CHAPTER XVII
THE DREAM IN THE DINGLE
A FEW days later I was summoned to the big man’s side as he sat, fully dressed for the first time, outside the cabin in the shade of a cedar. I sat beside him while he thanked me for my hospitality, and said it was his intention to push on to Roselake and thence to Wallace that very afternoon.
“I have business to transact there for my partner, Dick Bailey, who died in Alaska last winter,” he said, and stopped short, looking at me with a sudden question in his eyes. “By the bye, you people seem to be laboring under the impression that my name is Bailey,” he added.
“Mrs. Olds found the name on a pocketbook you carried,” I explained.
“To be sure—I was carrying an old wallet of Bailey’s. Our initials are the same, too.” He fell to musing, wrinkling his brows. But instead of telling me his name, he went on presently: “You are master of a somewhat unusual household, Dale. I am vastly interested. You’re a lucky dog to have such a Hebe for a protégée as the girl Wanza, such an infant prodigy as that young scamp, who shows fine discrimination, and glowers at me from the kitchen door, for an adopted son,—and who is the interesting lady patient on whom Wanza waits and who is shut up in a Blue Beard’s closet next my room? I have a sly sure instinct that tells me she is the most wonderful of the lot.”
The blood rushed to my face. The leer with which he accompanied his words was rakish, and his handsome face smirked disgustingly.
“She is an unfortunate neighbor of mine, who was crippled by a falling tree the night of the storm,” I answered coldly.
He gave me a quizzical glance, shrugged his shoulders, and exclaimed laughingly:
“Beauty in distress! Don Quixote to the rescue. You’re the sort of chap, I fancy, Dale, who goes about tilting at windmills. You belong to a past generation. But it is lucky for me I stumbled across you. Well, I care not to pry into your Blue Beard’s closet—the girl Wanza is a piquant enough little devil for me—”
“Just speak more respectfully of her, if you must speak at all,” I interrupted with heat.
“Don Quixote, Don Quixote,” he murmured, wagging a broad finger at me, and shaking his head playfully.
I said something beneath my breath, and rose from my chair hastily.
“Wait! Wait!” he cried. “Don’t let your choler rise. Sit down. We will not discuss the ladies. I was about to tell you my name, and give you my credentials—”
He broke off abruptly. Joey was issuing from the elder bushes piping on his flute. As I listened, a voice from the Dingle caught up the refrain, a voice high and sweet and clear.
“Bell Brandon was the birdling of the mountains—”
The line ended in a ripple of laughter. The man before me half raised in his seat. Then sweeter and lower:
“And I loved the little beauty, Bell Brandon—
And she sleeps ’neath the old arbor tree.”
The underbrush parted and Haidee came toward us, leaning slightly on one crutch. In her hand she carried a great bunch of pink spirea. Each cheek was delicately brushed with color, her star-eyes were agleam, her lips curved with laughter.
And then, all suddenly, the dimples and laughter and life fled from her beautiful face, her eyes turned dull and anguished. She was looking at the big man, and he was looking at her. His pasty face was gray as ashes. His little eyes contracted to pin-points.
Haidee’s dry lips writhed apart. One word dropped from them:
“You!”
She crouched forward, peered at him intently through the soft green shadows of the cedars, her eyes growing bigger as if wild with a sudden hope that they might have played her a trick. And then gradually the intentness left them, they hardened, and her whole face stiffened, and grew white and grim.
The big man had risen. He took a step forward now. There was something bullying in his attitude, something implacable in his altered face. His light eyes had a sinister gleam, but his savoir-faire did not desert him. He spoke to me, but his eyes never left the marble face of the woman who confronted him.
“Mr. Dale,” he said with a wave of the hand, “pardon our agitation. I am Randall Batterly. This is the first time my wife and I have met in five years.”
I reached Haidee’s side just in time, for the crutch slipped from her grasp, and she would have fallen but for my steadying arm.
Joey, the dauntless, sprang forward and menaced the big man with threatening, childish fist. “You leave my Bell Brandon alone!” he screamed, “you leave her alone—you big, bad man! I wish we’d let you die, I do.”
I placed Haidee in a chair. I took Joey’s hand and led him indoors. I heard a wild cry ring out:
“I thought you were dead in the Yukon, Randall Batterly, I thought you were dead. I hate you! I hate you!”
I closed the door on her agonized weeping.
Before the big man left that day he sent Wanza to ask me to come to him in the living room. I was in my workshop, and I shook my head when the message was delivered. In the mood I was in then it was well for me not to go to him. I shall never forget the expression on Mrs. Olds’ face when she sought me in the shop a half hour later to bid me good-bye. She had found, at last, food for her prying, suspicious mind.
“I am that shocked and surprised, Mr. Dale!” she gasped, all of a flutter. “Why, I’m just trembly! I heard high voices, and I stole out on the porch, and there they were, saying such dreadful, dreadful things to each other! And isn’t it odd, Mr. Dale, that they should come together here in this remote—I was going to say God forsaken—spot, this way? Now, don’t you suppose they will patch up their differences? I should think they might—they’re young folks—it seems a pity the amount of domestic infelicity nowadays—and they are a likely fine looking couple.” She drew breath, shook her head, and paused dramatically.
I felt her fish-eyes searching my face.
Then she broke out, as I maintained an apparently unruffled front:
“Of course, Mr. Dale, it is not for me to say all I think—not for me to say whose is the fault. But I must say I am surprised and disappointed—yes, and shocked—shocked, Mr. Dale, that Mrs. Batterly, a married woman, should proclaim herself a widow. When a woman will do that—why, what is one to think! I can’t abide duplicity. To my notion there is absolutely no excuse for that, Mr. Dale. And if she did not know her husband was alive—well, I have no words.”
I was sullen-hearted enough, God knows, and Mrs. Olds’ inane, arrogant drivel was like tinder on a blown fire. I was wild as an enraged bull who has the red scarf flaunted in his long suffering face. I thrust out my chin and I squared my shoulders, and I know my face must have grown ugly with my red-eyed anger.
If I had spoken then, I am sure Mrs. Olds could have guessed most accurately at the state of my heart with regard to Haidee. But just at that moment the cedar waxwing left its cage, circled about my head, and descended to settle in the crook of my arm. I straightened my arm, and it hopped to my outspread palm, looking up at me with pert, bright eyes. In that short space during which the bird poised there, I thought of a hundred poignant things to say to Mrs. Olds. But the bird flew away and I said not one of them.
After I had bidden good-bye to Mrs. Olds there was Wanza still to be reckoned with. I had just seen from my window the flurried departure of the nurse and her patient on the afternoon stage when I heard a tentative voice at my elbow, murmur: “Mr. Dale.”
I am sure there must have been a certain fierceness in my bearing as I wheeled about. But I was all unprepared for the fervid face that my lips almost brushed as I turned, the depth of emotion in the burningly blue eyes.
“Don’t!” she breathed, as I faced her. “Don’t, please!”
“Don’t what, child?” I articulated.
“Don’t look at me so sharp—so awful!” Her voice thinned, as if she were going to cry. Her brown, pleading hands came out to me. “I only want to say good-bye.”
As I still stood woodenly, looking at her, she moved back with a swift jerk of her slim body and put her hands behind her. Her face altered. It whitened, and she let her lids droop over eyes suddenly hot with resentment. Feeling like a brute I made haste to intercept the hands. I slipped my arms about her, caught the hands, and drew them around against my chest. I think I had never liked Wanza better than at that moment in her hurt pride, and womanliness.
“Dear Wanza,” I said, “my dear child—”
She pressed against me suddenly, and put her soft cheek against my sleeve.
“What is it, child, what is it?” I begged. I put my hand gently on her hair.
“I’m going away, Mr. Dale—I’m going! I been so happy here—with you and Joey and the birds.”
It was my turn to say “Don’t!” I said it imploringly, and I added: “I cannot bear to see you cry, Wanza.”
“Oh, let me cry! I’m upset, and nervous, and—and sad—I guess you’d call it. I’m going on home now, and set things to rights a bit, and to-night I’m going to Hidden Lake to stay with Mrs. Batterly. I promised.”
“She needs you, Wanza,” I said.
“I was to ask you if you would ride through the woods with her, in a half hour. She’s not quite fit to go alone, Mr. Dale.” Suddenly Wanza broke into a tempest of tears, and sobbed and shook, huddled against my shoulder, stammering: “Everything is upside down—upside down! But—yes, Mr. Dale, I am glad—glad—that Mrs. Batterly has got a husband living. He’s probably a bad man, and if she wanted to run away it was all right and nobody’s business. But it had to come out that she had a husband, and I’m glad it’s come—that’s all! I’m glad it’s come—now—afore—”
I looked down at the opulent fleece of hair spinning into artless spirals of maze against my shoulder, and I threaded a curl through my fingers absently before I probed this significant, stumbling final sentence. Then I caught at the lost word. “Before, Wanza? Before—what!”
“Before you got to thinking too much of her.”
I laughed. I stood away from the child and laughed ironically. The laugh saved the situation. Wanza raised her head, gave a watery smile, and flung out.
“You needn’t laugh. You were thinking too much of her—you know you was.”
“Please, Wanza,—don’t!”
“Now your face is black again.” Wanza’s mood changed swiftly. “Oh, Mr. Dale, I have a weight here,” she laid her hand on her chest. “I feel things pressing,—awful things! What’s going to happen, do you think, that I feel so queer and blue and bad?”
I shook my head. She went on quickly:
“Of course I’m broke up about leaving Cedar Dale just now, I just can’t bear to quit you and Joey—and the birds—and squirrels—and flowers—”
The tears were brimming up again in the velvet-blue eyes. I walked over to the waxwing’s cage, snapped shut the door on the tiny prisoner, and handed the cage to Wanza.
“Take him with you,” I bade her.
With the cage clasped in her arms, her eyes flooded with tears, but with smiles on her mobile lips, she went from the shop, backward, step by step.
After Wanza came Joey. A transfigured Joey. Wild with rage at the big man, threatening, and bombastic. Then softening into plaintive grief, wailing:
“Oh, Mr. David, my Bell Brandon’s going! She’s going! She won’t be here to-night for my sleep-time story. She won’t be here when I wake up to-morrow. She won’t ever stay here again.”
“No, lad,” I replied.
“Won’t she, don’t you ’spose? P’r’aps if she don’t like it at Hidden Lake she’ll come back. Don’t you think she’ll come again, Mr. David?”
“No,” I repeated, sadly.
He sniffled. Then he said, in a frightened tone, “Wanza ain’t going too, is she?”
“Yes, Joey.”
He drew his sleeve across his eyes. He swallowed. Then he said, winking hard, “I’ll miss Bell Brandon, but I’ll miss Wanza most.”
After a moment, I ventured:
“You have me, Joey.”
He drew his sleeve across his eyes again, gulped, and muttered:
“I’m ’shamed. I love you most! But she’s mothery—Wanza is, that’s it!”
Mothery—Wanza of the wind’s will—mothery!
I keep a picture still in my mind of that last day on which I rode through the forest with Haidee to Hidden Lake. Rain had drenched the earth the previous night, and though the sun smiled from a cloudless sky, the roads were heavy and our horses’ progress slow. There was a languid drowsiness in the air, enhanced by the low, incessant singing of cat-bird, robin and lark, and the overpowering scent of syringa and rose. We chose a shadowy trail, and our heads were brushed by white-armed flowery hawthorns, while honeysuckle threw fragrant tendrils across our way. The woods glowed emerald-green, and dappled gray, gemmed here and there with dogwood; great plumes of spirea rose like pink clouds in the purple vistas. Small hollows held crystal-clear water, and up from these hollows floated swarms of azure butterflies. We crossed a swift-running stream; and before us, between smooth, mossy banks fern-topped, lay a cup-like dell, shut in by shrubs and vines. I drew rein, and dismounted, and Haidee with a swift glance at my face drew in her mare.
She held some purple flowers in the bend of her arm, flowers that Joey had given her, she fingered the petals with a caressing touch. Her head drooped slightly, but her eyes met mine questioningly. The pallor of her face but made it more exquisite. Her gown was gray. Its folds rippled about her slight form. She seemed like some grave-eyed spirit. Her hair was in braids, outlining the ivory of her face. A scarf of white muslin left her warm throat bare.
I strove for words. But I could only whisper:
“I am your friend. Never forget. If danger ever threatens you—”
“If danger ever threatened me, I believe that you would intervene—you are a brave man, David Dale. But I shall live safely—going on with my even life—in my little cabin, with good Wanza for a companion. I have had a shock, Mr. Dale,” her voice quivered, her lips whitened with the words, “oh, such a shock! It is better not to speak of it. Not at least unless I tell you all there is to tell, and I am not ready as yet to do that.” She struggled with herself. She drew a deep breath. “But I came here to work! I shall work as I have planned until autumn, then—well, I do not know what then. You heard much yesterday—you know my attitude toward the man who is my husband. I dare say you are shocked, and shaken in your chivalrous estimate of me. I cannot help that. I do not feel that I can explain—it goes too deep. It is not to be laid bare before—forgive me—a stranger.”
She smiled at me sadly as if to soften the last words. But hurt and amazed, I cried:
“A stranger! Am I that?”
A light sprang into her eyes, the red came into her cheeks.
“Forgive me,” she said again.
“I am your friend—your true friend—no stranger.” I held out my hand. “I thought you understood.”
She kept her eyes upon me, but did not seem to see me. They were hunted, weary eyes; weary to indifference, I saw suddenly. And seeing this I took her slim fingers in mine and pressed them very gently and let them go.
Suddenly her composure broke. She turned whiter, she could scarcely breathe. She moved her head restlessly. “I can’t bear it—I can’t—I can’t! I wish I might fly to the ends of the earth—but there’s no escape.” She brushed her hand across her face. She cowered in her saddle. “It’s awful! I thought he was gone forever—forever, do you understand? Oh, the freedom, the rest—the peace! With his return has come the shadow of an old, old grief. It blots out the sunshine.”
My lips twitched as I attempted soothing words. I took her cold hands and chafed them. “Courage,” I whispered. She shook her head, quivering, panting and undone.
“Oh, I was born to live! Courage? I have none!”
She leaned forward and sunk her head on the pommel of the saddle. After a time she swung toward me. Her hair swept about her flaming cheeks, and veiled her burning eyes. She looked like some hunted wild thing.
“I hate him,” she hissed. “He knows I hate him. He does not care.”
We looked at each other.
“But he cares for you,” I stated.
“No, no,” she said, hastily, “don’t say that.”
Again we scanned each other’s faces. I spoke impetuously:
“You believe in Destiny. Well, so do I! But we are not weak instruments. You know what I mean. What law of society compels you to a bondage such as you hint at? You are a strong-minded woman. Now that you know the worst you have weapons to fight with. As soon as you look about you—when you come to face the facts, you will see this.” I struggled with my thoughts, then I threw wide my arms. “God knows what I am to say to you!”
She lifted up her head. “I have promised him to do nothing—to go on as I have been—he will not molest me.”
I half shrugged. “He loves you; of course, you believe that.”
“He may. He protested that he did, when I told him I must go my way.”
I heard her dully, my eyes on her face. She said a few more words brokenly, that I scarce gave ear to. At the conclusion of them I looked away to the purple wood vista. “Why did it please God,” I said, “to have you cross my path!”
Tears filled her eyes. “Those words did not sound like the words of a friend.”
“But they are said.” I moved away, she sat brooding. I mounted, and came to her side. “We are friends, we may be friends, surely! May I come to see you?”
“Indeed you must come. Your visits will be welcome.” She smiled, but her smile was twisted and dubious. “I expect great things of Wanza. She will be my entertainer. She will cheer me. Have Joey come to me—” Her voice failed her utterly. She was pale again as the syringa blooms at her side.
“We must push on, now,” I said.
She gathered up her reins.
And so we rode side by side to the little shack on the shore of Hidden Lake. But when she gave me her hand at parting, I stumblingly cried: “If he had not come—if he had not come, I should have tried to win your love!” Something in her eyes caused me to add: “I wonder if I should have succeeded.”
She paled and drew her hand from mine. “I could have loved you, David Dale,” she whispered.
That night when Joey was preparing for bed in the cedar room, I spied a bit of ribbon the color of the gowns Wanza wore, wreathed in among the grasses in the magpie’s cage. And at the sight Joey cried out:
“That’s Wanza’s. I want her! I want her to come back and stay, I do.”
Holding the ribbon in my hand, I passed out to the Dingle.
Here I sat down on the stump by the pool, in a ring of black shadow cast by the cedars, and lifted my face to the stars that were shining through the wattled green roof above my head. I was worn, physically and mentally, by the experiences of the day. I sat there stupidly, scarce moving, letting my pipe go out as I fed my grief with memories. Joey called out at intervals: “Good night, Mr. David, dear.” Each time I responded: “Good night, Joey.” At last no sound came from the cedar room. I knew he slept. It was very still in the Dingle. A toad hopped across the stone walk and a grass-snake flashed through the rose hedge, like a quick flame. Close to the pool’s brink the big flag-flowers vacillated in a faint, upspringing breeze, and the rushes swayed and shuddered above the timorous bluebells. The moon came up slowly, and I saw its face through the tree spaces. I wondered if Haidee were watching it from the shore of Hidden Lake. And then a naked Desolation crept up out of an unknown void, and I saw the gleam of its whitened bones. It gibed me. It trailed its bleached carcass across my arid path. The hour grew hideous. I felt myself alone—grievously alone—on the verge of utmost solitude, reaching out ineffectual hands toward emptiness. I recoiled, my senses whirling, from the limitless nothingness into which my vision pored.
I was clammy, with a cold sweat. My throat was dry. But the horror passed and I grew apathetic at length, and sodden. Then calm, merely. Soon I grew strangely somnolent. I nodded. But after a space I sat tense, my chin sunk, listening. A vague stirring in the night chilled my blood, and at the same time thrilled me. I listened and watched, breathing heavily, alert and narrow-eyed.
And then!
I saw Wanza part the tangles of syringa, and stand pink-robed, framed in white blossoms. Her face, rose-tinted and impassioned, was curtained on either side by her unbound resplendent hair. Her eyes, laughing and bright like happy stars, shone through the wilderness of locks. Her lips, smooth and pink as polished coral, smiled freshly as the lips of a tender child. Her arms were bare. In her strong brown hands she bore a wooden cage, and the waxwing slept within, its head beneath its wing. She hesitated, apparently saw no one—listened and heard no sound. She spurned her flowered frame, and came springing forward, her short skirt fluttering above her bare knees, her pink feet gleaming in the long grasses.
She passed close to me. Noiselessly she swept to the steps of the cedar room. She mounted. I saw her pass through the open doorway, where there was a pale nimbus of light. I saw her at the window. She took the magpie’s cage from its hook, and hung the waxwing there instead. Soon she reappeared. She carried the magpie in its cage. She came down the steps, and I heard a voice like a “moon-drowned” dream murmur roguishly:
“I have left them the waxwing. But I have taken away the magpie, lest it tell my secrets.”
I would have stopped her. But she had sprung with fluttering, perfumed haste through the syringa frame and vanished.
I dropped to the turf, clasped my arms about my head, and slept, a deep, refreshing sleep. It was dawn when I awakened, a pink, sweet-smelling dawn, scintillant with promise. I went to the cedar room, Joey slept, one arm thrown out above his tousled head, the shawl-flower quilt tossed aside. I covered him, and crossed to the window.
The magpie’s cage swung in its accustomed place.
As I approached, the bird fixed me with its quick, bright eye, and chortled:
“Mr. David Dale! Fixing man! Mr. David—dear.”
How strange that I should dream of Wanza!
Dreary days followed for Joey and me.
As the days began to shorten I rode frequently to Captain Grif’s in the cool of the evening, taking Joey on the saddle behind me. And each night Joey dropped asleep on the small bed in Wanza’s room while I played a rubber of chess with the captain. When Father O’Shan was present a new zest was given our evenings.
One stormy night Father O’Shan, Joey and I were belated at the cottage, and the father and I kept our good host up to an unconscionable hour in the room beneath the eaves, while Joey slept peacefully on the lower floor. Father O’Shan was in fine fettle, and his stories were pungent, his drollery inimitable. As the storm began I rolled into the captain’s bunk and lay there in vast contentment. The port hole was open, framing an oval of purple sky and drifting cloud rack. My fantasy was so keen that I could fairly smell the odor of bilge and stale fish and tar, and hear the tramp of feet on the deck over my head. When the storm was at its fiercest, and the little cottage shook and the lightning flashed through the port hole, it was easy to cheat myself into the belief that I was experiencing all the wild delights of a storm at sea.
The talk had turned on the superstitions of men who go down to the sea in ships. “Lonely men are superstitious men,” the father said. “There is something about aloneness that engenders visions and superstitions. People who dwell apart all have their visions.”
“And their madnesses,” I interjected. “People who live at the edge of things are entitled to their superstitions. During the first months of my life on my homestead, before Joey’s advent, I had one or two narrow squeaks—came within an ace of insanity, I believe now. I went so far that like the man in the story I met myself coming round the corner of the cabin one day. I pulled up then and went to the city for a month and took a rather menial position.”
Father O’Shan was looking at me curiously.
“I never heard of that before,” he said. “You pulled through all right.”
“Oh, yes! If it had not been for my dog I might have gone under the first year. But the dog was understanding.”
“A dog,” Captain Grif explained carefully, “is the instinctinest animal there be—and the faithfulest.”
I caught Father O’Shan’s eyes fixed on me ruminatingly from time to time during the evening. Once or twice, meeting my eyes, he favored me with his rare, heart-warming smile. When I said good night to him in the village, leaning from the saddle and shifting Joey’s sleeping figure somewhat, in order that I might offer him my hand, he pressed close to my horse’s side and peered up at me with friendly glance through the semi-darkness of the dimly lighted street.
“Too bad, Dale—too bad,” he said in his winning tones.
“Eh? Just what is too bad?” I asked.
He gripped my hand.
“Man, I’m sorry I did not know you in the darkest days—when the dog was understanding. I’d have tried to be understanding, too. A pity, Dale—a pity!”
“Never mind!”
“I shall pass through this world but once, you know—I don’t want to leave more things undone than I have to. But the unguessed things—that lurk quite obscure—they have a way of unearthing themselves—they hurt, Dale! Why, my boy, I rode past your cabin when you were putting the roof on! But I was busy. I did not stop. Oh, well—I’m glad you had your dog!”