Читать книгу Dixie Hart - Will N. Harben - Страница 10

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N the day set for Dixie's wedding Henley had occasion to go to the little express office, adjoining the old-fashioned brick car-shed in the village, to see about a shipment of produce which had been incorrectly marked. And as he was returning he saw the girl seated in her wagon in the open space between the station and the hotel.

Henley knew what it meant. She had come to meet her lover. She happened to have her glance fixed on some point in the opposite direction from him and did not know that he was near. He hesitated for an instant, and then decided that he would not intrude upon her privacy. There was something in her attitude of bland and helpless expectancy that probed the deepest fount of his sympathy.

"Poor, brave little woman!" he mused, as he turned his back upon the scene and moved on toward his store. "She's having her dream like all the rest. She may get a fair cut of the cards, and she may not. He ain't very promising material from the looks of his picture, but it wouldn't be fair to judge him by that. He may do his part, and the Lord knows she needs help. I'm too big a failure in the marrying line to object or offer advice."

Reaching his desk, he applied himself to the writing of some letters pertaining to his intended trip to Texas, but the pathetic sight he had of the girl at the station thrust itself between him and his task. She was his faithful friend. He loved her almost as if she had been a sister; she had confided in him; only he and she and her little family knew of what was to take place to-day. How strange to think that she would no longer be as she was! The wife of a man she had never seen, of a man whose full name Henley had not even heard.

Just then the still air was stirred by the sportive whippoorwill's call with which the young engineer of that particular train always announced with the locomotive's whistle his approach to Chester, and later there was a sound of escaping steam and the slow clanging of a bell as the train drew up in the shed. Only a moment's pause, and the train was off again.

It occurred to Henley that as his store was on the most direct way to her home Dixie would naturally drive past it on her return, so he went to the front, taking pains to stand back a few feet from the entrance that his position might not appear to be by design. He was glad that Cahews and Pomp were busy in the rear, and he became conscious of the hope that no stray customer would interrupt him at what seemed such a grave and important moment. Time passed, and still old Bob and the ramshackle wagon were not in sight. Henley cautiously ventured to the door, whence he glanced down the street. He saw the wagon. It was now at the door of the post-office, but no one was in it. With his hip-joint loose the animal swayed and sagged against one of the shafts, the reins hanging from his rump to the ground.

"They've stopped to get the mail," Henley said in his tight throat; "they'll be out in a minute. I'll take one peep at 'im, anyway."

But Dixie emerged from the narrow doorway of the little building alone. She was reading a letter, and she groped slowly across the sidewalk to the wagon, where she stood till she had finished it. Even at that distance Henley could see that she was pale, and he fancied that her hand and step were unsteady as she mounted to the spring seat and reached for the reins. Henley receded farther into the store, actuated by a vague intuition that she might not care to be seen, and he was glad that he had not intruded upon her, for, as she drove past the store, she did not glance toward it, but instead looked steadily in the opposite direction.

"The fellow didn't come, and she's had bad news besides," Henley mused, and he now stood in the doorway and looked after the shackly vehicle as it moved slowly away in the beating sunshine. "She's bad hit by something or other," he said, anxiously. "I've never seen her look like that before. Some'n has gone wrong."

He did not see her for three days. On the evening of the third day he was standing at the door of his barn. It was growing dark. The coming night had robed the mountain-peaks in gray, and put them out of sight. Old Wrinkle was singing "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord!" as he trudged back to the house, swinging his empty swill-pail. The door of Dixie Hart's cottage opened, and in a narrow frame of firelight she stood peering out toward him. Then he saw that she was coming. She moved swiftly, and with a sure step, till she paused at the fence which separated her land from his.

"I've been wanting to see you, Alfred," she said, in a low, changed voice. "I had no excuse to go to the store, and—well, I didn't think that was exactly the place, anyway to—to say what I had to say. You haven't spoke about what I told you to anybody—I know in reason that you haven't, but—"

"I'd cut off my right arm first," he declared, earnestly. "What you said that day was as sacred to me as if it had come from on high and my very salvation depended on it."

"I knew that," she said, softly. "I only said that to—to sort o' get started. I'm all upset, Alfred; I'll get right after a while, but things are all crooked now. I've had trouble—I reckon a girl might call it that and still have self-respect. I've had heaps of unexpected trouble."

"I was afraid some'n had gone wrong," Henley found himself able to say, "not hearing any more, you see, about—about what you talked of that day."

"I'm going to tell you, and then dismiss it," Dixie said, her pretty lip twitching, the dark curves under her eyes lending sharp contrast to their fathomless lustre. "I had everything ready, and went to meet him, but he didn't come. I went to the post-office and got a letter. He was—was taken sick—so the letter said. He was pretty bad off. In fact, Alfred, the truth is, he's dead; the—the fellow is dead."

Her head was down; she had folded her arms on the top rail of the fence, and she rested her brow on them. He was wondering if she was crying and what there was for him to say, when she suddenly, and quite dry-eyed, looked up and said: "But that must be a secret, too. Nobody knows about it except my home folks, and nobody must. I'd give plumb up if Carrie Wade was to flaunt that in my face and start it going over hill and dale."

"It's too bad," Henley ventured, as nearly upon what he considered consolation as his knowledge of her rather questionable bereavement would justify. "What was his complaint?"

"You mean, what ailded him?" Dixie asked, an incongruous flush battling with the pallor of her face and becoming observable even in the starlight. "Why, you see, Alfred, I didn't get full particulars—a body never can, you know, at a time like that—and in just a letter—but you can depend upon it that it was sudden."

"Maybe it was what they say is so common now," Henley pursued, awkwardly—"heart failure."

"Or weakness of the backbone." He was sure that she smiled impulsively, for she quickly covered her mouth with her hand and lowered her head to the fence again, and for a moment he stood staring at her and wondering if the calamity had caused her to be hysterical. Suddenly she looked up again and said:

"I reckon you think I ought to act different—that I ought to cry and take on—but I can't. You must make what allowance you can. You see, I never saw him in my life, and, well, it was just a wild-goose chase that started in nothing and ended the same way."

"I see," Henley ventured, "but I'm sorry. Death is bad enough, in any case, but to be called away without a minute's notice and on the eve of—"

"Well, you needn't be sorry for me—you needn't waste pity on me," Dixie broke in with irrelevant warmth. "You'll find me doing business at the same old stand, man or no man. If we can just keep this silly caper from getting out I'll be thankful. So far, I've got along by myself, and, outside of wanting to flaunt a husband in Carrie Wade's face, I don't know as I'll be particularly disappointed. I can keep on at the plough and hoe, rain or shine, and—" Her voice had trailed away into indistinctness, and he saw her lower lip quivering. She suddenly turned and hurried away.

He saw her vanish in the lighted doorway, and he stood overwhelmed with blended perplexity and sympathy.

"She's trying to keep a stiff upper lip, but she's hit, and hit hard—harder'n I thought possible in her case," he mused. "She never saw the feller, but she may have had a sort of a idea in her head of what he was like, an' the loss is as keen as if she had knowed him a long time, maybe keener, for the gloss hain't been rubbed off by actual acquaintance, as it has been off of me and most other married folks. I reckon my wife has put the gloss back on Dick Wrinkle, if it was ever off, and I've got a rival in the spirit-world that nothing earthly could ever hope to match. They say absence works that way, and when I get to Texas maybe she will look back on all I've done to keep peace and harmony betwixt us and appreciate me more than she is doing now. I say maybe, for, on t'other hand, she may be glad to have me away, and when I get back I may find that her whole heart is in the empty grave she is bent on digging and adorning at such a great outlay."