There were so many possibilities behind that door that his heart stood still at the bare thought of them, and he hesitated, both dreading and longing to go on. His knees trembled disgracefully as he ascended the stairs. At the top he found his sister, who placed a finger on her lips to enjoin silence and led him into the front room.
“Where’s Nell?” Jimmie’s voice was harsh and unnatural.
His sister pointed toward the bedroom within.
“Sleeping. Goodness knows she needs it,” she said grimly. “You’ve worried her nearly to death.”
At the first word Jimmie had started for the bedroom, but she barred the way and pushed him back into a chair. He sat and glared at her.
“I worried her?” he said weakly. “What have I done?”
His sister appeared to consider.
“I suppose it’s been hard for you, too,” she said finally. “Your ignorance amounts to a positive crime, but you’ve had to suffer for it. How long has she known this Mason?”
Jimmie reflected. “About a month.”
“I thought so. Now, you listen to me — then go in and see her. There’s a certain period in a woman’s life, Jimmie, that no man will ever understand. Often we don’t understand it ourselves — Nell didn’t. We are filled with an impatient longing, a dissatisfaction, and a sort of haunting fear. It is indescribable.
“While it lasts we need sympathy, forbearance, understanding; and we are always more or less irresponsible and — queer. In Nell’s case” — she smiled grimly — “it was rather more than less. But she has done nothing really wrong, and if I ever hear of your saying anything to her—”
She paused and eyed Jimmie sternly.
“I won’t,” he promised. “But what do you mean? What’s been the matter with her?”
And then, leaning forward in her chair and speaking in a low tone, his sister released the great secret.
As she continued Jimmie’s face took on an expression of blank incredulity and astonishment, and when she had finished he sat and regarded her in speechless amazement.
His sister leaned forward and spoke again, and Jimmie found his tongue.
“Four months!” he shouted. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“Because she didn’t know herself till I told her,” his sister replied — to an empty room.
Jimmie had cleared her chair with one bound and disappeared within.
He left the doors open behind him and there issued therefrom for the next fifteen minutes a series of curious sounds and noises and the mingling of two voices, utterly unintelligible and yet somehow full of meaning.
Jimmie’s sister sat, with a half-wistful, reminiscent smile, recalling a certain far-off period in her own life — the day when the amazing beauty and glory of a new and mysterious world had unfolded itself. Since then it had dimmed — but there was the memory.
Then Jimmie reappeared, his face radiant and joyous, and dragging after him — the white-enameled crib! His sister stared at him in wonder.
“What in the name of goodness are you going to do with that?” she demanded.
“Why,” said Jimmie, visibly embarrassed, “I thought — er — to get it ready, you know.”
His sister gasped; then she burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Then she commanded Jimmie to take the crib back where it belonged.
Jimmie regarded her with an air of dignified importance.
“Mind your own business,” said he. “This is mine. May I ask what you had to do with it?”
“Nothing whatever,” said his sister meekly.
Whereupon Jimmie took out his handkerchief and began to dust the crib with minute care and particularity — the crib which was destined, some five months later, to become the rhythmic resting-place of the inevitable third.
For Mason, of course, had lost his job.
The Lie
Thomas Hanley had always considered himself, and been considered by others, as a man without a heart. Firm, cold, entrenched behind the rigid morality of a Puritan conscience, he had lived wisely but not well.
He was the least loved and the most respected man in Burrton. As the result of unremitting toil and unfailing energy, he had come to be the owner of the lumber mill in which he had begun as a day laborer, and in it was all his life.
No man was so just, and none so entirely without mercy. No man had so fairly earned all that he possessed, nor held it with a stronger hand.
Strength, however, is admirable, and may be forgiven; but with it he had an idea. He hated shams, he hated politeness, he hated compromises, and, above all, he hated a lie. His strict and literal veracity was not a matter of pride to him; it was too natural. If one saw the sun rise at six o’clock, one still might doubt; one’s watch might be wrong; but if Thomas Hanley said the sun rose at six o’clock it was so. It is something to have acquired such an authority.
So extreme a practice of so stern a virtue excluded the lighter ones. One neither expected nor received generosity or sympathy at the hands of Thomas Hanley. He had reached the age of forty without ever having performed one act of injustice or one act of kindness, hating nothing but a lie and loving no one.
The town had already begun to amuse itself by conjectures as to the future owner of the lumber mill. There was no one in Burrton who had reason to entertain any hopes of the legacy; Hanley despised charitable institutions, and there was certainly no chance of his marrying.
Jim Blood declared it to be his firm belief that Hanley would burn the mill down and himself with it before he would allow it to pass into the hands of anyone else. When a man’s native town begins to jest about his death he might as well die.
And then, on a certain May evening, the inhabitants of Burrton experienced a shock from which they never recovered. The news traveled from one end of the town to the other as swiftly as the whirling of the great wheels in Hanley’s lumber mill. It was amazing, unprecedented, unbelievable. Thomas Hanley had walked home with Marie Barber.
Burrton was prepared for the worst, and it came speedily. The courtship was a curious one. That Hanley was in love no one was willing to believe. He even half doubted it himself. But he knew that he wanted Marie more than he had ever wanted anything in all his life, and he set about the accomplishment of his purpose in his own stern and forceful manner.
Marie was pretty, young, and popular. At Hanley’s first advances she was half frightened and half amused, then complacent. She never really loved him perhaps, but the devoted attention of a man who ignored the whole world beside was flattering to her vanity. In addition, she had a mother, and he owned the best business in Burrton. The combination proved irresistible; in September they were married.
Marie soon found that she need expect no gaiety or pleasure in her new home. Hanley loved as he had lived, sternly and honestly. Unsocial by nature and morose by habit, he would have found it impossible to enter into the little interests and frivolities that were Marie’s chief delight, even if he had cared to try. He grudged her nothing and allowed her all the freedom she could ask, but held himself aloof from the idle and harmless pleasures which she had learned to enjoy.
The effect of this was exactly the opposite from that predicted by the good people of Burrton. Marie, whether from the mere pleasure of novelty, or from a genuine affection for her husband, began seriously to occupy herself with the task of making his home pleasant and his life agreeable.
She gradually dropped or neglected her large circle of friends and acquaintances, spent more and more of her time at home or at her mother’s, assumed active care of the somewhat elaborate household Hanley had provided for her, and bade fair to become as severe a recluse and as rigid a moralist as himself.