The Able McLaughlins/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII
THEY had passed the bridge on their burdened way home. They had come to the place at which Chirstie had so astonishingly defied him. They had ridden together in a silence broken only by the refreshed wee Johnnie's cooing, as he bounced back and forth in his mother's lap. Wully looked covertly at his wife from time to time, in awe. She wasn't thinking now what a nice baby Peter Keith had been. Never once had she turned her face towards what was in the wagon-box, to see if it was indeed dying. Returning to town, she had instructed him, woman-like, to be sure that Peter had no weapons concealed, no way of hurting a benefactor. And Wully had unloaded his lumber raging. Caught, he was, trapped. Having to do this unspeakable thing to satisfy the sentimentality of a woman, and to save his secret from desecration. Grimly he had made sure from the doctor that there was no chance of Peter living to reveal what Wully had so well kept hidden. Coldly he had ordered the men at the stable to wash the blood from that face, from that matted beard, as if Peter was their cousin, and not his. Grudgingly he had helped them deposit the bony thing in the wagon. Covered to his head, still as a bag of meal, Peter lay there when Wully McLaughlin drove to the hotel to get his wife. And she had never once turned her head towards him.
And now, when Wully looked at her from the corner of his eyes, his own anger, his bitter hatred seemed a small thing before hers. Her face was as white as marble, and as hard, one might have thought. Her mouth was screwed tight in loathing. She sat perfectly still, looking straight ahead, tragically. She wasn't thinking of Aunt Libby now. Wully was almost afraid of her . . . afraid certainly to offer her comfort.
They rode west. The sun was high now, and shone dazzlingly over the brown stretches. The horses felt the stimulus of the frosty morning. Wee Johnnie jumped about, chuckling out his absurd little meaningless words. Three miles they went; four miles. From time to time Wully turned to assure himself that his enemy lay still. He would let him die there, without lifting a finger to lengthen his life by a second. The sight of that shape under the old brown blanket inflamed his hatred. He looked, and turned quickly away, remembering always that second time Peter had dared to lay violent hands on his wife. It was that second time he could never forgive, that second time.
The baby grew restless. He complained fretfully of his mother's lack of attention. Wully gave him, almost mechanically, the ends of the lines to play with. They pleased him, for a while. Then he turned again to his mother, unable to fathom her sternness. Never before had her hands touched him so coldly. Looking right ahead of her, she would pull that little shawl tightly around him again, after he had succeeded in working his bare arms out of it, tucking him in without a kiss or any coaxing. His eyes studied her face, and found there no thought for him. He stood up in her lap. He put his arms around her neck, and stroked the forbidden feather. She failed even to reprove him. He seized the chance—he put the curling thing into his mouth, and chewed the end of it experimentally. He spit it out in disgust. He sat down again in her lap, and began playing with the frogs on her new coat. He fingered the interesting fringe. He squirmed about more vigorously than ever. He called to her. He put his hands up to her face. She bent down and kissed him, but not as she usually gathered him against herself with warmth. The caress was hard and preoccupied, and he whispered a little. He tried pat-a-caking, to get her to smile upon him. That, too, failed. Wully handed him the whip, and he shook it so fiercely that they had both hastily to rescue their faces from the blows he might have inflicted. Still his mother looked straight ahead.
They came then to a low place. The horses could go only very slowly. The baby adjusted himself to the new motion of the wagon. There was a splashing of mud that made him giggle delightedly. It would have been a choice morning for any baby whose mother wasn't sitting frozen. Wee Johnnie made the best of it. He kicked, and giggled, and squirmed about.
The horses failed of their own accord to take their proper pace again. Wully had to speak to them. He slapped them lightly with the lines.
"Get up, Nellie!" he exclaimed. "What's the matter of you?"
Wee Johnnie moved his arms exactly as Wully had done.
"Get up, Nellie!" he said. "What's the matter of you?"
He said all that, plainly, if not perfectly, and before he knew what was happening, his mother had seized him, and was hugging him up against her, in the good old way, kissing him.
"Get up, Nellie!" he cooed. "What's the matter of you!"
She had been so surprised, so delighted with her son's first sentence that she had turned, even kissing him, to Wully, no joy complete unless he shared it.
"Did you hear that!" she cried triumphantly, her face blossoming towards him. "Say it again, Lammie!"
And almost before Wully could smile in return, he stopped. He turned around. He thought he heard a groan from his load. He couldn't even smile at her with that man possibly spying upon them. He looked—and from the end of the wagon that man had lifted his head a little, like a snake, and had seen the smile that Chirstie had turned upon her husband. And Wully—when he saw that face—it was the last thing in the world that he intended doing—but some way, in spite of himself, he achieved generosity—the spoil, it may have been, of ancestral struggle. At the terrible sight of that face, he pitied his enemy. That coward, in his damned way, had loved Chirstie. And in his tormented sunken dying he had seen all the sweet intimacy from which he had been shut out and had sunk back, felled by the blow of that revelation. Wully had foregone revenge. He had forborne running a sword less sharp through his fallen enemy than Chirstie's wifely smile had been. In a flash Wully saw himself sitting there by the woman, loved, living, not dying, full of strength and generations, while that man, loathed and rejected, was already burning in hell.
The poor devil!
He pulled the horses up suddenly, and gave his wife the lines. He climbed back to lift his cousin into a position less painful. Through holes in the old blanket, straws from beneath were scratching the ghastly face. There was a farmhouse not so far down the road.
"I'll stop there and buy him a pillow," Wully resolved.
THE END