Part 38

At the back of the store a small open space was filled with broken crates, straw and boxes--the debris of unpacking. And there he saw a youthful woman sitting with her head turned partially from the road. As he passed a suppressed sob shook her. It captured his attention, and, with a slight, involuntary gasp, he saw her face. The memories returned in a tumultuous, dark tide--she reminded him vividly of Lettice. It was in the young curve of her cheeks, the blue of her eyes, and a sameness of rounded proportions, that the resemblance lay.

He stopped, without formulated reason, and in spite of her obvious desire for him to proceed.

"It's hardly fit to sit here and cry before the whole County," he observed.

"The whole County knows," she returned in the egotism of youthful misery.

Her voice, too, was like Lettice's--sweet with the premonition of the querulous note that, Rutherford Berry had once said, distinguished all good women.

A sudden intuition directed his gaze upon the Courthouse lawn.

"They're selling you out," he hazarded, "for debt."

She nodded, with trembling lips. "Cannon is," she specified.

Cannon was the storekeeper for whom his brother-in-law clerked. He thought again, how monotonous, how everlastingly alike, life was. "You just let the amount run on and on," he continued; "you got this and that. Then, suddenly, Cannon wanted his money."

Her eyes opened widely at his prescience. "But there was sickness too," she added; "the baby died."

"Ah," Gordon said curtly. The lines in his worn face deepened, his mouth was inscrutable.

"If it hadn't been for that," she confided, "we could have got through. Everything had started fine. Alexander's father had left him the place: there isn't a better in the Bottom. Alexander says Mr. Cannon has always wanted it. Now ... now ..." her blue gaze blurred with slow tears.

Her similarity to Lettice grew still more apparent--she presented the same order, her white shirtwaist had been crisply ironed, her shoes were rubbed bright and neatly tied. He recalled this similitude suddenly, and it brought before him a clearly defined vision of Lettice, not as his wife, but of the girl he had driven to and from the school at Stenton. He had not thought of that Lettice for months, for three years; not since before she had died; not, he corrected himself drearily, since he had killed her. He had remembered the last phase, of the glazed and bloodless travesty of her youth. But even that lately had been lost in the fog of nothingness settling down upon him.

And now this girl, on a box back of Simmons' store, brought the buried memories back into light. They disconcerted him, sweeping through the lassitude of his mind; they stirred shadowy specters of fear.... The voice of the sheriff carried to them, describing the excellent repair of incidental sheds.

"I nailed all the tar-paper on the--the chicken house," she told him in a fresh accession of unhappiness, the tears spilling over her round, flushed cheeks.

It annoyed him to see her cry: it was as though Lettice was suffering again from old misery. His irritation grew at this seeming renewal of what had gone; it assumed the aspect of an intentional reproach, of Lettice returned to bother him with her pain and death. He turned sharply to continue on his way. But, almost immediately, he stopped.

"Your name?" he demanded.

"Adelaide Crandall."

The Crandalls, he knew, were a reputable family living in the valley bottom east of Greenstream village. Matthew Crandall had died a few years before, and, as this girl had indicated, had left a substantial farm to each of his sons. Cannon would get this one, and it was more than probable, the others.

The old enmity against Valentine Simmons, directed at Cannon, flamed afresh. Simmons or the other--what did the name matter? they were the same, a figurative apple press crushing the juice out of the country, leaving but a mash of hopes and lives. He stood irresolute, while Adelaide Crandall fought to control her emotions.

The badgering voice of the sheriff sounded again on his hearing. He crossed the road, pushed open the grinding iron gate of the fence that enclosed the Courthouse lawn, and made his way through the sere, fallen leaves to the steps.

III

"Twenty-seven hundred and ninety dollars," the sheriff reiterated; "only twenty-seven ninety ... this fine bottom land, all cleared and buildings in best repair. Going! Going!"

"Three thousand," a man called from the group facing the columned portico.

"Three thousand! Three thousand! Sale must be made. Going--"

"Thirty-one hundred," Gordon pronounced abruptly.

A stir of renewed interest animated the sale. Gordon heard his name pronounced in accents of surprise. He was surprised at himself: his bid had been unpremeditated--it had leaped like a flash of ignited powder out of the resurrected enmity to Valentine Simmons, out of the memories stirred by the figure that resembled Lettice.

The sheriff immediately took up his bid. "Thirty-one hundred! thirty-one, gentlemen; only thirty-one for this fine bottom land, all cleared--"