第50章

"You are rather hard with me, I think," he urged gently. "I don't think I'm playing the tyrant with you now."

"You are,--the baffled tyrant."

"But if I promised not to offend again, why should you deny me your acquaintance?"

"Because I don't believe you." She was getting nearer the door, and as she put her hand behind her and touched the knob, the wild terror she had felt, lest he should reach it first and prevent her escape, left her.

"You are treating me like a child that does n't know its own mind, or has none to know. You are laughing at me--playing with me; you have shown me that you despise me."

He actually laughed. "Well, you've shown that you are not afraid of me.

Why are you not afraid?"

"Because," she answered, and she dealt the blow now without pity, "I'm engaged,--engaged to Mr. Libby! "She whirled about and vanished through the door, ashamed, indignant, fearing that if she had not fled, he would somehow have found means to make his will prevail even yet.

He stood, stupefied, looking at the closed door, and he made a turn or two about the room before he summoned intelligence to quit it. When death itself comes, the sense of continuance is not at once broken in the survivors. In these moral deaths, which men survive in their own lives, there is no immediate consciousness of an end. For a while, habit and the automatic tendency of desire carry them on.

He drove back to Corbitant perched on the rickety seat of his rattling open buggy, and bowed forward as his wont was, his rounded shoulders bringing his chin well over the dashboard. As he passed down the long sandy street, toward the corner where his own house stood, the brooding group of loafers, waiting in Hackett's store for the distribution of the mail, watched him through the open door, and from under the boughs of the weatherbeaten poplar before it. Hackett had been cutting a pound of cheese out of the thick yellow disk before him, for the Widow Holman, and he stared at the street after Mulbridge passed, as if his mental eye had halted him there for the public consideration, while he leaned over the counter, and held by the point the long knife with which he had cut the cheese.

"I see some the folks from over to Jocelyn's, yist'd'y," he said, in a spasm of sharp, crackling speech, "and they seemed to think 't Mis' Mulbridge'd got to step round pretty spry 'f she did n't want another the same name in the house with her."

A long silence followed, in which no one changed in any wise the posture in which he found himself when Hackett began to speak. Cap'n George Wray, tilted back against the wall in his chair, continued to stare at the store-keeper; Cap'n Jabez Wray, did not look up from whittling the chair between his legs; their cousin, Cap'n Wray Storrell, seated on a nailkeg near the stove, went on fretting the rust on the pipe with the end of a stiff, cast-off envelope; two other captains, more or less akin to them, continued their game of checkers; the Widow Seth Wray's boy rested immovable, with his chin and hand on the counter, where he had been trying since the Widow Holman went out to catch Hackett's eye and buy a corn-ball. Old Cap'n Billy Wray was the first to break the spell.

He took his cigar from his mouth, and held it between his shaking thumb and forefinger, while he pursed his lips for speech. "Jabez," he said, "did Cap'n Sam'l git that coalier?"

"No," answered the whittler, cutting deeper into his chair, "she did n't signal for him till she got into the channel, and then he'd got a couple o' passengers for Leyden; and Cap'n Jim brought her up."

"I don't know," said Cap'n Billy, with a stiff yet tremulous reference of himself to the storekeeper, "as spryness would help her, as long as he took the notion. I guess he's master of his own ship. Who's he going to marry? The grahs-widow got well enough?"

"No. As I understand," crackled the store-keeper, "her husband's turned up. Folks over there seem to think't he's got his eye on the other doctor."

"Going to marry with her, hey? Well, if either of 'em gets sick they won't have to go far for advice, and they won't have any doctor's bills to pay. Still, I shouldn't ha' picked out just that kind of a wife for him."

"As I understand," the storekeeper began; but here he caught sight of Widow Seth Wray's boy, and asked, "What's wanted, Bub? Corn-ball?" and turning to take that sweetmeat from the shelf behind him he added the rest in the mouth of the hollowly reverberating jar, "She's got prop'ty."

"Well, I never knew a Mulbridge yet 't objected to prop'ty,--especially, other folks's."

"Barlow he's tellin' round that she 's very fine appearin'." He handed the corn-ball to Widow Seth Wray's boy, who went noiselessly out on his bare feet.

Cap'n Billy drew several long breaths. When another man might have been supposed to have dismissed the subject he said, " Well, I never knew a Mulbridge that objected to good looks in women folks. They've all merried hahnsome wives, ever since the old gentleman set 'em the example with his second one. They got their own looks from the first. Well," he added, "I hope she's a tough one. She's got either to bend or to break."

"They say," said Cap'n George Wray, like one rising from the dead to say it, so dumb and motionless had he been till now, "that Mis' Mulbridge was too much for the old doctor."

"I don't know about that," Cap'n Billy replied, "but I guess her son's too much for her: she's only Gardiner, and he's Gardiner and Mulbridge both."

No one changed countenance, but a sense of Cap'n Billy's wit sparely yet satisfyingly glimmered from the eyes of Cap'n George and the storekeeper, and Cap'n Jabez closed his knife with a snap and looked up. "Perhaps," he suggested, "she's seen enough of him to know beforehand that there would be too much of him."

"I never rightly understood," said Hackett, "just what it was about him, there in the army--coming out a year beforehand, that way."

"I guess you never will,--from him," said Cap'n Jabez.