Cressy

When he reached the hotel he turned into the bar-room, and observing that it happened to be comparatively deserted, asked for a glass of whiskey. In response to the barkeeper’s glance of curiosity—as Uncle Ben seldom drank, and then only as a social function with others—he explained:—

“I reckon straight whiskey is about ez good ez the next thing for blind chills.”

The bar-keeper here interposed that in his larger medical experience he had found the exhibition of ginger in combination with gin attended with effect, although it was evident that in his business capacity he regarded Uncle Ben, as a drinker, with distrust.

“Ye ain’t seen Mr. Ford hanging round yer lately?” continued Uncle Ben with laborious ease.

The bar-keeper, with his eye still scornfully fixed on his customer, but his hands which were engaged in washing his glasses under the counter giving him the air of humorously communicating with a hidden confederate, had not seen the school-master that afternoon.

Uncle Ben turned away and slowly mounted the staircase to the master’s room. After a moment’s pause on the landing, which must have been painfully obvious to any one who heard his heavy ascent, he gave two timid raps on the door which were equally ridiculous in contrast with his powerful tread. The door was opened promptly by the master.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said shortly. “Come in.”

Uncle Ben entered without noticing the somewhat ungracious form of invitation. “It war me,” he said, “dropped in, not finding ye downstairs. Let’s have a drink.”

The master gazed at Uncle Ben, who, owing to his abstraction, had not yet wiped his mouth of the liquor he had imperfectly swallowed, and was in consequence more redolent of whiskey than a confirmed toper. He rang the bell for the desired refreshment with a slightly cynical smile. He was satisfied that his visitor, like many others of humble position, was succumbing to his good fortune.

“I wanted to see ye, Mr. Ford,” he began, taking an unproffered chair and depositing his hat after some hesitation outside the door, “in regard to what I onct told ye about my wife in Mizzouri. P’r’aps you disremember?”

“I remember,” returned the master resignedly.

“You know it was that arternoon that fool Stacey sent the sheriff and the Harrisons over to McKinstry’s barn.”

“Go on!” petulantly said the master, who had his own reasons for not caring to recall it.

“It was that arternoon, you know, that you hadn’t time to hark to me—hevin’ to go off on an engagement,” continued Uncle Ben with protracted deliberation, “and”—

“Yes, yes, I remember,” interrupted the master exasperatedly, “and really unless you get on faster, I’ll have to leave you again.”

“It was that arternoon,” said Uncle Ben without heeding him, “when I told you I hadn’t any idea what had become o’ my wife ez I left in Mizzouri.”

“Yes,” said the master sharply, “and I told you it was your bounden duty to look for her.”

“That’s so,” said Uncle Ben nodding comfortably, “them’s your very words; on’y a leetle more strong than that, ef I don’t disremember. Well, I reckon I’ve got an idee!” The master assumed a sudden expression of interest, but Uncle Ben did not vary his monotonous tone.

“I kem across that idee, so to speak, on the trail. I kem across it in some letters ez was lying wide open in the brush. I picked em up and I’ve got ‘em here.”

He slowly took the letters from his pocket with one hand, while he dragged the chair on which he was sitting beside the master. But with a quick flush of indignation Mr. Ford rose and extended his hand.

“These are MY letters, Dabney,” he said sternly, “stolen from my desk. Who has dared to do this?”

But Uncle Ben had, as if accidentally, interposed his elbow between the master and Seth’s spoils.

“Then it’s all right?” he returned deliberately. “I brought ‘em here because I thought they might give an idee where my wife was. For them letters is in her own handwrite. You remember ez I told ez how she was a scollard.”

The master sat back in his chair white and dumb. Incredible, extraordinary, and utterly unlooked for as was this revelation, he felt instinctively that it was true.

“I couldn’t read it myself—ez you know. I didn’t keer to ax any one else to read it for me—you kin reckon why, too. And that’s why I’m troublin’ you to-night, Mr. Ford—ez a friend.”

The master with a desperate effort recovered his voice. “It is impossible. The lady who wrote those letters does not bear your name. More than that,” he added with hasty irrelevance, “she is so free that she is about to be married, as you might have read. You have made a mistake, the handwriting may be like, but it cannot be really your wife’s.”

Uncle Ben shook his head slowly. “It’s her’n—there’s no mistake. When a man, Mr. Ford, hez studied that handwrite—havin’, so to speak, knowed it on’y from the OUTSIDE—from seein’ it passin’ like between friends—that man’s chances o’ bein’ mistook ain’t ez great ez the man’s who on’y takes in the sense of the words that might b’long to everybody. And her name not bein’ the same ez mine, don’t foller. Ef she got a divorce she’d take her old gal’s name—the name of her fammerly. And that would seem to allow she DID get a divorce. What mowt she hev called herself when she writ this?”

The master saw his opportunity and rose to it with a chivalrous indignation, that for the moment imposed even upon himself. “I decline to answer that question,” he said angrily. “I refuse to allow the name of any woman who honors me with her confidence to be dragged into the infamous outrage that has been committed upon me and common decency. And I shall hold the thief and scoundrel—whoever he may be—answerable to myself in the absence of her natural protector.”

Uncle Ben surveyed the hero of these glittering generalities with undisguised admiration. He extended his hand to him gravely.

“Shake! Ef another proof was wantin’, Mr. Ford, of that bein’ my wife’s letter,” he said, “that high-toned style of yours would settle it. For, ef thar was one thing she DID like, it was that sort of po’try. And one reason why her and me didn’t get on, and why I skedaddled, was because it wasn’t in my line. Et’s all in trainin’! On’y a man ez had the Fourth Reader at his fingers’ ends could talk like that. Bein’ brought up on Dobell—ez is nowhere—it sorter lets me outer you, ez it did outer HER. But allowin’ it ain’t the square thing for YOU to mention her name, that wouldn’t be nothin’ agin’ MY doin’ it, and callin’ her, well—Lou Price in a keerless sort o’ way, eh?”

“I decline to answer further,” replied the master quickly, although his color had changed at the name. “I decline to say another word on the matter until this mystery is cleared up—until I know who dared to break into my desk and steal my property, and the purpose of this unheard-of outrage. And I demand possession of those letters at once.”

Uncle Ben without a word put them in the master’s hand, to his slight surprise, and it must be added to his faint discomfiture, nor was it decreased when Uncle Ben added, with grave naivete and a patronizing pressure of his hand on his shoulder,—“In course ez you’re taken’ it on to yourself, and ez Lou Price ain’t got no further call on ME, they orter be yours. Ez to who got ‘em outer the desk, I reckon you ain’t got no suspicion of any one spyin’ round ye—hev ye?”

In an instant the recollection of Seth Davis’s face at the window and the corroboration of Rupert’s warning flashed across Ford’s mind. The hypothesis that Seth had imagined that they were Cressy’s letters, and had thrown them down without reading them when he had found out his mistake, seemed natural. For if he had read them he would undoubtedly have kept them to show to Cressy. The complex emotions that had disturbed the master on the discovery of Uncle Ben’s relationship to the writer of the letters were resolving themselves into a furious rage at Seth. But before he dared revenge himself he must be first assured that Seth was ignorant of their contents. He turned to Uncle Ben.

“I have a suspicion, but to make it certain I must ask you for the present to say nothing of this to any one.”

Uncle Ben nodded. “And when you hev found out and you’re settled in your mind that you kin make my mind easy about this yer Lou Price, ez we’ll call her, bein’ divorced squarely, and bein’, so to speak, in the way o’ gettin’ married agin, ye might let me know ez a friend. I reckon I won’t trouble you any more to-night—onless you and me takes another sociable drink together in the bar. No? Well, then, good-night.” He moved slowly towards the door. With his hand on the lock he added: “Ef yer writin’ to her agin, you might say ez how you found ME lookin’ well and comf’able, and hopin’ she’s enjyin’ the same blessin’. ‘So long.”

He disappeared, leaving the master in a hopeless collapse of conflicting, and, it is to be feared, not very heroic emotions. The situation, which had begun so dramatically, had become suddenly unromantically ludicrous, without, however, losing any of its embarrassing quality. He was conscious that he occupied the singular position of being more ridiculous than the husband—whose invincible and complacent simplicity stung him like the most exquisite irony. For an instant he was almost goaded into the fury of declaring that he had broken off from the writer of the letters forever, but its inconsistency with the chivalrous attitude he had just taken occurred to him in time to prevent him from becoming doubly absurd. His rage with Seth Davis seemed to him the only feeling left that was genuine and rational, and yet, now that Uncle Ben had gone, even that had a spurious ring. It was necessary for him to lash himself into a fury over the hypothesis that the letters MIGHT have been Cressy’s, and desecrated by that scoundrel’s touch. Perhaps he had read them and left them to be picked up by others. He looked over them carefully to see if their meaning would, to the ordinary reader, appear obvious and compromising. His eye fell on the first paragraph.

“I should not be quite fair with you, Jack, if I affected to disbelieve in your faith in your love for me and its endurance, but I should be still more unfair if I didn’t tell you what I honestly believe, that at your age you are apt to deceive yourself, and, without knowing it, to deceive others. You confess you have not yet decided upon your career, and you are always looking forward so hopefully, dear Jack, for a change in the future, but you are willing to believe that far more serious things than that will suffer no change in the mean time. If we continued as we were, I, who am older than you and have more experience, might learn the misery of seeing you change towards ME as I have changed towards another, and for the same reason. If I were sure I could keep pace with you in your dreams and your ambition, if I were sure that I always knew WHAT they were, we might still be happy—but I am not sure, and I dare not again risk my happiness on an uncertainty. In coming to my present resolution I do not look for happiness, but at least I know I shall not suffer disappointment, nor involve others in it. I confess I am growing too old not to feel the value to a woman—a necessity to her in this country—of security in her present and future position. Another can give me that. And although you may call this a selfish view of our relations, I believe that you will soon—if you do not, even as you read this now—feel the justice of it, and thank me for taking it.”

With a smile of scorn he tore up the letter, in what he fondly believed was the bitterness of an outraged trustful nature, forgetting that for many weeks he had scarcely thought of its writer, and that he himself in his conduct had already anticipated its truths.

CHAPTER XII

The master awoke the next morning, albeit after a restless night, with that clarity of conscience and perception which it is to be feared is more often the consequence of youth and a perfect circulation than of any moral conviction or integrity. He argued with himself that as the only party really aggrieved in the incident of the previous night, the right of remedy remained with him solely, and under the benign influence of an early breakfast and the fresh morning air he was inclined to feel less sternly even towards Seth Davis. In any event, he must first carefully weigh the evidence against him, and examine the scene of the outrage closely. For this purpose, he had started for the school-house fully an hour before his usual time. He was even light-hearted enough to recognize the humorous aspect of Uncle Ben’s appeal to him, and his own ludicrously paradoxical attitude, and as he at last passed from the dreary flat into the fringe of upland pines, he was smiling. Well for him, perhaps, that he was no more affected by any premonition of the day before him than the lately awakened birds that lightly cut the still sleeping woods around him in their long flashing sabre-curves of flight. A yellow-throat, destined to become the breakfast of a lazy hawk still swinging above the river, was especially moved to such a causeless and idiotic roulade of mirth that the master listening to the foolish bird was fain to whistle too. He presently stopped, however, with a slight embarrassment. For a few paces before him Cressy had unexpectedly appeared.

She had evidently been watching for him. But not with her usual indolent confidence. There was a strained look of the muscles of her mouth, as of some past repression, and a shaded hollow under her temples beneath the blonde rings of her shorter hair. Her habitually slow, steady eye was troubled, and she cast a furtive glance around her before she searched him with her glance. Without knowing why, yet vaguely fearing that he did, he became still more embarrassed, and in the very egotism of awkwardness, stammered without a further salutation: “A disgraceful thing has happened last night, and I’m up early to find the perpetrator. My desk was broken into, and”—

“I know it,” she interrupted, with a half-impatient, half uneasy putting away of the subject with her little hand—“there—don’t go all over it again. Paw and Maw have been at me about it all night—ever since those Harrisons in their anxiousness to make up their quarrel, rushed over with the news. I’m tired of it!”

For an instant he was staggered. How much had she learned! With the same awkward indirectness, he said vaguely, “But it might have been YOUR letters, you know?”

“But it wasn’t,” she said, simply. “It OUGHT to have been. I wish it had”—She stopped, and again regarded him with a strange expression. “Well,” she said slowly, “what are you going to do?”

“To find out the scoundrel who has done this,” he said firmly, “and punish him as he deserves.”

The almost imperceptible shrug that had raised her shoulders gave way as she regarded him with a look of wearied compassion.

“No,” she said, gravely, “you cannot. They’re too many for you. You must go away, at once.”

“Never,” he said indignantly. “Even if it were not a cowardice. It would be more—a confession!”

“Not more than they already know,” she said wearily. “But, I tell you, you MUST go. I have sneaked out of the house and run here all the way to warn you. If you—you care for me, Jack—you will go.”

“I should be a traitor to you if I did,” he said quickly. “I shall stay.”

“But if—if—Jack—if”—she drew nearer him with a new-found timidity, and then suddenly placed her two hands upon his shoulders: “If—if—Jack—I were to go with you?”

The old rapt, eager look of possession had come back to her face now; her lips were softly parted. Yet even then she seemed to be waiting some reply more potent than that syllabled on the lips of the man before her.

Howbeit that was the only response. “Darling,” he said kissing her, “but wouldn’t that justify them”—

“Stop,” she said suddenly. Then putting her hand over his mouth, she continued with the same half-weary expression: “Don’t let us go over all that again either. It is SO tiresome. Listen, dear. You’ll do one or two little things for me—won’t you, dandy boy? Don’t linger long at the school-house after lessons. Go right home! Don’t look after these men TO-DAY—to-morrow, Saturday, is your holiday—you know—and you’ll have more time. Keep to yourself to-day as much as you can, dear, for twelve hours—until—until—you hear from me, you know. It will be all right then,” she added, lifting her eyelids with a sudden odd resemblance to her father’s look of drowsy pain, which Ford had never noticed before. “Promise me that, dear, won’t you?”

With a mental reservation he promised hurriedly—preoccupied in his wonder why she seemed to avoid his explanation, in his desire to know what had happened, in the pride that had kept him from asking more or volunteering a defence, and in his still haunting sense of having been wronged. Yet he could not help saying as he caught and held her hand:—

“YOU have not doubted me, Cressy? YOU have not allowed this infamous raking up of things that are past and gone to alter your feelings?”

She looked at him abstractedly. “You think it might alter ANYBODY’S feelings, then?”

“Nobody’s who really loved another”—he stammered.

“Don’t let us talk of it any more,” she said suddenly stretching out her arms, lifting them above her head with a wearied gesture, and then letting them fall clasped before her in her old habitual fashion. “It makes my head ache; what with Paw and Maw and the rest of them—I’m sick of it all.”

She turned away as Ford drew back coldly and let her hand fall from his arm. She took a few steps forward, stopped, ran back to him again, crushed his face and head in a close embrace, and then seemed to dip like a bird into the tall bracken, and was gone.

The master stood for some moments chagrined and bewildered; it was characteristic of his temperament that he had paid less heed to what she told him than what he IMAGINED had passed between her mother and herself. She was naturally jealous of the letters—he could forgive her for that; she had doubtless been twitted about them, but he could easily explain them to her parents—as he would have done to her. But he was not such a fool as to elope with her at such a moment, without first clearing his character—and knowing more of hers. And it was equally characteristic of him that in his sense of injury he confounded her with the writer of the letters—as sympathizing with his correspondent in her estimate of his character, and was quite carried away with the belief that he was equally wronged by both.

It was not until he reached the schoolhouse that the evidences of last night’s outrage for a time distracted his mind from his singular interview. He was struck with the workmanlike manner in which the locks had been restored, and the care that had evidently been taken to remove the more obvious and brutal traces of burglary. This somewhat staggered his theory that Seth Davis was the perpetrator; mechanical skill and thoughtfulness were not among the lout’s characteristics. But he was still more disconcerted on pushing back his chair to find a small india-rubber tobacco pouch lying beneath it. The master instantly recognized it: he had seen it a hundred times before—it was Uncle Ben’s. It was not there when he had closed the room yesterday afternoon. Either Uncle Ben had been there last night, or had anticipated him this morning. But in the latter case he would scarcely have overlooked his fallen property—that, in the darkness of the night, might have readily escaped detection. His brow darkened with a sudden conviction that it was Uncle Ben who was the real and only offender, and that his simplicity of the previous night was part of his deception. A sickening sense that he had been again duped—but why or to what purpose he hardly dared to think—overcame him. Who among these strange people could he ever again trust? After the fashion of more elevated individuals, he had accepted the respect and kindness of those he believed his inferiors as a natural tribute to his own superiority; any change in THEIR feelings must therefore be hypocrisy or disloyalty; it never occurred to him that HE might have fallen below their standard.

The arrival of the children and the resumption of his duties for a time diverted him. But although the morning’s exercise restored the master’s self-confidence, it cannot be said to have improved his judgment. Disdaining to question Rupert Filgee, as the possible confidant of Uncle Ben, he answered the curious inquiries of the children as to the broken doorlock with the remark that it was a matter that he should have to bring before the Trustees of the Board, and by the time that school was over and the pupils dismissed he had quite resolved upon this formal disposition of it. In spite of Cressy’s warning—rather because of it—in the new attitude he had taken towards her and her friends, he lingered in the school-house until late. He had occupied himself in drawing up a statement of the facts, with an intimation that his continuance in the school would depend upon a rigid investigation of the circumstances, when he was aroused by the clatter of horses’ hoofs. The next moment the school-house was surrounded by a dozen men.

He looked up; half of them dismounted and entered the room. The other half remained outside darkening the windows with their motionless figures. Each man carried a gun before him on the saddle; each man wore a rude mask of black cloth partly covering his face.

Although the master was instinctively aware that he was threatened by serious danger, he was far from being impressed by the arms and disguise of his mysterious intruders. On the contrary, the obvious and glaring inconsistency of this cheaply theatrical invasion of the peaceful school-house; of this opposition of menacing figures to the scattered childish primers and text-books that still lay on the desks around him, only extracted from him a half scornful smile as he coolly regarded them. The fearlessness of ignorance is often as unassailable as the most experienced valor, and the awe-inspiring invaders were at first embarrassed and then humanly angry. A lank figure to the right made a forward movement of impotent rage, but was checked by the evident leader of the party.

“Ef he likes to take it that way, there ain’t no Regulators law agin it, I reckon,” he said, in a voice which the master instantly recognized as Jim Harrison’s, “though ez a gin’ral thing they don’t usually find it FUN.” Then turning to the master he added, “Mister Ford, ef that’s the name you go by everywhere, we’re wantin’ a man about your size.”

Ford knew that he was in hopeless peril. He knew that he was physically defenceless and at the mercy of twelve armed and lawless men. But he retained a preternatural clearness of perception, and audacity born of unqualified scorn for his antagonists, with a feminine sharpness of tongue. In a voice which astonished even himself by its contemptuous distinctness, he said: “My name IS Ford, but as I only SUPPOSE your name is Harrison perhaps you’ll be fair enough to take that rag from your face and show it to me like a man.”

The man removed the mask from his face with a slight laugh.

“Thank you,” said Ford. “Now, perhaps you will tell me which one of you gentlemen broke into the school-house, forced the lock of my desk, and stole my papers. If he is here I wish to tell him he is not only a thief, but a cur and a coward, for the letters are a woman’s—whom he neither knows nor has the right to know.”

If he had hoped to force a personal quarrel and trust his life to the chance of a single antagonist, he was disappointed, for although his unexpected attitude had produced some effect among the group, and even attracted the attention of the men at the windows, Harrison strode deliberately towards him.

“That kin wait,” he said; “jest now we propose to take you and your letters and drop ‘em and you outer this yer township of Injin Springs. You kin take ‘em back to the woman or critter you got ‘em of. But we kalkilate you’re a little too handy and free in them sorter things to teach school round yer, and we kinder allow we don’t keer to hev our gals and boys eddicated up to your high-toned standard. So ef you choose to kem along easy we’ll mak’ you comf’ble on a hoss we’ve got waitin’ outside, an’ escort you across the line. Ef you don’t—we’ll take you anyway.”

The master cast a rapid glance around him. In his quickness of perception he had already noted that the led horse among the cavalcade was fastened by a lariat to one of the riders so that escape by flight was impossible, and that he had not a single weapon to defend himself with or even provoke, in his desperation, the struggle that could forestall ignominy by death. Nothing was left him but his voice, clear and trenchant as he faced them.