The Foolish Virgin

CHAPTER XX. TRAPPED

The sobbing in the little room was the only sound that came from one of the grimmest battle-fields from which the soul of a woman ever emerged alive.

To the first rush of cowardly tears Mary had yielded utterly. She had fallen across the high-puffed feather mattress of the bed, shivering in humble gratitude at her escape from the horror of blindness. The grip of his claw-like fingers on her throat came back to her now in sickening waves. The blood was still trickling from the wound which his nails had made when she tore them loose in her first mad fight for breath.

She lifted her body and breathed deeply to make sure her throat was free. God in heaven! Could she ever forget the hideous sinking of body and soul down into the depths of the black abyss! She had seen the face of Death and it was horrible. Life, warm and throbbing, was sweet. She loved it. She hated Death.

Yes—she was a coward. She knew it now, and didn't care.

She sprang to her feet with sudden fear. He might attack her again to make sure that her soul had been completely crushed.

She crept to the door and felt its edges.

“Yes, thank God, there's a place for the bar!” She shivered.

She ran her trembling fingers carefully along the rough logs and found it in the corner. She slipped it cautiously into the iron sockets, staggered to the bed and dropped in grateful assurance of safety for the moment. She buried her face in the pillow to fight back the sobs. How great her fall! She could crawl on her hands and knees to Jane Anderson now and beg for protection. The last shred of pretense was gone. The bankrupt soul stood naked and shivering, the last rag torn from pride.

What a miserable fight she had made, too, when put to the test! Ella had at least proved herself worthy to live. The scrub-woman had risen in the strength of desperation and killed the beast who had maimed her. She had only sunk a limp mass of shivering, helpless cowardice and fled from the room whining and pleading for mercy.

She could never respect herself again. The scene came back in vivid flashes. His eyes, glowing like two balls of blue fire, froze the blood in her veins—his voice the rasping cold steel of a file. And this coarse, ugly beast had held her in the spell of love. She had clung to him, kissed him in rapture and yielded herself to him soul and body. And he had gripped her delicate throat and choked her into insensibility, dropping her limp form from his hands like a strangled rat. She could remember the half-conscious moment that preceded the total darkness as she felt his grip relax.

He would choke and beat her again, too. He had said it in the sneering laughter at the door.

“A good little wife now and it's all right!”

And if you're not obedient to my whims I'll choke you until you are! That was precisely what he meant. That he was capable of any depth of degradation, and that he meant to drag her with him, there could be no longer the shadow of a doubt.

She could not endure another scene like that. She sprang to her feet again, shivering with terror. She could hear the hum of the conversation in the next room. He was persuading his mother to join in his criminal career. He was busy with his oily tongue transforming the simple, ignorant, lonely old woman into an avaricious fiend who would receive his blood-stained booty and rejoice in it.

He was laughing again. She put her trembling hands over her ears to shut out the sound. He had laughed at her shame and cowardice. It made her flesh creep to hear it.

She would escape. The mountain road was dark and narrow and crooked. She would lose her way in the night, perhaps. No matter. She could keep warm by walking. At dawn she would find her way to a cabin and ask protection. If she could reach Asheville, a telegram would bring her father. She wouldn't lose a minute. Her hat and coat were in the living-room. She would go bareheaded and without a coat. In the morning she could borrow one from the woman at the Mount Mitchell house.

She crept cautiously along the walls of the room searching for a door or window. There must be a way out. She made the round without discovering an opening of any kind. There must be a window of some kind high up for ventilation. There was no glass in it, of course. It was closed by a board shutter—if she could reach it.

She began at the door, found the corner of the room and stretched her arms upward until they touched the low, rough joist. Over every foot of its surface she ran her fingers, carefully feeling for a window. There was none!

She found an open crack and peered through. The stars were shining cold and clear in the December sky. The twinkling heavens reminded her that it was Christmas Eve. The dawn she hoped to see in the woods, if she could escape, would be Christmas morning. There was no time for idle tears of self-pity.

The one thought that beat in every throb of her heart now was to escape from her cell and put a thousand miles between her body and the beast who had strangled her. She might break through the roof! As a rule the shed-rooms of these rude mountain cabins were covered with split boards lightly nailed to narrow strips eighteen inches apart. If there were no ceiling, or if the ceiling were not nailed down and she should move carefully, she might break through near the eaves and drop to the ground. The cabin was not more than nine feet in height.

She raised herself on the footrail of the bed and felt the ceiling. There could be no mistake. It was there. She pressed gently at first and then with all her might against each board. They were nailed hard and fast.

She sank to the bed again in despair. She had barred herself in a prison cell. There was no escape except by the door through which the beast had driven her. And he would probably draw the couch against it and sleep there.

And then came the crushing conviction that such flight would be of no avail in a struggle with a man of Jim's character. His laughing words of triumph rang through her soul now in all their full, sinister meaning.

“The world ain't big enough for you to get away from me, Kiddo!”

It wasn't big enough. She knew it with tragic and terrible certainty. In his blind, brutal way he loved her with a savage passion that would halt at nothing. He would follow her to the ends of the earth and kill any living thing that stood in his way. And when he found her at last he would kill her.

How could she have been so blind! There was no longer any mystery about his personality. The slender hands and feet, which she had thought beautiful in her infatuation, were merely the hands and feet of a thief. The strength of jaw and neck and shoulders had made him the most daring of all thieves—a burglar.

His strange moods were no longer strange. He laughed for joy at the wild mountain gorges and crags because he saw safety for the hiding-place of priceless jewels he meant to steal.

There could be no escape in divorce from such a brute. He was happy in her cowardly submission. He would laugh at the idea of divorce. Should she dare to betray the secrets of his life of crime, he would kill her as he would grind a snake under his heel.

A single clause from the marriage ceremony kept ringing its knell—“until DEATH DO US PART!”

She knelt at last and prayed for Death.

“Oh, dear God, let me die, let me die!”

Suicide was a crime unthinkable to her pious mind. Only God now could save her in his infinite mercy.

She lay for a long time on the floor where she had fallen in utter despair. The tears that brought relief at first had ceased to flow. She had beaten her bleeding wings against every barrier, and they were beyond her strength.

Out of the first stupor of complete surrender, her senses slowly emerged. She felt the bare boards of the floor and wondered vaguely why she was there.

The hum of voices again came to her ears. She lay still and listened. A single terrible sentence she caught. He spoke it with such malignant power she could see through the darkness the flames of hell leaping in his eyes.

“Nobody's going to ask you HOW you got it—all they want to know is HAVE you got it!”

She laughed hysterically at the idea of reformation that had stirred her to such desperate appeal in the first shock of discovery. As well dream of reforming the Devil as the man who expressed his philosophy of life in that sentence! Blood dripped from every word, the blood of the innocent and the helpless who might consciously or unconsciously stand in his way. The man who had made up his mind to get rich quick, no matter what the cost to others, would commit murder without the quiver of an eyelid. If she had ever had a doubt of this fact, she could have none after her experience of tonight.

She wondered vaguely of the effects he was producing on his ignorant old mother. Her words were too low and indistinct to be heard. But she feared the worst. The temptation of the gold he was showing her would be more than she could resist.

She staggered to her feet and fell limp across the bed. The iron walls of a life prison closed about her crushed soul. The one door that could open was Death and only God's hand could lift its bars.