"I don't give a whoop what they say—why should you mind? I can take a chance, if you can, Sweetheart. Come on: be a sport!"
"Aw, Dexie!"
"That's m'little girl. I knew you was game. Give us a sweet kiss now—come awn. Whass matter?"
"The wind's pulling my hat loose," said Daisy, "I'll take it off."
"That's th' idea," approved Mr. Coleman, reining his impatience.
They were descending a hill, at the bottom of which a slough crossed the trail. Fences to right and left forbade a detour.
"I guess we'll have to drive right through it," said Daisy.
"How about the hat?" demanded Mr. Coleman, who was now so close that his companion could barely move her elbow, "can't you get it off?"
"Oh," Daisy looked up innocently, "I forgot about the hat. All right—there, it's off."
She took off the hat and laid it in her lap. They had now reached the edge of the shallow slough in the valley-bottom, into which the livery horse waded, gingerly and slow.
"Maybe he wants a drink," said Daisy; "whoa, pettie! Thirsty?"
The horse halted and lowered his head to the water-level.
"Poor fellow!" Daisy commented, as he drank in great famished gulps, "don't you ever water him, Dex? Aw, quit! Aw-w—you're mean! There, now—see what you've done," and, as Coleman, red and hot-eyed, drew back from kissing her, Daisy pointed to her hat, afloat on the slough.
"That's nothin'," said Coleman, regarding the hat as it slowly floated away from the side of the buggy.
"Oh, no," said Daisy, with sarcasm, "it just means I've got to go home and get another hat, before we start on this trip you were speaking of. I won't go into Toddburn bareheaded—not even for you."
Coleman rose from his seat. "I'll sure get it for you, right now, Sweetness," he said, "if that's how you feel about it."
"Well, you'd better hurry, for it's sailing away," Daisy advised; "no, you can't reach it over the wheel. You'll have to stand out on the step."
Mr. Dexie Coleman, who believed in doing everything with grace and ease, scorned to grip the honest buggy-top for sensible support, as he poised himself on the iron step, like Hermes, tiptoe for flight, and extended an arm out over the water. He calculated, and rightly, that he could just reach the hat and keep his balance.
But he had not reckoned with a gathering forcebehind him; and perhaps there was no more surprised man in Toddburn than this cavalier of the sewing machine when, a second or two later, just as his fingers closed upon the hat, a strong push from rearward propelled him sprawlingly into the slough. The water was only three feet deep; but, as he fell horizontally, he went right under.
Mr. Coleman's astonishment at the turn events had taken was so intense that he, as one might say, reclined for a moment in the bottom of the slough, with the water roaring in his ears and choking in his throat, before he gathered his wits together sufficiently to grope to his feet. By the time he had regained a wet uprightness, sputtered the muddy water out of his mouth, and blinked his eyes till vision returned, he found that he was alone in the slough. Daisy had driven the horse out on the farther shore, and was just getting out of the buggy. Mr. Coleman, watching in a fascinated way, with too much water still in his windpipe to speak, saw his late companion loop up the horse's lines in the backhand ring, knotting them so they would not fall and tangle the animal; then give the beast a smart little slap on the flank that started it off at a brisk trot down the trail.
"Whoa, there!" Mr. Coleman found breath to exclaim, in a thin aqueous squeal, as he paddled splashingly and frantically toward land. Butthe horse, headed toward its evening meal of loft-dried hay and oats in the Toddburn livery stable, exchanged its trot for a canter, and kept on going.
"You'll have to go some, to catch him," said Daisy, levelly and unsmiling; "he knows when he's well off." She kept her eyes steadily on Coleman, tightening her grip on the handle of the horsewhip which she had retained.
"Ha-agh!"
This is the nearest possible phonetic representation of the sound which came from the man's throat, as he jumped at her. But Daisy was alert and strong and full of fight. She stepped back and swung the horsewhip. The sharp impact of the lash plucked the skin from the centre of Coleman's right cheek. Returning "backhanded," the whip raised a weal along the left side of his face, extending from mouth to ear. Coleman stopped, straightened, and put his hand to his cheek, down which the blood was running.
"So you were going to hit me, were you?" flashed Daisy, breathless and sparkling. "You'resomeman!"
There is something salutary and restorative about the rod—that corrective instrument recommended by Solomon the Wise. Perhaps it is less the sting than the shame—although one must admit that both must go together, to produce the effect.
Dexie Coleman, all the bad humor gone out of him, sat down dejectedly on a boulder. For the moment, he forgot pose,—forgot that his face was muddy and bleeding, his hair rumpled, his clothes soaked and dripping—forgot himself altogether.
"I'm a mean son of a gun, ain't I?" he said.
Daisy looked at him a moment narrowly and coldly. But there was neither flutter of eyelash nor any other indication that he was "putting it on." The girl's face softened a little.
"What are you always trying to be somebody else for, Dexie?" she said; "talking like a vaudeville actor, and trying to be a 'bad man' with the girls, and smoking yourself to death with cigarettes, and trying to 'land soft jobs' like driving around the country with sewing machines. You're just an honest farm boy—why don't you be one? Get out and do some real work, and get tanned up a little, and skin your nice white hands on a pitchfork-handle."
Dex Coleman got off the stone and stood up. He was really a very well-built young man, and his wet clothes, clinging to him like tights, showed it.
"I'm goin'," he said briefly, "no use of parley-vooin' around here."
He rammed his hands in his wet pockets and, avoiding Daisy's eye, stalked away. He forgot to lift his hat, for which Daisy's heart warmed to him. It was rude; but it showed he was ashamedof himself. A young man shows shame by rudeness.
"Better come back and let me wash the blood off your face," Daisy called.
"Oh, to blazes with it!" came back gruffly, over Coleman's shoulder; then, after an interval of three strides' duration, "so-long—Kid."
The supper-table in the Nixon farmhouse was vacated by the time Daisy reached home. Mrs. Rourke was in the act of putting her supper in the oven to keep it warm; and Lovina Nixon was collecting the soiled dishes and piling them on the side-table for washing-up. John Nixon was deep in contemplation of the cuts in the harness and hardware section of a department store catalogue. Ware turned from the window, out of which he had been looking. A vague anxiety, newborn this evening, seemed to light the eyes he rested on Daisy as she entered.
As though he were the only person in the room, Daisy, looking neither to right nor left, came straight toward him from the door. She put her arms up, drew his face down, and kissed him on the lips.
"I want my hubby," she whispered, "my own hubby—bestest in the world!"
Ware's arms folded about her and he held her close.
Jim Burns, who had observed this tableau through the window, as he approached the house from outside, changed his mind about coming in. Jamming his hat over his eyes, he picked up a feed-pail and turned back toward the barn.
"Everything's all right now, anyway," he murmured, "whatever was the matter before. I guess likely my talking-to done him good."
Hot July had passed, and the sun of August had shaded to the blandness of near-September, when Daisy Ware climbed into her own buggy, behind her own smart bronco, and driving out through the gate of her own farm, took bowlingly the ruts of the Toddburn trail on her way to meet Lady Frances Ware's train.
For half a mile, the road led past Sir William's fields, in which the wheat was now its full ripe harvest yellow. Around one of these fields, a binder hummed, and the shirt-sleeved man on the seat of it flung a kiss to Daisy from afar. That shirt-sleeved man was Sir William Ware, Baronet. The man who was stooking behind the binder also lifted his hand to his lips, though inhiscase the salute was not a kiss but a friendly hail; for the stooker was he who had been yodling, artificial, "city-bug"-imitating Dexie Coleman. He had callouses on his palms now that it would be hard to get through with a chisel, and on each arm a biceps that would burst an iron ring.
Daisy herself was changed in some indefinable way. Her mouth was softened, her eyes hadbecome forward-looking and dreamy, her color more delicate. Her attitude was not now tensed, aggressive, a-jump with schoolgirlish spirit; but gentle, relaxed, restful. One could not on this day imagine her with the horsewhip of punishment in her hand.
There were no pools on the Toddburn highway to impede this August drive. The breath of autumn was soft in the air, and the summer's work of the sun was over. The ruts of the trail were cushioned with soft dust, the uplands ripe green, the trees full-sapped and thriving, every twig deciduously ready for the going of the leaves. The prairie plants had long ago sent the last of their pollen abroad by wind and voyaging bee. There were red berries on the rose-bushes, and white on the wolf-willow. The house of the world was swept and garnished for the fall.
The thoughts of the young woman who sat, with that quiescent and settled look in her eyes, on the seat of the tranquilly-travelling buggy, moved to her beginning of life and ratchetted slowly up the years to the now; and it came to Daisy Ware, as it has come to many another who thinks more abstrusely, that consummated marriage is, and properly, the climax of womanhood. Every growing thing about her whispered it to-day. The message received definiteness and point as there blew across her lap a fragment of fertile fluff that hadin its heyday and its summer nodding-time been part of a maiden dandelion-blossom.
In the light of this flash of truth from exemplary Nature, the young wife saw in its true light the "board and lodging" marriage in which she might have continued unawakened—continued, perhaps, until she was old and blase and "set" and sterile—if it had not been for the potent something, salutarily born, both to her and to her husband, by the airs that move among the hills and groves of God. She saw why a "little chum" is not a wife.
Lady Frances had been held, partly by her years and partly by the prejudices which fixedly inhabit the old, from exploring far this northwest of her son's adoption. Among people not socially en rapport with her, she had long ago decided she was too advanced in years to commence to mingle. She had found few enough intimates in the cities of this colonial dominion; she anticipated there would be in the country no "nice people" at all.
She had at last consented to come out to the farm, less because she had been assured that now suitable and comfortable accommodation awaited her, than because her heart contained a vague hunger. When she had started on her journey, she had thought it was her son she wanted to see. But now, as she sat reflectively in the coach that—after travelling what had seemed to her aninterminable stretch of country—was at last approaching the place Toddburn, Lady Frances Ware discovered that the one she most looked forward to meeting was, not her son, but her young daughter-in-law.
This was not wholly because of regard for Daisy herself—although the young wife, with her frank and clean girlishness, had won the warmest possible place in the old lady's affections—but because Daisy was linked with a hope and a dream that now abode daily with the mother of the last male of the ancient lineage of Ware.
Daisy had, by letting the bronco take its own gait, occupied a little too much time on the trip to the village—a thing her alert and practical former self would never have done—and, as she rose to the crest of the last hill outside Toddburn, she saw the passenger train just leaving the station, from which she was still separated by about half a mile. This meant that Lady Frances, if she had come—which was certain, for she was always punctual—was waiting alone at the little depot. Daisy sat up straight, rousing the little bronco to its best speed with voice and driving-reins.
"My dear, it's quite immaterial," was the response of the old gentlewoman to her apology, as the two embraced—not in the little depot waiting-room, but out on the end of the platform, where Daisy had found Lady Frances, standing by herluggage and looking about her. The old lady had on a simple black travelling dress and a light wrap, rather Victorian in pattern. Neither glasses nor any substitute were in view. Lady Frances could see "her way about" quite easily without them, and never carried anything as a concession to mode, or for pose or show.
"I have been enjoying myself immensely during the interval," she said, as the two proceeded to the sloping end of the platform, at the foot of which stood the buggy; "this is an enormous country—simply enormous, my dear. No, you needn't help me in."
Putting one gloved hand on the brace of the buggy-top, Lady Frances, from the slight eminence of the platform-end, reached handily the iron step of the buggy and raised herself halely to the cushioned seat.
"No, no, child—I should much prefer to wait till we are home—that is to say, unless you are hungry," she said, as Daisy started the pony in the direction of the Toddburn House.
"I'm not hungry, Mother. Billy said——"
"Billy?" Lady Frances made the interruption in a tone of pleasant interrogation.
"Will," Daisy substituted, with a little blush (Lady Frances, of course, could not know that she was a real wife now), "said that he thought youwould rather lunch at home, so I had a little something just before I left."
"Billy—Billy," Lady Frances, in mental enquiry, repeated the nickname, which had at first grated her a bit. Then her heart gave a great leap. She turned and looked closely at Daisy. One glance at the softened eyes, the delicate-hued and somewhat pale cheeks, the dreamy lips, the relaxed and restful lines of neck and bosom—and the old gentlewoman and mother, warmth of joy flooding all her arteries, reached out her hand, covered Daisy's with it, and held the young girl's fingers in a close and long caress.
"My darling, my darling!" she murmured, with a thrilling tenderness, "oh, wewillhave to take such care of you. Does William know?"
Daisy answered with her frank and matter-of-fact affirmative nod.
The drive home was a very quiet one. Daisy's new habit of forward-looking occupied her. Lady Frances Ware was wrapped in an ecstasy of that kind and depth which one does not want to break or to have broken by the paltry sound of the spoken word.
"That high-priced doctor from the city fired me out," said Dex Coleman, coming down to the barn where Jim Burns sat on the oat-box, behind the stall where the newly-arrived Toddburn livery horse munched hungrily at a fresh feed of hay, "and Bill's upstairs, so I couldn't ast him what it is. If it's a boy, the old lady will go crazy—that's one thing sure. Milt Hayes says he'll find out, as soon as he gets warmed up, and come down here and let us know."
Milt Hayes was the Toddburn liveryman's son, who had brought out the doctor to the Ware farm over roads crisped and snowbound by February, and had been given license to remain by the stove in the bustling and anxious house, until he "got thawed out".
"Ain't it queer, when you come to think of it, Dex?" remarked Jim Burns, as the other sat down beside him on the oat-box.
"Ain't what queer, Jim?" said Dex Coleman.
"Her," said Jim Burns, "goin' to school with us about five years ago, an' now—"
"It's queer, all right," agreed Dex Coleman.
"I wonder what she could have saw in him," pursued Jim Burns, following the groove of an old problem.
"Oh, I dunno," Dex Coleman set his hat to the back of his head and spat down between his hands in a thoughtful way, "Bill ain't a bad head, Jim, when you get to know him. I never worked for a better boss, nor for higher wages. He pays me every cent I'm worth an' a little more."
"Maybe so," said Jim Burns, "I ain't got nothin' against him personally. But—"
"But what?"
"Oh—nothin'," said Jim Burns.
"Come on, now, Jim,—tell us. What's wrong with Bill?"
"Well," Jim Burns flung out an expressive hand, "I could have had Daise myself, if he hadn't took her."
Dex Coleman tilted back his head and laughed till the barn rang. Jim Burns got up slowly off the oat-box and commenced to take off his coat.
"Come on," he said, "if you want a fight. I'll push your nose out through the back of your head, if you laugh at me that way, Coleman."
Coleman sobered, and slapped the other on the back.
"I ain't laughin' at you, boy," he said; "don't you ever think it. It was myself I was laughin' at. I wanted her too, Jim, them days. But we bothwent at it the wrong way. You said nothin' at all to her, and I said too much. Bill goes about it in the right way, and he gets the girl. Bill's a gentleman."
"Well," demanded Burns, "ain't we gentlemen, too? I am, anyway, and I have a poke in the jaw for any man that says I ain't."
"That," rejoined Dex Coleman, "is one son of a moose of a way to prove to a man that you're agentleman. The trouble with us out in this section of the country, Jim, is that, some way, we seem to have the idea in the back of our heads that a gentleman is a man who's got either money enough or nerve enough to sport around in a tailor-made suit and not do any work. That's the reason each of us is so sensitive about his claim to the title: because we think the man who says 'you're no gentleman' sees us as day-laborers and himself as our wealthy or nervy neighbor who don't have to work. Jim, this gentleman thing is inside of you—not outside. I've learned that much from workin' alongside of Bill, anyway.... Here comes Milt. Well, Milt, did they let you see it?"
"It ain't a 'it', boys," said Milt Hayes, "it's a him."
"Three cheers!" shouted Dex Coleman; "how did the old lady take it?"
"Oh, carried it kind of easy, in a shawl soclean-white it pretty near blinded you," replied Milt Hayes, staring; "why, how did you suppose she'd take it? By the scruff of the neck?"
"I don't mean the baby," explained Dex Coleman, "I mean the news."
"It wasn't no news to her," responded the other vaguely, "she brung him downstairs herself, I'm tellin' you."
"Oh, go to blazes!" exclaimed Dex Coleman, jumping off the oat-box, "boys, I'm goin' up to the house. I'll get in, sir, if I have to massacree that city doctor to do it."
"Ast how Daise is," called Jim Burns after Coleman as he went out, "we don't care about whether the old lady likes the baby or lumps it."
It was not long till tall, good-looking and still somewhat "nervy" Dex Coleman came whooping back to the barn with the word, "I bunted past the doctor, fellows—never even let on I knew he was there—and spoke right up to Lady Frances herself. She says all you boys may come right up and have a look at the baby."
"I guess wemay," said Jim Burns, as he followed the speaker out through the door; "it's Daise's baby, not hers."
"I had one look at him," commented Milt Hayes, as he brought up the rear of the procession, "but I guess I can stand another."
Lady Frances, as the three young men entered,was sitting in the big upholstered chair in the centre of the farmhouse living-room. Her eyes were shining, and her whole figure radiated an extraordinary animation. In her lap lay something in shawls—something that waved tiny red antennæ in a futile way, and emitted a series of unclassifiable sounds.
"He sounds like a crow," Milt Hayes said, sotto voce, to Jim Burns, "don't he?"
"You wouldn't know a crow from a cowbird, Hayes," Jim Burns muttered; "talk sense, or keep still."
The three approached on tiptoe. Lady Frances looked up and smiled.
"You may walk briskly, young men," she said, "the child is quite wide awake, and not at all nervous, I think."
The three came on abreast, a little sheepishly; but when they were about five feet away, Jim Burns, with an air of proprietorship, elbowed the other two aside and stepped to the front. Arriving at Lady Frances' chair, he leaned over and took a lengthy and critical survey of the infant.
"Well, ma'am," he said, "I been like a brother to Daise, and I've give Bill a talkin'-to, more than the once: so I can speak my mind plain-out about this baby. It's pretty fair-looking, and I guess by the way it slings its hands around and hollers, it'll live—but I don't think it does entirejustice to Daise's looks and Bill's style. I certainly don't. Come on, boys: yous can take a peek, but don't touch it with your big clumsy hands. You first, Dex, and then Milt. Don't breathe in his face, Coleman, you galoot!"
Here obviously ends the book of Daisy the Girl, but not the story of Daisy. For as Daisy—or, more briefly, "Daise"—she still lives in the Toddburn district of Plowland. If you are ever that way along, you may call—any hour of any day, for there are no receiving days in Plowland. In asking your direction of those along the trail, do not enquire for the "estate of Sir William Ware". Nobody would know whom you meant. Just say, "Where does Bill Ware live?"
For the ancient title has fallen into disuse, and the big house in the city has been sold, and Lady Frances does not wince when little Billie Ware, jumping up and down ecstatically at the window, shouts across to her, "Oh, Gamma, seezemhorses wun!"
—THE END—