The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 63

"I suppose ye're _insinuatin'_ ye don't like it here--don't like what ye're pore ol' Father c'n do fur ye?"

Her look of contempt would have cut short another man.

"Ye--wantta--go?" he finished.

She nodded mutely. And at that he flared at her terribly.

"It's like ye," he shouted, "like yere mother, like all the Perkinses.

Word-breakers! cowards! _s.h.i.+rkers!_"

The words seared. The careful articulation of the afternoon was gone.

"Promised--if I sent ye to school, ye'd stay here winters to look after ye're pore ol' Father--didn't ye?" He looked at her through narrow, reddish lids, where she had backed against the door. "Didn't ye?" he repeated. "But soon's he's done fur--soon's his _money's gone_--"

"Stop!" she cried. "_Stop i_--" Her breath caught.

He stared at her, the words shaken from him by the sheer force of her.

She had not moved, but, somehow, as she stood there against the unvarnished door facing him, fists at her side, eyes brilliant, she appeared to tower over him.

"I'll stay," she was saying in a queer, fierce monotone, "I'll stay here this winter anyhow if I freeze for it! I'll scrub and cook and haul wood for ye till I've paid ye back--_paid ye_," she repeated more softly, "till no one can say the Perkinses don't keep their word! And then--in the spring--I'm going--it'll be for good--. _For always_," she added, and turned limply towards the door.

To my surprise he sank heavily into the rickety chair by the stove.

"Go then," he muttered. "It's all I c'ld expect."

The door closed on her and still he sat there before the fire, head bent forward, as though he had an audience. I shrank back closer into the shadows, drawing my coat collar more snugly about my throat. It was incredible that he should play a part before her--and now alone! His very posture suggested a martyred, deserted old man. I felt myself in the presence of something inexplicable.--Then, in a frenzy of suppressed rancor, such as I had never felt before, I climbed the hill, the lumps of mud and ice seeming to cling against my footsteps as I went.

The winter was a bitter one that year, such as only the winters in that Northern, prostrate land can be. The countryside appeared to crouch under a pa.s.sive, laden-colored sky. Then the snow came settling in deeper and deeper layers, and, as it packed down, a coating of thin ice formed on its surface. One could walk on it at times, this crust that had grown over the land like a new skin.

We smuggled sweaters and coats to Lisbeth, making them old lest Con suspect us. But, even with all we could do for her, her suffering must have been without comparison. There was no fire in the shack except that in the old rusty cook stove which she tended, and the cold made an easy entrance through the loose carpentry of the walls. With it all there were the loneliness and the mental agony. At first, when she did not know how deep was Jim's devotion, there must have been times when life held out no promise to her except that of escape.

All this time the rest of the Dartons gave no sign. Old Con, I discovered, made occasional obscure trips to the city where he saw Lin Darton and Miss Etta, the former established as a second-rate real-estate dealer, the latter, as buyer for a large department store.

Later it became more apparent that it was after these trips of his that he was able to purchase another horse. He quoted more and more frequently from the Bible and the "Elegy." Such feeling as any of the neighbors may have had for Lisbeth was now completely turned aside by her tight-lipped reticence and her deft evasion of all references to her situation. Old Con was thoroughly established as a brilliant fellow, ruined by his family.

From the first I saw that the winter had to be endured like a famine.

Keep Jim away of course I could not, though I did persuade him, by dint of much argument, that it would be for Lisbeth's good to meet her away from the mill house; and what pleading he may have had with her to leave all and come with him, then and there, I could only imagine. Each time Lisbeth came back from these encounters a little paler, her lips a little firmer, her eyes burning with a steadier purpose. But it was the sort of purpose that robs instead of giving life, that strikes back on itself while it still clings to a sort of bitter triumph. Knowing her, I knew that it had to be so, for to despoil her of this high integrity would be to take from her something as essentially hers as was her sensitive spirit, her fine sureness of vision.

So we kept silence until, as the first signs of spring came on again, while the country alternately was flooded or lay under rigid pools of ice, the line of her mouth seemed to soften and a glow crept into her eyes and a dreaming. I held my breath and waited. Thin she was, like something worn to the thread. The fine color had given place to a blue tint in the cold, and to a colorless gray as she bent over the old stove within. But the exquisitely moulded line of cheek and chin, the grace of motion and the deep questing light in her eyes nothing could destroy. I believe that, to Jim, she grew more lovely as she appeared to fade.

At last the day came when the water ran in yellowed torrents in the creek or stood in stagnant pools under a new sun, when the blood bounded, overwarm, in the tired body. That day Old Con caught sight of them, walking arm in arm at the top of the hill, looking down as though to find a footing, and talking earnestly. They had never before ventured so near the mill. Catching sight of them from some distance, I foresaw the meeting before I could reach them. When I came close enough to see, Lisbeth was trembling visibly, as though from a chill, and Jim stood glowering down at Old Con.

Suddenly Lisbeth edged herself sidewise between them, shouldering Jim away.

"Don't touch him!" she cried. "It's what he's waiting for you to do!

Can't you see the look on his face--that wronged look of a man that's done nothing but wrong all his life?"

She stopped, the words swelling within her, too big for utterance. Jim put a quieting arm about her; and just then Old Con made an abrupt motion towards her wrist.

"I guess," he said, "that a father--"

But she was before him.

"Father! He's not my father, d'ye hear? I've kept my word to him and now I'm going to keep it to myself! You see that sun over the hills?"--She turned to Con.--"It's the spring sun--it's summer--summer, d'ye hear?

And it's _mine_--and I'm going to have it, before I'm dead like my mother died with her body still living! You're no more my father than that dead tree the sun can't ever warm again!--It's for good--I said it would be for good--and it is!"

We took her, sobbing dryly, between us, up the road.

That night in our house Lisbeth was married to Jim. A deep serenity seemed to hang about her as though for the moment the past had been shut away from her by a mist. As for Jim, there was a wonder in his eyes, not unlike that I had seen when he came upon an old Lippo Lippi, and a great comprehending reverence. There were tears at the back of my eyes--then the beauty of the scene drove all else back before it.

There is one more episode in the life of Con Darton and Lisbeth. Knowing him, it would be incredible that there should not be. It happened some five years later and I was concerned in it from the moment that I was summoned unexpectedly to Mr. Lin Darton's office in the city, a dingy though not unprosperous menage located in the cheaper part of the down town district. I found him sitting amid an untidy litter of papers at the table, talking through the telephone to some one who later developed to be Miss Etta; and I had at once a feeling of suffocation and closeness, due not alone, I believe, to the barred windows and the steaming radiator. The family resemblance that Mr. Lin Darton bore to Old Con threw into relief the former's honesty, and made more bearable his heavy sentimentalism, upon which Con had played as surely as on a bagpipe, sounding its narrow range with insistent evenness of response.

"I want to talk to you about Con," he said gravely, as soon as the receiver had been hung up, "and--Lisbeth." He uttered his niece's name as though it were a thing of which he could not but be ashamed.

I said nothing to this, and waited.

"As you are still in touch with her; and, as the situation is probably already partly known to you, I thought you might be able--willing--" He hesitated, paused; and a grieved look came into his eyes that was quite genuine. I realized the fact coldly.

"Whatever I can do," I a.s.sured him, "I shall be glad to."

"None of us," he continued, "have seen Lisbeth since that terrible night four years ago, when she turned Con away from her house."

I hesitated for a moment and then said: "It was three o'clock in the morning, if I remember, and he had written that he was coming to take her little son into the country, to give him a chance," I added bitingly, "of some real country air."

"It was a cold night," continued Lin Darton, as though he had not heard me, "and she has all she needs--while he--"

"To my mind, he had no business there!" I flared.

"He was her father."

He stared at me hard, as though he had uttered the final, indisputable word.

"He forfeited all right to that t.i.tle years ago."

"When?" demanded Mr. Darton.

"On the day of her birth," I snapped back at him.

"I do not understand you," he said coldly. And, when I remained silent, he added: "There is no greater crime than that of a child towards a father."

"Unless it be, perhaps, that of a father towards a child."

His sadness seemed to weigh him against the desk. I relented.

"To go against one's _own_--_against one's own_," he repeated, "and Con so sick now--"