THE STEADFAST HEART
CHAPTER ONE
The house presented a dazed, half-witted appearance. One could have said that it was lost and bewildered and discouraged, and had settled down where it was through sheer weariness. As a matter of fact, it was not a whole house, but only the wing of a house that seemed to have wandered away from the main structure and then had been unable to find its way back. In reality it represented an unfulfilled ambition. Many years ago a farmer had commenced to build himself a home piecemeal. Inasmuch as a kitchen is a primary requisite in a home, he had built this single room with the intention of adding to it in the spring—but spring never had arrived for him. The northern exposure of the structure remained in what might be termed an anatomical condition—like the pictures of the man in the medicine almanacs who stands gracefully exhibiting his veins and arteries—for on that side the studding, which was to have been covered by the lath and plaster of the dining-room wall, had never been covered by anything at all.
It was a deserted house, unoccupied for years. Its shingles curled their edges upward, so that they had rather the appearance of the dirty feathers of some squatting, slovenly bird; its windows, such of them as were not stuffed with sacking and paper, had not been washed for a decade, and weeds and daisies and a rank tangle of summer growth extended from what had once been a picket fence to the very door…. Smoke was curling up in a negligent, shiftless way from the chimney.
Scarcely had the salt pork commenced to frizzle in the greasy spider when Titus Burke kicked open the rickety door and slouched into the room. He flung his black felt hat in a corner—and a little cloud of dust arose from it, spread and settled again, to add just that much to the accumulated filth of the place. He glanced at the stove, sniffed the odor of frying pork, and scowled.
“Sow-belly! Hain’t had nothin’ fit to put into a man’s stummick for a week.” Then with bleary humor, “Say, what’s matter? Hain’t none of the neighbors got chickens?”
Evidently Titus expected no reply from his son, nor did the boy attempt a reply—but went about his work—house work—with the same queer stolidity he had exhibited before his father entered. The thing was common to him, the whole proceeding, and made no impression upon him. Nothing made much of an impression on Angus Burke.
The woman on the mattress in the corner stirred, moaned, turned so she could see her husband.
“Did you get them for me, Titus?” she whined. “Where’s my black pills? You give them to me, now; don’t go hidin’ them from me…. Hand ’em over. Can’t you see I’m most dyin’ for the want of them?… If I was to die I’d like to know who’d look after you and keep your house and do your cookin’….” She raised herself on her elbow and stretched out a skinny, bloodless, trembling hand.
“Shet up your caterwaulin’,” replied Titus. “I got ’em, and I’ll hand ’em over as soon as I git around to it. Think a man kin do everythin’ all to once?”
This dialogue, too, was in the ordinary way of things for Angus. He knew his father would tantalize his mother by withholding her drug as long as he derived pleasure from it. It was the common ritual of the occasion and he would have wondered dully at its omission. So would the woman…. She fell back sullenly and began to moan loudly and artificially.
Angus poured muddy coffee into a cracked cup, whose thickness was such that one had to open wide the mouth to drink from it. There was neither cream nor milk…. He carried it to his mother, who snatched it without a word of thanks, spilling a portion as her shaking hand carried it to her mouth. She drank until only a tablespoonful remained in the bottom of the cup and then demanded her black pills again.
“’S a bad habit, ol’ woman. Guess I’ll break you of it,” said Titus. “If I wasn’t to give you the stuff, you couldn’t git it, and if you couldn’t git it, you couldn’t take it—and then you wouldn’t go on disgracin’ me like you be.” This was also a part of the ritual, as was Mrs. Burke’s muttered blistering curse.
Titus walked to the stove and lifted a cracked lid. “Don’t you go cussin’ me out, ol’ woman. You gimme the respect proper from a woman to her lawful wedded husband…. And jest fer cuttin’ up sich didoes I’m goin’ to punish you, like it’s my bounden duty to do. Here goes your pills into the stove.”
The woman was inarticulate. From her mouth came sounds which were not human sounds. Perhaps even Titus was able to perceive that he had carried his playfulness too far, for he abandoned his joviality suddenly and threw the little box to his wife.
“There,” he said with a snarl, “it’s the last you git outa me, so make the most of it.”
Mrs. Burke clutched her treasure from the floor and scuttled back to the mattress. Sitting on its edge, she turned her body to conceal her hands from her menfolk, broke off particles of blackish brown and dropped them into her cup, stirring them with her spoon until they partially dissolved…. Open she had been in her demands for the drug, brazen in her pleadings, yet, at the consummation of her desires, she still maintained a fiction that she took the drug surreptitiously. Some faint spark must have remained aglow within her. Still with her back to the room, she swallowed the mass and turned her face to the wall.
Angus Burke and his father ate their meal in silence.
After he had wiped the grease from the spider with a succession of slices of bread, Titus pushed back his chair and tilted it against the wall. His appetite was satisfied, for he was not dainty, and his long walk from Rainbow had dissipated the more disagreeable of the effects of his liquor. He was inclined to be genial after the peculiar fashion of Titus Burke.
He grinned at Angus with a tincture of malice in the contortion, for he did not like Angus. He did not like the boy, because when Titus joked he liked to hear the resultant cry of pain, and Angus would not cry out, could be made to betray no sign of fear or misery. It might have been courage, animal courage; it might have been mental and physical numbness, or, indeed, there might lie dormant and buried within the lad some store of real fortitude. Titus laid it to stubbornness, and regarded it as a species of filial disobedience.
As for Angus, he hated his father with the hatred of a dog which has been often kicked. It was a dull, inactive hatred, of which nothing could come. To run away never occurred to him, for such a solution of his problems required imagination, and Angus’s imagination was to be aroused from its sluggishness only when his mother conjured up terrors…. And where would he run? Was not the life of the Burkes a constant running away anyhow? From place to place they migrated, occupying filthy hovel after filthy hovel—until moved on by irate proprietors of adjacent henyards, or by constables after an epidemic of petty thefts. Such was all the life Angus could remember—if he had sought to remember. It had been, “Push on…. Push on…. You can’t stop here,” since the day when he could scarcely toddle…. In their present abode they had settled a scant two weeks before, drawn to Rainbow by what Angus did not know. All he knew was that in a day, a week, they would move on again—and then again endlessly.
“Angy,” said Titus in his most jovial tone, “how’d you like to be left the sole support of that there mother of your’n?”
Angus went on wiping out the spider with a piece of newspaper and made no reply.
“Nice boy!” exclaimed Titus with specious admiration. “Hain’t he a good, obedient, respectful son? Hain’t he p’lite to his daddy? Every time I speak he answers up pleasant and cheer-full-like…. Angy loves his ol’ daddy.”
The spider was hung on a nail and Angus began washing dishes in the tin hand basin.
“Hear me speakin’ to ye?” Titus roared with sudden menace. “If you didn’t I’ll contrive to fix up your hearin’…. How’d ye like to be left the sole support of this mother of your’n?”
“Now don’t go talkin’ that way, Titus,” said his wife from the mattress. Already her voice was stronger, more lifelike, for the drug was working its miracle.
“Shet up,” said Titus briefly. “Don’t go interferin’ betwixt parent and child. Don’t go settin’ this sweet boy agin his daddy that he thinks so much of.” He turned his attention to Angus again. “Don’t pay no attention to that mother of your’n, which is a trouble and care to both of us and ought to be ashamed of herself. I asked you a question, and, so doin’, be you a-goin’ to answer it? Yes or no?”
Angus turned a dull, phlegmatic, expressionless face to his father. “It don’t make no difference to me,” he said, and went on with his work.
“Kin you look after her fine like I’ve done, keepin’ her dressed like a queen, and allus smilin’ and happy? Kin you be a good son to her like I been a good husband—pervidin’ more grub ’n she could eat and humorin’ her and lettin’ her lay abed all day like a lady with a fortune? Kin you do them things if I go away?”
Mrs. Burke moaned, but refrained from speech. She did not believe her husband would desert her, but whenever, as was frequent, he threatened to do so, terror seized the remnant of her soul and she suffered.
“What you makin’ that squealin’ about?” Titus demanded. “Don’t go interruptin’ a pleasant conversation. Me ’n my son is speculatin’ on the future, if certain happenin’s should come to happen, which they’re likely to do. I got a hankerin’ to see the world, Angy. I’d like to travel off to Californy and Missouri and mebby Europe. Wouldn’t you jest be proud, Angy, if your ol’ daddy was to see a king? Think of standin’ onto your two feet and lookin’ at a king with a crown a-shinin’ onto his head! There’s been Burkes that’s seen royalty, Missis Burke. You married into the Burke fam’ly and you ought to hold your head higher. Seems like you hain’t never appreciated the honor I done you when I married you…. I’ll bet Burkes has called kings by their fust names.” He pointed to himself and shook his head impressively. “This here husband of your’n, which you let on to dispise, Missis Burke, has set onto the same log with a governor—the governor of a whole state—and that there governor, which comes next to bein’ a king, he up and calls me Titus. What d’ye think of that? He calls me Titus ’cause he seen what a ree-markable feller I be…. Now I’m a-goin’ to look up a king and see what he says.”
Suddenly his humor changed, and he banged the forelegs of his chair to the floor as he jumped to his feet and stamped to a far corner of the room. There, in the dim light, he withdrew a stained tobacco pouch from his pocket and took from it a roll of currency. This he thumbed over laboriously, counting with muttering lips. Even the shadows of that far corner did not suffice to hide the bills from his wife’s eyes, and she sat erect.
“Titus Burke,” she screamed, “where ’d you get all that money?”
He turned with bared teeth. “Shet up. ’Tain’t none of your business where I got it. Honest labor, that’s where. Earned it with the sweat of my brow, and that’s all the gratitude I git from a ongrateful wife—accusin’ me of stealin’ it.”
“Oh, Titus, you haven’t been and done somethin’ you can be sent to the penitentiary for?”
“Didn’t I tell you to hush your mouth? Who’s a-goin’ to any penitentiaries? Not a Burke that’s set on a log with a governor and that’s goin’ to see a king. Missis Burke, you pain me deep.”
The woman struggled to her feet, her eyes blazing with unnatural light, her mouth twisted with fear. As she approached the dim light entering the open door, her face became more clearly visible. The skin was tinted with yellow, it sagged, and under her eyes were loose folds of skin. The eyes were black and glittering, not dead and dull as they had been an hour before, and the thought back of them was not now fear or rage, but infinitely more sordid than these, for it was cupidity.
“How much?” she demanded hoarsely. “How much money you got there? I want to see it. I want to hold it in my hand. Titus, you just let me touch it…. Ain’t any of it for me?”
“Git back where you b’long…. This here don’t concern you. I earned it hard and I’m a-goin’ to keep it.” A savage smile distorted his face. “This here’s travelin’ expenses. It’s goin’ to take me to see that king I was alludin’ to.”
“How much?” repeated Mrs. Burke insistently.
“I’ve jest counted up to forty-six dollars, and I hain’t finished yit…. Hain’t seen so much for quite a spell. Don’t you wisht you had it?” He held the money tantalizingly toward his wife, but when she snatched at it, he struck her wrist violently aside. “G’wan back and eat opium,” he growled dangerously.
“You stole it,” she squawked. “You stole it.”
Opium now owned full possession of the woman. A spurious flush made her cheeks more unseemly than before and there was a false sprightliness about her, an ephemeral, unnatural vigor which was somehow horrible to see. Her appearance was impious…. She moved closer to her husband.
Titus was weary of his fun. His lips twisted into lines of cruelty and he struck his wife so that she fell sprawling to the floor, where she lay and screamed, uttering shriek after shriek.
“Be still, you hell-cat,” Titus muttered. For a moment he stood over her menacingly, then he stepped across her body to the door where he paused. “Don't go follerin’ me,” he said to Angus. “You hain’t wanted where I’m goin’ where I’m goin’—for good. I’m trough bein’ weighted down by you two, weighted down and drug back…. Now ’t I got capital I’m a-goin’ to git a fresh start in the world.” He paused and waited for some expostulation from the boy, but Angus did not so much as glance toward him…. The woman’s screams persisted, as Titus walked out of the door and down the dusty road…. Angus Burke neither realized nor considered that he was being deserted by his father. He moved about stolidly, indifferent to all that had taken place….