Chapter XXIII

Among the men of John's trade it was deemed an effeminate thing for a laboring-man to allow his marriage to cut into his duties to his daily work. And as Cavanaugh already had a job waiting, which was the erection of a fine brick residence on a near-by plantation, John joined him, ready for work, on the day following the one of his arrival home. This left Tilly all alone in the cottage. At first she was so absorbed by the changes she was making about the house--the moving of this article or that and the rehanging of the cheap pictures and curtains, that she had little time for self-analysis or a study of her environment.

However, after the first three days had passed and there was now nothing in the cottage to be done except to prepare her husband's supper, breakfast, and lunch for his dinner-pail, the time began to drag on her hands. She sat on the little porch nearly all the time, for the outside view was more soothing than the cramped interior of the rather dark little house. Across the vacant lots, and above the dim roofs of the neighboring negro shanties, she saw the smoke from the town's cotton-factories, woolen-mills and iron-foundries, the steam-whistles of which were John's signals for early rising and her own best guide to the approach of nightfall and her husband's longed-for return. Above the trees, an eighth of a mile away, could be seen the roof of Mrs. Trott's house. John had reluctantly pointed it out one evening as they stood at the gate, and every day now she looked at it as the physical symbol of a mystery which was growing more and more inexplicable. She had come to feel that there was something about John's mother which he himself did not fully understand and from which he shrank in morbid and manly sensitiveness.

Cavanaugh had called one evening, and as the three friends sat on the porch, the weather being warm, he had explained that his wife was still confined to her bed and was deeply regretting her inability to come over and see Tilly. But neither did the contractor help Tilly to solve the brooding enigma. On the contrary, his very reticence seemed to deepen it, for he had the disturbed air of a man avoiding some disagreeable fact. How could it be, Tilly began to ask herself, that a man so genial as John should have absolutely no women friends in the town of his birth, and why was it that even his men friends should so persistently shun his residence and show so little interest in his bride? There was Joe Tilsbury, she recalled. What a contrast, what an inexplicable contrast! Joe's friends had given the wife he had brought home a far-reaching welcome, afternoon receptions, quilting-bees, dances, straw-rides, surprise-parties, and even the jovial jokers of the village, in grotesque costumes, had serenaded the couple with tin pans and cow-horns. Tilly herself had taken part in the courtesies to the wife of a man far beneath John in point of position and attainments. What could it mean? What?

Four days after the departure of her daughter, Mrs. Whaley received the third letter from Tilly, and Whaley found her one morning at her churn with that letter on her knee, the dasher inactive in a steadily extended hand.

"Who's that from?" he inquired. "Oh, I see! She writes powerful often, don't she? Well, how does she like it?"

Mrs. Whaley was silent, her eyes on the milk-coated hole in the churn-lid through which the worn dasher was wont to glide up and down. Noting her mood, Whaley gruffly took up the letter and, adjusting his black-rimmed nose-glasses, he read it.

"What do you think of it?" she asked, when he put it down.

"I don't know as I think anything much about it," was his response. "House, house, house! That is all there is in it--tables here and chairs there, a new organ, cook-stove that runs by gas, and water on tap within arm's-length--to say nothing of milk left on the front-door step, as well as a block of ice in summer-time every morning. All that, I say, but not one word about the big union-tabernacle-tent revival that Cavanaugh said was to open there this week? I'd walk ten miles through the broiling sun to meet that preacher and hear him rip the hide off of the ungodly down there. That town is just big enough to be full of hell, 'blind-tiger' joints, and houses full of shamefaced strumpets that are fined in city court and allowed to keep on even by the law in their devilish occupation."

Mrs. Whaley was never known to sigh. Sighs are born of elements which she had suppressed till they had died a natural death, but there was something in her very uncommunicating manner that provoked her husband's lingering at her side.

"You don't say what you think," he said, restoring his glasses to their tin case and snapping its lid down.

She raised her eyes and fixed them on his. "It is not what she says, but what it seems to me she ought to say and don't that seems strange to me," was her reply. "Why, there is no mention at all about any of John's kin--not one single word about his mother--not one single word about any woman stepping in even for a minute. I don't care anything about your tabernacles or your whisky-joints--what seems strange to me is that Tilly don't seem to have made a single acquaintance since she got there. She writes, you see, about Cavanaugh coming over and why his wife didn't, as if that was something to tell. She writes about John being away in the country all day, and, as far as I can gather, she is at home all by herself from dawn till nightfall. There is something powerfully odd about all that. I don't know what it is, but it is there."

"I know one thing about John Trott that I didn't know when he was here," Whaley pursued, tapping his thumb with the case of his glasses, "and I tell you if I had known it he would have had to change before he took a daughter of mine to live under a roof with him. I got it straight that he's been heard to say that he didn't believe in a God or the Bible, and that folks were silly fools that did. I heard it this morning and I made it my business to trace it down. He said it, and I'm here to say that I don't want to be the granddaddy of the children of an atheist. The wrath of an offended God would fall on them and on me. Tilly was put in my care. The Catholics damned the soul of my son when he went over to those idol-worshipers through the wiles of a present-day Eve, and here I stood stock-still and let an avowed atheist take away my daughter. Do you think I'm going to stand it? Man-killing is said to be wrong, but killing human snakes is not, and a man that will lead an innocent Christian girl away from the smiles of God deserves death, let the law of the land be what it may. I've got a good pistol. I've got a steady finger and a firm arm. I tell you to look out. I don't know what may happen. Our Lord said Himself that He came not to bring peace, but a sword, and I'll be at war with atheism against my own flesh and blood till I die."

"You wouldn't be as foolish as that," Mrs. Whaley faltered, for once daring to oppose her spouse. "Even if he is an infidel he may get over it under--under Tilly's influence."

"Get over it, a dog's hind foot!" Whaley sniffed, his great nostrils fluttering, his harsh face rigid. "No wife ever does. They go with their husbands and so do the children, and children's children, all the way down, if the flow of hell's poison is not stopped, and I'll stop it."

On the day that dialogue was taking place Sam Cavanaugh was seated by the bedside of his wife. "Yes, I went by there," he was saying. "John had bought some fine peaches from a mountain wagon and wanted Tilly to have them to put up in jars. She was out in the little yard. I saw her clean across the old circus-grounds. She was walking back and forth, and I'll admit she looked lonely. You were right about what you said that time. I begin to see my mistake. As awkward as it would have been, maybe I ought to have had a straight talk with John, if nobody else. It looks to me like he is slowly opening his eyes now, but doesn't know how to fetch up the subject when we are together. He comes a little later in the morning and starts for home on the dot. I've seen him on the scaffold, looking off over the fields in the very saddest sort of way. He is becoming different. He never curses the men now when they make a bobble or are slow with mortar or brick, and he has lost interest in plans and figures. They have all noticed it. Some seem to understand, while others don't. They all respect him too much to tattle among themselves about his private matters. They love him. They all love John Trott--rough as he is, they all love him; and as for me--as for me--my God! my heart aches! I feel like I've made a mistake, but I can't feel that I am much to blame, for I was going by my best lights. They love each other, those two do, with all their souls. How could I burst it up with a nasty revelation like I'd 'a' had to make?"