THE OLD RAGMAN AND MRS. DEAN.
THE OLD RAGMAN AND MRS. DEAN.
THE
UNTEMPERED WIND
BY
JOANNA E. WOOD
NEW YORK
J. SELWIN TAIT AND SONS
65 FIFTH AVENUE
COPYRIGHT, 1894, BY
J. SELWIN TAIT & SONS.
All Rights Reserved.
THE UNTEMPERED WIND.
CHAPTER I.
——"Consider this,—
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation:"—
It was early spring, the maples were but budding, the birds newly come and restless, the sky more gray than blue, and the air still sharp with a tang of frost. Jamestown's streets, however, looked both bright and busy.
Groups of children went to school, hurrying out to the street, and looking this way and that for a companion. A mother came to a gate with a little girl, and pointing now to right, now to left, seemed to give her directions which way to go. The little girl started bravely. She wore a pink cap, and carried a new school-bag. "Hurry on!" a girl called to her, and she advanced uncertainly. A hesitating dignity born of the new school-bag forbade a decided run; her friend's haste forbade her to linger. They met and passed on together.
An old man, with ophthalmia, feeling his way with a stick and muttering to himself with loose lips, went by. Two brothers crossed the street together, one swinging along easily, smoking a pipe, and carrying an axe over his shoulder; the other advancing with that spasmodic appearance of haste which seems the only gait to which crutches can be compelled.
An alert dog rushed madly up the middle of the street, pausing abruptly now and then to look round him with sharp interrogation, as if daring anything to "come on!" His challenge was vain, and he was fain to solace himself by scattering a convention of sparrows, dashing into the midst of them and sending the birds up into the maples, followed by insulting yelps, in reply to which they twittered in derision.
Homer Wilson drove his team of heavy brown horses through the street at a trot, his sinewy frame clad in weather-beaten blue jeans, his hat pushed far back on his head, as if to emphasize the defiant breadth of his forehead.
The woman still strained her eyes after the little girl, now only distinguishable by the brightness of her cap. They say that mothers often watch by the gateways of life.
The groceryman passed to open his store—the baker and butcher were already busy.
Through this scene of busy commonplace interest and bustle passed a woman, somewhat below the average height, and of strong but symmetrical build. Her face was down-bent and almost hidden in the depths of a dark sunbonnet of calico. All that could well be discerned in this shadow were two soft, sorrowful eyes, pale cheeks, and down-drooped lips. No one spoke to her, and she addressed no one. She went from place to place, out of one shop into another, with downcast eyes, and with something of that swift directness with which a bird, startled from its nest at evening, darts with folded wings from covert to covert. She was Myron Holder—a mother, but not a wife.
When under no more sacred canopy than the topaz of a summer sky—with no other bridal hymn than the choral of the wind among the trees—in obedience to no law but the voice of nature—and the pleading of loved lips—with no other security than the unwitnessed oath of a man—a woman gives herself utterly, then she is doubtless lost. But it must be remembered that the law she breaks is an artificial law enacted solely for her protection: and it must be conceded that there may be a great and self-subversive generosity which permits her to give her all, assuming bonds of sometimes dreadful weight, whilst the recipient goes his way unshackled—uncondemned.
There may be nothing to be said in defence of Myron Holder; but there is much that could be told only with bleeding lips, written only by a pen dipped in wormwood, of the attitude of her fellows towards her.
The world of to-day sees its Madonna, with haloed head, standing amid lilies. The world of her day saw neither nimbus nor flowers; they saw what, to their unbelieving eyes, was but her shame. Let those who jeer with righteous lips at women such as this poor village outcast, remember that the meek Maid-Mother whom they adore perchance shrank before the cruel taunts and pointing fingers of women at the doorways and the wells.
Myron Holder left the butcher's to go to the grocery store; from thence she crossed diagonally to Mrs. Warner's, the woman who, half an hour before, had looked so lingeringly after her child. Myron stood at the back door waiting, whilst Mrs. Warner came down stairs to answer her knock. "Mrs. Deans wanted to know if Mrs. Warner would lend her the quilting-frames." Mrs. Warner would.
Mrs. Warner was a very good woman, therefore she looked unutterable contempt at Myron Holder, and left her on the doorstep, whilst she brought out the heavy wooden quilting-frames. Mrs. Warner's husband drove the mail wagon which made one trip daily to the city and back to Jamestown. He would in one hour, as his wife very well knew, pass Mrs. Deans' door, but she did not consider that; and as she had watched her own child out of sight, so she watched Myron Holder's laden form pass down the street, out into the country—a large basket in one hand, and the heavy quilting-frames over her shoulder, pressing sorely upon "the sacred mother-bosom," already yearning for the easing child lips.
When clear of the village, Myron Holder slackened her pace a little and setting the basket down for a moment turned back the deep scoop of her sunbonnet, that the cooling wind might breathe its benison upon her cheeks, flushed with shame and hot from the exertion of her rapid walk with her burden. Stooping slowly down sideways, she reached her basket and taking it up proceeded on her way. Her face shone forth from the dark folds of her sunbonnet, and seemed by its purity of line and expression to give the lie to the eyes filmed by acknowledged shame; only filmed, however, for the eyes themselves held no vile meanings, no defiant avowal of guilt, no hint of sinful knowledge, no glance of callous indifference. She walked on steadily, the spongy earth beneath her feet seeming to breathe forth the essence of spring as it inhaled the warmth of the sunshine.
SHE PAUSED TO REST.
SHE PAUSED TO REST.
Presently the sound of wheels came to her. She strove with her burdened hand to brush forward the sheltering folds of her sunbonnet, but in vain, as her haste defeated its object. Her cheeks were shrouded but in a flaming blush as Homer Wilson drove past. He stared at her steadily; but she did not raise her eyes, and he passed on. His springless wagon jolted over all the stones and inequalities of the country roads; just as Homer Wilson neither brushed aside obstacles nor skirted them when they opposed his path, but, in his obstinate, hard-headed way, rode rough-shod over them, feeling, perhaps, the hurt of their opposition, but never showing that he did.
Again there was silence on the road. It was too early yet for any insect life, and the sparrows did not fly so far from the houses, but
"Above in the wind was the swallow
Chasing itself at its own wild will."
The flush for a space died out of her cheeks. As she continued on her way the snake-fence changed to a neat board one, that in turn gave place to one of ornate wire. In the middle of this was a little gate, which she passed; then came a wider five-barred gate through which she entered, and found her way to the rear of a large white frame house, standing in an old apple orchard.
Her steps were bent to the "cook house," an erection of unplaned pine boards, where, in summer, the kitchen-work of Mrs. Deans' household was carried on. Before Myron Holder crossed its threshold, she sent one long look over to the left, where, leafless yet and gray—save where a cedar made a sullen blotch of green—the trees of Mr. Deans' woodland bounded her vision in a semi-circular sweep. As she turned her to the doorway, a new expression had found place within her eyes—upon her lips—poignant but indecipherable. For resolution, resignation, and despair are sometimes so analogous as to be inseparable.
CHAPTER II.
"A treasure of the memory, a joy unutterable."
"Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried.
She could not look at the sweet heaven
Either at morn or eventide."
Myron Holder's father was Jed Holder, the broom-maker. His death occurred when Myron was eighteen years old. He had clung to his quaint occupation to the last, after factory-made brooms stood even at the store doors in Jamestown.
His fortunes had fallen off sadly in the last few years of his life, but he worked away as steadily at his trade as in the old days, when, looking from his door, his eyes were met by the mast-like masses of a Kentish hop orchard. He had planted hopvines all about the fence of his little house in Jamestown. They clambered up the sides of the house, twined insinuatingly about the disdainful sunflowers, and throwing their tendrils abroad from the roots wound round and round the tall stalks of grass, weighing them down with the burden of their unsought embrace.
Little Myron was often impressed with the truth that a single leaf broken from a growing hopvine kills the whole spray. She learned to "pick up her feet," as her father expressed it, and step daintily between the wandering vines, so that no slurring footstep might injure them.
Jed Holder had carried on the broom-making for many years very systematically. Year by year he rented from Sol Disney a bit of the virgin soil of the woodland, and the tall brown tassel of the broom corn overtopped the stamps in the clearing. Year by year the little patch of corn crept nearer and nearer the limit of Disney's diminishing woodland—seeming, as Jed Holder said, "to sweep the trees off before it," but being in its turn swept aside by waves of golden grain.
It was a sore day to Jed Holder when he sent off his first order for Western broom corn, forced to do so by the impossibility of renting ground rich enough to perfect and mature his crop.
In the short winter days Jed used to work in Disney's brush helping to "clear" it. In return for his services he received all the young maples they encountered: out of these in the long winter evenings he fashioned his broom handles.
Jed never could remember how the knowledge was conveyed to him that broom handles were being made by the thousands by a machine out of the refuse in the wake of logging camps.
If the recognition of this iconoclastic fact was not an intuition, it must have been something very like one—some transmission of a half contemptuous thought from the brain of the smart groceryman in the city when he ridiculed the price Jed asked for his hand-made brooms. Jed pondered over the matter much, but never could recall the source of his information. But when he lay in his last illness, watching the shadow of the hopvine on the blinds, all these tormenting thoughts vanished. The murmurs that fell from his lips were all of other days, of hop picking, of England, of Kentish lanes and birds, of one whom he named lovingly as "Myron lass" and yet did not seem to identify with the girl who waited upon him so untiringly, under the direction of her grandmother, an old, old woman, bent with rheumatism, and hard of face and heart, whose lips set cruelly and eyes grew stony when her gray-haired son babbled of "Myron lass." When he lay in his coffin she could not grieve, for raging that he was not to lie with all his kin in Kent.
She made Myron suffer vicariously for her long dead mother, whose death coming soon after Myron's birth had driven Jed Holder to seek strange scenes, away from where he had known the fullest happiness of which he was capable.
But Myron bore her grandmother's bad temper with patience and without bitterness. Her father often said to her, "The yeast is bitter, but it is the yeast that makes bread sweet."
Jed Holder died one day in autumn, when the aromatic green cones had been picked from the hops and lay browning upon paper-covered boards in the sun. The last breath Jed Holder drew savored of their fragrance, and the aroma of the hops dispelled the faint odor of mortality in the death chamber.
The winter succeeding his death was a long and bitter one. Fuel was high; and however sparingly bought, still the plainest provisions cost money. Albeit Myron and her grandmother lived frugally, yet they exhausted Jed's poor hoardings very soon. Spring found them penniless.
But in summer, life is more easily sustained, and Myron found various occupations which sufficed to keep her grandmother in tolerable comfort. Hoeing and weeding, cleaning house and berrying, doing extra washings, cooking for threshers and harvesters, all had their part in Myron's busy life. Her grandmother was never satisfied either with her ability or her willingness to work; but for all that she worked, and worked well too.
There was soon proof positive of this given her grandmother, for after Myron had helped in the half yearly saturnalia of work Mrs. Deans called "house cleaning," the latter arranged to have Myron come to the farm daily to help the bound girl.
For that summer Mrs. Deans had boarders—boarders who read, and walked, and brought in great bunches of golden rod, and masses of wild aster, and long trails of virgin bower clematis.
There were Mrs. and Miss Rexton, Miss Carpenter and Dr. Henry Willis, a young medico. They had all driven to the lake one day from the Mineral Spring Hotel, where they were stopping. The lake curved in a shining semi-circle round Jamestown, and swept off in ever-widening curves far away, until sky and water blended in a band of blinding silver radiance. The party of four had been caught in a thunderstorm, and sought refuge on Mrs. Deans' veranda.
Then and there they had decided that they must come there for the rest of the summer, and with one accord set about persuading Mrs. Deans to give her consent. Of a truth their persuasion would have had little effect upon that worthy woman, had not the remuneration suggested seemed to her quite extravagantly sufficient; therefore she was pleased at length to accede to their request, and a few days later found the quartette comfortably settled at Mrs. Deans'.
Miss Carpenter was Dr. Willis' maiden aunt. Miss Rexton believed herself to be his affinity and hoped that he agreed with her. Mrs. Rexton was a chattel of her daughter's.
Myron Holder's duties were now made more manifold than ever, but she was well content that it should be so; only the long mile she walked night and morning from and to the village tired her greatly, taking the edge off her vitality in the morning and utterly exhausting her at night. So Mrs. Deans proposed that she should stay all night at the farm; not actuated by any kindly thought for Myron, but because, like the good financier that she was, she wanted to get her money's worth out of her.
As for old Mrs. Holder, she had no timid qualms about staying alone: she missed the little scraps of news, however, that Myron always had to tell, and—unconsciously—suffered from lack of some one to berate.
The summer passed slowly—autumn came. Mrs. Deans' boarders departed. Myron Holder once more walked the mile night and morning; she had had a hard summer's work. Her hands and wrists were reddened and coarsened; her face was very pale, and bistre shades lingered about her eyes. But she and her grandmother had to live, and after December snows were blowing she still trudged the mile back and forth.
It was only by great chance that Mrs. Deans retained Myron's services; but her son, a loutish young man of twenty-two, had fallen from a hickory-nut tree and dislocated his hip.
The increasing attention he demanded, and the care of her poultry, and her accumulated sewing kept Mrs. Deans fully occupied. So Myron Holder continued her daily attendance at the Deans farm. January and February passed. March was blowing its wildest, when one day Myron Holder did not come to Mrs. Deans'.
The latter waited fuming, resolved, as she expressed it, to "give Myron Holder a fine hearing when she did come."
Mrs. Deans was always promising somebody or other a "hearing," which, by the bye, was an exceedingly misleading term, for in the conversation thus referred to the other party did the listening whilst Mrs. Deans talked.
The wild wind of the morning had intensified into a bitter sleet, which darted its blasts into the face like sharp-pointed lashes, when Mrs. Deans heard a knock at the side door. She opened it herself to find old Mrs. Holder, bent, wet, furious, standing in the slush. Mrs. Deans bade her come in, with a meaning look at the corn husk mat before the door.
Mrs. Holder paid no heed to the look, but with muddy feet stepped into the room fair upon Mrs. Deans' new rag carpet, and standing there, a quaint old figure, clad in the forgotten fashion of thirty years back, proceeded to give Mrs. Deans what that lady herself would have called "a hearing."
Mrs. Deans had a ready tongue, an inventive imagination, a fund of vituperative imagery, and a pleasant habit of drowning the voice of any one who chose to contradict her; but in one's own house, to be confronted in this way, abused for some unknown crime, covered with contumely, and showered with contemptuous epithets, and all from an old woman whose granddaughter was honored in doing one's kitchen work, was not conducive to dignity and presence of mind.
Mrs. Deans was too old a scold, however, to be routed without an effort to vindicate herself. Finding it vain to wait an opportunity for speech (Mrs. Holder never seemed to pause for breath), she simply began to talk also—Myron's non-appearance, Mrs. Holder's impertinence, and her own mystification giving ample subject-matter for her eloquence to do justice to.
But Mrs. Holder talked on, apparently unconscious of Mrs. Deans' remarks—finally she hurled one direct question at the latter: "Did you know—that's what I want to find out—did ye? And if ye did, what d'ye think of yourself? You——"
She was about to branch off into a personal description of Mrs. Deans—somewhat unflattering—when the latter seized her cue.
"Did I know what?" she demanded.
Mrs. Holder came to a dead stop and looked at her.
"Did I know what?" reiterated Mrs. Deans majestically.
"Did you know—Myron—" she stopped, this thing was difficult to frame in words.
"Well?" said Mrs. Deans.
"Did you know Myron was—would be—had—" again the voluble Mrs. Holder faltered. Mrs. Deans looked at Mrs. Holder—and something whispered to her what Mrs. Holder could not say. "Do you mean to tell me—" she paused—filling up the hiatus with an eloquent look.
Then she loosened the tides of her indignation, and sweeping aside all memories of Myron's honesty, and faithful service, and patience, launched against her the full flood of her invective.
Presently Mrs. Holder chimed in: there was something absurd yet tragically repulsive in these two women, but a moment before reviling each other, now absorbed only in the desire to outvie each other in the epithets they hurled against the girl—the granddaughter of the one, the uncomplaining servant of the other.
Their attitude, however, was prophetically typical of the treatment Myron Holder was to receive. The whole village forgot its private quarrels to point the finger at its common victim. Beset with all the frightful anticipations of motherhood, bowed beneath the burden of a shame she appreciated and accepted, hounded nearly to madness by her grandmother's jibes and reproaches, Myron Holder's heart was wellnigh desperate.
The spring winds brought her dreadful suggestions of despair. The first hepaticas shone up at her as balefully as the lighted fagots to a martyr's eye. The springing hopvines seemed to twine their tendrils tight and tighter about her heart. All the scents and sounds of spring were ever after to her an exquisite torture. But her soul was of strong fibre.
Before all the scorn of the village, all the rebukes of Mrs. Deans, all the wrath of her grandmother, all the bitterness and misery and hopelessness of her own heart, Myron Holder was mute.
No murmur escaped her lips against the man who had forsaken her. The village knew her shame, but it could not fathom her secret. Myron Holder was deaf to all commands, entreaties, persuasions, sneers. Her face, holy with the divine shadow of coming maternity, turned to her questioners an indecipherable page—writ large with characters of shame and sorrow, but telling naught else.
* * * * * *
There came a night when Myron Holder descended into that hell of suffering called child-birth—struggled with prolonged agony—helpless and alone—and cried aloud—to that dead father—to that unknown mother—to God—for Death.
Myron Holder was a woman and had come to years of knowledge, and her fall was doubtless a sin and a shame to her—black and unforgivable; but far as Myron Holder had fallen, deep as was her humiliation, black as was her shame, inexcusable her error, she still shines in effulgent whiteness when compared with those women who refused her aid that long night through, demanding as recompense for their ministering the betrayal of her betrayer. Myron Holder would not pay their price.
The dim gray dawn lighted the pain-scarred face of a sleeping mother, by whose side reposed a fair-haired child; a child the secret of whose parentage was still locked within its mother's heart.
* * * * * *
"Them kind always lives," Mrs. Warner said to her husband, when, on a June morning, she saw Myron Holder totter past her door. Mrs. Warner should have thanked the God she worshipped, fasting, that it was so: had Myron Holder died, no woman in all Jamestown would have been free from blood-guiltiness. They had beheld a woman in such extremity as moved the hearts of Inquisitors, stayed the torch of persecution, shackled the relentless rack, deferred the vengeance of the law, and had withheld their hands from helping.
Those same hands which wrought garments for the heathen and shamed not to offer their alms to God!
CHAPTER III.
"It is a wild and miserable world,
Thorny and full of care,
Which every friend can make his prey at will."
"Know how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong."
Beneath the quietness of Myron Holder's manner there raged a very chaos of reckless, despairing thought. It is undeniable that at this time no maternal love warmed her heart towards her child.
There was one night—one dreadful night—whose memory stained forever even the dark pages of her retrospect. A night through the long hours of which she lay and thought of death—not to herself—but to the sleeping infant at her side. All the tales she had ever heard of desperate women's crimes came to her, assailing her weakened will and tired brain with insidious suggestions of safety, and freedom, and immunity from blame.
Pallid, she rose in the early dawn. As she passed the old English mirror in its shabby gilt frame, she caught a fleeting glimpse of burning cheeks, cracking parched lips and bloodshot eyes. She withdrew her glance shuddering.
It was very early in the morning. She crossed the kitchen, and softly opening the door looked forth upon the unawakened world. The air was somewhat chilly, but sweet and soft. A heavy dew spread a pearly film over the grass, broken here and there by a silvery shield, where the spider webs held the moisture: gossamers they are in these early morning hours when the world is pure and quiet,—shreds of the Madonna's winding sheet, as we all know. But what are they when the dew is gone and they are laden with the dust and soot and grime of the long hot day? Gossamers still?
Down between the trees she could see the dull glimmer of the lake, awaiting the sun to strike it into silver; a few pale stars lingered, loath to bid the world good-by before the moon, which, a wraith-like orb, still soared on high, white and diaphanous. All was calm, passionless, and pure. As Myron Holder looked there grew within her soul a sick shuddering against the woman of the past night. She saw herself vile where all was holy, passionate where all was peace. And from her soul, a plea, indefinite in aspiration, and vaguely voyaging to some unknown haven, went forth, that her old heart might be vouchsafed to her, her own suffering, fearing, trusting, loving, betrayed heart, instead of this throbbing centre of pain with its bitter blood of despair and hate.
Slow resolutions began to stir in her heart: she would go through the world "spending and being spent" for others: she would be patient to her grandmother, always remembering she had shamed her: she would be true and faithful and self-sacrificing in every relation she assumed to others; she would be sympathetic to all and she would die soon, very soon, she thought, and the village would mourn her and at last speak of her with loving kindness. Poor Myron! Like "many mighty men," she did not realize the utter barrenness of a posthumous joy or understand how diffident Death can be when wooed.
Her mood was jarred by the child's cry and the grandmother's querulous complaint. She turned from the morning just as the sun's rays shot across the lake.
As soon as she was able to do so she resumed her work—bending over her toil, a patient figure in a worn blue print gown and dark sunbonnet, a humble mark she seemed for public scorn: yet all the scandal and spite of the scurrilous little village played about her.
As Mrs. Disney expressed it, old Mrs. Holder "took it most terrible hard": therefore the village matrons contracted a habit of running in at all hours to the little hop-clad house and condoling with Mrs. Holder, and with her speculating as to the identity of the child's father.
Now and then these zealous comforters rather overdid the matter, notably when Mrs. Weaver, with a view of exonerating Mrs. Holder from all blame and relieving her of all responsibility for Myron's behavior, remarked that "It did seem as if bad was born in some people."
Old Mrs. Holder rose at that, and speedily made Mrs. Weaver aware that Myron's badness was purely sporadic, and that heredity had nothing to do with it. She did not express herself in this way, but conveyed the same idea much more forcibly.
It is possible that, being Myron's grandmother, she felt a slight reflection from Mrs. Weaver's well-meant suggestion that Myron had inherited vice as her birthright; be that as it may, she speedily made Mrs. Weaver aware that if there was any truth in such an idea, she herself must be in a perilous state: the old Englishwoman had managed to glean pretty accurate data about the Jamestown people, and she knew that Mrs. Weaver's mother had "tript in her time." Mrs. Weaver called no more upon Mrs. Holder, but the others showed no abatement of their zeal.
These good Jamestown women had a pleasant habit of sitting with Mrs. Holder until Myron's form appeared at noon or night. They gazed at her while she opened the gate, trod the little path past the front door, and until she turned the corner: when Vice in the person of Myron entered the back door, Virtue embodied in one or more of Jamestown's matrons fled from the front door, hearing, ere the gate was reached, the first measures of the jeremiad with which her grandmother greeted her. There was little wonder that Myron Holder grew morbidly nervous and supersensitive. She would scarce have been responsible for any deed, however evil.
All the morning the anticipated agony of the ordeal of walking up the path, under these scathing eyes, oppressed and tortured her. No martyr ever contemplated with greater dread the red-hot ploughshares than Myron Holder did those few yards of red trodden earth, bordered by fox grass and burdock leaves.
Through the long hours of the slow afternoons she braced herself for the return home at night, but she did not try to elude any of the humiliations of her position. The garden gate was terrible to her as the surgeon's knife to the sufferer—for the hasp was loosened and twisted, the gate had to be lifted before it could be opened, and sometimes she was kept fumbling with the fastening until the blood swam before her eyes in a red mist.
Doubtless she should have considered all these painful contingencies and walked more heedfully, but the thought, which the Jamestown matrons often quoted, did not, as they seemed to think it should, dull the pain of the thousand stings she received daily—it only pressed them home. There are many
"Dainty themes of grief
In sadness to outlast the morn;"
but the tale of Myron Holder's expiation is not one of them—it is a sordid theme, yet, being human, not too sordid to be writ out. It is a painful relation; but when one woman lived it, we may not shrink from contemplating it, nor hesitate to view step by step the way one woman trod.
The first summer of her child's life wore away. Autumn came before Myron Holder was goaded into any demonstration of her suffering.
She was one day working for Mr. Disney, who worked old Mr. Carroll's place on shares. It was the time of the apple harvest. All day long they had been picking, gathering, sorting, and carrying the heavy fruit. Between Mr. Carroll and Mr. Disney was waged a continual war of wits, each endeavoring to get the better of the other. The afternoon was far spent when old Mr. Carroll came, limping out, bent and thin, only his erectness of poise when he stood still evidencing the old soldier.
The fruit had been divided into two long heaps, alike in their dimensions, but, as all the pickers knew, of widely different quality.
The grass was sere and yellowed, the sapless apple leaves fell in rustling showers at the lightest breath of wind, and now and then an apple fell with a dull sound upon the earth. The brown side of the drive-house formed a neutral background into which all the sombre tints of the little scene blended, save the brilliant reds and yellows of the two long piles of apples.
"Well, Mr. Disney—got the apples sorted?" asked Mr. Carroll with affected geniality. Mr. Disney, a shallow-witted man, was betrayed by the smile on the lips into disregard of the cold eyes, and replied with rash effusiveness:
"Yes—picked, sorted, divided, sold, almost cooked and eaten." Old Mr. Carroll's smile froze.
"Which is my pile?" he asked with an indescribable intonation of sarcastic contempt, which pierced even Disney's denseness and made a slow red gather to his cheeks as he answered—"That one."
"Then I'll take this one," replied Mr. Carroll, indicating the other. Disney faltered then—wanted to re-divide—and managed to confuse himself completely. Mr. Carroll listened contemptuously; his keen old eyes had discerned the mud on the apples in the heap assigned to him, and he had decided, rightly enough, that they were windfalls.
Disney's half-hearted plea for a re-division was manifestly absurd, and the caustic old man enjoyed a pleasant half-hour in ridiculing the idea. For once he had his enemy fairly "on the hip."
The end of it was that presently, when Mr. Warner drove past, he saw old Mr. Carroll enthroned upon an upturned bushel basket, his cynical old eyes gleaming with amusement, his feet shifting restlessly with delight, his tongue irritating Disney almost beyond endurance.
He had placed himself on the side of the drive-house door and demanded that his apples be carried in then and there. Disney longed to refuse, but his agreement provided that he perform all the labor of harvesting and storing Mr. Carroll's share. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to obey the irascible old man, who, in numerous playful ways, made the carrying in of the fruit a weariness of the flesh to Disney. He stopped him to pull stray wisps of grass out of his pails, or to examine a purely imaginary blemish in an apple. He let his cane slip down so that Disney tripped over it. He took one of the pails, and pretended to fix one of the handles, which was perfectly secure as it was—and all the time he talked, gently, irritatingly, making the most innocent of pauses for replies that Disney felt he must make, but which he made as briefly as possible.
The afternoon waned; finally the last apple of the heap was transferred to the drive-house. Then Mr. Carroll rose, trying his best to conceal the stiffness of his joints from Disney, locked the drive-house door and limped off to his lonely house, solitary but triumphant.
A little later he watched the departure of the disgusted Disney and his pickers—Myron Holder dragging wearily home alone, body and heart alike aching; the rest slyly nudging one another, with meaning looks at Disney's sullen face.
Still later, when Mr. Carroll blew out his yellow wax candle, he pushed aside the limp white blind, raised the many-paned window and looked forth into the moonlight. It was very clear and quiet. Disney's pile of apples lay roughly outlined beneath its covering of old sacks. Mr. Carroll looked at it amusedly—as he looked a stray apple, left swinging unseen, fell. As the sound reached his ears a malevolent smile irradiated his face. Still smiling, he put the window down, let the blind fall and sought sleep.
That night Myron Holder traversed the road home in the deepest dejection; forced to endure all day the covert sneers of the other pickers, with extreme bodily weariness added to her mental burden, helpless as a fly from which a wanton hand has torn the wings, she felt, as she trod her solitary way home, utterly despairing.
Ere she was fairly within the doors her grandmother's taunting words met her. Roused from her long apathy of mute endurance, she tore her sunbonnet from her head and flashed one dreadful look of rage and defiance at the old woman—such a look as made Mrs. Holder' stagger back, holding up her hand as if to shield herself from a blow. Terrified at the turmoil in her own breast, Myron turned and fled into her room. She saw the boy's little form upon the blue and white checked counterpane of her bed, she rushed up to the couch, her hands were clenched, her heart seemed throbbing in her throat. Dreadful thoughts circled about her, wild and diverse, but all hung upon the one axis of pain. Half in delirium, she bent over the child. It looked up at her and smiled, and stirred feebly, but yet as if its impulses made towards her. With a cry she caught it to her bosom.
There was one creature that yet smiled upon her. Thereafter, from day to day, throughout the long winter, her adoration of her child waxed stronger and stronger.
Every instant she could spare from her toiling she held it in her arms. On Sunday, when good Jamestown people did no extra work, Myron Holder had her only pleasure. For then she shut herself into her room with the child, whispering to it, caressing it, soothing it when awake, and during its long sleep holding it with loving avarice in her arms, too greedy of the cherished weight to relinquish it to the couch.
Her grandmother managed even from this tenderness to distill some bitter drops to add to Myron's cup. She dwelt long and eloquently upon the wrong Myron had done the child. Slowly the winter passed, and Mrs. Deans once more hired Myron Holder to come to the farm daily. The child was left with old Mrs. Holder, while Myron earned a subsistence for all three.
What Myron Holder endured daily no words can tell. By what written sign may we symbolize the agony of a heart, bruised and pierced and crushed day after day? By what language express the torture of a pure soul, stifled in a chrysalis of shame?
Some souls may be purified by fire, doubtless, as the old Greeks cleansed their asbestos fabrics; but we should be wary how we thrust our fellows into the furnace, for no base tissue will stand the fire, and a soul, to emerge unsmirched and undestroyed, must be of strong fibre indeed.
CHAPTER IV.
"O Jesus, if thou wilt not save my soul,
Who may be saved? Who is it may be saved?
Who may be made a saint if I fail here?"
"As who should say: 'I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!'"
There are doubtless a few of us in the world capable of judging and pronouncing sentence upon the rest.
It is unfortunately inevitable, however, that such capabilities remain forever underestimated, and the possessors rarely receive the acknowledgments due from an ungrateful world.
Mrs. Deans was one of the chosen few who recognize their own infallibility, and accept as a sacred trust the knowledge that they are indispensable. To be a god, Mrs. Deans only lacked the minor attribute of immortality—a want of which she was herself unconscious.
Mrs. Deans strove earnestly to better her neighbors and cause them to conform to her standards of what was right. She was a firm believer that "open rebuke is better than secret love," and whatever risk Myron ran, under Mrs. Deans' rule she incurred no danger of being "carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease"—a thing much to be dreaded. Nor was there any possibility of her forgetting, for a half-hour at a time, the light in which Mrs. Deans viewed her, which was, of course, the somewhat trying illumination that the Children of Light project upon the Children of Darkness.
Mrs. Deans had a modestly good opinion of herself. "Thou art the salt of the earth" impressed her with all the directness of a personal remark. Those who enjoyed the privileges of Mrs. Deans' household were, first and least, her husband—Henry Deans. He was a small man, with "a little wee face, with a little yellow beard, a Cain-colored beard." It was five years since his horses, running away as he returned from the market town, capsized him over a steep bank, down which the barrel of salt he had bought rolled also, and, striking him in the back, partially paralyzed him.
Since that time he had sat under his wife's ministry. In summer the back porch held his chair, in winter the kitchen. By keeping a careful eye upon the bound girl, he sometimes discovered her in a dereliction; it was a happy hour for him when this was the case. It had the effect of distracting his wife's attention from him, for one thing—and when too closely centred upon any one person, Mrs. Deans' regard was apt to prove embarrassing; it also won him much commendation from her—being convinced of the utter depravity of the bound girl, both "individually and collectively," it gratified Mrs. Deans to have her "moral certainty" attested by positive proofs. It made her realize her seer-like qualities.
Mrs. Deans' son, Gamaliel, known to his fond mother as "Maley," and to Jamestown as "Male," stood first in his mother's regard.
Gamaliel was Mrs. Deans' idea of a "fancy" name. She had hesitated long before bestowing it upon her boy, wavering between Gamaliel and Ambrose. She finally decided upon the former, it being more uncommon. The son of Mrs. Deans' sister-in-law's brother was called Ambrose—and, also, Gamaliel was, as Mrs. Deans said, "more suitable," whether to her son's mental or physical endowments she did not specify. Old Mrs. Holder once said she never could "picture out" any one else being called Gamaliel, nor believe that Mrs. Deans' son could have had any other name.
He was a stubborn young lout, whose strong will was only subjective to his mother's because he did not recognize his own strength. She had curbed him as he bitted the huge young Clydesdale colts. Sometimes a well-broken horse realizes its own strength, and we hear a horrid story of torn flesh and trampled limbs when it turns to rend its master. If Gamaliel Deans ever revolted, his mother would suffer.
However, he was quiescent enough, for his mother's schemes were all for his benefit. Besides, he appreciated the charms of a quiet life, and had inherited a liberal share of the diplomacy his paralytic father displayed when he feigned sleep for long hours at a stretch, hoping that he might entrap the bound girl into some piece of unwary carelessness. Both Henry Deans and his son Gamaliel had a deeply rooted belief in the value of the bound girl as a counter-irritant.
Mrs. Deans had had just a "pigeon pair" of children, as Jamestown put it, but her girl had died when an infant. Mrs. Deans was too good a woman not to bear up under the loss, especially as she did not care for girls.
The bound girl made up the regular trio which Mrs. Deans drove before her over roads of her choosing.
It is unnecessary to say much of the bound girl. Mrs. Deans described them often—"Evil incarnate," she called them. Mrs. Deans changed her bound girls now and then. They came to her with all the different merits and various vices of their unhappy class. They left her different incarnations of the same weary, broken, deadened spirit of labor and endurance. Their individual characteristics, capabilities and tendencies had nothing whatever to do with their case. Woman and mother as Mrs. Deans was, she was never moved by their peculiar needs.
It is requisite, doubtless, to the "Great Plan" that there be bound ones among us, enduring—like the hereditary embalmer—the parischite of Egypt—a loathsome heritage—and yet—the pity of it! But Mrs. Deans was not one to question the Providence which ordained for these bound girls their lot in life.
"They're born bad, and bad they are, and bad they'll be—every one of them—evil, root and branch; you can't be up to them and their ways." These were Mrs. Deans' sentiments upon the subject of bound girls, and other opinions do not matter.
The hired men Mrs. Deans treated with the deference due to those who must be conciliated and who are free agents. Mrs. Deans, if not exactly harmless as the traditional dove, had at least a smattering of the wisdom of the serpent.
Mrs. Deans was distinctly a leader in Jamestown society. She was a very good woman, liberal to the Church, foremost in collecting for missions, ready to head a donation list at any time; therefore every one said Myron Holder was very lucky to have won Mrs. Deans' help. That this "help" consisted in being allowed to do the hardest work under the most intolerable circumstances for very meagre pay, they did not stop to consider. Mrs. Deans said she felt it a "duty" to have Myron Holder. We are all so thoroughly acquainted with the fact that duties are unpleasant, that the Jamestown women are not to be blamed for looking upon Mrs. Deans in the light of a martyr.
Mrs. Warner expressed the sense of the village view of the matter when she said, "It beats me how Mrs. Deans can put up with that Myron Holder! Going about as if she was injured, bless your heart, with a face as long as a fiddle and looking as if she was half killed, when she ought to be thankful to be let into a decent house to work."
And indeed the hopeless face Myron Holder bore above her aching heart was a public reproach; but we do not see rebuke where we do not look for it, and Jamestown felt itself above censure.
In the old Puritan graveyards in the New England States there was a place set apart, where in a common receptacle were buried those who held a different faith from the Puritans, or who avowed no faith at all. This was called the "damned corner." Whether the Puritans, out of zeal to do their Master's work, intended in this way to facilitate the business of separating the sheep from the goats, or whether it was with a view of securing their own sacred dust from contamination, does not appear. But it is a custom which still survives. We all have a "damned corner," where, beneath the intolerable burden of our disapprobation, we deposit those we know are wrong. Of course, common decency requires that we keep these spots swept with our criticism, garnished with invective; and when it is considered that in Mrs. Deans' eyes even Gamaliel sometimes showed faults, it will be understood the worthy woman had no sinecure.
Mrs. Deans' mind was somewhat "out of drawing" to her body, which was broad, large, fair, and of generous proportions. Why fat and good-temper should have been so long proverbially associated is difficult to discern; in so far as the ordinary mind can analyze, it would seem as if adipose was a distinct excuse for bad temper. To be hotter than other people in summer and not so cold in winter is one of the simplest and most obvious results of fat—yet who shall say this is conducive to sympathy with other people?
Mrs. Deans had been a Warner, and was inclined to goitre. Her large head, with its oily bands of fair hair, was always somewhat inclined backwards. Her general appearance suggested, in a remote way, a colossal and bad-tempered pouter pigeon—a likeness absurdly emphasized sometimes by the redness of her eyes.
When Myron Holder crossed the threshold with the quilting-frames, a scene characteristic of the place greeted her. Mrs. Deans stood in the foreground, holding the floor; her husband listened to her eloquence, blinking appreciatively if somewhat apprehensively. You never knew—to use one of her own expressions—when you "had Mrs. Deans, and when you hadn't." She was apt to deflect suddenly from the chase she was engaged in, and start full cry after another's shortcomings. More than once Henry Deans, enjoying himself hugely while his wife browbeat the bound girls, had his joy turned to mourning by suddenly discovering that the peroration of his wife's address had for its inspiration his own shortcomings.
His wife was, as he confided to Gamaliel, "onsartain"; it was a perilous joy to listen to her, and, therefore, perhaps, the more exhilarating.
The bound girl—a slight, tow-headed child with high, unequal shoulders, and arms, and wrists, developed by her life of toil into absurd disproportion to her body—stood by the stove, listening with a dazed look in her weary eyes. She had broken a seven-cent lamp-glass.
Myron put aside the basket of groceries, took the quilting-frames to an empty corner, and set about her preparations for the weekly washing. The bound girl still stood motionless by the fire, and Mrs. Deans still talked; her husband was shifting uneasily in his chair, for her remarks were beginning to wander from the case in point, and her condemnations and criticisms were becoming too sweeping to be altogether pleasant, when, much to the relief of her hearers, Mrs. Deans' attention was distracted by the arrival of the ragman, with his noisy, rattling van, piled high with coarse, bulging sacks of canvas. Mrs. Deans assumed her sunbonnet, and went out to him. He was a man of sixty or so, thin, good-humored, and with what Mrs. Deans called, "An eye to the main chance." Perched high upon the seat of his old-fashioned blue van, he was exposed to all the variableness of the weather; but he took sunshine and rain in good part, and seemed little the worse, save that he was tanned to a fine mahogany tint.
He went regular rounds through the country, gathering rags and scrap-iron. His calling is a survival of the old classic system of barter. The interior of his van was filled with an array of pans and pails and all sorts of tin-ware; a drawer at the back held common cutlery, horn-handled knives and forks, and tin spoons, such as his customers used. With these wares he paid for the rags and old iron. Many a thousand pounds of each had he and his old black horse collected.
He had a faculty for gauging the weight of a bag of rags that was truly impressive. "That'll go thirty pound," he would say; then weighing it hastily, "Turned at thirty and a half," he would announce with an air of surprise at his own mistake. Then, by a quick fling, the bag would be skillfully bestowed upon the top of the van; his load was always one-sided, but never fell off.
Mrs. Deans always had rags for him, and invariably bought pie-plates.
"Who is that?" said he to Mrs. Deans, after the chaffering process was over, and she stood, pie-plates in hand, watching him put the wooden peg through the staple to keep the hasp tight. He had caught a glimpse of Myron Holder.
"That—oh, Jed Holder's Myron," returned Mrs. Deans, assuming the face with which she taught Sunday school.
"'Tis, eh? What do you have her for?"
"I feel a duty to have her here, but it goes ag'in me, Mr. Long—it does that; but there, we all have our cross and we must help along as well as we can. Are you going to call at old Mrs. Holder's? She takes it most terrible hard."
"Yes, I'll call there; it's a lucky job for the girl she's got such a backer as you, Mrs. Deans. 'Twould be a good thing if there was more like you. It beats all what wimmen is coming to these days! Who's the man?"
"Don't ask me—ask her; that's the only place I know to find out; she's that close, though! And stubborn! Even I, for all I've done for her, and put up with, don't know! No more does her grandmother. But I'll find out."
"Well, well—that's curious," said the ragman, by this time perched aloft again and shaking the reins over the high, lean haunches of his horse; "good day, Mrs. Deans; you have a fine place here."
"Good morning. When'll you be back? Be sure you call."
"I'll be round in a couple of months again. Good morning," he replied, as his van jolted away.
"It seems to me," said he, soliloquizing, "that Mrs. Deans has washed more'n she can hang out! Jed Holder's daughter can keep her month shet if she makes up her mind to it; I knowed Jed."
This ragman had not gathered the rags of Jamestown for thirty years without acquiring some knowledge of the people. "I kin read 'em by their rags," he used to tell his wife.
He was justified in doubting Mrs. Deans' ability to perform the task she had set herself—to fathom Myron's secret.
"That girl of Jed Holder's has made a fine job of herself!" the ragman said to old Mr. Carroll, as he drove homeward in the evening.
"Yes," said old Carroll; "women are a bad lot, a bad, scheming lot."
"Oh, come, come; you'll be getting married to some young girl one of these fine days," retorted the astute ragman.
"I—no, sir; not such a fool," snorted the old man, highly pleased. "Will you come in and have a drop?"
The ragman would; they entered the house together, the black horse meantime reaching down to nibble at the last year's grass, through which the first tender blades of the new growth were pointing.
Presently the ragman emerged, looking much happier and warmer; the wind was chill in the evenings yet, and Mr. Carroll's "drop" meant a good, stiff glass of gin.
Mr. Carroll came to the door after him. "Mrs. Deans declares she'll find out, but the job will puzzle even her, I'll warrant," the ragman was saying as he climbed nimbly up over the front wheel.
"Trust her for that; women are all alike. 'Set a thief to catch a thief,'" replied his host with a sardonic chuckle. (If Mrs. Deans could have heard him!)
The ragman loudly evidenced his appreciation of this fine wit, and departed, calling out, "Evening—good evening—you've got a fine, snug place here, Mr. Carroll."
His homeward way led through quiet country roads, and long grass-grown "concessions."
The promise of spring made sweet the air, and although the night felt gray and chill, it did not numb, as do autumn nights of the same temperature.
The ragman's house stood on the outskirts of a little town, and was dwarfed and overshadowed by the barn, which occupied the main portion of the lot. One little corner of this barn was devoted to the big black horse; the rest was given over to rags. If the rags are not sent to the mills as they are collected, they are "sorted," which means that buttons, hooks, and eyes are cut off, and the woollen separated from the cotton rags. The former are sent to the shoddy mills; the paper factories absorb the others.
The ragman's trade has its traditions and romances; and the tales of fortunes found by ragpickers are beautiful truths to all of their calling; so this ragpicker, like all others, carefully felt the pockets and linings of the garments that came to him. During his thirty years of rag-picking he had found one two-dollar bill, seven ten-cent pieces, eighteen five-cent bits, one pair of gloves and an average of one lead pencil a year—but he still hoped.
Finding a fortune in rags, however, is a little like trying to locate the pot of gold at the rainbow's foot.
Myron Holder had heard plainly the ragman's query and Mrs. Deans' reply. Old Henry Deans, blossoming forth like a snail out of its shell, as soon as his wife's back was turned, said with leering facetiousness, "Ah—a fellow askin' after you, Myron," and pointed his fist with a look that made the blood spring to the woman's cheeks and linger there, a painful blot as though the face had been smitten. She bent over her tub in silence, her heart hot within her. The regard of such men and women as Myron Holder lived among may not seem of much moment to us, nor their criticisms of any import at all, but it must be remembered that they formed Myron Holder's world; and their verdict upon her was terrible, inasmuch as with them lay the power of inflicting the penalty they pronounced.
Mrs. Deans bustled in, rattling her pie-plates. Every one was at work and unhappy, so after scathing her husband with a contemptuous look, on general principles, she betook herself to the kitchen proper, and soon getting the quilting-frames into position, proceeded to "tie" her quilts, which process consisted in dotting their resplendent red and blue surfaces with fuzzy knots of yellow yarn.
That night, when Myron Holder went home, she thought for the first time, once or twice rebelliously, of the portion meted out to her; but that unaccustomed mood passed and left her in her normal condition of self-reproach.
It is perhaps true that martyrdom is a form of beatitude; but, if compulsory, it rarely has a spiritualizing effect. Myron Holder was condemned to endure all the "slings and arrows" that a spiteful, narrow-minded village can aim. She arose in the morning and ate her hasty breakfast to the sound of bitter words, directed with the unerring malignity of long-suppressed dislike, at last given an excuse for expression. She worked all day, subject to the taunts of a vulgar virago, the coarseness of that unlicked cub, Gamaliel, the intolerable leers and jibes of the half-paralyzed Henry Deans. She returned at night to be greeted by her grandmother's venomous reproaches. Doubtless she deserved all this—but her acceptance of it might have been different, for Myron Holder had come of no slavish race of down-trodden serfs. She had sprung from a long line of sturdy English forbears, lowly indeed, but free and bold. It would scarcely be a matter for wonder had Myron Holder fought with her back against the wall, defied the world she knew, utterly—its narrow prejudices, cramped conventions, traditionary decencies; but she did not. At this time she neither rebelled nor struggled—she endured; so did Prometheus.
CHAPTER V.
"Oh, the waiting in the watches of the night!
In the darkness, desolation, and contrition and affright;
The awful hush that holds us shut away from all delight;
The ever-weary memory that ever weary goes,
Recounting ever over every aching loss it knows,
The ever-weary eyelids gasping ever for repose—
In the dreary, weary watches of the night!"
"The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts, and then flies.
What is this world's delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright."
One day, shortly after the ragman's call, old Mr. Carroll came to have a talk with Mr. Deans. He did this often. It was not that he had any particular liking for Henry Deans or his wife, but the forced inaction of the former left him unoccupied all day long, and Mr. Carroll dearly liked "to have his talk out" when once he commenced. As a prelude to the talk proper, they discussed for an hour or so the affairs of the village, the crops of their neighbors, the scarcity of pasture and the great number of tramps. Into this part of the conversation Mrs. Deans entered heartily. After these matters were canvassed thoroughly, the men settled themselves more easily in their chairs, and took up the more serious business of the hour.
Now there were only two subjects that Mr. Carroll thoroughly enjoyed talking about—politics and war; the former he regarded as the "root of all evil," the latter as the only means of reform. Mr. Deans only cared to discuss religion and crops.
Each talked in his own strain about his own hobby, without regard to what his companion was saying. While one was speaking the other waited, absent-eyed, for the first pause for breath, when he promptly took up his parable where he had left off when forced to pause for breath himself. The one never heard what the other said, each being too much occupied in thinking what he should say next to bother about listening to any one else. They derived much of the same mutual benefit and amusement from these conversations as two dogs do when they race madly up and down opposite sides of a fence, barking at each other. Many learned arguments, held in high places, are conducted upon these same lines.
The sunny afternoon wore along. Mrs. Deans had yawned several times, yawned audibly and significantly; but her husband, in full cry after the errors of the Catholics and the bigotry of the Church of England, disregarded the danger signal, and went on his conversational way rejoicing. Mr. Carroll, winding his way through the intricacies of the bribery and corruption and scandals of the last election, was oblivious of her yawns, their meaning, and even—ungallant as it may seem—of her presence.
Gamaliel, coming in from his plough to refill his water-jug, looked slyly through the door at the trio.
"She's putting her ears back," said he to himself, with pleasurable anticipation of a row, as he looked at his mother. He waited a few moments in expectation of a crisis, but at the instant when his hopes were highest an interruption occurred in the arrival of Mrs. Wilson.
Mr. Carroll loathed Mrs. Wilson, a well-fed-looking but lugubrious woman, chronically aggrieved. From her own account, she had inherited and endured "all the ills the flesh is heir to," but nevertheless she was plump and comfortable-looking. Her dark eyes were bright, her red cheeks rosy, her nose a pug; her lips showed red against the whiteness of her false teeth—when the teeth were in her lips pouted, when the teeth were out her lips pursed.
Mrs. Wilson was somewhat perilously given over to vanities, and had fringe on her black merino dress and a white muslin rose in her black bonnet. She had her knitting with her, an index of her intention to stay for tea, and an encouragement to Mrs. Deans to insist that she should remain. Mrs. Wilson protested she had had no intention of staying, and Mrs. Deans insisted that she should stay. Mrs. Wilson's protestations continued all the while she was laying off her bonnet, and Mrs. Deans' persuasive eloquence flowed freely; finally, with a fine assumption of compulsion, Mrs. Wilson ceased protesting, and allowed herself, knitting in hand, to be led back to the dining-room.
By the time the two ladies emerged, Mr. Carroll was hobbling out of the gate and Mr. Deans was enjoying a long-deferred chew. The two women sat down opposite each other in rocking-chairs. Mrs. Wilson produced a black apron, which she donned, and then felt in her pocket for the goose-quill she carried to hold the end of her knitting needle, stuck it in her belt, and proceeded to turn the heel of a carpet-warp sock; at the same time to give Mrs. Deans a full and particular account of her sufferings from erysipelas. Mrs. Deans herself had had some experience with that disease, having once seen a woman in St. Ann's who was bald from its effects.
Mrs. Wilson's needles clicked; Mrs. Deans' waxed thread hummed as she vigorously sewed carpet-rags; a distant thud-thud told that Myron Holder was churning.
The sun began to sink. Suddenly Mrs. Wilson dropped her hands and her knitting into her lap, and asked, with an explosive abruptness only excusable as an indication of the startling character of the question:
"Say, Jane—I want to ask you something! Has Myron Holder named her young one?"
Mrs. Deans struck one hand into the other.
"Well, it beats all! I never! If you'll believe me, I don't know."
"I just wondered whether she had or not, but I never saw you to ask, or if I saw you I forgot, and I didn't hear tell of its being named yet. Now what do you suppose, Jane, speaking confidential between ourselves, and knowing it'll go no further—if you was asked, now, what would you say she'd call it, if 'twas put to you?"
"Well, Marian," replied Mrs. Deans, with the air of a baffled astrologer, "since you ask me plain, I'll tell you one thing—I can see as far through a ladder as most people, and if I go falling it ain't through going about with my eyes shut; but all I know about it is one thing, and that ain't two; whatever Myron Holder calls the young one she won't call it Jed, for that old Mrs. Holder won't allow at no rate—for no favor. Not that Myron said anything about it; that ain't her way. She's close—terrible close is Myron, and deep beyond belief. But old Mrs. Holder says—and what she says she'll stick to, being stubborn and fixed in her notions—she says, 'No naming of such brats after my son.' No—not if Myron asks on bended knee, Mrs. Holder won't give in."
"But say, Jane," hazarded Mrs. Wilson, as one who advances an improbable and wild suggestion, "supposing Myron Holder don't ask, but just does it? Do you suppose she'd dare?"
"'Tain't hardly likely," returned Mrs. Deans, looking judicial; "that would be pretty serious, even for Myron Holder. But I don't know; she's bad clean through—that's easy enough seen; why she makes the greatest time over that young one you ever seen. Why, Mrs. Warner told me that the other Sunday, when she went to Holder's well for a pail of water, that the house being very quiet, she went and looked in the windows, knowing old Mrs. Holder was out to Disney's for milk. She couldn't see nothing in the front room nor the kitchen, but in the bedroom there she seen Myron Holder with the boy. The boy was asleep, and she was kneeling by the bed, talking away to the sleeping child!—'s good's praying to it, Mrs. Warner said."
"I've no patience with such goings on as them," said Mrs. Wilson, clicking her needles agitatedly. "I should think she'd be ashamed to act up like that, considering all that's come and gone."
"Well, you'd think so," agreed Mrs. Deans, winding up her ball of rags. "But there, Marian! There's no use talking, her kind don't care for nothing."
"Well, it's to be hoped she don't throw no slurs on any decent fellow, like your Male or my Homer," said Mrs. Wilson, with dismal foreboding in her voice. "It would be just like her to pick on some fine name. But I warn her of one thing: slurs is something I can't abide and won't put up with."
"Nor me, Marian, nor me," said Mia. Deans, her spirit rising in anticipation of the imaginary fray. "Let Myron Holder call her brat Gamaliel, and I'll let her know for once, in her life, that respectable people has their rights. Just only let her, once, and that's all. If I don't show her pretty prompt what's what, blame me!"
"Well, 'twould be a most terrible slur on any fellow, that's all I can say," returned Mrs. Wilson.
After tea Homer Wilson called for his mother and drove her away, her white muslin rose nodding above the black barÉge veil she tied across her forehead to ward off neuralgia, her hands clasping lovingly a bottle of liniment distilled from dried "smartweed," which Mrs. Deans had bestowed upon her. Mrs. Deans watched their departure from the veranda; presently she voiced her reflections aloud:
"Marian don't crack up Homer as much as she used to do; guess that shoe pinches a bit. Well, served her right! Nobody but a fool gives away his clothes before he's done with them! They shouldn't have been so smart giving Homer the deed."
"No, I don't hold with doing that. Don't catch me doing any such business, not I," said Mr. Deans' voice from the kitchen.
Mrs. Deans jerked her shoulders impatiently, and took herself and her meditations out of her husband's hearing. She was gone some little time, having walked down to the pasture to look at the lambs. As she entered the cook-house she murmured to herself, "I can't make my mind up to it somehow, but she was anxious, was Marian, terrible anxious about the name—Homer Wilson."
Homer Wilson and his mother drove homeward. They passed Myron Holder entering the gate of her home. She had taken off her sunbonnet and held it by the strings, as she fastened the gate. Her hair, loosened and roughened, was massed about her head in such a way as to form a soft, shadowy background, from which the pale oval of her face shone forth almost startlingly.
"Guess Mrs. Deans is taking her money's worth out of Myron Holder," said Homer after they passed. "She looks mighty tired out."
"Oh, goodness, Homer," said his mother, "don't take up with that girl. 'Tired out!' Serve her right if she is! It's pure charity Jane Deans' having her; and as for stubbornness and badness, Jane says she can't be beat. I guess her old grandmother has a tough time of it! Old folks has a poor chance when young ones get the whip-hand. Give—give—and when you've given all you've got you're no more good! Well, time's short here any way, and a good thing it is! No pleasure after one gets old—only burdens on other people." Here Mrs. Wilson sniffed loudly, and ostentatiously wiped away an imaginary tear.
Homer's face burned in the dusk; his heart rose hot against the reflection his mother's speech was meant to cast upon him. But he made no answer; he was used to such things; they drove on without further speech. The loose links in the horses' traces jingled; their hoof-beats sounded soft on the sandy road. They drew near the house before Mrs. Wilson spoke again; then she said briskly: "Homer, don't go speaking to Myron Holder if you meet her; she's a dangerous girl."
"She looks it," said Homer, with a touch of sarcasm. "I don't think I'll be hurt by passing a good day with her, though."
"That's right—I might have known as much. Get mixed up with her next, as if I hadn't had enough trouble," whined his mother.
Homer was getting exasperated. The knowledge that he had that very morning passed Myron Holder in absent-minded silence added to the irritation of his mood. His mother's persistent misconstruction of his motives and actions was at times almost unbearable. He answered out of pure perversity: "She's the best looking girl in the village, by long odds; and as for not speaking to her, I fancy the women do plenty of 'passing by on the other side' business without the men helping them. You won't find many men, I reckon, unwilling to speak to Myron Holder."
A strange conviction of the absolute truth of what he was saying smote across his mind, and suddenly Myron Holder's pale face seemed to show out of the gloom before him, as he had seen it a little while before against the dark background of her hair. His mother almost groaned aloud; a dreadful thought flittered momentarily through her mind, but Homer was already pulling up the horses.
He helped her out carefully, and she entered the house absorbed in peevish self-pity.
Old Mr. Wilson was ready to receive her and eager to hear the "news." When Homer finished attending to his horses and came into the house, he found they had already retired. He heard the murmur of his mother's voice, broken only by a sharp exclamation or a short interrogation from his father. He blew out the lamp and sat down at the open window, laying his head on his hands. The frogs in the pond were uttering their weird and dismal note. No other sound has a more melancholy echo, a more desolate tone. An earthy breath of wind was wafted from across the newly ploughed land near the house. In the sunshine the aroma from fresh furrows is sweeter than the breath of sweet grass; at night it brings the odor of the charnel.
The wind died down; it was very still and dark. The dew fell. Presently Homer Wilson rose, and, still in the dark, found his way softly upstairs. His thick brown hair was laden with the night damps, but even the first heavy dews of spring do not leave long, glistening, smarting furrows on the cheeks—do not fall in slow-wrung, scalding drops upon clinched hands, do not linger in salt traces about the lips they touch.
