Lonesome Land by B. M. Bower (life changing books to read .TXT) 📗

Not even Mrs. Hawley could remain after that. She went out and closed the door carefully behind her, without even finding voice enough to return Valeria's sweetly modulated good night.

“She's got a whole lot to learn,” she relieved her feelings somewhat by muttering as she mounted the stairs.

What it cost Manley Fleetwood to abstain absolutely and without even the compromise of “soft” drinks that night, who can say? Three years of free living in Montana had lowered his standard of morality without giving him that rugged strength of mind which makes a man master of himself first of all. He had that day lain, drunken and sleeping, when he should have been at his mental and physical best to meet the girl who would marry him. It was that very defection, perhaps, which kept him sober in the midst of his taunting fellows. Now that Valeria was actually here, and was his wife, he was possessed by the desire to make some sacrifice by which he might prove his penitence. At any cost he would spare her pain and humiliation, he told himself.

He did it, and he did it under difficulty. He was denied the moral support of Kent Burnett, for Kent was sulking over his slight, and would have nothing to say to him. He was jeered unmercifully by Fred De Garmo and his crowd. He was “baptized” by some drunken reveler, so that the stench of spilled whisky filled his nostrils and tortured him the night through. He was urged, he was bullied, he was ridiculed. His head throbbed, his eyeballs burned. But through it all he stayed among them because he feared that if he left them and went to Val, some drunken fool might follow him and shock her with his inebriety. He stayed, and he stayed sober. Val was his wife. She trusted him, and she was ignorant of his sins. If he went to her staggering and babbling incoherent foolishness, he knew it would break her heart.

When the sky was at last showing faint dawn tints and the clamor had worn itself out perforce—because even the leaders were, after all, but men, and there was a limit to their endurance—Manley entered the parlor, haggard enough, it is true, and bearing with him the stale odor of cigars long since smoked, and of the baptism of bad whisky, but also with the air of conscious rectitude which sits so comically upon a man unused to the feeling of virtue.

As is so often the case when one fights alone the good fight and manages to win, he was chagrined to find himself immediately put upon the defensive. Val, as she speedily demonstrated, declined to look upon him as a hero, or as being particularly virtuous. She considered herself rather neglected and abused. She believed that he had stayed away because he was angry with her on account of her refusal to leave town, and she thought that was rather brutal of him. Also, her head ached from tears and lack of sleep, and she hated the town, the hotel—almost she hated Manley himself.

Manley felt the rebuff of her chilling silence when he came in, and when she twitched herself loose from his embrace he came near regretting his extreme virtue. He spent ten minutes trying to explain, without telling all of the truth, and he felt his good opinion of himself slipping from him before her inexorable disfavor.

“Well, I don't blame you for not liking the town, Val,” he said at last, rather desperately. “But you mustn't judge the whole country by it. You'll like the ranch, dear. You'll feel as if you were in another world—”

“I hope so,” Val interrupted quellingly.

“We'll drive out there just as soon as we have breakfast.” He laid his hand diffidently upon her tumbled hair. “I had to stay out there with those fellows. I didn't want to—”

“I don't want any breakfast,” said Val, getting up and going over to the window—it would seem to avoid his caress. “The odor of that dining room is enough to make one fast forever.” She lifted the grimy lace curtain with her finger tips and looked disconsolately out upon the street. “It's just a dirty, squalid little hamlet. I don't suppose the streets have been cleaned or the garbage removed from the back yards since the place was first—founded.” She laughed shortly at the idea of “founding” a wretched village like that, but she had no other word at hand.

“Arline,” she remarked, in a tone of drawling recklessness. “Arline swears. Did you know it? I suppose, of course, you do. She said something that struck me as being shockingly true. She said I'm 'sure having a hell of a honeymoon.'” Then she bit her lips hard, because her eyelids were stinging with the tears she refused to shed in his presence.

“Oh, Val!” From the sofa Manley stared contritely at her back. She must feel terrible, he thought, to bring herself to repeat that sentence—Val, so icily pure in her thoughts and her speech.

Val was blinking her tawny eyes—like the eyes of a lion in color—at the street. Not for the world would she let him see that she wanted to cry! A figure, blurred to indistinctness, appealed in a doorway nearly opposite, stood for a moment looking up at the reddened sky, and came across the street. As the tears were beaten back she saw and recognized him, with a curl of the lip.

“Here comes your cowboy friend—from a saloon, of course.” Her voice was lazily contemptuous. “Only his presence in the street was needed to complete the picture of desolation. He has been in a fight, judging from his face. It is all bruised and skinned, and one eye is swollen—ugh! My guide, my adviser—is it possible, Manley, that you couldn't find a nice man to meet me at the train?” She turned from the disagreeable sight of Kent and faced her husband. “Are all the men like that? And are all the women like—Arline?”

Manley looked at her dumbly from the sofa. Would Val ever come to understand the place, and the people, he was wondering.

She laughed suddenly. “I'm beginning to feel very sorry for Walt,” she said irrelevantly, pointing to the easel and the expressionless crayon portrait staring out from the gilt frame. “He has to stay in this room always. And I believe another two hours would drive me hopelessly insane.” The word caught her attention. “Hope!” she laughed ironically. “What imbecile ever thought of hope in the same breath with this place? What they really ought to do is paint that 'Abandon-hope' admonition across the whole front of the depot!”

Manley, because he had lifted his head too suddenly and so sent white-hot irons of pain clashing through his brain, turned sullen. “If you hate it as bad as all that,” he said, “why, there'll be a train for the East in about two hours.”

Val stiffened perceptibly, though the petulance in her face changed to something wistful. “Do you mean—do you want me to go?” she asked very calmly.

Manley pressed his fingers hard against his temples. “You know I don't. I want you to stay and like the country, and be happy. But—the way you have been talking makes it seem—a-ah!” He dropped his tortured head upon his hands and did not trouble to finish what he had intended to say. Nervous strain, lack of sleep, and a headache to begin with, were taking heavy toll of him. He could not argue with her; he could not do anything