Once to Every Man. Evans Larry

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СКАЧАТЬ he petulantly echoed the question. “More? Why, you got your paper, ain’t you? Was you expectin’ sunthin’ else? Wasn’t looking for a letter, now was you?”

      Denny backed slowly away from the wheel. Dumbly he stood and licked his lips. He cleared his throat again and swallowed hard before he answered.

      “No,” he faltered at last, with the same level gravity. “No, I wasn’t exactly expectin’ a letter. But I kind of thought–I–I was just hopin’–”

      His grave voice trailed heavily off into silence. Eyes still numbly bewildered he turned, leaning forward a little, to gaze out across the valley at the great square silhouette of Judge Maynard’s house on the opposite ridge, while Old Jerry wheeled the protesting buggy and started deliberately down the hill. Just once more the latter paused; he drew the fat gray mare to a standstill and leaned a last time far out from the seat.

      “A-course I didn’t mean nothin’ when I spoke about complainin’ against the Judge,” he called back. “You know that, don’t you, Denny? You know I was just jokin’, don’t you?” A vaguely worried, appealing strain crept into the cracked accents. “An’ a-course you wouldn’t say nothin’ about my speakin’ like that. I think a whole heap too much of the Judge to even try to git him into trouble–and–and then the Judge–he might–you understand that I was only jokin’, don’t you, Denny?”

      Young Denny nodded his head silently in reply. Long after the shrill falsetto grumbling had ceased to drift back up the hill to him he stood there motionless. After a while the fingers that still clutched the bundle of circulars opened loosely and when he did finally wheel to cross slowly to the kitchen door the papers and catalogues lay unheeded, scattered on the ground where they had fallen.

      He stopped once at the threshold to prop his pike-pole against the house corner before he passed aimlessly inside, leaving the door wide open behind him. And he stood a long time in the middle of the dark room, staring dully at the cold, fireless stove. Never before had he given it more than a passing thought–he had accepted it silently as he accepted all other conditions over which he had no control–but now as he stood and stared, it came over him, bit by bit, that he was tired–so utterly weary that the task of cooking his own supper that night had suddenly become a task greater than he could even attempt. The very thought of the half-cooked food sickened him–nauseated him. Motionless there in the dark he dragged one big hand across his dry lips and slowly shook his head.

      “They didn’t want me,” he muttered hoarsely. “It wasn’t because they forgot me before; they didn’t want me–not even for the strength of my shoulders.”

      With heavy, shuffling steps he crossed and dropped loosely into a chair beside the bare board table that stood in front of one dingy window. A long time he sat silent, his lean chin propped in his rough palms, eyes burning straight ahead of him into vacancy. Then, little by little, his great shoulders in the vividly checkered coat began to sag–they slumped downward-until his head was bowed and his face lay hidden in the long arms crooked limply asprawl across the table-top.

      Once more he spoke aloud, hours later.

      “They didn’t want me,” he repeated dully. “Not even for the work I could do!”

      CHAPTER III

      It was very quiet in the front room of the little cottage that squatted in the black shadow below Judge Maynard’s huge house on the hill. No sound broke the heavy silence save the staccato clip-clip of the long shears in the fingers of the girl who was leaning almost breathlessly over the work spread out on the table beneath the feeble glow of the single oil-lamp, unless the faint, monotonous murmur which came in an endless sing-song from the lips of the stooped, white-haired old figure in the small back room beyond the door could be named anything so definite.

      John Anderson’s lips always moved when he worked. His fingers, strong and clean-jointed and almost womanishly smooth–the only part of the man not pitifully seared with age–flew with a bewildering nimbleness one moment, only to dwell the next with a lingering caress upon the shaping features before him; and for each caress of his finger tips there was an accompanying, vacantly gentle smile or an uncertainly emphatic nod of the silvered head which gave the one-sided conversation a touch of uncanny reality.

      And yet, at regularly recurring intervals, even his busy fingers faltered, while he sat head bent far over to one side as though he were listening for something, waiting for some reply. At every such pause the vacant smile left his face and failed to return immediately. The monotonously inflectionless conversation was still, too, for the time, and he merely sat and stared perplexedly about him, around the small workshop, bare except for the single high-stool that held him and the littered bench on which he leaned.

      There was a foot-wide shelf against each wall of that room, fastened waist high from the floor, and upon it stood countless small white statues, all slim and frail of limb, all upturned and smiling of lip. They were miraculously alike, these delicate white figures, each with a throat-tightening heartache in its wistful face–so alike in form and expression that they might have been cast in a single mold. Wherever his eyes might fall, whenever he turned in one of those endlessly repeated fits of faltering uncertainty, that tiny face was always before him, uplifted of lip, smiling back into John Anderson’s vacant eyes until his own lips began to curve again and he turned once more, nodding his head and murmuring contentedly, to the clay upon his bench.

      Out in the larger front room, as she hovered over the work spread out before her, the girl, too, was talking aloud to herself, not in the toneless, rambling voice that came from John Anderson’s mumbling lips, but in hushed, rapt, broken sentences which were softly tinged with incredulous wonder.

      The yellow glow of the single lamp, pushed far across the table from her, where the most of its radiance was swallowed up by the gloom of the uncurtained window, flickered unsteadily across her shining, tumbled hair, coloring the faintly blue, thinly penciled lines beneath her tip-tilted eyes with a hint of weariness totally at variance with the firm little sloping shoulders and full lips, pursed in a childish pout over a mouthful of pins.

      The hours had passed swiftly that day for Dryad Anderson; and the last one of all–the one since she had lighted the single small lamp in the room and set it in the window, so far across the table from her that she had to strain more and more closely over her swift flashing scissors in the thickening dusk–had flown on winged feet, even faster than she knew.

      Twice, early in the evening she had laid the long shears aside and risen from the matter that engrossed her almost to the exclusion of every other thought, to peer intently out of the window across the valley at the bleak old farmhouse on the crest of the opposite ridge; and each time as she settled herself once more in the chair, hunched boyishly over the table edge, she only nodded her bright head in utter, undisturbed unconsciousness of the passage of time.

      “He’s late getting home tonight,” she told herself aloud, after she had searched the outer darkness in vain for any answering signal, but there was not even the faintest trace of troubled worry in her words. She merely smiled with mock severity.

      “He’s later than he ought to be–even if it is his last week back in the hills. Next week I’ll have to make him wait–”

      Her vaguely murmured threat drifted away into nothingness, left unfinished as she rose and stood, hands lightly bracketed upon her hips, scrutinizing the completed work.

      “There,” she went on softly, sighing in deep relief, “there–that’s done–if–if it will only fit.”

      She removed the cluster of pins from her mouth and unfastened the long strip of newspaper from the section of the old black skirt СКАЧАТЬ