Hidden Creek Part 19

It was soon very apparent that he was celebrating. For an hour he stood every newcomer to a drink, and then he withdrew to a table in a shadowy corner, and sitting there, tilted against the wall, he sipped from his gla.s.s, smoked and dreamed. Hour after hour of the slow, noisy night went by and still he sat there, watching Sheila through the smoke, seeing in her, more and more glowingly, the body of his dream.

It was after dawn when Sheila touched Carthy's elbow. The big Irishman looked down at her small, drawn face.

"Mr. Carthy," she whispered, "would it be all right if I went home now?

It's earlier than usual, but I'm so--awfully tired?"

There was so urgent an air of secrecy in her manner that Carthy muttered his permission out of the corner of his mouth. Sheila melted from his side.

The alley that had been silvery cool with dusk was now even more silvery cool with morning twilight. Small sunrise clouds were winging over it like golden doves. Sheila did not look at them. She ran breathless to her door, opened it, and found herself face to face with d.i.c.kie.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LIGHT OF DAWN

There was a light of dawn in the room and through the open window blew in the keen air of daybreak. d.i.c.kie was standing quite still in the middle of the floor. He was more neat and groomed than Sheila had ever seen him.

He looked as though he had stepped from a bath; his hair was sleek and wet so that it was dark above the pure pallor of his face; his suit was carefully put on; his cuffs and collar were clean. He did not have the look of a man that has been awake all night, nor did he look as though he had ever been asleep. His face and eyes were alight, his lips firm and delicate with feeling.

Before him Sheila felt old and stained. The smoke and fumes of the bar hung about her. She was shamed by the fresh youthfulness of his slender, eager carriage and of his eyes.

"d.i.c.kie," she faltered, and stood against the door, drooping wearily, "what are you doing here at this hour?"

"What does the hour matter?" he asked impatiently. "Come over to the window. I want you to look at this big star. I've been watching it. It's almost gone. It's like a white bird flying straight into the sun."

He was imperative, laid his cool hand upon hers and drew her to the window. They stood facing the sunrise.

"Why did you come here?" again asked Sheila. The beauty of the sky only deepened her misery and shame.

"Because I couldn't wait any longer than one night. It's sure been an awful long night for me, Sheila ... Sheila--" He drew the hand he still held close to him with a trembling touch and laid his other hand over it.

Then she felt the terrible beating of his heart, felt that he was shaking. "Sheila, I love you." She had hidden her face against the curtain, had turned from him. She felt nothing but weariness and shame.

She was like a leaden weight tied coldly to his throbbing youth. Her hand under his was hot and lifeless like a scorched rose. "I want you to come away with me from Millings. You can't keep on a-working in that saloon.

You can't a-bear to have folks saying and thinking the fool things they do. And I can't a-bear it even if you can. I'd go loco, and kill. Sheila, I've been thinking all night, just sitting on the edge of my bed and thinking. Sheila, if you will marry me, I will promise you to take care of you. I won't let you suffer any. I will die"--his voice rocked on the word, spoken with an awful sincerity of young love--"before I let you suffer any. If you could love me a little bit"--he stopped as though that leaping heart had sprung up into his throat--"only a little bit, Sheila," he whispered, "maybe--?"

"I can't," she said. "I can't love you that way even a little bit. I can't marry you, d.i.c.kie. I wish I could. I am so tired."

She drew her hand away, or rather it fell from the slackening grasp of his, and hung at her side. She looked up from the curtain to his face. It was still alight and tender and pale.

"You're real sure, Sheila, that you _never_ could?--that you'd rather go on with this--?"

She pressed all the curves and the color out of her lips, still looking at him, and nodded her head.

"I can't stay in Millings," d.i.c.kie said, "and work in Poppa's hotel and watch this, Sheila--unless, some way, I can help you."

"Then you'd better go," she said lifelessly, "because I can't see what else there is for me to do. Oh, I shan't go on with it for very long, of course--"

He came an eager half-step nearer. "Then, anyway, you'll let me go away and work, and when I've kind of got a start, you'll let me come back and--and see if--if you feel any sort of--different from what you do now?

It wouldn't be so awful long. I'd work like--like h.e.l.l!" His thin hand shot into a fist.

Sheila's la.s.situde was startled by his word into a faint, unwilling smile.

"Don't laugh at me!" he cried out.

"Oh, d.i.c.kie, my dear, I'm not laughing. I'm so tired I can hardly stand.

And truly you must go now. I'm horrid to you. I always am. And yet I do like you so much. And you are such a dear. And I feel there's something great about you. I should be glad for you to leave Millings. There is a much better chance for you away from Millings. I feel years old to-day. I think I've grown up too old all at once and missed lovely things that I ought to have had. d.i.c.kie"--she gave a dry sort of sob--"_you_ are one of the lovely things."

His arms drew gently round her. "Let me kiss you, Sheila," he pleaded with tremulous lips. "I want just to kiss you once for good-bye. I'll be so careful. If you knowed how I feel, you'd let me."

She lifted up her mouth like an obedient child. Then, back of d.i.c.kie, she saw Sylvester's face.

It was more sallow than usual; its upper lip was drawn away from the teeth and deeply wrinkled; the eyes, half-closed, were very soft; they looked as though there was a veil across their pensiveness. He caught d.i.c.kie's elbow in his hand, twisted him about, thrusting a knee into his back, and with his other long, bony hand he struck him brutally across the face. The emerald on his finger caught the light of the rising sun and flashed like a little stream of green fire.

d.i.c.kie, caught unawares by superior strength, was utterly defenseless. He writhed and struggled vainly, gasping under the blows. Sylvester forced him across the room, still inflicting punishment. His hand made a great cracking sound at every slap.

Sheila hid her face from the dreadful sight. "Oh, don't, don't, don't!"

she wailed again and again.

Then it was over. d.i.c.kie was flung out; the door was locked against him and Sylvester came back across the floor.

His collar stood up in a half-moon back of his ears, his hair fell across his forehead, his face was flushed, his lip bled. He had either bitten it himself or d.i.c.kie had struck it. But he seemed quite calm, only a little breathless. He was neither snarling nor smiling now. He took Sheila very gently by the wrists, drawing her hands down from her face, and he put her arms at their full length behind her, holding them there.

"You meet d.i.c.kie here when you're through work, dream-girl," he said gently. "You kiss d.i.c.kie when you leave my Aura, you little beacon light.

I've kept my hands off you and my lips off you and my mind off you, because I thought you were too fine and good for anything but my ideal.

And all this while you've been sneaking up here to d.i.c.kie and Jim and Lord knows who else besides. Now, I am agoin' to kiss you and then you gotta get out of Millings. Do you hear? After I've kissed you, you ain't good enough for my purpose--not for mine."

Gathering both her hands in one of his, he put the hard, long fingers of his free hand back of her head, holding it from wincing or turning and his mouth dropped upon hers and seemed to smother out her life. She tasted whiskey and the blood from his cut lips.

"You won't tell _me_, anyway, that lie again," he panted, keeping his face close, staring into her wide eyes of a horrified childishness--"that you've never been kissed."

Again his lips fastened on her mouth. He let her go, strode to the door, unlocked it, and went out.

She had fallen to the floor, her head against the chair. She beat the chair with her hands, calling softly for her father and for her G.o.d. She reproached them both. "You told me it was a good old world," she sobbed.

"You told me it was a good old world."

CHAPTER XV

FLAMES

A hot, dry day followed on the cool dawn. In his room d.i.c.kie lay across his bed. The sun blazed in at his single long window; the big flies that had risen from the dirty yard buzzed and b.u.mped against the upper pane and made aimless, endless, mazy circles above and below one another in the stifling, odorous atmosphere. d.i.c.kie lay there like an image of Icarus, an eternal symbol of defeated youth; one could almost see about his slenderness the trailing, shattered wings. He had wept out the first shock of his anger and his shame; now he lay in a despairing stupor. His bruised face burned and ached; his chest felt tight with the aching and burning of his heart. Any suspicion of his father's interpretation of his presence in Sheila's room was mercifully spared him, but the knowledge that he had been brutally jerked back from her pure and patient lips, had been ignominiously punished before her eyes and turned out like a whipped boy--this knowledge was a dreadful torture to his pride. Sheila, to be sure, did not love him even a little bit; she had said so. All the longing and the tumult of his heart during these months had made no more impression upon her than a frantic sea makes upon the little bird at the top of the cliff. She had, he must think, hardly been aware of it. And it was such a terrible and frantic actuality. He had fancied that it must have beaten forever, day by day, night by night, at her consciousness.

Can a woman live near so turbulent a thing and not even guess at its existence? Her hand against his heart had lain so limp and dead. He hadn't hoped, of course, that she loved him the way he loved. Probably no one else could feel what he felt and live--so d.i.c.kie in young love's eternal fas.h.i.+on believed in his own miracle; but she might have loved him a little, a very little, in time--if she hadn't seen him beaten and shamed and cuffed out of her presence like a dog. Now there was no hope.

No hope at all. No hope. d.i.c.kie rocked his head against his arm. He had told Sheila that he would take care of her, but he could not even defend himself. He had told her that he would die to save her any suffering, but, before her, he had writhed and gasped helplessly under the weight of another man's hand, his open hand, not even a fist.... No after act of his could efface from Sheila's memory that picture of his ignominy. She had seen him twisted and bent and beaten and thrown away. His father had triumphantly returned to rea.s.sure and comfort her for the insult of a boy's impertinence. Would Sheila defend him? Would she understand? Or would she not be justified in contemptuous laughter at his pretensions?

Such thoughts--less like thoughts, however, than like fiery fever fits--twisted and scorched d.i.c.kie's mind as he lay there. They burnt into him wounds that for years throbbed slowly into scars.