Teeftallow/Chapter 38

AFTER his altercation with Abner, A. M. Belshue hurried to the old manor, filled with anxiety for his young wife whose sobbing retreat from the well he had seen as he came up the private road toward his home.

Notwithstanding what Abner had said he persisted in an uneasy and a kind of insincere belief that Abner had insulted his wife and this had caused her weeping. He told himself that Abner had spoken to her with the contempt, the crude hill irony, or the cold reserved manner which the hill folk use toward a woman who mothers a child altogether out of love and not out of foresight. Undoubtedly Abner Teeftallow had so used his wife, and that was why she wept. But even while the jeweller repeated this assertion to himself, in the depths of his mind lay a questioning, a repressed doubt, which wrought on his nerves. From this subconscious depth a phrase came to Belshue precisely as if another person had spoken the words inside his ear. The voice said, "She ought to be very grateful for all you've done for her." And with this desolate comment, the voice disappeared again somewhere within the sunless caverns of his being.

The jeweller hurried in through the pauperish magnificence of his piazza into a stately hallway whose tinted stuccoed ceiling had faded and fallen away in places to be renewed by smooth whitewashed plaster; and this in turn had grayed and cracked and fallen. The jeweller's inner voice had been put back where it belonged and he was thinking, "Insulting a woman after his conduct—I ought to have run him off the place with a Winchester. . . ." He would next time.

Belshue passed into a large living room which he had furnished for Nessie, but she was not there. She seemed ​to have been out for some time. The autumn wind rattled the great French windows and flung out the muslin curtains which Nessie had put up. Yet with all its draughtiness, the odour of infants, which careless hill mothers allow, permeated the air. Three drying diapers hung on chairs before a great fireplace in which a log smouldered. As an ironic touch, the capstone of the fireplace was carved with an old coat of arms which must have belonged to Abner Teeftallow—the coat of arms, the unfragrant cloths of the baby, an unmade bed, a hearthstone scattered with ashes and bits of kindling. . . .

Belshue went through an adjoining room which once had been a legal library. All left of it now were some private acts of the Tennessee legislature; two volumes of Blackstone; an early copy of Kent—books which had daunted the eloquence of the auctioneer who had gutted the old judge's library. Cheek by jowl with them in their walnut shelves were towels, napkins, hammers, wrenches, buckles, brads, harness, dried peppers, cured onions, a tuft of mullein to make medicinal tea, gourds of seeds from flourishing gardens; a kind of illiterate hoi polloi elbowing the last remnants of the old aristocracy of law books.

The jeweller went through one deserted room after another with a growing fear in his heart, when finally he passed out of the dining room along a covered brick walk about twenty feet long to the detached kitchen. In this dark room he heard a rattling and entered, expecting to see Lizzie, the Negro cook. Instead he saw Nessie herself bending over the stove besmudged with pots. Belshue looked at his wife in surprise.

"Where's Lizzie?"

Nessie answered, with a long breath, "She was afraid to stay here—I don't mind doing this."

"Afraid to stay here, why?"

"The neighbours have been talking to her."

Belshue felt an impulse to ask angrily, "What did they say?" but he hesitated for fear it would bring up the old ​unpleasant subject, but finally he did ask the question in a colourless tone:

"What did they say?"

"They told Lizzie they saw a light moving about your second-story windows at night."

"Why, certainly!" cried the jeweller, surprised and irritated, "that was me regulating my watches."

"I told her that, but Lizzie wanted to know why you were regulating watches at night; why you bothered at all to regulate a lot of old watches. I never could make her understand it was just your pastime. We talked about it for a long time." Nessie gave another long sigh. "Finally she said she had to go because her sister was sick; she hated to leave me—niggers always say that."

The middle-aged jeweller stood looking at his young wife with a sort of frustrated tenderness for her and a desire to shield her and keep her looking fresh and flowerlike. The faint veil which maternity had spread over her had been saddening to him; whereas had the child been his own, this change in her appearance would have been pensive and sweet, like the air of an old song.

"I'll get you another cook." Then, after a moment, he said, "if necessary I'll—quit tinkering with the watches."

Nessie shook her head without noticing his renunciation. "I don't think any of them will stay."

"How about a white woman?"

A look almost of fright came into the young woman's face.

"No, Mr. Belshue, don't get a white woman, I—I—" she controlled her voice and gave a reason which was not the real one, "I'm used to nigger servants. . . ."

Her disturbance brought up again to the jeweller's mind the isolation that spread over their two lives and left them marooned here in this old manor, cut off from all companionship.

"Can I do anything to help you now, Nessie?" he asked.

The girl looked around with that lack of administrative ability which reduces work to drudgery.

​"No-o-o, I don't see—" Here, to her surprise, she saw that her water bucket was dry. She had believed it full.

"I thought I had some water. You may bring some if you will, Mr. Belshue."

Her notion that she already had water stirred a painful suspicion in Belshue which he could not analyse. He stepped across to the bucket, but hesitated, exploring his uneasiness and trying to define it. Some impulse caused him to ask abruptly, "Nessie, did you hurt your hand at the well while ago?"

She looked at her hands. "No—why?"

"Nothing," he said in a kind of uncertain relief. "That Teeftallow boy said you hurt your hand at the well while ago, that was what made you cry."

Nessie looked at the jeweller with widened eyes, drew a breath, then said in a low tone, "No—he was—mistaken—I didn't hurt my hand."

By this Belshue knew that Nessie meant Abner had told an untruth. She never said any one told an untruth, but always softened it into a "mistake."

The husband thought quickly and gratefully, "That proves Teeftallow lied; then he must have insulted her." He had it on his lips, was drawing in a breath to ask, "Did he insult you, Nessie?" when a certain thing stopped him. He shifted his question to, "Why did you cry, Nessie?" when again he paused with the shaken feeling of a man with one foot slipping over a precipice. The inhibiting thought was this: he knew that his wife would hesitate, pale, but finally she would tell him the exact truth. A chariness of intruding into his wife's confidence had grown on him in the few months of their married life. She would tell him the truth. Now, as he stood with his unuttered question on his lips, "Why did you weep?" a sudden discomforting analysis dawned on his mind for the first time. He had made a mistake when he had searched out and married his ideal, a sincere truthful woman. He had always imagined he wanted a completely truthful wife, but he had not anticipated that ​she might have some unpleasant truths to tell him. Nessie never thrust her truths upon him, but when he pressed her she told him honestly what she thought and never made any allowance for his sensibilities in her religious adherence to verity. She would not feed him comfortable untruths, which if repeated often enough and earnestly enough, might in time become truths. And there occurred to Belshue the disquieting fact that an ability and willingness to lie with emotion and conviction were perhaps the most precious traits of character which any wife could bring to any husband.

The jeweller came out of these odd reflections to the matter in hand.

"Anyway, he won't make you cry any more, Nessie. I ordered him off the place."

The girl looked at her husband with widened eyes. "You didn't, Mr. Belshue!"

"Why, certainly, I did; do you want him to—" Again he broke off his natural exclamation to avoid a frank answer and substituted, "You don't want him to make you cry, do you?"

"No-o," hesitated Nessie, "I suppose it is best." Then, plucking up her resolution, "But nobody ever comes here, Mr. Belshue, now that Lizzie has gone. . . ."

"I'll get you another cook!" exclaimed the jeweller, annoyed. "It seems I'm no company."

"Yes, you are, but—but it's lonesome for both of us, and—and when somebody comes, once in a long while. . . ."

The jeweller was exasperated. His wife practised shifts and evasions well enough when it came to—well, what had it come to?—to something she herself desired; but for him, she had nothing but flint-like truths. The torment hidden in Belshue's soul suddenly rose up.

"Nessie," he cried, "I should think mere gratitude for what I have done for you would make you see—make you feel—" He paused a moment with a spasm twitching the muscles of his face. "You—you still love him," he said in a throaty tone, "that's the trouble!"

​Nessie stared at the jeweller with her own face whitening.

"I—I told you I loved him long ago, Mr. Belshue!"

"But you always will!"

The girl was painfully moved. She pressed a smudged hand against her full breast. "I—I don't know, I—suppose so."

"A man who would mistreat you—seduce you!" cried the jeweller, "leave you helpless, about to become a mother, in the hands of a mob! drive you to the point of suicide! And I—My God, I gave up everything I had on earth for you—a business, a sort of friendship among the men. I was the only person in Irontown who did not spit on you, but somehow or other, I still felt you were pure and fine, and—I loved you, Nessie—Oh, Nessie, it seems to me mere gratitude—" He paused, miserably holding out his hands to his wife.

But the jeweller was middle-aged and had that inhuman remoteness which middle age always has for youth. The girl could not enter into his emotions at all. She began defending her lover at once.

"But you are not fair to Abner, Mr. Belshue," she gasped, "he—he was coming to Irontown to—to—take me away the night the mob wh-whipped him." This last phrase she whispered, and then began weeping again at this exquisitely edged misfortune, sobbing, drawing her breath in gasps, wiping her eyes on the back of her wrist to avoid her smudged hand.

The simplicity of her grief filled Belshue with utter despair. All the fears and forebodings which had lain uneasily in the depths of his heart rose up and were realized. It seemed to Belshue that this sweet, sincere, untidy girl was at that moment withdrawn slowly from him, that she moved physically away from him never to return.

He faced about and went slowly out of the kitchen door, forgetting the bucket. He walked slowly and with a tottery effect of age into the great house and up a flight of curving stairs into a room he had set apart for his own. In it, over ​by a great window, was a rack of old watches which had never been called for by their owners. They were the accumulation of years. Their running filled the room with a faint myriad-voiced ticking.

The jeweller mechanically compared his master watch with the others, turning his eyes from one dial to another in regular order. As he did so he whispered through gray lips, "It seems mere—gratitude . . ." He did not complete his sentence even mentally, but sat down in his chair and listened to the ticking of the watches.

The sound suggested once more to Belshue that Time might be a Lilliputian army double-quicking down the long slope of eternity into nothingness.