The Happy End | Page 6

have something to say. Hannah was his, she was promised to him. He felt the coolness of her cheeks, her bright mouth against his. A tyranny of misery and desire flooded him at the sudden danger--it was as much as that--threatening his happiness and life.
It was a danger founded on his entire ignorance of what he must combat. He couldn't visualize it, but it never occurred to him that Hannah would actually go away--leave him and Greenstream. No, it was a quality in Hannah herself, a thing that had always lurked below the surface, beyond his knowledge until now. Yet he realized that it formed a part of her appeal, a part of her distinction over the other girls of the county.
Maybe it was because he was never in his heart absolutely certain of her--even when she was closest to him she seemed to slip away beyond his power to follow. His love, he acknowledged for the first time, had never been easy or contented or happy. It had been obscure, like the night about him now; it resembled a fire that he held in his bare hands. Hannah's particularity, too, was allied to this strange newly- awakened peril. In a manner it was that which had carried Phebe out of the mountains. Now the resemblance between them was far stronger than their difference.
There was more than a touch of all this in the girls' mother, in her bitterness and discontent. He felt that he hated the elder as much as he did Phebe. If the latter were a man----
He dressed with the greatest care for his next evening with Hannah. Hosmer wore no stiffer nor whiter collar, and Calvin's necktie was a pure gay silk. He arrived just as the moon detached itself from the fringe of mountain peaks and the frogs started insistently. His heart was heavy but his manner calm, determined, as he entered the Braley kitchen. No one was there but Susan; soon however, Phebe entered in an amazing slovenly wrapper with a lace edge turned back from her ample throat; and Hannah followed.
Phebe made a mocking reference to the sofa in the parlor, and Hannah's expression was distasteful; but she slowly followed Calvin into the conventional chamber.
He made no attempt to embrace her, but said instead: "I came to fix the day for our wedding."
"Phebe wants me to go with her for a little first," she replied indirectly. "She says I can come back whenever I like."
"Your Phebe has no say in it." He spoke harshly. "We're honestly promised to each other and don't need outside advice or interference."
"Don't you go to call Phebe 'outside,'" she retorted. "She's my sister. Perhaps it's a good thing she came when she did, and saved me from being buried. Perhaps I'm not aiming to be married right off."
V
Hannah was standing, a hand on the table that held the pink-shaded lamp, and the light showed her petulant and antagonistic. A flare of anger threatened to shut all else from Calvin's thoughts; but suddenly he was conscious of the necessity for care--care and patience. He forced back his justified sense of wrong.
"I wasn't referring direct to Phebe," he told her. "I meant that between us nobody else matters, no one in the world is of any importance to me but you. It's all I think about. When I was building the house, our house, I hammered you into it with every nail. It is sort of made out of you," he foundered; "like--like I am."
He could see her relenting in the loss of the rigidity of her pose. Hannah's head drooped and her fingers tapped faintly on the table. He moved closer, urging his advantage.
"We're all but married, Hannah; our carpet is being wove and that suite of furniture ordered through Priest. You've been upset by this talk of theaters and such. You'd get tired of them and that fly-by-night life in a month."
"Phebe hasn't."
"What suits one doesn't suit all," he said concisely.
"It would suit more girls than you know for," she informed him. "Take it round here, there's nothing to do but get married, and all the change is from one kitchen to another. You don't even have a way to match up fellows. Soon as you're out of short skirts one of them visits with you and the rest stay away like you had the smallpox. Our courting lasted a week and you were here four times."
"We haven't much time, Hannah," he reminded her. "It was right hard for me to see you that often. There was a smart of things you were doing, too."
"The more fool!" she exclaimed.
Again his resentment promised to leap beyond control. He clenched his hands and stared with contracted eyes at the floor.
"Well," he articulated finally, "we're promised anyhow; that can't be denied.