“Aren’t they pretty?” she twittered invitingly but obscurely.
Then, as he took an eager stride forward, she skipped away like a ponderous maenad soliciting Bacchic pursuit.
“A pair of pippins,” he agreed, inclusively.
After this, she prepared breakfast for him.
From Dixieland, Eliza surveyed them with a bitter eye.
He had no talent for concealment.
His visits morning and evening were briefer, his tongue more benevolent.
“I know what you’re up to down there,” she said.
“You needn’t think I don’t.”
He grinned sheepishly and wet his thumb.
Her mouth worked silently at attempted speech for a moment.
She speared a frying steak and flipped it over on its raw back, smiling vengefully in a mounting column of greasy blue vapor.
He poked her clumsily with his stiff fingers; she shrieked a protest mixed of anger and amusement, and moved awkwardly out of his reach with bridling gait.
“Get away!
I don’t want you round me!
It’s too late for that.”
She laughed with nagging mockery.
“Don’t you wish you could, though?
I’ll vow!” she continued, kneading her lips for several seconds in an effort to speak.
“I’d be ashamed.
Every one’s laughing at you behind your back.”
“You lie!
By God, you lie!” he thundered magnificently, touched.
Hammer-hurling Thor.
But he tired very quickly of his new love.
He was weary, and frightened by his depletion.
For a time he gave the widow small sums of money, and forgot the rent.
He transferred to her his storming abuse, muttered ominously to himself in long aisle-pacings at his shop, when he saw that he had lost the ancient freedom of his house and saddled himself with a tyrannous hag.
One evening he returned insanely drunk, routed her out of her chamber and pursued her unfrocked, untoothed, unputtied, with a fluttering length of kimono in her palsied hand, driving her finally into the yard beneath the big cherry tree, which he circled, howling, making frantic lunges for her as she twittered with fear, casting splintered glances all over the listening neighborhood as she put on the crumpled wrapper, hid partially the indecent jigging of her breasts, and implored succor.
It did not come.
“You bitch!” he screamed.
“I’ll kill you.
You have drunk my heart’s-blood, you have driven me to the brink of destruction, and you gloat upon my misery, listening with fiendish delight to my death-rattle, bloody and unnatural monster that you are.”
She kept the tree deftly between them and, when his attention was diverted for a moment to the flood of anathema, tore off on fear-quick feet, streetward to the haven of the Tarkintons’ house.
As she rested there, in Mrs. Tarkinton’s consolatory arms, weeping hysterically and dredging gullies in her poor painted face, they heard his chaotic footsteps blundering within his house, the heavy crash of furniture, and his fierce curses when he fell.
“He’ll kill himself!
He’ll kill himself!” she cried.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Oh, my God!” she wept.
“I’ve never been talked to that way by any man in my life!”
Gant fell heavily within his house.
There was silence.
She rose fearfully.
“He’s not a bad man,” she whispered.
One morning in early summer, after Helen had returned, Eugene was wakened by scuffling feet and excited cries along the small boardwalk that skirted the house on its upper side and led to the playhouse, a musty little structure of pine with a single big room, which he could almost touch from the sloping roof that flowed about his gabled backroom window.
The playhouse was another of the strange extravagancies of Gantian fancy: it had been built for the children when they were young.
It had been for many years closed, it was a retreat of delight; its imprisoned air, stale and cool, was scented permanently with old pine boards, cased books, and dusty magazines.
For some weeks now it had been occupied by Mrs. Selborne’s South Carolina cook, Annie, a plump comely negress of thirty-five, with a rich coppery skin.
The woman had come into the mountains for the summer: she was a good cook and expected work at hotels or boarding-houses.
Helen engaged her for five dollars a week.