The Everlasting Whisper Part 17

"Tell me, Gloria. I'll promise not to come near you until you say I may. Is it _yes_?"

"Yes," said Gloria, and was gone in a flash, turning, running up and out of sight.

He stood looking after her, tapping and tapping at his cigarette-case.

_Chapter XIII_

To Gloria the sluggish moments were fraught with despondency or pulsating terror. All arrangements were made; she was powerless, in a trap; a justice was coming; she was going to marry Gratton. She lay on her bed with her door bolted and wept bitterly, moaning over and over: "Oh, I wish I were dead!" She heard Gratton stirring restlessly downstairs. She herself grew restless; she sprang up, tiptoed to her door, and slipped out as silent as a shadow. She went into the little room where the telephone was and through it to the sun-porch. For a long time she stood looking out across the mountains, her hand pressed to lips which trembled. She thought of her mother who, coming as fast as she could, no doubt by automobile, since she would not have the patience for trains, would not arrive before to-morrow morning. A night here--alone, worse than alone----

But great as was the emotional tension, l.u.s.ty and now wearied youth must be served. She had danced and ridden all through the night; she had not had over an hour or so of broken sleep; she had been going all day. She dropped to sleep on the swing-couch on the porch. It was so very silent all about her; the shadows were creeping, creeping among the pines.

She awoke with a start. It was quite dark; the first stars burned with steadily growing brilliancy. Some one was standing above her, looking down at her. She could see only the vague outline----

"Gloria----"

A little cry of fear broke from her.

"Gloria," pleaded Gratton. "Don't you know I wouldn't----?"

"I'll be down in a minute," she told him, drawing as far away as she could, speaking with nervous haste. "Go down, please. Wait for me."

"The justice is downstairs," he said, his own voice agitated despite his effort for mastery. "Are you ready?"

"Yes, yes! In a minute I'll be down. Go. Please go."

He hesitated; she could have screamed at him. But presently he began withdrawing. Slowly, hideously slowly----

"When you are ready. And--he has a long ride back, Gloria. We should not keep him waiting."

She watched until he had gone. Then she crouched, staring with wide, unseeing eyes into the outside dark. The man would go right away; she would not have even him to mitigate the horrible condition of aloneness with Gratton.

"I won't marry him!" she cried out. "I won't. I hate him. He is a beast, and--I won't!"

There was, after all, nothing to force her. Nothing--save that she had been away all this time with Gratton, that he had bought clothing for her, that he had registered himself and wife. _And the newspapers_! She heard a door slam and sprang up; if the justice went away now without marrying them! She _would_ marry him; why, if he had been of a notion to demur she would have made him marry her!

"I can't think clearly. I wonder if I am insane?" She went with heavy, leaden steps back to her room. A pale, weary face looked at her from her gla.s.s. She began arranging her hair. Her fingers, with wills of their own, refused to obey her own command laid upon them. She sought wildly to delay, delay to the last fragment of the last second before yielding to the inevitable; she wanted to loiter over her hair, and her fingers raced. She could hear voices downstairs. Gratton's voice, low and urgent; a thin, querulous voice; she shuddered. That would be the justice. Another voice, a man's and strange to her. He said nothing, but twice she heard him laugh, a laugh that jarred upon her nerves. She guessed who he would be; the man Gratton had sent to bring the justice.

"Gloria!" Gratton was calling from the foot of the steps.

The voice that answered for her was clear and steady and, downstairs, must have sounded untroubled:

"I'm coming. Just a minute."

Two hours ago, while Gloria had been watching the shadows creeping among the pines, Mark King had arrived. He had come down the ridge from the rear and thus to the outbuilding by the stable which housed the caretaker, old Jim Spalding.

"h.e.l.lo, Mark," Jim had said, a trifle startled by King's sudden appearance. "Here you come again, like a Injun out'n the woods."

Jim was smoking his pipe on his bench. King paused, saying:

"h.e.l.lo, Jim. Has Ben showed up yet?"

"No, he ain't showed, Mark. Expectin' him?"

"Yes. Who's in the house, then?"

"Why, some of 'em come on ahead. Ben's girl, for one, and that city guy, Gratton, for another. She didn't say anything about Ben comin'; she did say, though, the missis would be along pretty soon."

Gloria and Gratton here? King frowned. He had had ample time during the long weeks since the twelfth of August to decide that he had nothing to say to Gloria Gaynor. And now she was here--with Gratton. He turned into Jim's quarters. He had no desire--or at least so he told himself very emphatically--to see either one of them.

"I've hit the trail hard to-day, Jim," he said as Jim followed him and King closed the door. "And I'm dead tired and as hungry as a bear. What shape's the cupboard in?"

"Fine," returned Spalding hospitably. "You know me, Mark."

So it happened that while Gloria fought her losing battle all alone, Mark King sat at Spalding's table, not a hundred yards away, and made a silent meal of coffee and bread of Jim's crude baking, and a dubious, warmed-over stew. Thereafter King threw himself down on Jim's bunk and the two smoked their pipes. With nothing in particular to be said, virtually nothing was said.

"Needn't tell anybody I'm here, Jim." King was knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "I haven't any business with the folks in there. But keep your eye peeled for Ben, will you? The minute he comes I want to see him."

"Maybe," suggested Spalding, "his girl brought word?"

"No. Ben is in Coloma. Gratton and Miss Gaynor and Mrs. Gaynor would have come up from the city, you know. That means they would have come through Placerville or Truckee."

"Guess so," agreed Spalding. "That's right. I'll set outside where I can watch for Ben. Goin' to take a snooze?"

"Yes."

And after lying ten minutes staring up at the ceiling above him King went to sleep.

"Must of been goin' some to-day," meditated the man who was once more on his bench outside the door. "King looks tuckered."

He sat through the thickening shadows watching the stars come trooping into the darkening sky, hearkening to the night breeze among the trees, and the thin singing noises of insects. An hour or so later he heard horses. "That would be Ben, now," was his first thought. His second was that it might be some one else, and that there was no sense waking a tired man for nothing. So he went down toward the house. He saw two men dismount and tie their horses; he saw the door open and Gratton come out. The hors.e.m.e.n went up to the porch. Neither was Ben Gaynor. One, as he pa.s.sed in through the light-filled doorway, was a little grey man whom Jim had never seen before; the other man, it happened, he knew.

Rather well by sight and reputation, a good-for-nothin' scalawag, as Jim catalogued him, name of Steve Jarrold. The door closed after them and Jim went back to his bench.

In the house they were waiting for Gloria. The little grey man whom they called "judge," and who had a way of clearing his throat before and after the most trifling remark, went up and down with his hands under his coat-tails, peering near-sightedly at pictures and books and wall-paper.

"Quite a tidy little place Ben Gaynor's got here," he said patronizingly. "Quite a tidy little place."

Gratton paced back and forth, whirling always abreast of the stairs, looking up expectantly. Steve Jarrold, the man whom Gloria had heard laugh, never budged from the spot where he had landed when entering the living-room; his wide, spraddled legs seemed rooted through the big feet into the floor. Big-framed and bony, with startlingly black restless eyes and a three or four days' growth of wiry beard no less l.u.s.trously black, he was ragged, unkempt, and unthinkably dirty. His eyes roved all about the room; they came back to Gratton, sped up the steps, came back to Gratton with a leer in them, and all the while he turned and turned his black dusty hat like a man doing a job he was being paid for.

At last, since no delay holds back for ever the rolling of the great wheels of time, Gloria came. Slowly she descended the stairs, one hand at her breast, one gripping the banister. Her pallor was so great that her lips, though pale also, looked unnaturally red in contrast. They were just a little apart; she seemed to breathe with difficulty. Her eyes, glancing wildly about the room and at the men to be seen in the hallway, were the eyes of one in a trap, seeking frantically for escape, knowing that there was no escape. Her brain, like one's in a fever, was quick to impressions, alive with broken fragments of thought like so many flashes of vari-coloured light. She noted trifles; she saw a painting over Gratton's head--a seascape her father had given her for her fourteenth birthday. She saw three pairs of eyes staring at her, men's eyes, to her the eyes of wild animals; she read as clearly as if their messages had been in large, printed letters what lay in the mind of each: in the little grey man's, the judge's, speculation; in Steve Jarrold's, the jeers of a man of Jarrold's type at such a moment when they fall upon the bride; in Gratton's, quickened desire of her and triumphant cunning.