Joe had debated the matter fully in his mind before going in to supper. Since he had sent her tempter away, there was no necessity of taking Ollie to task, thus laying bare his knowledge of her guilty secret. He believed that her conscience would prove its own flagellant in the days to come, when she had time to reflect and repent, away from the debauching influence of the man who had led her astray. His blame was all for Morgan, who had taken advantage of her loneliness and discontent.
Joe now recalled, and understood, her reaching out to him for sympathy; he saw clearly that she had demanded something beyond the capacity of his unseasoned heart to give. Isom was to blame for that condition of her mind, first and most severely of all. If Isom had been kind to her, and given her only a small measure of human sympathy, she would have clung to him, and rested in the shelter of his protection, content against all the world. Isom had spread the thorns for his own feet, in his insensibility to all human need of gentleness.
Joe even doubted, knowing him as he did, whether the gray old miser was capable of either jealousy or shame. He did not know, indeed, what Isom might say to it if his wife’s infidelity became known to him, but he believed that he would rage to insanity. Perhaps not because the sting of it would penetrate to his heart, but in his censure of his wife’s extravagance in giving away an affection which belonged, under the form of marriage and law, to him.
Joe was ashamed to meet Ollie at the table, not for
After supper Joe flattened himself against the kitchen wall where he had sat the night before on the bench outside the door, drawing back into the shadow. There he sat and thought it over again, unsatisfied to remain silent, yet afraid to speak. He did not want to be unjust, for perhaps she did not intend to meet Morgan at all. In addition to this doubt of her intentions, he had the hope that Isom would come very soon. He decided at length that he would go to bed and lie awake until he heard Ollie pass up to her room, when he would slip down again and wait. If she came down, he would know that she intended to carry out her part of the compact with Morgan. Then he could tell her that Morgan would not come.
Ollie was not long over her work that night. When Joe heard her door close, he took his boots in his hand and went downstairs. He had left his hat on the kitchen table, according to his nightly custom; the moonlight coming in through the window reminded him of it as he passed. He put it on, thinking that he would take a look around the road in the vicinity of the gate, for he suspected that Morgan’s submissive going masked some iniquitous intent. Joe pulled on his boots, sitting in the kitchen door, listening a moment before he closed it after him, and walked softly toward the road.
A careful survey as far as he could see in the bright moonlight, satisfied him that Morgan had not left his horse and buggy around there anywhere. He might come later. Joe decided to wait around there and see.
It was a cool autumn night; a prowling wind moved silently. Over hedgerow and barn roof the moonlight lay in white radiance; the dusty highway beyond the gate was changed by it into a royal road. Joe felt that there were memories abroad as he rested his arms on the gate-post. Moonlight and a soft wind always moved him with a feeling of indefinite and shapeless tenderness, as elusive as the echo of a song. There was a soothing quality in the night for him, which laved his bruised sensibilities like balm. He expanded under its influence; the tumult of his breast began to subside.
The revelations of that day had fallen rudely upon the youth’s delicately tuned and finely adjusted nature. He had recoiled in horror from the sacrilege which that house had suffered. In a measure he felt that he was guilty along with Ollie in her unspeakable sin, in that he had been so stupid as to permit it.
But, he reflected as he waited there with his hand upon the weathered gate, great and terrible as the upheaval of his day-world had been, the night had descended unconscious of it. The moonlight had brightened untroubled by it; the wind had come from its wooded places unhurried for it, and unvexed. After all, it had been only an unheard discord in the eternal, vast harmony. The things of men were matters of infinitesimal consequence in nature. The passing of a nation of men would not disturb its tranquillity as much as the falling of a leaf.
It was then long past the hour when he was habitually asleep, and his vigil weighed on him heavily. No one had passed along the road; Morgan had not come in sight. Joe was weary from his day’s internal conflict and external toil. He began to consider the advisability of returning to bed.
Perhaps, thought he, his watch was both futile and unjust. Ollie did not intend to keep her part in the agreement. She must be burning with remorse for her transgression.
He turned and walked slowly toward the house, stopping a little way along to look back and make sure that Morgan had not appeared. Thus he stood a little while, and then resumed his way.
The house was before him, shadows in the sharp angles of its roof, its windows catching the moonlight like wakeful eyes. There was a calm over it, and a somnolent peace. It seemed impossible that iniquitous desires could live and grow on a night like that. Ollie must be asleep, said he, and repentant in her dreams.
Joe felt that he might go to his rest with honesty. It would be welcome, as the desire of tired youth for its bed is strong. At the well he stopped again to look back for Morgan.
As he turned a light flashed in the kitchen, gleamed a moment, went out suddenly. It was as if a match had been struck to look for something quickly found, and then blown out with a puff of breath.
At once the fabric of his hopes collapsed, and his honest attempts to lift Ollie back to her smirched pedestal and invest her with at least a part of her former purity of heart, came to a painful end. She was preparing to leave. The hour when he must speak had come.
He approached the door noiselessly. It was closed, as he had left it, and within everything was still. As he stood hesitating before it, his hand lifted to lay upon the latch, his heart laboring in painful lunges against his ribs, it opened without a sound, and Ollie stood before him against the background of dark.
The moonlight came down on him through the half-bare arbor, and fell in mottled patches around him where he stood, his hand still lifted, as if to help her on her way. Ollie caught her breath in a frightened start, and shrank back.
“You don’t need to be afraid, Ollie–it’s Joe,” said he.
“Oh, you scared me so!” she panted.
Each then waited as if for the other to speak, and the silence seemed long.
“Were you going out somewhere?” asked Joe.
“No; I forgot to put away a few things, and I came down,” said she. “I woke up out of my sleep thinking of them,” she added.
“Well!” said he, wonderingly. “Can I help you any, Ollie?”
“No; it’s only some milk and things,” she told him. “You know how Isom takes on if he finds anything undone. I was afraid he might come in tonight and see them.”
“Well!” said Joe again, in a queer, strained way.
He was standing in the door, blocking it with his body, clenching the jamb with his hands on either side, as if to bar any attempt that she might make to pass.
“Will you strike a light, Ollie? I want to have a talk with you,” said he gravely.
“Oh, Joe!” she protested, as if pleasantly scandalized by the request, intentionally misreading it.
“Have you got another match in your hand? Light the lamp.”
“Oh, what’s the use?” said she. “I only ran down for a minute. We don’t need the light, do we, Joe? Can’t you talk without it?”
“No; I want you to light the lamp,” he insisted.
“I’ll not do it!” she flared suddenly, turning as if to go to her room. “You’ve not got any right to boss me around in my own house!”
“I don’t suppose I have, Ollie, and I didn’t mean to,” said he, stepping into the room.
Ollie retreated a few steps toward the inner door, and stopped. Joe could hear her excited breathing as he flung his hat on the table.
“Ollie, what I’ve got to say to you has to be said sooner or later tonight, and you’d just as well hear it now,” said Joe, trying to assure her of his friendly intent by speaking softly, although his voice was tremulous. “Morgan’s gone; he’ll not be back–at least not tonight.”
“Morgan?” said she. “What do you mean–what do I care where he’s gone?”
Joe made no reply. He fumbled for the box behind the stove and scraped a slow sulphur match against the pipe. Its light discovered Ollie shrinking against the wall where she had stopped, near the door.
She was wearing a straw hat, which must have been a part of her bridal gear. A long white veil, which she wore scarf-wise over the front display of its flowers and fruits, came down and crossed behind her neck. Its ends dangled upon her breast. The dress was one that Joe never had seen her wear before, a girlish white thing with narrow ruffles. He wondered as he looked at her with a great ache in his heart, how so much seeming purity could be so base and foul. In that bitter moment he cursed old Isom in his heart for goading her to this desperate bound. She had been starving for a man’s love, and for the lack of it she had thrown herself away on a dog.
Joe fitted the chimney on the burner of the lamp, and stood in judicial seriousness before her, the stub of the burning match wasting in a little blaze between his fingers.
“Morgan’s gone,” he repeated, “and he’ll never come back. I know all about you two, and what you’d planned to do.”
Joe dropped the stub of the match and set his foot on it.
Ollie stared at him, her face as white as her bridal dress, her eyes big, like a barn-yard animal’s eyes in a lantern’s light. She was gathering and wadding the ends of her veil in her hands; her lips were open, showing the points of her small, white teeth.
“Isom–he’ll kill me!” she whispered.
“Isom don’t know about it,” said Joe.
“You’ll tell him!”
“No.”
Relief flickered in her face. She leaned forward a little, eagerly, as if to speak, but said nothing. Joe shrank back from her, his hand pressing heavily upon the table.
“I never meant to tell him,” said he slowly.
She sprang toward him, her hands clasped appealingly.
“Then you’ll let me go, you’ll let me go?” she cried eagerly. “I can’t stay here,” she hurried on, “you know I can’t stay here, Joe, and suffer like he’s made me suffer the past year! You say Morgan won’t come––”
“The coward, to try to steal a man’s wife, and deceive you that way, too!” said Joe, his anger rising.
“Oh, you don’t know him as well as I do!” she defended, shaking her head solemnly. “He’s so grand, and good, and I love him, Joe–oh, Joe, I love him!”
“It’s wrong for you to say that!” Joe harshly reproved her. “I don’t want to hear you say that; you’re Isom’s wife.”
“Yes, God help me,” said she.
“You could be worse off than you are, Ollie; as it is you’ve got a name!”
“What’s a name when you despise it?” said she bitterly.
“Have you thought what people would say about you if you went away with Morgan, Ollie?” inquired Joe gently.
“I don’t care. We intend to go to some place where we’re not known, and––”
“Hide,” said Joe. “Hide like thieves. And that’s what you’d be, both of you, don’t you see? You’d never be comfortable and happy, Ollie, skulking around that way.”
“Yes, I would be happy,” she maintained sharply. “Mr. Morgan is a gentleman, and he’s good. He’d be proud of me, he’d take care of me like a lady.”
“For a little while maybe, till he found somebody else that he thought more of,” said Joe. “When it comes so easy to take one man’s wife, he wouldn’t stop at going off with another.”
“It’s a lie–you know it’s a lie! Curtis Morgan’s a gentleman, I tell you, and I’ll not hear you run him down!”
“Gentlemen and ladies don’t have to hide,” said Joe.
“You’re lying to me!” she charged him suddenly, her face coloring angrily. “He wouldn’t go away from here on the say-so of a kid like you. He’s down there waiting for me, and I’m going to him.”
“I wouldn’t deceive you, Ollie,” said he, leaving his post near the door, opening a way for her to pass. “If you think he’s there, go and see. But I tell you he’s gone. He asked me to shut my eyes to this thing and let you and him carry it out; but I couldn’t do that, so he went away.”
She knew he was not deceiving her, and she turned on him with reproaches.
“You want to chain me here and see me work myself to death for that old miserly Isom!” she stormed. “You’re just as bad as he is; you ain’t got a soft spot in your heart.”
“Yes, I’d rather see you stay here with Isom and do a nigger woman’s work, like you have been doing ever since you married him, than let you go away with Morgan for one mistaken day. What you’d have to face with him would kill you quicker than work, and you’d suffer a thousand times more sorrow.”
“What do you know about it?” she sneered. “You never loved anybody. That’s the way with you religious fools–you don’t get any fun out of life yourselves, and you want to spoil everybody else’s. Well, you’ll not spoil mine, I tell you. I’ll go to Morgan this very night, and you can’t stop me!”
“Well, we’ll see about that, Ollie,” he told her, showing a
“Isom, Isom!” she mocked. “Well, tell Isom you spied on me and tell the old fool what you saw–tell him, tell him! Tell him all you know, and tell him more! Tell the old devil I hate him, and always did hate him; tell him I’ve got out of bed in the middle of the night more than once to get the ax and kill him in his sleep! Tell him I wish he was dead and in hell, where he belongs, and I’m sorry I didn’t send him there! What do I care about Isom, or you, or anybody else, you spy, you sneaking spy!”
“I’ll go with you to the road if you want to see if he’s there,” Joe offered.
Ollie’s fall from the sanctified place of irreproachable womanhood had divested her of all awe in his eyes. He spoke to her now as he would have reasoned with a child.
“No, I suppose you threatened to go after Isom, or something like that, and he went away,” said she. “You couldn’t scare him, he wouldn’t run from you. Tomorrow he’ll send me word, and I’ll go to him in spite of you and Isom and everything else. I don’t care–I don’t care–you’re mean to me, too! you’re as mean as you can be!”
She made a quick tempestuous turn from anger to tears, lifting her arm to her face and hiding her eyes in the bend of her elbow. Her shoulders heaved; she sobbed in childlike pity for herself and the injury which she seemed to think she bore.
Joe put his hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t take on that way about it, Ollie,” said he.
“Oh, oh!” she moaned, her hands pressed to her face now; “why couldn’t you have been kind to me; why couldn’t you have said a good word to me sometimes? I didn’t have a friend in the world, and I was so lonesome and tired and–and–and–everything!”
Her reproachful appeal was disconcerting to Joe. How could he tell her that he had not understood her striving and yearning to reach him, and that at last understanding, he had been appalled by the enormity of his own heart’s desire. He said nothing for a little while, but took her by one tear-wet hand and led her away from the door. Near the table he stopped, still holding her hand, stroking it tenderly with comforting touch.
“Never mind, Ollie,” said he at last; “you go to bed now and don’t think any more about going away with Morgan. If I thought it was best for your peace and happiness for you to go, I’d step out of the way at once. But he’d drag you down, Ollie, lower than any woman you ever saw, for they don’t have that kind of women here. Morgan isn’t as good a man as Isom is, with all his hard ways and stinginess. If he’s honest and honorable, he can wait for you till Isom dies. He’ll not last more than ten or fifteen years longer, and you’ll be young even then, Ollie. I don’t suppose anybody ever gets too old to be happy any more than they get too old to be sad.”
“No, I don’t suppose they do, Joe,” she sighed.
She had calmed down while he talked. Now she wiped her eyes on her veil, while the last convulsions of sobbing shook her now and then, like the withdrawing rumble of thunder after a storm.
“I’ll put out the light, Ollie,” said he. “You go on to bed.”
“Oh, Joe, Joe!” said she in a little pleading, meaningless way; a little way of reproach and softness.
She lifted her tear-bright eyes, with the reflection of her subsiding passion in them, and looked yearningly into his. Ollie suddenly found herself feeling small and young, penitent and frail, in the presence of this quickly developed man. His strength seemed to rise above her, and spread round her,
The wife of the dead viking could turn to the living victor with a smile. It is a comforting faculty that has come down from the first mother to the last daughter; it is as ineradicable in the sex as the instinct which cherishes fire. Ollie was primitive in her passions and pains. If she could not have Morgan, perhaps she could yet find a comforter in Joe. She put her free hand on his shoulder and looked up into his face again. Tears were on her lashes, her lips were loose and trembling.
“If you’d be good to me, Joe; if you’d only be good and kind, I could stay,” she said.
Joe was moved to tenderness by her ingenuous sounding plea. He put his hand on her shoulder in a comforting way. She was very near him then, and her small hand, so lately cold and tear-damp, was warm within his. She threw her head back in expectant attitude; her yearning eyes seemed to be dragging him to her lips.
“I will be good to you, Ollie; just as good and kind as I know how to be,” he promised.
She swayed a little nearer; her warm, soft body pressed against him, her bright young eyes still striving to draw him down to her lips.
“Oh, Joe, Joe,” she murmured in a snuggling, contented way.
Sweat sprang upon his forehead and his throbbing temples, so calm and cool but a moment before. He stood trembling, his damp elf-locks dangling over his brow. Through the half-open door a little breath of wind threaded in and made the lamp-blaze jump; it rustled outside through the lilac-bushes like the passing of a lady’s gown.
Joe’s voice was husky in his throat when he spoke.
“You’d better go to bed, Ollie,” said he.
He still clung foolishly to her willing hand as he led her to the door opening to the stairs.
“No, you go on up first, Joe,” she said. “I want to put the wood in the stove ready to light in the morning, and set a few little things out. It’ll give me a minute longer to sleep. You can trust me now, Joe,” she protested, looking earnestly into his eyes, “for I’m not going away with Morgan now.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that, Ollie,” he told her, unfeigned pleasure in his voice.
“I want you to promise me you’ll never tell Isom,” said she.
“I never intended to tell him,” he replied.
She withdrew her hand from his quickly, and quickly both of them fled to his shoulders.
“Stoop down,” she coaxed with a seductive, tender pressure of her hands, “and tell me, Joe.”
Isom’s step fell on the porch. He crashed the door back against the wall as he came in, and Joe and Ollie fell apart in guilty haste. Isom stood for a moment on the threshold, amazement in his staring eyes and open mouth. Then a cloud of rage swept him, he lifted his huge, hairy fist above his head like a club.
“I’ll kill you!” he threatened, covering the space between him and Joe in two long strides.
Ollie shrank away, half stooping, from the expected blow, her hands raised in appealing defense. Joe put up his open hand as if to check Isom in his assault.
“Hold on, Isom; don’t you hit me,” he said.
Whatever Isom’s intention had been, he contained himself. He stopped, facing Joe, who did not yield an inch.
“Hit you, you whelp!” said Isom, his lips flattened back from his teeth. “I’ll do more than hit you. You–” He turned on Ollie: “I saw you. You’ve disgraced me! I’ll break every bone in your body! I’ll throw you to the hogs!”
“If you’ll hold on a minute and listen to reason, Isom, you’ll find there’s nothing at all like you think there is,” said Joe. “You’re making a mistake that you may be sorry for.”
“Mistake!” repeated Isom bitterly, as if his quick-rising rage had sunk again and left him suddenly weak. “Yes, the mistake I made was when I took you in to save you from the poorhouse and give you a home. I go away for a day and come back to find you two clamped in each other’s arms so close together I couldn’t shove a hand between you. Mistake––”
“That’s not so, Isom,” Joe protested indignantly.
“Heaven and hell, didn’t I see you!” roared Isom. “There’s law for you two if I want to take it on you, but what’s the punishment of the law for what you’ve done on me? Law! No, by God! I’ll make my own law for this case. I’ll kill both of you if I’m spared to draw breath five minutes more!”
Isom lifted his long arm in witness of his terrible intention, and cast his glaring eyes about the room as if in search of a weapon to begin his work.
“I tell you, Isom, nothing wrong ever passed between me and your wife,” insisted Joe earnestly. “You’re making a terrible mistake.”
Ollie, shrinking against the wall, looked imploringly at Joe. He had promised never to tell Isom what he knew, but how was he to save himself now without betraying her? Was he man enough to face it out and bear the strain, rush upon old Isom and stop him in his mad intention, or would he weaken and tell all he knew, here at the very first test of his strength? She could not read his intention in his face, but his eyes were frowning under his gathered brows as he watched every move that old Isom made. He was leaning forward a little, his arms were raised, like a wrestler waiting for the clinch.
Isom’s face was as gray as ashes that have lain through many a rain. He stood where he had stopped at Joe’s warning, and now was pulling up his sleeves as if to begin his bloody work.
“You two conspired against me from the first,” he charged, his voice trembling; “you conspired to eat me holler, and now you conspire to bring shame and disgrace to my gray hairs. I trust you and depend on you, and I come home––”
Isom’s arraignment broke off suddenly.
He stood with arrested jaw, gazing intently at the table. Joe followed his eyes, but saw nothing on the table to hold a man’s words and passions suspended in that strange manner. Nothing was there but the lamp and Joe’s old brown hat. That lay there, its innocent, battered crown presenting to Joe’s eyes, its broad and pliant brim tilted up on the farther side as if resting on a fold of itself.
It came to Joe in an instant that Isom’s anger had brought paralysis upon him. He started forward to assist him, Isom’s name on his lips, when Isom leaped to the table with a smothered cry in his throat. He seemed to hover over the table a moment, leaning with his breast upon it, gathering some object to him and hugging it under his arm.
“Great God!” panted Isom in shocked voice, standing straight between them, his left arm pressed to his breast as if it covered a mortal wound. He twisted his neck and glared at Joe, but he did not disclose the thing that he had gathered from the table.
“Great God!” said he again, in the same shocked, panting voice.
“Isom,” began Joe, advancing toward him.
Isom retreated quickly. He ran to the other end of the table where he stood, bending forward, hugging his secret to his breast as if he meant to defend it with the blood of his heart. He stretched out his free hand to keep Joe away.
“Stand off! Stand off!” he warned.
Again Isom swept his wild glance around the room. Near the door, on two prongs of wood nailed to the wall, hung the gun of which Joe had spoken to Morgan in his warning. It was a Kentucky rifle, long barreled, heavy, of two generations past. Isom used it for hawks, and it hung there loaded and capped from year’s beginning to year’s end. Isom seemed to realize when he saw it, for the first time in that season of insane rage, that it offered to his hand a weapon. He leaped toward it, reaching up his hand.
“I’ll kill you now!” said he.
In one long spring Isom crossed from where he stood and seized the rifle by the muzzle.
“Stop him, stop him!” screamed Ollie, pressing her hands to her ears.
“Isom, Isom!” warned Joe, leaping after him.
Isom was wrenching at the gun to free the breech from the fork when Joe caught him by the shoulder and tried to drag him back.
“Look out–the hammer!” he cried.
But quicker than the strength of Joe’s young arm, quicker than old Isom’s wrath, was the fire in that corroded cap; quicker than the old man’s hand, the powder in the nipple of the ancient gun.
Isom fell at the report, his left hand still clutching the secret thing to his bosom, his right clinging to the rifle-barrel. He lay on his back where he had crashed down, as straight as if stretched to a line. His staring eyes rolled, all white; his mouth stood open, as if in an unuttered cry.
