the end of another year he was, as heir, owner of all his father's acres. So it was that John and Cora Sherrod began life rich and happy. Their boy was born, grew up a bright and sprightly lad, and was sent to college. From the rude country schoolhouse and its simple teachings he was sent to the busy university, among city boys and city girls, miserable in ungainly self-consciousness, altogether out of place. He left behind him the country lads and lasses, the tow-heads and the barefoots, and his heart was sore. But in the beginning of his second year the simplicity of his rural heart showed signs of giving way to urban improvements. His strength won for him a place on the football team, and the sense of dignity of this position displaced his self-consciousness and taught him to be interested in the world beyond his home. He began to know something besides the memory of green fields and meadows and clear blue skies.

All these months he was faithful to a slip of a girl down in the country to whom he had feared to utter a word of love. She knew she loved him because she had cried when he went away and had cried when he came back. Letters, stiff and painfully correct as to spelling and chirography, came each week from dear little Justine Van. To her his long letters, homesickness crowding between the lines, although she could not see it, were like messages from paradise. A dozen times a day she read each letter as she sat in her room, or in the hated schoolroom at Glenville, or in the shady orchard, or in the lonely lane. She longed to have him back at home, to hear his merry laugh, to romp with him as they had romped before he went away to school--but here she blushed and remembered that he was tall now, and dreadfully old and grand, and she was--she was fifteen! Jud thrashed a fellow student one day because he poked fun at an old tintype of Justine that he happened to see in the boy's room. The victim had laughed at the green bonnet, the long pig-tails, and the wide eyes of the girl in the picture--"just as if they were looking for the photographer's bird, you know."

Near the middle of his second year at college the crash came and the half-dazed boy hurried home. His father was dead and the whole country was telling the stories of his great financial losses. Every dollar, every foot of land had been swept away by reverses arising from investments in Arizona mines. Captain James Van went down in the same disaster. When word reached his home of the suicide of John Sherrod, he was on his way to the barn with a pistol hidden over his heart. Horror and the awakening of courage made him cast the pistol aside and turn to face the blow as a brave man should, with his wife and child behind his back.

Jud and Justine could not at first, and did not for many days, realize the force of the blow. One had lost father as well as home; the other had lost home and had sunk to a depth of poverty that grew more and more appalling as her young mind began to understand. The boy, when he finally grasped the situation, bared his arms and set forth to support himself and his mother by hard work. The shock of the suicide was too great for Mrs. Sherrod. Her reason fled soon after her husband was laid in the grave, but it was a year before death took her to him. During that last year of life she lived in the old place, a helpless invalid, mentally and physically, although the property belonged to another. David Strong held a mortgage on the home place, but he did not foreclose it until she was gone.

For a year Jud cared for his mother, and worked in the fields with David Strong's men at wages of twelve dollars a month. Half of the year's crop Strong gave to the widow of John Sherrod, although not a penny's worth of it was hers by right. After her death Strong and his family moved into the big old house, and Jud Sherrod lived in a room in what had been his home.

Justine Van's grandmother, in her will, left to the girl a thirty-acre piece of ground, half timber, half cultivated, about a mile from the white house in which the beneficiary was born and which was swallowed up by the great disaster. Bereft of every penny, James Van took his wife and daughter to the miserable little cottage. The girl shouldered as much of the burden of poverty as her young and tender shoulders could carry. She begged for an appointment as teacher in the humble schoolhouse where her a-b-abs had been learned, and for two years and a half before her marriage she had taught the little flock of boys and girls. Especially necessary did this means of earning a livelihood become when, two years after the failure, her father died. Then Mrs. Van followed him, and Justine, not nineteen, was face to face with the world, a trembling, guileless child.

Her wages at the schoolhouse were twenty-five dollars a month, for six months in a year, and the yield of grain from her poorly tilled farm was barely enough to pay the taxes and the help hire. Old Jim Hardesty farmed the place for her, and he robbed her. For six months after the mother's death she lived alone in the cottage, and then the neighbors finally taking the matter in hand and insisting that she be provided with a companion, her old nurse, Mrs. Crane, came to the place. She was shrewd from years of adversity and persuaded Justine to send Jim Hardesty packing--and that was the hardest duty Justine had ever had to meet.

The discouraged boy, over on David Strong's place, worn thin with hard work and sickness, deprived of every chance, as he thought, to realize his ambitions, found in the girl a sympathetic comrade. Of all the people in his world she was the only one who understood his desires, and could, in a way, share with him the despair that made life as he lived it seem like a narrow cell from which he could look longingly with no hope of escape. Tired and sore from misfortune, these two simple, loving natures turned to each other. His first trembling kiss upon her surpr

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