Читать книгу Dixie Hart - Will N. Harben - Страница 9

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HAT evening after supper, while the sultry dusk hung heavily over the land, shutting out the few lights of the village and obscuring the near-by mountain, Henley took his chair into the passage, and, without his coat, he leaned back against the weather-boarding and lighted his pipe. He had not been there long when his wife, having finished her duties in the kitchen, came out and stood over him. Accustomed to her varying moods, he saw by her attitude that she was displeased.

"Pa told me something I don't like," she began. "I tried not to pay attention to it, but it was so unexpected, so unheard-of, so plumb disrespectful, that it hurt me. He said you told him you was going to Texas to keep from being here during the—the memorial service next month."

"I told him no such thing," Henley retorted, with an effort to control his rising temper. "I can't be responsible for the slap-dash way he puts things. I don't like his eternal gab, nohow."

"Well, you must have said something," Mrs. Henley pursued, probingly. "He never makes up things out of whole cloth. He is not that way."

"Well, I suppose I did say something," Henley reluctantly admitted. "He was nagging the life out of me at the store about what you intended to do, and holding me up to ridicule, and I reckon I did say that I wouldn't be here—that my business would keep me in Texas. As for that matter, I told you about the trip long before this queer—long before you decided to do this—this thing."

"I know just how you said it," the woman threw back, sharply. "I know what you've thought all along about Pa and Ma being here, and me loving 'em and caring for 'em. You do your best to hide it, but you can't."

"Well, if I do my best, what more could you expect?" Henley asked, with more logic than patience.

"I'd want you to keep your promise to me," Mrs. Henley said, crisply, and she bent lower over him and fixed her offended eyes on his. "You told me before we were married that you'd promise never to object—you even said you admired me for my feelings, and that it proved to you that I had stability and strength of character—that you wouldn't have a wife that would ever forget her dead husband."

"Well, I have kept my promise," Henley said. "I am not sure that I knowed just precisely what I was doing when I made it, but I've kept it. As for attending his—his funeral services at such a late day, that is another thing. I don't see how you could expect it."

"You don't?" she flared up. "Will you tell me if there would be anything to be ashamed of in your being there? Would a divine service of that sort disgrace you? Would it besmirch your character?"

"No, and nobody said it would," Henley managed to fish from his addled brain. "But I simply thought, somehow, that it would look better for me to be out of the way. Funerals and the like are generally attended by mourners, and, well, where would I come in? I reckon my proper seat would be with you and the—the rest of the family on the front bench, if it was anywhere. It would look funny for me just to be a looker-on from the back part of the house, and I'd feel like a dern fool in front. A dern fool—you may not know what that is from experience, but you ought to from observation; you've had one under your eye for some time."

"Well, you simply don't approve of it," the woman returned, resentfully. "You can set there, blessed with good health and life, and plenty to eat and wear, and actually begrudge the little mite of respect that is paid to the helpless dead. In being overpersuaded and marrying you I was untrue to him and his memory, and now you make it worse by opposing a simple little ordinance that is due every person on earth, high or low."

"It ought to have been done earlier, and before I got—got mixed up in it, if it was done at all," Henley said, trying to speak mildly and, even, pacifically.

"I know that now," Mrs. Henley said, in a tone of such deep self-reproach that her stare softened and wavered; "but it wasn't thought of. I never knew it was the style till this man come along and told me; but that is no reason I shouldn't make amends, late as it is. It is all the better proof that Dick is remembered. But you can go to Texas." The stare hardened and became fixed again. "Folks will say you are jealous and mean, and that I was an unfaithful fool for listening to you, but I will have to stand it."

"Well, I'll simply be obliged to be away," Henley said, doggedly. "The business won't be put off, and—and—"

"And you are a heartless brute!" the gaunt woman cried, as she whirled from him and strode into the house.

A few minutes later there emerged from the near-by door of the kitchen the real instigator of the present dispute. He trudged across the passage, drawn down on one side by the weight of a dripping swill-pail which he was taking to the pigpen, descended the short flight of steps, and turned back toward Henley. He stood for a moment hesitatingly, the pail wiping its dripping exterior against his baggy jean trousers. Then he said: "I've got a thing or two to say to you, Alf, if you will oblige me by steppin' down to my pen so I can stop that hog's squealin' long enough to hear myself talk. One at a time, I say, an' let it be me."

"By all means," Henley answered, ambiguously, and he joined Wrinkle on the grass and they walked down the path together to the pigpen in a corner of the rail-fenced cow-lot.

"No use enterin' a talkin'-match with the whistle of a crazy steam-engine," the stepfather-in-law strained his lungs to say, and he grunted as he raised the pail to the top rail of the pen and cautiously tilted it to let the contents run into the wooden trough.

"Now, that's more like it," he said, his voice rising above the suction-pump noise of the hungry animal. He lowered the empty pail to the ground, and with a paddle began to dig out the mushy sediment from the bottom and throw it into the trough, as a mason might mortar from a trowel. "The truth is, Alf, I've got an apology to make to you, and I didn't want to do it up thar before them women. The other day when I said that about old Welborne a-sendin' you a bunch o' flowers to decorate Dick's grave I wasn't actually thinkin' about you as much as I was about Welborne an' his close-fisted ways. Of course, now I think of it again, it would be a good way for 'im to git back at you for yore joke in sendin' the tombstone man to him, and I catch myself lafin' every time I think of it, and the way you'd look if he did, but—"

"What the devil do you mean?" Henley broke in, testily. "Here you are startin' in to apologize for a thing and going over it again word for word? Have you plumb lost your senses?"

"Was I doin' that?" Wrinkle asked, blandly, though even in the twilight Henley could see that his eyes were twinkling. "Well, I'm sorry again, and I'm just man enough to say so, Alf. I'll apologize as many times as you like. I'll keep on till you are satisfied. But you must listen. You are a-gittin' powerful touchy here lately, and it ain't becomin' in a man of yore dignity. It will git so after a while that I can't express any sort of opinion to you without a fist-fight. I was goin' on to say that I was jest thinkin' of old Welborne's quick wit in every emergency that set me to wonderin' that day how he might act in sech a case. They say everything is grist to his mill—that he turns every single thing that drifts his way into profit great or small. And that day after you railed out at me in the store I went across the Square to see how yore joke would terminate. The door of his dingy little office was open, an' I could see the grave-rock man inside bendin' over old Welborne at his little table, pointin' at the pictures in his book and sweatin' like a nigger in a cotton-gin. But what struck me most of all was the glazed look in old Welborne's eye; he looked like he wasn't hearin' a word the fellow was spoutin', but was thinkin' o' some'n else plumb different. I walked on and hung about outside till the tombstone man come out. He was as mad as Hector. I seed he was, an' stopped 'im in a offhand way and axed him what luck.

"'Luck hell,' says he—he used the word, I didn't—'I talked to that dried-up old mummy,' says he, 'fer an hour jest to find that he was settin' thar all the time figurin' in his head about a speculation I'd made 'im think of while I was talkin' to him.'

"The agent was so mad that he wouldn't explain what the speculation was, but I heard it that evenin'. Hank Bradley was tellin' it to a crowd at the post-office. You know Hank makes all manner of sport of his uncle behind the old skunk's back. He told a tale, too, that I'd never heard. It seems that old Welborne's mother-in-law died, and Welborne went to a undertaker to buy 'er coffin. He picked out a fifty-dollar one, and talked and talked till he finally got the pore devil down to forty. Then he said:

"'You'd sell two for seventy-five, wouldn't you?'

"'I reckon I might,' the undertaker said, 'but you only want one.'

"'I'll need another 'fore many months,' old Welborne said. 'My father-in-law won't last long. I'll take one now at thirty-seven-fifty and the other when the time comes.'"

Henley laughed, despite his displeasure. "That is just like him," he said, "and I believe every word of it."

"His present speculation takes the rag off'n the bush," said Wrinkle. "The talk of the gravestone man started him to thinkin' about what thar might be in that line for him, and he recalled that he owned ten acres of ground on a rise in the edge of town which he had bought at a tax-sale for twenty-five dollars. The very next mornin' he had a feller diggin' post-holes an' puttin' a fence around it with a main gate that had a big curvin' sign over it with the words 'Sunnyside Cemetery' on it, and I'm told that he has been all over town tellin' folks that the old graveyard is too low and soggy to be half decent, and that his'n was a great improvement. He intimated, too, that nobody but blue-bloods could git the'r names enrolled, and thar has been a powerful scramble for places, even by folks that have no idea of dyin' yet a while. You see, Alf, I got a good many particulars at fust hand, for he was out here to see Hettie in regard to accommodations for Dick, and I heard all that was said. Accordin' to Welborne thar is to be a wholesale movin' right away and choice quarters will be scarce, right when they are in the most demand."

"I suppose she—I suppose my wife—"

"Yes, she bit, Alf, and took a full mouthful at that. Welborne told her he was givin' her the pick of the whole thing because she was startin' the ball rollin', an' her fine marble would set the place off. She selected twenty foot square under a weepin'-willow, which he said had a rock bottom and the best view of the town. It only set her back two hundred round plugs, but she had that much left in the bank, and seems powerful well, satisfied. I wouldn't 'a' fetched all this up, but I 'lowed you'd like to know what a big thing growed out of yore little joke that day. I love a good joke myself, but when one's turned on you in a sort o' wholesale way, it don't feel the best in the world."

"There is no joke about it; it's outright stealing!" Henley had reference to Welborne's part of the transaction. "Any man can get money out of fool women, if he's mean enough to take advantage of their silly whims."

"I often wonder about you an' me an' the whole bunch of us here at the house," Wrinkle said. "Not one of the four is blood kin to the other, and yet here we are all wedged together as tight as young catbirds in a nest. Folks say the hardest question on earth is how to live, and yet to me it's been as easy as fallin' off a log into soft sand. Me 'n Jane never counted on Dick for any sort of aid, an' yet it was through him that we are provided for—in fact, he was so wishy-washy and helpless that we was glad to have him tie up with a woman that had a few dollars. He went in for a high old time, and he had it. I couldn't object—I was that way myself. He was as bad after gals as a drummer, and in his sparkin' days, as maybe you know, he could have had his pick. I couldn't keep from hearin' you an' Hettie talkin' in the passage jest now, and when she come into the light mad enough to bite a tenpenny nail in two I saw thar had been a row. Her notion to have you on hand at sech a time as that may seem odd, but women are all odd. They want what other women can't have, and I reckon Het thinks it would be a sort o' feather in 'er cap to mourn in public over one husband while she's leanin' agin another that is ready an' willin' in every way."

"I reckon we've talked long enough about it," Henley said, frigidly, and he glanced toward the lights in the farm-house.

"Yes, I reckon so," returned the gadfly. "As for me, I never was able to see how Het could accuse you of bein' jealous of Dick, when—"

"Jealous fiddlesticks!" Henley snorted. "I never was jealous of a live man, much less a dead one."

"It would seem that way," was all the support Wrinkle would give to the claim, as he took up his pail and started back to the house. "I didn't say you was, but Het seems to size it up that way."

Left alone, and with hot fires of resentment raging in his breast, Henley sauntered along the fence till he was behind his barn. His change of position brought him within a few yards of Dixie Hart's cottage, and he suddenly heard her voice. She was speaking to some one. Peering through the deepening darkness, which was broken only by the gleams of a few random stars, he saw her inside her yard at the gate, and leaning on the fence from the outside was the tall, well-clad form of Hank Bradley.

"You are not going to treat a feller as mean as that," Bradley was heard to say, in a gruff, pleading tone, "when I've been begging you so many times."

"I can't let you come in now, and I can't go to ride with you, either," Henley heard her answer, as she stood well away from the fence. "I've got good and sufficient reasons, and I hope you won't ask me any more."

"I'll keep on asking till the crack of doom," Bradley said, in a voice that shook. "You know I'm not the weak-kneed kind. The Bradley stock hold on like bulldogs. When they take a notion to anything they want it, and they keep on till they get it. So look out, Dixie Hart. I'm not to blame; your eyes burn holes in me and set me on fire. The more you turn me down the more I think about you."

"Well, you mustn't come any more," Dixie said, firmly. "Good-night."

Henley saw her move across the grass and vanish in the cottage. He heard Bradley stifle a surly exclamation of disappointment, and saw him turn and walk off slowly toward his uncle's house.

"Poor girl!" Henley said to himself. "In all her troubles she has to ward off a dirty, designing scamp like that; but she's doing it like a queen, an' no harm can touch 'er. And she's going to get married! She is going into the treacherous thing absolutely blindfolded, and the Lord only knows what will come of it. It's a risk for the best, and under the best conditions—it may prove to be the final stroke that will knock out her wonderful courage. God have mercy on her!"