_ PART TWO
CHAPTER III
Beyond the dining room was their bedroom, and beyond that a chamber which, for years in a state of deserted, semi-ruin, Gordon had had newly floored and rendered weather-proof, and now used as a place of assemblage. He found Lettice there when he had finished supper.
She was sitting beside a small table which held a lighted lamp with a shade of minute, woven pieces of various silks. Behind her was a cottage organ, a mass of fretted woodwork; a wall pierced by a window was ornamented by a framed photograph of a woman dead and in her coffin. The photograph had faded to a silvery monotony, but the details of the rigid, unnatural countenance, the fixed staring eyes, were still clear. Redly varnished chairs with green plush cushions and elaborate, thread antimacassars, a second table ranged against the wall, bearing a stout volume entitled "A Cloud of Witnesses," and a cheap phonograph, completed the furnishing.
It was warm without, but Lettice had shut the window, the shawl was still about her shoulders. She was sewing upon a small piece of white material.
"Here, General, here," Gordon commanded, and the dog followed him seriously into the room. "Pat him, Lettice, so's he'll get to know you," he urged.
"I don't think I want to," she began; but, at her husband's obvious impatience, she experimented doubtfully, "Here, puppy."
"Can't you call him by his name?" he interrupted. "How ever'll he come to know it?"
"I don't want to call him at all," she protested, a little wildly. "I don't like him to-night; perhaps to-morrow I will feel different."
"Well, do or don't, that dog's a part of the house, and I don't want to hear Mrs. Caley say this or that about it, neither."
"Mrs. Caley isn't as bad as you make her out; it's me she's thinking about most of the time. I tell her men are not like women, they never think about the little things we do. Father was like that ... you are too. That's all the men I have known." Her voice trailed off into an abrupt silence, she sat staring into the room with the needlework forgotten in her hand.
Gordon turned to the dog, playing with him, pulling his ears. General Jackson, in remonstrance, softly bit Gordon's hand. "That's a dandy dog. Making yourself right at home, hey! Biting right back, are you! Let me feel your teeth, phew--"
"Gordon," Lettice exclaimed suddenly in a throaty voice, "I'm afraid.... Tell me it will be all right, Gordon."
He looked up from the dog, startled by the unaccustomed vibration of her tones. "Of course it will be all right," he reassured her hastily, making an effort to keep his impatience from his voice; "I never guessed you were so easy scared."
"I'll try not," she returned obediently. "Mrs. Caley says it will be all right, too." She seemed, he thought, even younger than when he had married her. She was absurdly girlish. It annoyed him; it seemed, unjustly, to place too great a demand upon his forbearance, his patience. A wife should be able to give and take--this was almost like having a child to tend. Lately she had been frightened even at the dark, she had wakened him over nothing at all, fancies.
He decided to pay no further attention to her imagining; and moved to the phonograph, where he selected one of a small number of waxy cylinders. "We'll see how the General likes music," he proclaimed. He slipped the cylinder over a projection, and wound the mechanism. A sharp, high scratching responded, as painful as a pin dragging over the ear drum, a meaningless cacophony of sounds that gradually resolved into a thin, incredibly metallic melody which appeared, mercifully, to come from a distance. To this was presently joined a voice, the voice, as it were, of a sinister, tin manikin galvanized into convulsive song. The words grew audible in broken phrases:
... was a lucky man,
Rip van Winkle ... grummmble
... never saw the women
At Coney Island swimming ...
General Jackson sat abruptly on his haunches, and lifted a long, quavering protest. As the cylinder went round and round, and the shrill performance continued, the dog's howling grew wilder; it reached a point where it broke into a hoarse cough, then again it recommenced lower in the scale, carrying over a gamut of indescribable, audible misery.
Gordon slapped his leg in acute enjoyment. "The General's a regular opera singer, a high-rolling canary. Go after it ... a regular concert dog."
"Gordon," Lettice said, in a small, strained voice. Apparently he had not heard her. "Gordon," she repeated more loudly. She had dropped the piece of sewing, her hands were clenched, her face wet and pallid. "Gordon!" she cried, her voice cutting through the sound of the phonograph and the howling dog; "stop it, do you hear! I'll go crazy! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"
He silenced the machine in genuine surprise. "Why, everything works you up to-night. I thought you'd like to hear General Jackson sing; he's got a real deep barytone."
Lettice sat limply in her chair. "I stood it just as long as I could," she half whispered.
Gordon walked to the unshuttered window, gazing out; above the impenetrable, velvety dark of the western range the stars gleamed like drops of water. He felt unsettled, ill at ease; dissatisfaction irked his thoughts and emotions. His unrest was without tangible features; it permeated him from an undivined cause, oppressed him with indefinable longing. He got, he dimly realized, but a limited amount of satisfaction from the money now at his command. He was totally without financial instinct--money for itself, the abstraction, was beyond his comprehension. He had bought a ponderous gold watch, which he continually neglected to wind; the years of stage driving had sated him of horses; his clothes were already a subject of jest in Greenstream; and he had seriously damaged his throat, and the throat of Sim Caley, with cigars. He had been glad to return to the familiar, casual cigarettes, the generous bag of Green Goose for five cents; Sim had reverted to his haggled plug. He had no desire to build a pretentious dwelling--his instinct, his clannish spirit, was too closely bound up in the house of his father and grandfather to derive any pleasure from that.
After he had spent a limited amount, the principal at his disposal lay untouched, unrealized. He got a certain measure of content from its sheer bulk at his back; it ministered to his vanity, to his supreme self importance. He liked negligently to produce, in Simmons' store, a twenty or even fifty dollar currency note, and then conduct a search through his pockets for something smaller. He drank an adequate amount of whiskey, receiving it in jugs semi-surreptitiously by way of the Stenton stage; Greenstream County was "dry," but whiskey in gallons was comparatively inexpensive. He would have gambled, but two dollars was a momentous hazard to the habitual card players of the village. He thought, occasionally, of taking a short trip, of two or three days, to nearby cities outside his ken, or to the ocean--Gordon had never seen a large body of water; but his life had travelled such a narrow course, he was so accustomed by blood and experience to the feel of the mountains, that, when the moment arrived to consider an actual departure, he drew back ... put it off.
What he was subconsciously longing for was youth. He was instinctively rebelling, struggling, against the closing fetters of time, against the dilution of his blood by time, the hardening of his bones, the imperceptible slackening of his muscles. His intimate contact with the vigorous youth of Lettice had precipitated this rebellion, this strife in which he was doomed. He would have hotly repudiated the insinuation that he was growing old; he would still, perhaps, have fought the man who said that he was failing. And such a statement would be beside the fact; no perceptible decay had yet set up at the heart of his manhood. But the inception of that process was imminent; the sloth consequent upon Lettice's money was hastening it.
Lettice's youthful aspect, persisting in the face of her approaching motherhood, disconcerted him; it was inappropriate. Her freshly-flushed, rounded cheeks beside his own weather-beaten, lean jaw offered a comment too obvious for enjoyment. He resented, from his own depleting store, her unspent sum of days. It created in him an animosity which, as he turned from the window, noted almost with relief faint lines about her mouth, the sinking of her color.
She was sitting with her eyes shut, the sewing neglected in her lap, and did not see Mrs. Caley standing in the doorway. The woman's gaze lingered for a moment, with an unmasked, burning contempt, upon Gordon Makimmon, then swept on to the girl.
"Lettice!" she exclaimed, in a species of exasperated concern, "don't you know better than to sit up to all hours?" _