Teeftallow/Chapter 15

THE first faint star stabbing its pinprick of light through the spraddling branches of the mulberry tree held the jeweller's eyes as he pulled the doorbell of the Scovell House. He rang a second time when he heard a rustling of skirts in the dark hallway. He turned expectantly, but it was only the landlady, Miss Scovell, in a slatternly Mother Hubbard dress bringing the lamp to place it on the newel post for the night. She looked to see who was at the door; then, in a voice edged with distaste, directed, rather than invited.

"You go in the parlour—I'll tell her."

She stationed her beacon then went back upstairs mumbling audibly, "Middle-aged old fool—young girl—old enough to be her—" and then mercifully passed out of hearing.

Miss Scovell's detestation was aroused not so much by the jeweller's age as by what he believed. Her mutterings gave the jeweller's thoughts a painful twist. Belshue was two and a half times as old as the girl. Nessie was eighteen. Yet throughout all his forty-five years the jeweller had never deviated in his allegiance to eighteen-year-old girls. Even when he was a little anti-social boy of ten or eleven, young women of eighteen seemed to him the most beautiful, the most comforting creatures in all the world. During his early adolescence, girls of this age filled him with perfervid dreams and desires. In early manhood Belshue's affections were normally engaged. He had plighted himself to marry a girl, then, to his own dismay, had fallen in love with her younger sister. The heretic's love was a sort of fixed spotlight into which and out of which marched a procession of eighteen-year-old girls. In each instance his love had seemed eternal; ​he felt he could never love another. Belshue was an artist.

So now, as the jeweller waited on the shabby piazza of the Scovell House, these mumblings of the landlady wounded him. He thought bitterly, "What difference does age make? If a man and a woman really love each other, nothing should come between them."

His heart quickened a beat as he saw the bottom of Nessie's skirt come into the light from the newel post; he marked the little motions of the sheer blue skirt caused by the touch of her knees as the girl lowered herself into view. She looked pale, paler than usual. Her fiar hair was coiled in cables about her ears and at the back of her head; some of it was dark in shadow, some gleamed like pale silk. In the lamplight her eyes were very large and dark. She seemed unusually sober and a little strained. She gave him the faintest mechanical smile as she put her hand in his.

"Did you have a good day?" she asked out of habit.

His delicate jeweller's touch could feel the needle pricks, like fine sandpaper, upon the hardened ends of her fingers.

"So-so," he answered, and then turned toward the shadowy end of the piazza. "Let's sit out here in the swing where it's cool."

The girl answered hurriedly that she thought they "had better sit in the parlour" and moved determinedly into the warm dark room.

The jeweller was disappointed. He followed in Nessie's perfumed wake, obsessed with a nervous desire to sit with her in the swing. He even mentioned it again, but Nessie replied in her hurried manner that somebody might talk about them; Miss Scovell said folks had talked already.

The two entered the hot air of the room which Nessie and Miss Scovell called the "parlour." It was quite dark and stale from lack of ventilation. The jeweller swore mentally at Miss Scovell's intrusion in his affairs, then, as Nessie groped for a lamp, a sudden notion came to him to make the most of his opportunity. He would step forward, put his ​arms about the faintly visible girl, and all at once fling his hopes into the balance. He would ask her to marry him; if she loved him she would yield, if she did not . . . he would know. His heart began beating at his bold plan. He stepped forward, reached out arms that tingled to go about the girl, when there came the scratch and flare of a match. When Nessie saw the jeweller so near her she drew a little intake of breath and stepped quickly around to the opposite side of the table before she took off the chimney and lighted the lamp.

The jeweller watched the operation in silence. He was filled with a quivering sensation at what he had come so narrowly doing. But with the lamp lighted any such proposal became impossible.

Nessie stayed by the queer old china-bowled lamp until the jeweller was seated, and then chose another of the stiff green-plush chairs spaced along the wall at some distance from her caller. Belshue regretted his premature choice of seats. He felt instinctively that while a mature woman may be courted by words alone, a young girl, like other young animals, must be wooed by a series of slight physical contacts. The milliner's assistant seemed inviting. Even in the hot parlour she contrived to look cool. He could see her arms through her sheer blue sleeves, and her hands which lay demurely in her lap vaguely discovered the contour of her rounded thighs. Again he mentioned the heat in the parlour, implying the swing.

"It's been a hot day," she answered impersonally. "They're goin' to have a hot spell for their revival."

There was nothing for it except to make conversation about the dullnesses of village life with this girl sitting three chairs remote from him. He asked who would hold the meeting.

"Brother Blackman. They say he's a wonderful preacher."

Nessie would have liked to talk about the meeting and thus lead to the topic of Belshue's soul, which she once had a romantic notion of saving, but the jeweller let the opening ​drop. She forewent her plan for evangelization and thought hurriedly for another topic, for she was never at ease in Belshue's presence.

"Had you heard Mr. Ditmas was going to buy some land from Railroad Jones?"

"No, I don't hear much gossip."

"Some men were talking about it in the store."

The disconnection of this conversation was in odd contrast to the silent strife about the swing which was still going on beneath their words. The jeweller tried to break through this irrelevant patter by saying earnestly, "Why do you stick in that store, Nessie? That's no place for a girl like you—in a store—trimming hats."

"I really like trimming hats," she parried quickly. "I like working with colours. Then, it's hot everywhere—I bet it's hot at the dance to-night." This last speculation popped out because she was wondering if Abner had gone on to the dance without her.

"The dance where?"

"At Mr. Warrington's."

A faint jealous suspicion aroused in Belshue. He glanced at her aslant.

"Did you want to go?"

"I couldn't. I belong to the church."

Belshue continued studying her in faintly suspicious speculation. "Did someone ask you to go?"

She said no, no one had asked her. Then a faint colour came into Nessie's face. She sat extremely still, moistened her lips, and a moment later began talking rapidly of any topic that came into her head: of a hat she had sold, of an engine which Railroad Jones would bring to his new railroad in a week or two, of a new mortgage which Perry Northcutt was asking Railroad Jones to put on his property to protect the bank.

This scramble back to the irrelevant filled the jeweller with a kind of rancorousness. He explained with stony patience that no doubt the expenses of the railroad were ​overrunning the established quota at the bank and the directors wanted more security.

"I'm sure that's it," breathed Nessie, as if a burden had been lifted from her mind.

For the next thirty or forty minutes their conversation was a trying haphazard talk which covers the intimate jangle between illy paired lovers. The girl, three chairs distant from her suitor, still leaned away from him, and Belshue sat bent forward toward Nessie as if a rope were about his hips binding him to his seat.

As Nessie chattered of this and that, she was really thinking with dismay, "I have told a story. I can no longer say I am a truthful girl." Her sense of wickedness grew and grew; it interrupted her speech. At last she looked at the middle-aged man sitting bound in the stiff green chair and said with entire disconnection, "Mr. Belshue, I told you a story."

Her breath tone, the wideness of her blue eyes gave a serio-comic touch to her confession.

"What was your story about?" asked the jeweller, with the first glimpse of humour he had known during the evening.

"About the dance—somebody did ask me to go with them."

Belshue stopped smiling.

"Who?"

"One of the boys here in the hotel."

The jeweller sat pondering this, also thinking with a thrill how exquisite a thing it would be to have a perfectly truthful wife. Out of his thoughts he said abruptly, "Nessie, I hate for you to stay here. There's no telling who you'll be thrown with. I wish—"

"Goodness, the boarders don't worry me, I'm in my room."

"Yes, but somebody asked you to a dance."

"He wrote me a note."

"A note!" The feeling grew that it really was unsafe for ​Nessie in the hotel. "The idea of the fellow writing a note to the girl he has never met!"

"Didn't you?" asked Nessie with a faint smile.

"Yes, but we knew each other in a way—working next door to each other."

"This person works in Irontown."

"That's different," put in the jeweller sharply. "I'm a middle-aged—" He broke off his distasteful sentence to recast it. "I'm a citizen of Irontown and I'm responsible for what I do. You're just a young girl all by yourself in this musty hotel." In the warmth of his speech he somehow broke the invisible rope which bound him to his chair, for he got up and moved toward her. "And it's a shame, you staying in a dump like this, Nessie! And you needn't do it! I've got a place in the country where it's cool. A good place to stay, comfortable. The old Coltrane homestead, if you know where that is. . . ." He rushed on incoherently, passionately, making the middle-aged plea of property. "I bought it ten years ago for its taxes. I thought if I ever did want to marry, I'd have a big old-fashioned manor. . . . Look here, Nessie—"

She got up quickly, frightened at his speech and formidable approach. She put out a hand to ward him off.

"Wait! Stop!" she begged. "Don't talk so loud!"

He dropped to an unsteady undertone. "But I do want you, Nessie! I stand day after day waiting for just a glimpse of you. I want you more than anything on earth! I—I—" The girl's pale crown of hair undid the jeweller's self-control, "Nessie! Good God, you don't hate me!" As he stepped toward her she got quickly behind her stiff green chair with a whitened face.

"Stop! Hush!" she begged in a horrified whisper. "Don't talk so loud; somebody will hear you!"

She stood behind her feeble barricade, her heart pounding so that Belshue could see the pulse in the dimple at the base of her throat. As he approached again she quavered, "Please! Please, stay where you are!"

​She was utterly without defence and on the verge of tears. Her novels, her criterions of conduct had never suggested that a girl might have to shield herself physically from a proposal of marriage.

The indignity of the girl dodging from him behind the green plush chair stopped the jeweller quite as much as her frightened whispers and white face. He put one of his hands on hers on the back of the chair and renewed his persuasions more coherently.

"Nessie, I know we will be happy together! You don't love me now but you will! I'd be so careful of you, Nessie, so devoted—at least the old Coltrane place would give you a—a home and a—a background. There's something aristocratic about the old house, just as there is about you! Old Judge Coltrane was an aristocrat!"

This time the name Coltrane set up in Nessie an obscure recollection, "Coltrane!" she thought, "Coltrane!" And it flashed on her that old Judge Coltrane had been Abner Teeftallow's grandfather!

Suddenly the tragic romance of the old-style Southern novel spread itself before the girl. Belshue was the villain; he had disinherited Abner!

But the jeweller caught the hand under his and was drawing her toward him.

"Nessie, I love you more than my life! I'm in misery without you."

At the jeweller's outburst of passion, he wavered in Nessie's mind between villain and hero. Her novel-reading had left her inextricably mixed. She had expected something clear-cut. Now she wavered between equivocal impulses—to jerk away and fly his reddened, middle-aged face; to yield herself, after all, into his arms. A vague something had awakened in her at this roughness: pity, tenderness, the dawn of passion, his patient, long-continued goodnesses to her when no one else even glanced at her. After all, why not? She let his arms go about her, but with a feeling mixed with shame, and somehow with grotesqueness . . . ​A heavy noise on the stairs just outside the parlour door shocked the two like the crack of doom. They got apart, with frightened faces. The girl went to the door, straightening her hair. Through the glass she could see a form lying on the steps. In Nessie's overwrought state this seemed tragic. She beckoned the jeweller and whispered, "Who do you suppose it is?"

With a trembling hand Belshue patted the girl reassuringly. "Some drunken fellow, nobody . . ."

But a certain prescience seized Nessie. She opened the door and stepped out on the piazza.

"Bring the lamp!" she ordered sharply.

"Nessie," he remonstrated, "I wouldn't . . ." But he picked up the lamp and followed her. When he got out on the piazza, Nessie was kneeling by the figure's side, her arms around its shoulders. She gasped out incoherently, "Oh, Lordy! I done this! God help me!" She swallowed, and her face worked in the lamplight. "Pick up his legs! Pick 'em up! We got to git him to bed!"

As she seemed on the verge of carrying the bulk alone, Belshue obeyed. When he set the lamp on the top step it showed the white face of a youth drunken to insensibility. A single crimson streak where he had fallen against the step marked his forehead. He was the very hero of her novels come to life—a handsome youth flinging himself to the dogs for her love!

Mr. Belshue picked up the limp legs. He caught them high up on the thighs to take all the weight possible off the girl. Together they pulled up the stairs past the night lamp on the newel post. When they had struggled to the top, they lurched slowly along the hallway to one of the bedroom doors. They got inside and placed the powerful figure on a bed which had not been made up that day. Nessie laid her handkerchief on the wounded forehead.

Then the two samaritans straightened, drew weary breaths, and without speaking walked out into the hall and downstairs again.

​On the way down the jeweller ventured an arm around Nessie's waist. The girl undid his embrace deliberately and without meeting any resistance.

"Mr. Belshue," she said with a newly found dignity, "I made a mistake down in the parlour. I am sorry if I caused you to think I loved you, for I do not. If you love me, I regret it very, very much, for I do not love you and I can never marry you—I don't think I shall ever marry. I'd rather you wouldn't come to see me any more. So good-bye and God bless you." She held the door open for him to go out.

A great peace had come over Nessie. Speech and action were in character at last. She could have cited one the gist of this scene and conversation from half-a-dozen novels packed away in her trunk upstairs had she been calm enough to do it.