Lonesome Land by B. M. Bower (reading strategies book .TXT) 📖

“Val at the hotel? How long has she been there?” Manley began smoothing his hair and his crumpled clothes with his hands, “Good heavens! You told her I'd gone on out, and had missed her on the trail, didn't you, Kent? She doesn't know I'm in town, does she? You always were a good fellow—I haven't forgotten how you—”

“Well, you can forget it now. I didn't tell her anything like that. I didn't think of it, for one thing. She knew all the time that you were in town. I'm tired of lying to her. I told her the truth. I told her you were drunk.”

Manley's jaw dropped. “You—you told her—”

“Ex-actly. I told her you were drunk.” Kent nodded gravely, and his lips curled as he watched the other cringe. “She called me a liar,” he added, with a certain reminiscent amusement.

Manley brightened. “That's Val—once she believes in a person she's loyal as—”

“She ain't now,” Kent interposed dryly. “When I let up she was plumb convinced. She knows now what ailed you the day she came and you didn't meet her.”

“You dirty cur! And I thought you were a friend. You—”

“You thought right—until you got to rooting a little too deep in the mud, old-timer. And let me tell you something. I was your friend when I told her. She's got to know—you couldn't go on like this much longer without having her get wise; she ain't a fool. The thing for you to do now is to buck up and let her reform you. I've always heard that women are tickled plumb to death when they can reform a man. You go on over there and make your little talk, and then buckle down and live up to it. Savvy? That's your only chance now. It'll work, too.

“You ought to straighten up, Man, and act white! Not just to square yourself with her, but because you're going downhill pretty fast, if you only knew it. You ain't anything like you were two years ago, when we bached together. You've got to brace up pretty sudden, or you'll be so far gone you can't climb back. And when a man has got a wife to look after, it seems to me he ought to be the best it's in him to be. You were a fine fellow when you first hit the country—and she thought she was getting that same fine fellow when she came away out here to marry you. It ain't any of my business—but do you think you're giving her a square deal?” He waited a minute, and spoke the next sentence with a certain diffidence. “I'll gamble you haven't been disappointed in her.”

“She's an angel—and I'm a beast!” groaned Manley, with the exaggerated self-abasement which so frequently follows close upon the heels of intoxication. “She'll never forgive a thing like that—the best thing I can do is to blow my brains out!”

“Like Walt. And have your picture enlarged and put in a gold frame, and hubby number two learning his morals from your awful example,” elaborated Kent, in much the same tone he had employed when Val, only the day before, had rashly expressed a wish for a speedy death.

Manley sat up straighter and sent a look of resentment toward the man who bantered when he should have sympathized. “It's all a big joke with you, of course,” he flared weakly. “You're not married—to a perfect woman; a woman who never did anything wrong in her life, and can't understand how anybody should want to, and can't forgive him when he does. She expects a man to be a saint. Why, I don't even smoke in the house—and she doesn't dream I'd ever swear, under any circumstances.

“Why, Kent, a fellow's got to go to town and turn himself loose sometimes, when he lives in a rarified atmosphere of refined morality, and listens to Songs Without Words and weepy classics on the violin, and never a thing to make your feet tingle. She doesn't believe in public dances, either. Nor cards. She reads 'The Ring and the Book' evenings, and wants to discuss it and read passages of it to me. I used to take some interest in those things, and she doesn't seem to see I've changed. Why, hang it, Kent, Cold Spring Coulee's no place for Browning—he doesn't fit in. All that sort of thing is a thousand miles behind me—and I've got to—” He stopped short and brooded, his eyes upon the dank sawdust at his feet.

“I'm a beast,” he repeated rather lugubriously. “She's an angel—an Eastern-bred angel. And let me tell you, Kent, all that's pretty hard to live up to!”

Kent looked down at him meditatively, wondering if there was not a good deal of truth and justice in Manley's argument. But his sympathies had already gone to the other side, and Kent was not the man to make an emotional pendulum of himself.

“Well, what you going to do about it?” he asked, after a short silence.

For answer Manley rose to his feet with a certain air of determination, which flamed up oddly above his general weakness, like the last sputter of a candle burned down. “I'm going over and take my medicine—face the music,” he said almost sullenly, “She's too good for me—I always knew it. And I haven't treated her right—I've left her out there alone too much. But she wouldn't come to town with me—she said she couldn't endure the sight of it. What could I do? I couldn't stay out there all the time; there were times when I had to come. She didn't seem to mind staying alone. She never objected. She was always sweet sad good-natured—and shut up inside of herself. She just gives you what she pleases of her mind, and the rest she hides—”

Kent laughed suddenly. “You married men sure do have all kinds of trouble,” he remarked. “A fellow like me can go on a jamboree any time he likes, and as long as he likes, and it don't concern anybody but himself—and maybe the man he's working for; and look at you, scared plumb silly thinking of what your wife's going to say about it. If you ask me, I'm going to trot alone; I'd rather be lonesome than good, any old time.”

That, however, did not tend to raise Manley's spirits any. He entered the hotel with visible reluctance, looked into the parlor, and heaved a sigh of relief when he saw that it was empty, wavered at the foot of the steep, narrow stairs, and retreated to the dining room, with Kent at his heels knowing that the matter had passed quite beyond his help or hindrance and had entered that mysterious realm of matrimony where no unwedded man or woman may follow and yet is curious enough to linger.

Just inside the door Manley stopped so suddenly that Kent bumped against him. Val, sweet and calm and cool, was sitting just where the smoke-dimmed sunlight poured in through a window upon her, and a breeze came with it and stirred her hair. She had those purple shadows under her eyes which betray us after long, sleepless hours when we live with our troubles and the world dreams around us; she had no color at all in her cheeks, and she had that aloofness of manner which Manley, in his outburst, had described as being shut up inside herself. She glanced up at them, just as she would have done had they both been strangers, and went on sugaring her coffee with a dainty exactness which, under the circumstances, seemed altogether