Freda was so quiet as she and Mauney drove along the river road and so unusually unresponsive to his remarks, that he began to wonder if he had discovered her in another of her unpredictable moods. For some time he, too, was silent.
“Well, Freda,” he said at length, with forced cheerfulness, “suppose we both loosen up for a change. That musicale was pretty nearly too much for me, and I suppose it affected you in the same way. These last two weeks have been about the least satisfactory passage in my life, so far, and if I were to give in to my feelings I would be a rare study in despondency.”
“Lockwood blues!” said Freda, dismally, as she slowly stopped the car by the side of the road. “It’s bound to get you. However, we’ve got to go on living, and I hear that you’ve been showing some attentions to a married woman.”
“Indeed,” laughed Mauney, good-naturedly, “and who is the favored lady?”
“This isn’t such a laughing matter as it looks, Mauney,” she replied with some severity. “My mother’s wild about it.”
“About what?”
For an instant she tugged at her gloves and removed them. “I wish,” she said, “that I were feeling a littlehappier than I am. I’ll tell you what it’s all about. You were said to have been seen on the street with Mrs. Poynton, and also leaving her house one evening.”
“Well, that’s true enough,” admitted Mauney as he waited for her to continue.
“Then youwerewith her?” asked Freda quickly.
“Yes, why not?” he asked with a puzzled frown. “Isn’t she all right?”
“God knows whether she’s all right or not, but she’s got a horrible reputation.”
“Jean Byrne!” exclaimed Mauney, incredulously.
“Yes,” she nodded impatiently. “Mrs. Poynton has been very injudicious. I have never really interested myself in the details and I hate saying such things about anyone, but I simply couldn’t believe that you had associated yourself with her in any way. But now that you admit it I suppose I am obliged to tell you more. It’s all over town that you stayed at her house all night.”
Mauney’s mouth opened to speak. Then his face suddenly grew pale and he gazed in silence past her head into the woods that rose at the side of the road.
“Well, aren’t you going to deny it?” she asked in a tone of surprise.
“Surely I don’t need to?” he said a little angrily. “Surely you don’t believe them?”
“If I were eighteen I’d say no. But I’m twenty-six, unfortunately. And still more unfortunately, some things are true no matter how much we don’t believe them. I think,” she added precisely, “it’s only a fair proposition that you should either deny it or make some intelligent explanation.”
Mauney’s face, as it lowered slightly towards hisbreast, was that of a man for whom the light of the world had suddenly gone out.
“And I’m afraid,” he said calmly, but with clear decision, “that I will never do either.”
“But, don’t you see,” she asked with perceptible concern, “that I would not demand it, except that it has been put up to me strongly?”
“I can see nothing,” he replied slowly, “but an unbeautiful lack of faith.”
Freda had turned her head away, so that Mauney did not see the dawning light of wide-eyed fear, nor the quiver of infinite regret.
For a moment she remained thus, and when roused by the shuffling of his feet she turned again, he was stepping from the car.
“I know you will pardon me,” he said. “But under the circumstances, and with this scandal over my head, I cannot allow you to be seen with me in public.”
“Oh, don’t!” She tried to speak, but further words would not come. She saw him lift his hat and, turning away, walk slowly down the road. It had all happened so quickly that she could scarcely believe her eyes. What had she done?
For a moment she watched his retreating figure. Then, with decision to turn the car after him, she settled behind the wheel and adjusted the spark lever preparatory to starting the engine. But her hands, obeying some vague instinct, dropped to her lap. His leave-taking had been so final—and she was a woman! She turned again in the seat and watched him as he went. How could he leave her so abruptly. Surely the trouble between them had been entirely upon the surface. Surely he misunderstood her. This superficial mood of hers,that demanded explanations, was but a vexatious billow. Underneath lay the sea of her love. She did not believe a word of the wretched scandal. Neither now, nor before. He was innocent, of course. What had she done?
A car was approaching and Freda automatically started her engine and turned her motor to the road. Slowly she moved along the smooth tarvia surface, crawling like a guilty thing farther away from Lockwood. She wanted to turn about, drive quickly back, and, drawing up beside him, make amends. But her car seemed to be possessed of a will of its own. It kept straight on into the country, while Freda put forth a futile effort to wring decision from the jumbled thoughts in her mind. Above all considerations, a new fear was possessing her.
“I know; I know it,” something said within her. He had turned away from her with an air of finality—that man who was so hard to move. During the past week he had stubbornly resisted her whimsical tantalizations. Facing her conscious weapons of provocation, he had remained self-contained. But to-night, almost without knowing it, she had moved him, indeed. And Mauney, with his great inertia, once moved, would maintain an irrevocable motion. It was thus, she felt.
Her knowledge of his personal difficulties had taught her a glorious admiration that now changed to a quite tender pity; and the thought of having added to them brought up self-hate that tortured her almost intolerably.
Yet, although it would be seemingly simple enough now to double back on her course and assure him of her trust, she realized how strangely paralyzed her will power had become. One emotion will lead to definiteaction. But she was now possessed of a dozen sharp emotions that baffled her and rendered her uniquely powerless to act. As she drove on very slowly, unconscious of time, there occurred a gradual balancing and checking off of these various feelings, until, at length, she knew only that, by her own words and attitude, she had killed love in the man she reverenced, and that he was now suffering. Finally, when she turned about and drove homeward, her mind had clarified her feelings until nothing remained but a wild regret. Half stupefied she entered her father’s gateway and ran the car into the garage.
When she walked into the house, she found her father sitting in the library, reading.
“Where’s Mother?” she asked.
“She’s over at Beecher’s,” he replied. “Why?”
“Oh, nothing.”
She stood in the library door, stupidly looking at him huddled behind his newspaper. The house was very quiet. He was engrossed with the journal. She heard the ticking of a clock in a bedroom upstairs. Her father sat with one foot crossed over the other in such a way that his trouser leg was pulled to reveal his grey sock. She noticed that the design on the sock, woven there with black thread, was broken and that some of the threads were standing at loose ends.
Suddenly the rattle of the newspaper startled her. “What’s wrong?” he asked, glancing up.
“Nothing, Dad,” she said, turning towards the hallway.
“Did you want your mother?”
“No.”
She walked quickly to the telephone, raised her handto take down the receiver, then hesitated. She knew that it would be a simple matter to telephone to Mauney. It was only ten o’clock. And so much depended, it seemed, on her telephoning to him just now. Dropping upon the telephone stool she placed her hand again on the receiver and kept it there. She was quite unconscious of her father’s presence nearby. The only thought in her mind was that Mauney was suffering. It would be so easy to say: “Please come down; I want to see you.” But her hand slowly relaxed and fell into her lap. Her will power had strangely left her.
“I’m going to bed,” announced her father, coming out into the hallway, yawning. As he reached the foot of the staircase he paused. “By the way,” he said. “There were a couple of important people down from Merlton this evening, Freda!”
“Anything promising?” she asked vacantly.
“Nothing to the public, mind!” he smiled, raising his hand in a gesture of caution. “But, between friends, I’ll drop a word of cheer. These gentlemen are looking for a site for a really big concern. They’ve got a factory in their minds that covers ten acres and I let ’em know that Lockwood had that much ground for them, too. Aren’t you tickled?”
“Oh, yes,” nodded Freda automatically, although she did not know what he had said. When he had gone to his bedroom, she rose from the stool knowing that she was quite incapable of telephoning to Mauney.
The house seemed quieter than it had ever been before. Removing her sweater-coat, she literally pitched it into a corner and went out on the verandah. Careless of all but the wild regret that was torturing her she dropped into a hammock and clasped her headwith her hands. Whenever she glanced between her fingers she saw the lawn with its dismal pines and a faint mist that curled up over the edge of the cliff nearby. The lights of the United States shore, usually so bright, were shut out by a fog.
Presently, from the gateway next the street, two pencils of brilliant light quivered against the pine trunks, and, slowly swerving, illuminated the house, as a motor car softly approached. The man who drove it saw the verandah clearly and the form of a woman reclining in the hammock. She had evidently thrown herself down very carelessly, for her black stocking stood out in bold contrasts with the yellow hammock. Edward Courtney followed down the graceful lines to her ankle and to the neat patent-leather Oxford, whose tip barely rested on the floor. Having finished his admiring inspection he sounded his horn blatantly and touched into silence the soft purr of the motor as he drew near and stopped.
Freda sat quickly up.
“Want a spin?” he asked, turning toward her over the side of the car.
“No, Ted,” she replied, “I don’t feel like it, thanks.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
Courtney got out and came up on the verandah.
“I suppose,” he remarked, helping himself to a chair, “a person has to speak ahead these days, eh?”
“Oh, I’m not in such demand as all that, Ted,” she replied. “But I’m blue to-night.”
“Blue! Good Lord, girl, that’s tough. You need cheering. And I’m an awfully good cheerer, too.”
As he spoke he leaned back in his chair so that the light from the dining-room window struck fair uponhis long, pleasant face. Freda, whose first wish had been that Courtney might just now find himself in hell or any other place, but her verandah, suddenly felt that, even in her present mood, human company was a relief.
“Ted,” she said. “I wonder if you ever have a serious thought in that head of yours.”
“Very seldom, Freda. This head has never ached with an idea. Why should it? I’d rather have it ache with sloe gin or curaçoa. An idea is so liable to turn out to be weak-kneed, or revolutionary, or expensive, and sloe gin is so simple and reliable.”
“I believe you’ve had some to-night,” she remarked dryly. “Something has made you unusually bright.”
“I’ve had a thimbleful, I confess.”
“And you have the nerve to come over here to a perfectly dry house without bringing some with you!”
“How stupid of me,” he smiled, slyly. “I thought drinking was one of your pet aversions—”
“So it is; but I—”
“I almost hesitated to come on that account,” he interrupted. “Bill Squires told me I was ‘canned,’ and Betty Doran told me I was disqualified for polite society. They’re over home, there, now, discussing the New York theatre season with the mater. She landed in to-day with a raft of new jazz stuff and a confounded jumping-jack that won’t jump. Some beggar on Bryant Square stuck her a quarter for it. Did I understand you to say, Freda, that you would like a drink?”
Courtney produced a bottle from his coat pocket and set it on the table near him.
“I didn’t bring any glasses,” he ventured.
“Never mind,” she said, rising. “That part is easy.I think a drink will do me good this evening. I’ve been half sick all day.”
The comfort that Freda derived from both Courtney and the spirits was very meagre. He rambled on lightly for a time, glass in hand, explaining how bored he had become with Lockwood, and what a necessity existed for some excitement or other.
Freda found that his essential vapidity was no solace, but an irritant, and that her few draughts of sloe gin, so far from wooing her away from the present woe, seemed to clarify and emphasize it. While he talked, she constantly reviewed her recent episode with Mauney, and the flush of her cheeks, so vivid in the glare of Courtney’s matches, depended less on gin than on a growing mood of expostulation against the nature of things. He, of course, would have been incapable, even in his soberest moments, to divine or even recognize her spiritual state, and could, therefore, be excused, at present, for failing. When she began talking in a happier-sounding tone, he did not know that a veritable blaze of irresponsible temper had kindled. Thick of ear, he missed the irony of her voice. Thicker of brain, he took her words at their face value, unconscious of the tremendous discount that existed.
“You’re a regular old dear, Ted,” she said. “What would I ever do without you? You and your sloe gin! You and your nice cars, Ted, and your yachts. Aren’t you a darling old thing!”
“Glad to get a little appreciation,” he laughed. “Ever since the dance I’ve been waiting to see you.” He paused a moment. “Have you forgiven me yet, girl?” he asked more seriously.
“You stupid boy! A woman always forgives a manfor falling in love with her. In fact,” she added thoughtfully, “a woman will forgive anything in the world, but suppression.”
“I couldn’t suppress it, Freda!” he replied, leaning toward her and resting his hand on hers. “Ihadto tell you I loved you.”
“Really, Ted!” she answered flippantly. “Please go on.”
“But you’re such a firebrand I never know how to take you,” he confessed, “I never know what will please. If I don’t warm up I think your eyes are despising me, and if I do you suddenly teach me my place. And then you tell me you’re practically engaged. Ah, well!” he sighed, dropping his hand reluctantly to his side. “I’ll try to be a platonic friend, though it’s a damned hopeless business. What do you say to a moonlight trip among the islands?”
“There’s no moon, Edward.”
“But we have strong imaginations.”
“Yes, too strong, I’m afraid. How would we go?”
“On the launch.”
For an instant Freda sipped from her glass, reflectively.
“You probably think I’m afraid to take you up on that, Ted,” she said very calmly. “But you’re wrong Go and get your launch and I’ll be waiting for you on the steps of our boathouse.”
Courtney smoked quietly a moment without speaking. As he rose, stretched himself, and walked toward his roadster, Freda sat watching him. Not until he had driven to the gate did she move a muscle. Then, with a short, spasmodic sigh, she rose from the hammock and entered the house. She had donned a sweater anda coat and was just coming out again to the verandah, when her mother’s step was heard crunching the pebble path.
“Where are you going?” she asked, as she came up.
“For a breeze up the river,” Freda said, ill-temperedly.
“With whom?”
“Ted Courtney.”
“Well, are you aware of the time?”
“No, not very much.”
“And it’s a dark, foggy night,” continued Mrs. MacDowell, with a glance towards the river. “It’s much too late to—”
“Why, Mother,” laughed Freda, “it’sneverlate. That’s just a conventional idea. Maybe the fog will blow away in an hour or so, and the stars come out and even the moon, too, for all we know.”
“But I don’t want you to go, my girl,” she continued, stepping nearer Freda, and peering critically into her face.
“I haven’t worried much about your consent, Mother, during the past few years, have I?” she asked crisply. “Do you think I would begin to do so now—to-night?”
There was almost studied scorn in Freda’s carriage as she stepped widely past her mother and left the verandah, while Mrs. MacDowell stood watching her disappear in the direction of the river.
Down at the boathouse, under the high cliff, she presently awaited Ted’s coming. There were sights and sounds here to beguile her impetuous thoughts. The night was warm and her prophecy of moonlight came true. From above the opposite shore the great, yellow orb lifted with delicate tremblings, as if its sphere were made of elastic substance. Its golden light caressedthe whimsical clouds of mist that scurried like steam above the dull, green water. The waves lifted and fell, but never broke, as if, on such a night, they were anxious to be so gentle.
She sat perfectly still, knowing it was all madness, but as determined as she ever had been about anything. Then she turned her head thinking she heard the sound of his launch. But she had not heard it. It came with silent engines, like a sleek, white ghost, long and graceful, emerging from the fog and slowing down as it bent its course to sidle noiselessly closer and closer. She stood up, shrinking back, half afraid, as if this trim craft were not guided by human hands, but was approaching like an event, exquisite, but inevitable. She sprang then to the landing to clasp his hands as he drew her aboard. “Freda, you’re wonderful,” she heard him say, as the boathouse grew smaller, and the nose of the launch bore out into the broad, grey, depths of river and moon and mist.
No one knows how beautiful Lockwood is until he sees it from a boat on a bright night. There are broad, grey buildings whose massive stone faces shine like frost. Lines of glimmering lamps stretch far along the level thoroughfares and mark the streets that climb steeply upward from the water. In the midst, clusters of generous trees, motionless and black, send up, somewhere from their indefinite mass, dark spires into the soft, grey sky, while a tall clock-tower gazes with its yellow eyes east and south and west. At midnight, town and river are silent, save for the mournful chime of the clock marking a new day. And one who hears the message from the river finds a wistful, unspeakable sadness in its tone.
The mists cleared to reveal a white craft floating aimlessly in mid-stream. The moon threw into bold sculpture a man and a woman who lounged in silence there. Both were as still as the becalmed night, their restlessness appeased as by a magic from the golden moon. There were no words. In the woman’s heart there was no happiness. It had not been love. It had been wild regret and mad despair.
By the window of her room, opened to the river, Freda remained all the rest of the night. There was no soul near her. She watched the grey river until the moon sank, and until the sun rose slowly from behind the opposite shore. No one would ever understand it. It was not the kind of sorrow that could be confessed and forgotten. Something irrevocable had controlled her fate. Now, so long as the world stood, her heart would find no friend to learn its bitterness. Deep in its inscrutable recesses suffering would call to suffering and receive no answer. Alone, desperately alone, she must stumble bravely before the inevitable current that bears towards to-morrow.
But these night thoughts gradually surrendered their poignancy to the bald light of growing day.
In the middle of the forenoon Mauney came to the house.
She took him into the library, and pointed to a chair beside the large French window that let in a blinding shaft of sunshine.
“I hope I’ll be pardoned,” he said, “for coming down so early.”
She made no reply, but watched him as he leaned forward to gaze at the sunlight on the rug.
“I still can’t think that you were honest last night, Freda,” he continued. “I can’t think that you believe this confounded scandal.”
“No, Mauney,” she answered sadly. “I never believed it.”
“I can understand how you felt,” he admitted, “And I ought not to have been so precipitate. I ought to have denied it for you. I deny it now thoroughly and completely. Jean Byrne was an old school teacher of mine.”
“Oh, Mauney, you don’t need to explain. My faith in you never faltered a minute at any time. I was only afraid that I had hurt you.”
“You did, too,” he said, “But being hurt didn’t alter the fact that I loved you, and that I love you right now more than any thing on earth.”
He rose and walked to her chair.
“Freda,” he said tenderly, “I can’t go on living without you. You are necessary to me. Tell me that you care as little as I do about this scandal!”
“It’s nothing—just nothing,” she replied, rising and walking to the window.
He followed her, and as he saw her white gown rimmed with the strong sunshine, and her black hair caught in a fringe of golden light his heart bounded. Here before him was the living woman he loved. She was his treasure.
“I have waited long enough,” he said, taking her hand. “I have been a fool long enough, Freda. Our love is deeper than such a petty misunderstanding.”
“Yes,” she said very softly, without turning from the window, “It is deeper.”
With his hand on her shoulder he turned her face tohim, but as he was about to draw her close he noticed a sadness in her eyes that puzzled him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked gently.
“Tell me what’s right!” she replied, as she bit the tip of her handkerchief. “I’m sure I’ll kill you when I confess—and yet, I must tell you, so you can know what I’m like.”
“What do you mean?”
“Last night I promised to marry Ted Courtney.”
Mauney stared incredulously.
“Courtney!” he stammered. “But—Freda—why?”
Her eyes, as they turned toward the window, were dry and possessed of a bitter calmness.
“I don’t understand,” Mauney said, and paused. “You promised to marry Courtney. Do you mean that?”
“Yes—unfortunately.”
“But surely—” he began. “You’re not going to—to do it.”
“Yes, Mauney,” she said, “I’m going to be his wife. Will you let me explain?”
He stared at her mystified.
“Remember me for one virtue, will you?” she asked, as she turned to fondle his coat lapels.
“Remember that I never deceived you. How can I tell you? Last night,” she continued in a lower tone, as her eyes shifted to the pine branches beyond the window, “I couldn’t have been quite myself. I tried to fight against my feelings, but I was crazy with regret, and weak.”
“But, Freda.”
“Sometime,” she interrupted. “You may be able to understand. I’m afraid you couldn’t now.”
“But think,” he said. “You can break your promise. Youmust!” He drew her impetuously to him.
“Don’t, please don’t,” she implored. “I can’t let you.”
His arms were trembling and on his face she read dismay. “But have you never loved me?” he demanded, “all these months?”
“I am an impatient person, Mauney,” she replied, freeing herself from his arms. “With me love must be romance or nothing. I must be taken when the fire burns in my heart. I can’t control it. All I know is that somehow you missed it. And now I cannot—come to you.”
Mauney, plunging his hands into his pockets, wheeled suddenly towards the window and stood for a long moment in puzzled meditation.
“Do you love Courtney?” he asked suddenly, glancing towards her.
“That question,” she replied, “seems somehow to be outside the rights of our present conversation.”
Her face, which had been pale, flushed a little. “If you are going to demand too many explanations, then I’ll ask you how it was possible for you to put Max Lee between us?”
“Why, Freda,” he began.
“And don’t you think,” she interrupted, “that, if you are quite frank with yourself, you’ll admit that you played with me a little longer than I could be expected to stand?”
He did not reply.
“Mauney,” she said, seating herself with all appearance of complacency in a deep chair. “Let’s not insist on rebelling against what is inevitable.”
“But why should it be inevitable?” he asked. “Ithink I am sufficiently intelligent to grasp any reasonable explanation.”
He walked quickly towards her. “Look here,” he said, folding his arms on his chest and fastening her gaze, “if you don’t love Courtney, why the devil will you marry him?”
For a moment her dark eyes seemed to expand with her effort to capture a fit reply. Then she said, slowly and softly, as if, in any event, her realistic nature could find some solace in things as they are: “I am going to marry him because he loves me, and because I was weak enough to give myself to him.”
Like a flash the situation dawned on Mauney. It dawned so flashingly that he tried to hide from it all afternoon. Her impetuous nature! His own tardiness and his own misinterpreted duty to Maxwell Lee. While he had maintained loyalty to Lee, this woman, this Freda, whose very likeness had been burned into his soul, had been slipping from his fingers. And now, torn between self-blame and an effort to excuse her most recent fault, he began to recognize just how ultimate and hopeless the whole matter was.
He met Mr. Fitch, of Lantern Marsh, on the street and accepted a ride to the farm with him. Perhaps he would never have thought of going home had Fitch not suggested it. There was nothing at Lantern Marsh to go for, either. But he craved solitude, and at least his old home would afford him that. The old swamp would somehow understand him, he felt. There would be a queer kind of sympathy in that old swamp.
When he reached home he found a visitor, one he had almost forgotten and one whom he was not overjoyed at meeting in his present chaotic mood. David McBratney had been in Merlton for eight years and wasonly now, after so long an absence, refreshing his acquaintance with the people of his youth. It was fortunate, according to Dave, that Mauney had just happened in when he was there. But Mauney felt that the most unfortunate fact in the world was that he should have to converse politely with any one to-night. They were all just ready to sit down at the supper table—William with his shirt sleeves rolled up on his sun-burned arms, Evelyn placing her two red-faced little boys on stools, and McBratney being shown a place beside Mauney on the opposite side. When they were seated, William, carving knife in one hand and a long, serving fork in the other, looked up lazily from the crisply-browned roast on the platter toward his wife and made an awkward, snuffling sound. Mrs. Bard caught the hint.
“Mr. McBratney,” she announced, “will ask the blessing. Bow your heads, you kids!”
“Bless, O Lord, we beseech Thee, this food, forgive our sins, and guide us ever in the light of thy countenance. This we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
An amused smile flickered over William’s face as he winked unnoticed to Evelyn, his wife. Then, plunging his fork into the juicy meat, he proceeded to slice it.
“Dave,” he asked. “How’s your appetite?”
“Pretty good, Bill,” responded McBratney. “It’s a long time since I had a meal off o’ this old table, isn’t it?”
Evelyn Bard, opposite her husband, was busy spreading butter on thick slices of bread for her boys. Theystared in silence at the visitor, interrupting their occupation only long enough to accept the buttered bread and to begin chewing it.
McBratney had lost nothing of his swarthy complexion. His dark eyes were just as sharp, but more serious, than formerly. He wore a threadbare, yet neat, grey suit and a plain, blue four-in-hand necktie. Broad of shoulder, he lounged against the edge of the table, gazing half-meditatively at the children.
“Well, Dave,” remarked William, as they all fell to eating, “you hain’t never been back since you went away have you?”
“This is the first time, Bill. I got kind of lonesome to see the old folks; so I thought I’d come down for a few days. My mother tells me that dad has never been satisfied since he sold the farm. She says he drives down here about once a week, just to see how things are going.”
“Yep,” nodded William, “atleastonce a week, don’t he, Evelyn?”
She nodded. “The poor old chap can’t stay away,” she explained. “He never should have sold out, I always think. When a man gets attached to a place it’s foolish to leave, at his age, anyway.”
William was chewing his food thoughtfully, with an expression of narrow-eyed meditation.
“Dave,” he ventured, at length. “I always thought your old man never forgave you for leavin’ home. Course, I never said a word to him, understand. It takes all kinds of people to make up the world, and I’m not sayin’ you didn’t do the right thing, neither. Maybe some people might say you was wrong, but I got enoughto do without tendin’ to other people’s business.” William’s eye quickly took in McBratney’s business suit, while a look of curiosity came over his face. “Of course,” he said, in a tone that challenged explanation, “I always had an idea as you had gone into preachin’.”
“I studied at it awhile,” McBratney admitted, good-naturedly, “and then I suddenly quit it.”
“What made you quit it, Dave?” persisted William. “Was it costin’ too much?”
“No, it don’t cost too much, but I couldn’t see much head nor tail to it,” confessed McBratney. “I went on with it till they started talking about the Trinity, and—”
“Trinity, eh, Dave?”
“Yes, and a lot of other theories that don’t count. When they began splitting hairs about baptism and sacraments, I said to myself, ‘This isn’t pitching hay!’”
“That’s a fact, too, Dave,” nodded William, sagely.
“’Twasn’t whatIwas cut out for anyway,” said McBratney. “I couldn’t see how baptism nor sacraments, nor any such like, was going to save the world. I saw people every day in Merlton, who were so deep in sin that they were pretty near hopeless, and, although I don’t know much, I reckoned that these fine points of doctrine were all twaddle.”
“That’s what I always thought, Dave. You didn’t make no mistake there, I tell yuh.”
“No, Bill,” he replied. “All I knew was that something big and strong had taken hold of me. I knew that I had the love of God in my heart and that every ounce of muscle in my body was going to be used up helping some of these poor beggars on to their feet.”
“That’s right, Dave—that’s the only religion there is,”commented William. “You didn’t make no mistake there.”
“And so I just pitched those Hebrew books about as far as I could heave, and settled down into steady work at the settlement.”
“Good for you, Dave. What kind of settlement do you mean?”
“A settlement, Bill, is a kind of organization supported by various people for reclaiming bums and no-goods,” said McBratney. “We take in the riff-raff, without a word, give ’em clothes and grub, and get ’em work to do. We start them off in life again and give them a second chance to go straight. Our idea is to reclaim damaged goods, Bill, we try to—”
“Um-hum!” interjected William, “I can see the sense in that, Dave. What’s your work?”
“I’m on the employment department. I keep a list of jobs, and fit these bums into them. After they get started I go around and see how they’re doing. If they’re falling down on the job I brace them up a little or change their job for them.”
“Do you get much salary, Dave?”
“No. It isn’t the money I’m after, Bill. What I like about it is the game. Some of these bums have to be handled pretty carefully, and that’s my work. I never was afraid of anybody, and I’ve got to meet the man yet that can handle me.”
McBratney’s eyes sparkled with keen pleasure, and he squared his shoulders unconsciously as he spoke. Fighting the worst in men was his occupation. It was an energetic business of consecrated brawn. It was muscular Christianity of the most earnest and pugnacioustype. Mauney felt that here beside him at the table sat a kind of modern crusader. Onehadto be good if McBratney was about, or otherwise be able to defeat him in a pugilistic contest.
For two or three hours Mauney found no alternative, but to sit and talk with him. At any other time the occupation would have been bearable or even pleasant, for he discovered many admirable, and almost lovable, qualities—if one could dare to feel so tenderly toward a modern Sir Galahad. But Mauney was too full of his own troubles to-night to be otherwise than indifferent to McBratney. His heart seemed to be breaking beneath these troubles. He wanted to leave his brother and the others, and walk alone by himself by that old swamp in front of the house. McBratney had changed, William and Evelyn had changed, he himself was changing in some indefinite way, while all the universe seemed in flux. What existed without change?
Some one came walking up the lane and opened the kitchen door. It was the Englishman who rented the old McBratney farm. His face was mildly excited.
“Did you see the fire?” he asked.
“Where, Joe?” asked William, uneasily.
He stepped back on the verandah and looked towards the road, and Mauney saw a dull, red reflection on his face. In a moment they were all walking toward the road. By some means a fire had started among the dried grasses of the swamp, and was spreading rapidly, with nervous little flashes of flame shooting up through heavy, grey clouds of smoke. There was no wind to fan the fire, but the light grass carried it swiftly along in a curve like an enlarging wave.
“It’s going to get into them cedars, too,” said William.
“Well, let ’em go,” said McBratney. “The barn’s safe as long as there’s no wind. There’s nothing you can do, anyway.”
“I wonder how it got started?” queried William. “I seen some gypsies in that end o’ the field over there last night. Maybe they left some live coals.”
“That may be,” admitted Joe, the Englishman. “But I’ve heard as how a bog like this here sometimes generates its own fire by spontaneous combustion, I have.”
Their faces were all well lit up now by the reflection. Mauney glanced at the house. Its red bricks were illuminated by a ghastly, unnatural glow, while the window-panes began flashing spasmodically, one after the other, as if some one inside the house were going with a light from room to room. The fire ran swiftly toward the edge of the swamp, and the cedar boughs burst quickly into flame as if they were composed of explosive substance. Among a dozen trees the flame spread savagely until the appearance was that of huge, black torches, perched together to give a warning to the sky.
Held by the fascination which fire always possesses, they stood for two hours watching its ravages. From shore to shore the crimson, liquid wave crossed and rebounded until at last the cedars and hemlocks were all ablaze, forming a wide and brilliant fringe for a central, smoke-obscured space. It was not like the same place. It was not like the Lantern Marsh. Later, when the yellow flames had all gone out and the rising moon showed only the constant clouds of smudgy smoke risingand disappearing, Mauney sat alone on the front steps of the farmhouse, watching it with mute fascination. At last his marsh was completely defeated, ruined and blotted out. But a whimsical comfort possessed him. It was not defeated. Winter and then spring—and the unfailing reservoirs of the deep earth would pour water into the scorched basin again. Grass and trees would eventually grow up where now there was only ashes, to proclaim that life had gained the victory over death—that there was no death, but only life.
THIS BOOK IS A PRODUCTION OFTHE RYERSON PRESSTORONTO, CANADA
The Ryerson PressFounded 1829
The Ryerson Press
Founded 1829