The Roof Tree

CHAPTER XXVII

Parish Thornton had used all his persuasion to prevent Dorothy's going with him to Virginia. He had argued that the solace of feeling her presence in the courtroom would hardly compensate for the unnerving effect of knowing that the batteries of the prosecution were raining direct fire on her as well as on himself.

Twice, while he had waited the summons that must call him to face his ordeal, the attorney who was to defend him had come over into Kentucky for conference, and it was to the professional advice of this lawyer, almost clairvoyant in his understanding of jury-box psychology, that Dorothy had at last yielded.

"We'll want to have you there later on," he had told the wife. "Juries are presumed to be all logic; in fact, they are two-thirds emotion – and if you appear for the first time in that courtroom at precisely the right moment with your youth and wholesomeness and loyalty, your arrival will do more for your husband than anything short of an alibi. I'll send for you in due season – but until I do, I don't want you seen there."

So Dorothy had stayed anxiously at home.

One crisp and frosty morning she went over to Jake Crabbott's store where she found the usual congregation of loungers, and among them was Bas Rowlett leaning idly on the counter.

Dorothy made her few purchases and started home, but as she left the store the man upon whom she had declared irreconcilable war strolled out and fell into step at her side. She had not dared to rebuff him before those witnesses who still accounted them friends, but she had no relish for his companionship and when they had turned the bend of the road she halted and faced the fellow with determined eyes.

About them the hills were taking on the slate grays and chocolate tones of late autumn and the woods were almost denuded of the flaunting gorgeousness which had so recently held carnival there, yet the sodden drabness of winter had in nowise settled to its monotony, for through the grays and browns ran violet and ultramarine reflexes like soft and creeping fires that burned blue, and those few tenacious leaves that clung valiantly to their stems were as rich of tone as the cherry-dark hues that come out on well-coloured meerschaum.

"I didn't give ye leave ter walk along with me, Bas," announced the girl with a spirited flash in her eyes, and her chin tilted high. "I've got a rather es ter ther company I keeps."

The man looked at her for a hesitant interval without answering, and in his dark face was a mingling of resentment, defiance, and that driving desire that he thought was love.

"Don't ye dast ter trust yoreself with me, Dorothy?" he demanded with a smile that was half pleading and half taunt, and he saw the delicate colour creep into her cheeks and make them vivid.

"I hain't afeared of ye," she quickly disavowed. "Ever sence thet other time when ye sought ter insult me, I've done wore my waist bloused – a-purpose ter tote a dirk-knife. I've got hit right now," and her hand went toward her bosom as she took a backward step into the brittle weed-stalks that grew by the roadside.

But Bas shook his head, and hastened to expound his subtler meaning.

"I didn't mean ye war skeered of no bodily vi'lence, Dorothy. I means ye don't das't trust yoreself with me because ye're affrighted lest ye comes ter love me more'n ye does ther man ye married in sich unthoughted haste. I don't blame ye fer bein' heedful."

"Love ye!" she exclaimed, as the colour deepened in her cheeks and neck, then went sweeping out again in the white and still passion of outraged indignation. "I hain't got no feelin' fer ye save only ter despise ye beyond all measure. A woman kain't love no craven an' liar thet does his fightin' by deceit."

Bas Rowlett looked off to the east and when he spoke it was with no reference to the insults that cut most deeply and sorely into mountain sensibilities.

"A woman don't always know what she loves ner hates – all at onc't. Betwixt them two things thar hain't no sich great differ noways. I'd ruther hev ye hate me then not ter give me no thought one way ner t'other… Ye're liable ter wake up some day an' diskiver thet ye've jest been gittin' ther names of yore feelin's mixed up." He paused in his exposition upon human nature long enough to smile indulgently, then continued: "So long es ye won't abide ter let me even talk te yer, I knows ye're afear'd of me in yore heart – an' thet's because ye're afeared of what yore heart hitself mout come ter feel."

"Thet's a right elevatin' s'armon ye preaches," she made scornful answer, "but a body doesn't gentle a mad dog jest ter show they hain't skeered of hit."

"Es fer Parish Thornton," he went on as though his musings were by way of soliloquy, "ye kain't handily foller him whar he's goin' ter, nohow. He's done run his course already."

A hurricane gust of dizzy wrath swept the woman and her voice came explosively: "Thet's a lie, Bas Rowlett! Hit'll be you thet dies with a rope on yore neck afore ye gits through – not him!"

"Ef I does," declared the man with equanimity, "hit won't be jest yit. I grants him full an' free right of way ter go ahead of me."

But abruptly that cool and disconcerting vein of ironic calm left him and he bent his head with the sullen and smouldering eyes of a vicious bull.

"But be thet es hit may. I claims thet ye kain't stand out erginst my sweetheartin' ef ye trusts yoreself ter see me. You claims contrariwise, but ye don't dast test yore theory. I loves ye an' wants ye enough ter go on eatin' insults fer a spell… Mebby ther Widder Thornton'll listen ter reason – when ther jury an' ther hangman gits done."

The girl made no answer. She could not speak because of the fury that choked her, but she turned on her heel and he made no effort to follow her.

The steeply humped mountains on either side seemed to Dorothy Thornton to close in and stifle her, and the bracing, effervescent air of the high places had become dead and lifeless in her nostrils, as to one who smothers.

That evening, when Sim Squires came in to supper, he made casual announcement that he understood Bas had gone away somewhere. His vapid grin turned to a sneer as he mentioned Rowlett's name after the never-failing habit of his dissembling, but Dorothy set down his plate as though it had become suddenly too hot to hold.

"Whar did he go?" she demanded with a gasp in her voice, and the hired man, drawing his platter over, drawled out his answer in a tone of commonplace:

"Nobody didn't seem ter know much erbout hit. Some 'lowed he'd fared over ter Virginny ter seek ter aid Parish in his trial." He paused, then with well-feigned maliciousness he added, "but ef I war inter any trouble myself, I'd thank Bas Rowlett ter keep his long fingers outen my affairs."

Gone to help Parish! Dorothy drew back and leaned against the wall with knees grown suddenly weak. She thought she knew what that gratuitous aid meant!

Parish fighting for his life over there in the adjoining state faced enemies enough at his front without having assassins lurking in the shadows at his back!

Perhaps Bas had not actually gone yet. Perhaps he could be stopped. Perhaps her rebuff that morning had goaded him to his decision. If he had not gone he must not go! The one thought that seemed the crux of her vital problem was that so long as he remained here he could not be there.

And if he had not actually set out she could hold him here! His amazing egotism was his one vulnerable point, the single blind spot on his crafty powers of reasoning – and that egotism would sway and bend to any seeming of relenting in her.

She was ready to fight for Parish's life in whatever form the need came – and she had read in the old Bible how once Judith went to the tent of Holifernes.

Dorothy shuddered as she recalled the apocryphal picture of the woman who gave herself to the enemy, and she lay wide-eyed most of that night as she pondered it.

She would not give herself, of course. The beast's vanity was strong enough to be content with marking, as he believed, the signs of her gradual conversion. She would fence with him and provoke him with a seeming disintegration of purpose. She would dissemble her abhorrence and aversion, refashioning them first into indulgent toleration, then into the grudging admission that she had misjudged him. She would measure her wit against his wit – but she would make Kentucky seem to him too alluring a place to abandon for Virginia!

When she rose at dawn her hands clenched themselves at her sides. Her bosom heaved and her face was set to a stern dedication of purpose.

"I'll lead him on an' keep him hyar," she whispered in a voice that she would hardly have recognized as her own had she been thinking at all of the sound of voices. "But afore God in Heaven, I'll kill him fer hit atter-ward!"

So when Rowlett, who had really gone only on a neighbourhood journey, sauntered idly by the house the next afternoon near sunset, Dorothy was standing by the stile and he paused tentatively in the road. As though the conversation of yesterday had not occurred, the man said:

"Howdy, Dorothy," and the girl nodded.

She was not fool enough to overplay her hand, so her greeting was still disdainful, but when he tarried she did not send him away. It was, indeed, she who first referred to their previous encounter.

"When I come home yistidday, Bas," she said, "I sot down an' thought of what ye said ter me an' I couldn't holp laughing."

"Is thet so?" he responded. "Wa'al what seems ridic'lous to one body sometimes seems right sensible ter another."

"Hit sounded mighty foolish-like ter me," she insisted, then, as if in after thought, she added, "but I'd hate mightily ter hev ye think I wasn't willin' ter give ye all ther rope ye wants ter hang yoreself with. Come on over, Bas, whenever ye've a mind ter. Ef ye kin convert me, do hit – an' welcome."

There was a shade of challenge in the voice such as might have come from the lips of a Carmen, and the man's pulses quickened.

Almost every day after that found Bas Rowlett at the house and the evenings found him pondering his fancied progress with a razor-edged zest of self-complacency.

"She'll hold out fer a spell," he told himself with large optimism. "But ther time'll come. When an apple gits ripe enough hit draps offen ther limb."

Over at the small county seat to the east the squat brick "jail-house" sat in the shadow of the larger building. There was a public square at the front where noble shade trees stood naked now, and the hitching racks were empty. Night was falling over the sordid place, and the mountains went abruptly up as though this village itself were walled into a prison shutting it off from outer contacts.

The mired streets were already shadowy and silent save for the whoop of a solitary carouser, and the evening star had come out cold and distant over the west, where an amber stretch of sky still sought feebly to hold night apart from day.

Through the small, grated window of one of the two cells which that prison boasted, Parish Thornton stood looking out – and he saw the evening star. It must be hanging, he thought, just over the highest branches of the black walnut tree at home, and he closed his eyes that he might better conjure up the picture of that place.

With day-to-day continuances the Commonwealth had strung out the launching of his trial until the patience of the accused was worn threadbare. How much longer this suspense would stretch itself he could not guess.

"I wonder what Dorothy's doin' right now," he murmured, and just then Dorothy was listening to Bas Rowlett's most excellent opinion of himself.

It would not be long, the young woman was telling herself, before she would go over there to the town east of the ridges – if only she could suppress until that time came the furies that raged under her masquerade and the aversion that wanted to cry out denunciation of her tormentor!

But the summons from the attorney had never come, and Bas never failed to come as regularly as sunrise or sunset. His face was growing more and more hateful to her with an unearthly and obsessing antipathy.

One afternoon, when the last leaves had drifted down leaving the forests stark and unfriendly, her heart ached with premonitions that she could not soften with any philosophy at her command.

Elviry Prooner had gone away when Bas arrived, and the strokes of Sim Squires' axe sounded from a distant patch of woods, so she was alone with her visitor.