Cressy

“And what do YOU think of it, Rupert?” he asked carelessly.

“I think, sir,” said Rupert, “that allowin’—for onct—that Johnny ain’t lying, mebbee it’s Cressy McKinstry that Seth’s huntin’ round, and knowin’ that she’s always runnin’ after you”—he stopped, and reddening with a newborn sense that his fatal truthfulness had led him into a glaring indelicacy towards the master, hurriedly added: “I mean, sir, that mebbee it’s Uncle Ben he’s jealous of, now that he’s got rich enough for Cressy to hev him, and knowin’ he comes to school in the afternoon perhaps”—

“‘Tain’t either!” broke in Johnny promptly. “Theth’s over ther beyond the thchool, and Crethy’s eatin’ ithecream at the bakerth with Uncle Ben.”

“Well, suppose she is, Seth don’t know it, silly!” answered Rupert, sharply. Then more politely to the master: “That’s it! Seth has seen Uncle Ben gallivanting with Cressy and thinks he’s bringing her over yer. Don’t you see?”

The master however did not see but one thing. The girl who had only two days ago carelessly left it to him to explain a compromising situation to her mother—this girl who had precipitated him into a frontier fight to the peril of his position and her good name, was calmly eating ices with an available suitor without the least concern of the past! The connection was perhaps illogical, but it was unpleasant. It was the more awkward from the fact that he fancied that not only Rupert’s beautiful eyes, but even the infant Johnny’s round ones, were fixed upon him with an embarrassed expression of hesitating and foreboding sympathy.

“I think Johnny believes what he says—don’t you, Johnny?” he smiled with an assumption of cheerful ease, “but I see no necessity just yet for binding Seth Davis over to keep the peace. Tell me about yourself, Rupe. I hope Uncle Ben doesn’t think of changing his young tutor with his good fortune?”

“No, sir,” returned Rupert brightening; “he promises to take me to Sacramento with him as his private secretary or confidential clerk, you know, ef—ef”—he hesitated again with very un-Rupert-like caution, “ef things go as he wants ‘em.” He stopped awkwardly and his brown eyes became clouded. “Like ez not, Mr. Ford, he’s only foolin’ me—and—HIMSELF.” The boy’s eyes sought the master’s curiously.

“I don’t know about that,” returned Mr. Ford uneasily, with a certain recollection of Uncle Ben’s triumph over his own incredulity; “he surely hasn’t shown himself a fool or a boaster so far. I consider your prospect a very fair one, and I wish you joy of it, my boy.” He ran his fingers through Rupert’s curls in his old caressing fashion, the more tenderly perhaps that he fancied he still saw symptoms of stormy and wet weather in the boy’s brown eyes. “Run along home, both of you, and don’t worry yourselves about me.”

He turned away, but had scarcely proceeded half a dozen yards before he felt a tug at his coat. Looking down he saw the diminutive Johnny. “They’ll be comin’ home thith way,” he said, reaching up in a hoarse confidential whisper.

“Who?”

“Crethy and ‘im.”

But before the master could make any response to this presumably gratifying information, Johnny had rejoined his brother. The two boys waved their hands towards him with the same diffident and mysterious sympathy that left him hesitating between a smile and a frown. Then he proceeded on his way. Nevertheless, for no other reason than that he felt a sudden distaste to meeting any one, when he reached the point where the trail descended directly to the settlement, he turned into a longer and more solitary detour by the woods.

The sun was already so low that its long rays pierced the forest from beneath, and suffused the dim colonnade of straight pine shafts with a golden haze, while it left the dense intercrossed branches fifty feet above in deeper shadow. Walking in this yellow twilight, with his feet noiselessly treading down the yielding carpet of pine needles, it seemed to the master that he was passing through the woods in a dream. There was no sound but the dull intermittent double knock of the wood-pecker, or the drowsy croak of some early roosting bird; all suggestion of the settlement, with all traces of human contiguity, were left far behind. It was therefore with a strange and nervous sense of being softly hailed by some woodland sprite that he seemed to hear his own name faintly wafted upon the air. He turned quickly; it was Cressy, panting behind him! Even then, in her white closely gathered skirts, her bared head and graceful arching neck bent forward, her flying braids freed from the straw hat which she had swung from her arm so as not to impede her flight, there was so much of the following Maenad about her that he was for an instant startled.

He stopped; she bounded to him, and throwing her arms around his neck with a light laugh, let herself hang for a moment breathless on his breast. Then recovering her speech she said slowly:—

“I started on an Injin trot after you, just as you turned off the trail, but you’d got so far ahead while I was shaking myself clear of Uncle Ben that I had to jist lope the whole way through the woods to catch up.” She stopped, and looking up into his troubled face caught his cheeks between her hands, and bringing his knit brows down to the level of her humid blue eyes said, “You haven’t kissed me yet. What’s the matter?”

“Doesn’t it strike you that I might ask that question, considering that it’s three days since I’ve seen you, and that you left me, in a rather awkward position, to explain matters to your mother?” he said coldly. He had formulated the sentence in his mind some moments before, but now that it was uttered, it appeared singularly weak and impotent.

“That’s so,” she said with a frank laugh, burying her face in his waistcoat. “You see, dandy boy”—his pet name—“I reckoned for that reason we’d better lie low for a day or two. Well,” she continued, untying his cravat and retying it again, “how DID you crawl out of it?”

“Do you mean to say your mother did not tell you?” he asked indignantly.

“Why should she?” returned Cressy lazily. “She never talks to me of these things, honey.”

“And you knew nothing about it?”

Cressy shook her head, and then winding one of her long braids around the young man’s neck, offered the end of it to his mouth, and on his sternly declining it, took it in her own.

Yet even her ignorance of what had really happened did not account to the master for the indifference of her long silence, and albeit conscious of some inefficiency in his present unheroic attitude, he continued sarcastically, “May I ask WHAT you imagined would happen when you left me?”

“Well,” said Cressy confidently, “I reckoned, chile, you could lie as well as the next man, and that, being gifted, you’d sling Maw something new and purty. Why, I ain’t got no fancy, but I fixed up something against Paw’s questioning ME. I made that conceited Masters promise to swear that HE was in the barn with me. Then I calculated to tell Paw that you came meandering along just before Maw popped in, and that I skedaddled to join Masters. Of course,” she added quickly, tightening her hold of the master as he made a sudden attempt at withdrawal, “I didn’t let on to Masters WHY I wanted him to promise, or that you were there.”

“Cressy,” said Ford, irritated beyond measure, “are you mad, or do you think I am?”

The girl’s face changed. She cast a half frightened, half questioning glance at his eyes and then around the darkening aisle. “If we’re going to quarrel, Jack,” she said hurriedly, “don’t let’s do it BEFORE FOLKS.”

“In the name of Heaven,” he said, following her eyes indignantly, “what do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, with a slight shiver of resignation and scorn, “if you—oh dear! if IT’S ALL going to be like THEM, let’s keep it to ourselves.”

He gazed at her in hopeless bewilderment. Did she really mean that she was more frightened at the possible revelation of their disagreement than of their intimacy?

“Come,” she continued tenderly, still glancing, however, uneasily around her, “come! We’ll be more comfortable in the hollow. It’s only a step.” Still holding him by her braid she half led, half dragged him away. To the right was one of those sudden depressions in the ground caused by the subsidence of the earth from hidden springs and the uprooting of one or two of the larger trees. When she had forced him down this declivity below the level of the needle-strewn forest floor, she seated him upon a mossy root, and shaking out her skirts in a half childlike, half coquettish way, comfortably seated herself in his lap, with her arm supplementing the clinging braid around his neck.

“Now hark to me, and don’t holler so loud,” she said turning his face to her questioning eyes. “What’s gone of you anyway, nigger boy?” It should be premised that Cressy’s terms of endearment were mainly negro-dialectical, reminiscences of her brief babyhood, her slave-nurse, and the only playmates she had ever known.

Still implacable, the master coldly repeated the counts of his indictment against the girl’s strange indifference and still stranger entanglements, winding up by setting forth the whole story of his interview with her mother, his forced defence of the barn, Seth’s outspoken accusation, and their silent and furious struggle in the loft. But if he had expected that this daughter of a Southwestern fighter would betray any enthusiasm over her lover’s participation in one of their characteristic feuds—if he looked for any fond praise for his own prowess, he was bitterly mistaken. She loosened her arm from his neck of her own accord, unwound the braid, and putting her two little hands clasped between her knees, crossed her small feet before her, and, albeit still in his lap, looked the picture of languid dejection.

“Maw ought to have more sense, and you ought to have lit out of the window after me,” she said with a lazy sigh. “Fightin’ ain’t in your line—it’s too much like THEM. That Seth’s sure to get even with you.”

“I can protect myself,” he said haughtily. Nevertheless he had a depressing consciousness that his lithe and graceful burden was somewhat in the way of any heroic expression.

“Seth can lick you out of your boots, chile,” she said with naive abstraction. Then, as he struggled to secure an upright position, “Don’t git riled, honey. Of course you’d let them kill you before YOU’D give in. But that’s their best holt—that’s their trade! That’s all they can do—don’t you see? That’s where YOU’RE not like THEM—that’s why you’re not their low down kind! That’s why you’re my boy—that’s why I love you!”

She had thrown her whole weight again upon his shoulders until she had forced him back to his seat. Then, with her locked hands again around his neck, she looked intently into his face. The varying color dropped from her cheeks, her eyes seemed to grow larger, the same look of rapt absorption and possession that had so transfigured her young face at the ball was fixed upon it now. Her lips parted slightly, she seemed to murmur rather than speak:—

“What are these people to us? What are Seth’s jealousies, Uncle Ben’s and Masters’s foolishness, Paw and Maw’s quarr’ls and tantrums to you and me, dear? What is it what THEY think, what they reckon, what they plan out, and what they set themselves against—to us? We love each other, we belong to each other, without their help or their hindrance. From the time we first saw each other it was so, and from that time Paw and Maw, and Seth and Masters, and even YOU and ME, dear, had nothing else to do. That was love as I know it; not Seth’s sneaking rages, and Uncle Ben’s sneaking fooleries, and Masters’s sneaking conceit, but only love. And knowing that, I let Seth rage, and Uncle Ben dawdle, and Masters trifle—and for what? To keep them from me and my boy. They were satisfied, and we were happy.”

Vague and unreasoning as he knew her speech to be, the rapt and perfect conviction with which it was uttered staggered him.

“But how is this to end, Cressy?” he said passionately.

The abstracted look passed, and the slight color and delicate mobility of her face returned. “To end, dandy boy?” she repeated lazily. “You didn’t think of marrying me—did you?”

He blushed, stammered, and said “Yes,” albeit with all his past vacillation and his present distrust of her, transparent on his cheek and audible in his voice.

“No, dear,” she said quietly, reaching down, untying her little shoe and shaking the dust and pine needles from its recesses, “no! I don’t know enough to be a wife to you, just now, and you know it. And I couldn’t keep a house fit for you, and you couldn’t afford to keep ME without it. And then it would be all known, and it wouldn’t be us two, dear, and our lonely meetings any more. And we couldn’t be engaged—that would be too much like me and Seth over again. That’s what you mean, dandy boy—for you’re only a dandy boy, you know, and they don’t get married to backwood Southern girls who haven’t a nigger to bless themselves with since the war! No,” she continued, lifting her proud little head so promptly after Ford had recovered from his surprise as to make the ruse of emptying her shoe perfectly palpable, “no, that’s what we’ve both allowed, dear, all along. And now, honey, it’s near time for me to go. Tell me something good—before I go. Tell me that you love me as you used to—tell me how you felt that night at the ball when you first knew we loved each other. But stop—kiss me first—there, once more—for keeps.”

CHAPTER XI

When Uncle Ben, or “Benjamin Daubigny, Esq.,” as he was already known in the columns of the “Star,” accompanied Miss Cressy McKinstry on her way home after the first display of attention and hospitality since his accession to wealth and position, he remained for some moments in a state of bewildered and smiling idiocy. It was true that their meeting was chance and accidental; it was true that Cressy had accepted his attention with lazy amusement; it was true that she had suddenly and audaciously left him on the borders of the McKinstry woods in a way that might have seemed rude and abrupt to any escort less invincibly good-humored than Uncle Ben, but none of these things marred his fatuous felicity. It is even probable that in his gratuitous belief that his timid attentions had been too marked and impulsive, he attributed Cressy’s flight to a maidenly coyness that pleasurably increased his admiration for her and his confidence in himself. In his abstraction of enjoyment and in the gathering darkness he ran against a fir-tree very much as he had done while walking with her, and he confusedly apologized to it as he had to her, and by her own appellation. In this way he eventually overran his trail and found himself unexpectedly and apologetically in the clearing before the school-house.

“Ef this ain’t the singlerest thing, miss,” he said, and then stopped suddenly. A faint noise in the school-house like the sound of splintered wood attracted his attention. The master was evidently there. If he was alone he would speak to him.

He went to the window, looked in, and in an instant his amiable abstraction left him. He crept softly to the door, tried it, and then putting his powerful shoulder against the panel, forced the lock from its fastenings. He entered the room as Seth Davis, frightened but furious, lifted himself from before the master’s desk which he had just broken open. He had barely time to conceal something in his pocket and close the lid again before Uncle Ben approached him.

“What mouut ye be doin’ here, Seth Davis?” he asked with the slow deliberation which in that locality meant mischief.

“And what mouut YOU be doin’ here, Mister Ben Dabney?” said Seth, resuming his effrontery.

“Well,” returned Uncle Ben, planting himself in the aisle before his opponent, “I ain’t doin’ no sheriff’s posse business jest now, but I reckon to keep my hand in far enuff to purtect other folks’ property,” he added, with a significant glance at the broken lock of the desk.

“Ben Dabney,” said Seth in snarling expostulation, “I hain’t got no quar’ll with ye!”

“Then hand me over whatever you took just now from teacher’s desk and we’ll talk about that afterwards,” said Uncle Ben advancing.

“I tell ye I hain’t got no quar’ll with ye, Uncle Ben,” continued Seth, retreating with a malignant sneer; “and when you talk of protectin’ other folks’ property, mebbe ye’d better protect YOUR OWN—or what ye’d like to call so—instead of quar’llin’ with the man that’s helpin’ ye. I’ve got yer the proofs that that sneakin’ hound of a Yankee school-master that Cress McKinstry’s hell bent on, and that the old man and old woman are just chuckin’ into her arms, is a lyin’, black-hearted, hypocritical seducer”—

“Stop!” said Uncle Ben in a voice that made the crazy casement rattle.

He strode towards Seth Davis, no longer with his habitual careful, hesitating step, but with a tread that seemed to shake the whole school-room. A single dominant clutch of his powerful right hand on the young man’s breast forced him backwards into the vacant chair of the master. His usually florid face had grown as gray as the twilight; his menacing form in a moment filled the little room and darkened the windows. Then in some inexplicable reaction his figure slightly drooped, he laid one heavy hand tremblingly on the desk, and with the other affected to wipe his mouth after his old embarrassed fashion.

“What’s that you were sayin’ o’ Cressy?” he said huskily.

“Wot everybody says,” said the frightened Seth, gaining a cowardly confidence under his adversary’s emotion. “Wot every cub that sets yer under his cantin’ teachin’, and sees ‘em together, knows. It’s wot you’d hev knowed ef he and Roop Filgee hadn’t played ye fer a softy all the time. And while you’ve bin hangin’ round yer fer a flicker of Cressy’s gownd as she prances out o’ school, he’s bin lyin’ low and laffin’ at ye, and while he’s turned Roop over to keep you here, pretendin’ to give ye lessons, he’s bin gallivantin’ round with her and huggin’ and kissin’ her in barns and in the brush—and now YOU want to quar’ll with me.”

He stopped, panting for breath, and stared malignantly in the gray face of his hearer. But Uncle Ben only lifted his heavy hand mildly with an awkward gesture of warning, stepped softly in his old cautious hesitating manner to the open door, closed it, and returned gently:—

“I reckon ye got in through the winder, didn’t ye, Seth?” he said, with a labored affectation of unemotional ease, “a kind o’ one leg over, and one, two, and then you’re in, eh?”

“Never you mind HOW I got in, Ben Dabney,” returned Seth, his hostility and insolence increasing with his opponent’s evident weakness, “ez long ez I got yer and got, by G-d! what I kem here fer! For whiles all this was goin’ on, and whiles the old fool man and old fool woman was swallowin’ what they did see and blinkin’ at what they didn’t, and huggin’ themselves that they’d got high-toned kempany fer their darter, that high-toned kempany was playin’ THEM too, by G-d! Yes, Sir! that high-toned, cantin’ school-teacher was keepin’ a married woman in ‘Frisco, all the while he was here honey-foglin’ with Cressy, and I’ve got the papers yer to prove it.” He tapped his breast-pocket with a coarse laugh and thrust his face forward into the gray shadow of his adversary’s.

“An’ you sorter spotted their bein’ in this yer desk and bursted it?” said Uncle Ben, gravely examining the broken lock in the darkness as if it were the most important feature of the incident.

Seth nodded. “You bet your life. I saw him through the winder only this afternoon lookin over ‘em alone, and I reckoned to lay my hands on ‘em if I had to bust him or his desk. And I did!” he added with a triumphant chuckle.

“And you did—sure pop!” said Uncle Ben with slow deliberate admiration, passing his heavy hand along the splintered lid. “And you reckon, Seth, that this yer showin’ of him up will break off enythin’ betwixt him and this yer—this yer Miss—Miss McKinstry?” he continued with labored formality.

“I reckon ef the old fool McKinstry don’t shoot him in his tracks thar’ll be white men enough in Injin Springs to ride this high-toned, pizenous hypocrit on a rail outer the settlement!”

“That’s so!” said Uncle Ben musingly, after a thoughtful pause, in which he still seemed to be more occupied with the broken desk than his companion’s remark. Then he went on cautiously: “And ez this thing orter be worked mighty fine, Seth, p’r’aps, on the hull, you’d better let me have them papers.”

“What! YOU?” snarled Seth, drawing back with a glance of angry suspicion; “not if I know it!”

“Seth,” said Uncle Ben, resting his elbows on the desk confidentially, and speaking with painful and heavy deliberation, “when you first interdoosed this yer subject you elluded to my hevin’, so to speak, rights o’ preemption and interference with this young lady, and that in your opinion, I wasn’t purtectin’ them rights. It ‘pears to me that, allowin’ that to be gospel truth, them ther papers orter be in MY possession—you hevin’ so to speak no rights to purtect, bein’ off the board with this yer young lady, and bein’ moved gin’rally by free and independent cussedness. And ez I sed afore, this sort o’ thing havin’ to be worked mighty fine, and them papers manniperlated with judgment, I reckon, Seth, if you don’t objeck, I’ll hev—hev—to trouble you.”

Seth started to his feet with a rapid glance at the door, but Uncle Ben had risen again with the same alarming expression of completely filling the darkened school-room, and of shaking the floor beneath him at the slightest movement. Already he fancied he saw Uncle Ben’s powerful arm hovering above him ready to descend. It suddenly occurred to him that if he left the execution of his scheme of exposure and vengeance to Uncle Ben, the onus of stealing the letters would fall equally upon their possessor. This advantage seemed more probable than the danger of Uncle Ben’s weakly yielding them up to the master. In the latter case he, Seth, could still circulate the report of having seen the letters which Uncle Ben had himself stolen in a fit of jealousy—a hypothesis the more readily accepted from the latter’s familiar knowledge of the schoolhouse and his presumed ambitious jealousy of Cressy in his present attitude as a man of position. With affected reluctance and hesitation he put his hand to his breast-pocket.

“Of course,” he said, “if you’re kalkilatin’ to take up the quar’ll on YOUR rights, and ez Cressy ain’t anythin’ more to me, YOU orter hev the proofs. Only don’t trust them into that hound’s hands. Once he gets ‘em again he’ll secure a warrant agin you for stealin’. That’ll be his game. I’d show ‘em to HER first—don’t ye see?—and I reckon ef she’s old Ma’am McKinstry’s darter, she’ll make it lively for him.”

He handed the letters to the looming figure before him. It seemed to become again a yielding mortal, and said in a hesitating voice, “P’r’aps you’d better make tracks outer this, Seth, and leave me yer to put things to rights and fix up that door and the desk agin to-morrow mornin’. He’d better not know it to onct, and so start a row about bein’ broken into.”

The proposition seemed to please Seth; he even extended his hand in the darkness. But he met only an irresponsive void. With a slight shrug of his shoulders and a grunting farewell, he felt his way to the door and disappeared. For a few moments it seemed as if Uncle Ben had also deserted the schoolhouse, so profound and quiet was the hush that fell upon it. But as the eye became accustomed to the shadow a grayish bulk appeared to grow out of it over the master’s desk and shaped itself into the broad figure of Uncle Ben. Later, when the moon rose and looked in at the window, it saw him as the master had seen him on the first day he had begun his lessons in the school-house, with his face bent forward over the desk and the same look of child-like perplexity and struggle that he had worn at his allotted task. Unheroic, ridiculous, and no doubt blundering and idiotic as then, but still vaguely persistent in his thought, he remained for some moments in this attitude. Then rising and taking advantage of the moonlight that flooded the desk, he set himself to mend the broken lock with a large mechanical clasp-knife he produced from his pocket, and the aid of his workmanlike thumb and finger. Presently he began to whistle softly, at first a little artificially and with relapses of reflective silence. The lock of the desk restored, he secured into position again that part of the door-lock which he had burst off in his entrance. This done, he closed the door gently and once more stepped out into the moonlit clearing. In replacing his knife in his pocket he took out the letters which he had not touched since they were handed to him in the darkness. His first glance at the handwriting caused him to stop. Then still staring at it, he began to move slowly and automatically backwards to the porch. When he reached it he sat down, unfolded the letter, and without attempting to read it, turned its pages over and over with the unfamiliarity of an illiterate man in search of the signature. This when found apparently plunged him again into motionless abstraction. Only once he changed his position to pull up the legs of his trousers, open his knees, and extend the distance between his feet, and then with the unfolded pages carefully laid in the moonlit space thus opened before him, regarded them with dubious speculation. At the end of ten minutes he rose with a sigh of physical and mental relaxation, refolded the letter, put it in his pocket, and made his way to the town.