Читать книгу The Heart that Knows - Charles George Douglas Roberts - Страница 5

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Technically, it was a rectory, in that it was the official residence of the rector of the parishes of Westcock and Dorchester; but the old, wide-eaved, brick house where Mr. Goodridge lived was known as Westcock Parsonage. It stood about half-way up the long slope of the hill, presenting its side, with dormer-windowed roof, to the vast, aerial view of the marshes and the bay, while its wide gable-end fronted on the ill-kept road running up and over the ridge. At each end of the house stood a luxuriant thicket of lilacs, and between the lilacs, along below the windows of the view, ran a green terrace studded with pink, yellow, and blue beehives. Below the terrace spread a neat garden of old-fashioned flowers, flanked by old cherry and apple trees; and below that a strip of vegetable garden, showing by its trim prosperity that the rector was a good gardener. Then, a sloping field of upland grass, thick-starred with buttercups and daisies. Then the Wood Point road along the hillside, with its two parallel lines of weather-beaten fence; and below the road a half-mile of fields and rough pasture lots, leading down to the deep-bosomed fertility of the marsh-level. From those high, narrow dormer-windows on the roof, looking southeastward over the solitudes of green, and tawny gold, and blue, all the pageants of the hours and the seasons could be seen radiantly unfolding. Behind the house, to shield it from the fierce north winds, towered groves of ancient, sombre, dark green spruce and fir, their high, serried tops populous with crows. Across the front end of the parsonage ran a low veranda, and about ten paces before the veranda steps stood a lofty, spire-like, blue-green hackmatack-tree, whose feathery and delicate needles sighed to every air. In a circle around the hackmatack ran the red earth driveway, then straight on for about forty paces to the white front gate, leading to the road over the hill. Some fifty or sixty paces below the parsonage gate this road crossed the Wood Point road at right angles, and led away down between pastures on the right and the high fences and trees of Westcock House on the left, till it petered out to a mere cart-track, passed under a set of high bars, and wound away over the marshes toward the creek-mouth and the dyke.

It was up this road that Luella came in the dusk, with the faint sound of the church-bell pulsing intermittently on her ears. She passed the bars without knowing whether she had let them down or climbed over. Mounting the slope, she was poignantly conscious of a sudden waft of perfume from a deep thicket of blossoming lilacs in the back field of Westcock House. The soft, melting, passionate fragrance stabbed her like a knife-thrust. It was memory made palpable, of one wonderful night when she and Jim had sat for hours amid the scented dark of those trees, listening to the soft roar of the ebb down the channels of Tantramar. Her face twisted, and she half-stumbled. Then she pressed on resolutely up the hill.

At the crossroads she halted. To reach her own home, she must turn to the right along the Wood Point road, pass the black groves of Westcock House, with their haunted deeps of silence, skirt the mysterious gully of the Back Lot, descend the water-worn track of Lawrence’s Hill, and so along past Purdy’s shipyard to the corner store of her uncle, old Abner Baisley, on the bank of the Frosty Hollow “Bito.” She did not want to go home. In the dining-room window of the parsonage she saw a light. To her that house stood for every loving-kindness, and understanding, and succour. She wanted to feel the rector’s hand, warm and strong, clasp hers for a moment. She wanted Mrs. Goodridge to give her a kiss and a vigorous hug, and murmur at the same time, rather abstractedly, “Well, dear!” Through all the numbness of her despair she was absurdly conscious of the sudden, disconcerting way in which the lady would then take notice, and exclaim—“But where’s your sunbonnet, Luella? You’ll catch your death of cold, out at night without a thing on your head, and the dew falling!” These things went through her brain, however, like something she had read of long ago, concerning people who perhaps had never existed at all. She knew that the rector and Mrs. Goodridge were both away at church. That pitiless, faint throbbing of the bell had stopped a few moments before,—and the rector was now beginning, “Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places—” Mrs. Goodridge was in the square, green-lined rectory pew, close under the pulpit, and even now turning to scan the back pews with her bright but near-sighted blue eyes and to wonder what could be keeping Luella and Jim so late. No, there was no help at the parsonage. And if her friends, dear and trusted as they were, had been at home, Luella knew that she would not, could not, have let out her cry of anguish even to them. She would have shut her teeth fast, just as she was doing now, till her jaws hurt.

She realized now that she had gone up to the big white gate of the parsonage, and was staring through it, her forehead pressed against the top bar. What her purpose was, or her desire, she did not even try to think. There was nothing to be done, but just wait, wait, wait, every hour an eternity, yet all bearing her with fierce, insidious haste toward a calamity from which there was no escape. With her eyes fixed upon the dim shape of the parsonage veranda, yet seeing nothing, she stood there motionless, she knew not how long. Suddenly she was startled by the sound of footsteps close at her side, and, turning swiftly, she found herself face to face with Mary Dugan, the maid of all work at the parsonage.

Mary Dugan threw up her hands in amazement.

“Well, I never!” she cried. “Be this you. Luelly Warden, or your ghost?”

“It’s me, Mary!” answered Luella, in a strained, flat voice.

“But, land’s sakes alive, why ain’t you down to the church, gittin’ married this very minute?” went on Mary, hopelessly bewildered.

“I ain’t going to get married,” muttered Luella, dully, leaning her forehead once more against the top bar. Her hair had come down again, and seemed to make a pale light in the rich summer gloom.

“You, not git married? What d’you mean? What’s happened? Where’s Jim?” queried Mary, breathlessly.

“We had a falling out. He’s gone!” responded Luella, in an even voice, as if it was all no great matter.

Mary Dugan was silent for a moment. She felt herself in the presence of a tragedy, and her simple heart was moved. She had seen a ship go out that afternoon, but had not dreamed it was the G. G. Goodridge. She came up close, and threw an arm over Luella’s shoulder.

“That wa’n’t the Goodridge I seen goin’ out this afternoon!” she said.

“It was!” replied Luella.

“Poor dear! Poor dear!” whispered Mary, awed by the situation, which her experienced heart was quick to apprehend. “I’d never have thought it of Jim Calder. Of all the Westcock boys, he’s the last one I’d ’a’ thought it of!”

The infinite pity in her voice smote Luella’s slumbering pride to life. She shook off the compassionate arm, and turned upon Mary with eyes that flamed in the dark.

“I did it myself!” she cried, thickly. Her words would hardly form themselves, and her tongue tripped. “Jim ain’t to blame. It’s every mite my fault. I did it myself!” Thrusting Mary aside, she flung off fiercely down the hill, and turned the corner for home. In her outraged pride she had spoken words which sowed an ill seed of doubt in even the kindly mind of Mary Dugan. For the time, however, Mary had no thought save of compassion for the girl, and of indignation against Jim Calder.

“Poor babe!” she muttered to herself, looking with pity after the dim figure flitting along against the black background of the Westcock House firs. “I’m afeard she’s been an’ gone an’ bit off her nose to spite her face! Lor’, how Westcock’ll talk! Tss! Tss! I wisht I knowed jest what’d happened!” Speculating on this theme Mary let herself through the gate, and strolled contemplatively up the drive between the two rows of little, pointed spruce bushes which the rector had just planted. At the veranda steps she paused, sniffed with deep satisfaction the rich and soft night air, and muttered—“Lor’, how sweet them laylocks does smell!” Then, remembering that the front door was locked, she went around to the kitchen and let herself in with the big, back door key.

Meanwhile Luella was speeding on past the haunted groves, and down over Lawrence’s Hill. In her sick rage at the pity in Mary Dugan’s voice, she quite forgot that she might be cruelly misinterpreted if she took the blame upon herself. All she thought of was that she could not and would not endure to be pitied. She felt that she would strangle with her bare hands any one who should say she had been jilted. At the foot of the hill she paused, and stared for several minutes along the road to her right, where a light gleamed through an apple-tree some three or four hundred yards away. That light came from the window of Mrs. Rebecca Calder, Jim’s mother; and Luella said to herself: “She’s glad of it. I know she is!” Having muttered this over several times, she seemed to feel Mrs. Calder’s uncompromising and inescapable eyes upon her, and grew suddenly aware once more that her hair was down about her shoulders. Hurriedly she coiled it up again, then turned her steps resolutely homeward, with the rush of the ebb tide, as the creek emptied itself tempestuously into the Tantramar, filling the night with soft, indeterminate sound.

When she had come opposite Purdy’s shipyard, holding her eyes aloof from the spot where still stood the skeleton poles and scaffoldings, empty as her life, it suddenly occurred to her that by this time church must be coming out. The thought galvanized her into activity. She must not meet any one who had been there, any one who had joined in the buzz of wondering talk in the porch after service. Above all, she could not face her Uncle Abner on his return. He would be furious, and insulted. She could see him stalking back, stiff in his long black broadcloth coat, his raw, high-featured, narrow face both hard and weak, and his thin, grayish-reddish side-whiskers bristling forward. She realized what his petty, intolerable questioning would be, and how his close-set little eyes would be red around the lids as they gimleted into her soul. She must, oh, she must be home, and safely locked into her own room over the side porch, before he arrived. She broke into a run, now; and only steadied down again to a swift walk when two “hands” from the shipyard approached. They gave her “Good evenin’,” cordially and respectfully, and turned to stare after her in amazement as she went by them with only an inarticulate sound in response to their salutation. Her lips and mouth and throat were as dry as wood. To her infinite relief she reached the “Bito” without passing any more wayfarers. Two teams were hitched to the fence beside the store, and half a dozen men and boys were loitering around outside, waiting for Mr. Baisley to return from service and open up shop again. Not looking at any of them, and merely muttering a collective reply to their various greetings, Luella sped past to the little garden gate, up the narrow path, and in through the tiny lattice-work porch at the end of the house, which was the private entrance, and served to keep the living-rooms apart from the traffic of the store. Not pausing to light the lamp, she ran up the narrow, crooked, tilted stairs, gained her slant-roofed sanctuary under the eaves, and locked herself in. Till the morrow, at least, she was safe from all torture of tongues.