"Keep the main-travelled road up the Coolly—it's the second house after crossin' the crick."
Theride from Milwaukee to the Mississippi is a fine ride at any time, superb in summer. To lean back in a reclining-chair and whirl away in a breezy July day, past lakes, groves of oak, past fields of barley being reaped, past hay-fields, where the heavy grass is toppling before the swift sickle, is a panorama of delight, a road full of delicious surprises, where down a sudden vista lakes open, or a distant wooded hill looms darkly blue, or swift streams, foaming deep down the solid rock, send whiffs of cool breezes in at the window.
It has majesty, breadth. The farming has nothing apparently petty about it. All seems vigorous, youthful, and prosperous. Mr. Howard McLane in his chair let his newspaper fall on his lap, and gazed out upon it with dreaming eyes. It had a certain mysterious glamour to him; the lakes were cooler and brighter to his eye, the greens fresher, and the grain more golden than to any one else, for he was coming back to it all after an absence of ten years. It was, besides,hisWest. He still took pride in being a Western man.
His mind all day flew ahead of the train to the little town, far on toward the Mississippi, where he had spent his boyhood and youth. As the train passed the Wisconsin River, with its curiously carved cliffs, its cold,dark, swift-swirling water eating slowly under cedar-clothed banks, Howard began to feel curious little movements of the heart, like those of a lover nearing his sweetheart.
The hills changed in character, growing more intimately recognizable. They rose higher as the train left the ridge and passed down into the Black River valley, and specifically into the La Crosse valley. They ceased to have any hint of upheavals of rock, and became simply parts of the ancient level left standing after the water had practically given up its post-glacial scooping action.
It was about six o'clock as he caught sight of the splendid broken line of hills on which his baby eyes had looked thirty-five years ago. A few minutes later, and the train drew up at the grimy little station set into the hillside, and, giving him just time to leap off, plunged on again toward the West. Howard felt a ridiculous weakness in his legs as he stepped out upon the broiling-hot, splintery planks of the station and faced the few idlers lounging about. He simply stood and gazed with the same intensity and absorption one of the idlers might show standing before the Brooklyn Bridge.
The town caught and held his eyes first. How poor and dull and sleepy and squalid it seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his left, and stretched away to the north, between two rows of the usual village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty. An unpaved street, with walled, drab-colored, miserable, rotting wooden buildings, with the inevitable battlements;the same—only worse and more squalid—was the town.
The same, only more beautiful still, was the majestic amphitheatre of green wooded hills that circled the horizon, and toward which he lifted his eyes. He thrilled at the sight.
"Glorious!" he cried involuntarily.
Accustomed to the White Mountains, to the Alleghanies, he had wondered if these hills would retain their old-time charm. They did. He took off his hat to them as he stood there. Richly wooded, with gently sloping green sides, rising to massive square or rounded tops with dim vistas, they glowed down upon the squat little town, gracious, lofty in their greeting, immortal in their vivid and delicate beauty.
He was a goodly figure of a man as he stood there beside his valise. Portly, erect, handsomely dressed, and with something unusually winning in his brown mustache and blue eyes, something scholarly suggested by the pinch-nose glasses, something strong in the repose of the head. He smiled as he saw how unchanged was the grouping of the old loafers on the salt-barrels and nail-kegs. He recognized most of them—a little dirtier, a little more bent, and a little grayer.
They sat in the same attitudes, spat tobacco with the same calm delight, and joked each other, breaking into short and sudden fits of laughter, and pounded each other on the back, just as when he was a student at the La Crosse Seminary and going to and fro daily on the train.
They ruminated on him as he passed, speculating in a perfectly audible way upon his business.
"Looks like a drummer."
"No, he ain't no drummer. See them Boston glasses?"
"That's so. Guess he's a teacher."
"Looks like a moneyed cuss."
"Bos'n, Iguess."
He knew the one who spoke last—Freeme Cole, a man who was the fighting wonder of Howard's boyhood, now degenerated into a stoop-shouldered, faded, garrulous, and quarrelsome old man. Yet there was something epic in the old man's stories, something enthralling in the dramatic power of recital.
Over by the blacksmith shop the usual game of "quaits" was in progress, and the drug-clerk on the corner was chasing a crony with the squirt-pump with which he was about to wash the windows. A few teams stood ankle-deep in the mud, tied to the fantastically gnawed pine pillars of the wooden awnings. A man on a load of hay was "jawing" with the attendant of the platform scales, who stood below, pad and pencil in hand.
"Hit 'im! hit 'im! Jump off and knock 'im!" suggested a bystander, jovially.
Howard knew the voice.
"Talk's cheap. Takes money to buy whiskey," he said, when the man on the load repeated his threat of getting off and whipping the scales-man.
"You're William McTurg," Howard said, coming up to him.
"I am, sir," replied the soft-voiced giant, turning and looking down on the stranger, with an amused twinkle in his deep brown eyes. He stood as erect as an Indian, though his hair and beard were white.
"I'm Howard McLane."
"Ye begin t' look it," said McTurg, removing his right hand from his pocket. "How are yeh?"
"I'm first-rate. How's mother and Grant?"
"Saw 'm ploughing corn as I came down. Guess he's all right. Want a boost?"
"Well, yes. Are you down with a team?"
"Yep. 'Bout goin' home. Climb right in. That's my rig, right there," nodding at a sleek bay colt hitched in a covered buggy. "Heave y'r grip under the seat."
They climbed into the seat after William had lowered the buggy-top and unhitched the horse from the post. The loafers were mildly curious. Guessed Bill had got hooked onto by a lightnin'-rod peddler, or somethin' o' that kind.
"Want to go by river, or 'round by the hills?"
"Hills, I guess."
The whole matter began to seem trivial, as if he had been away only for a month or two.
William McTurg was a man little given to talk. Even the coming back of a nephew did not cause any flow of questions or reminiscences. They rode in silence. He sat a little bent forward, the lines held carelessly in his hands, his great lion-like head swaying to and fro with the movement of the buggy.
As they passed familiar spots, the younger man broke the silence with a question.
"That's old man McElvaine's place, ain't it?"
"Yep."
"Old man living?"
"Iguesshe is. Husk more corn'n any man he c'n hire."
In the edge of the village they passed an open lot on the left, marked with circus-rings of different eras.
"There's the old ball-ground. Do they have circuses on it just the same as ever?"
"Just the same."
"What fun that field calls up! The games of ball we used to have! Do you play yet?"
"Sometimes. Can't stoop as well as I used to." He smiled a little. "Too much fat."
It all swept back upon Howard in a flood of names and faces and sights and sounds; something sweet and stirring somehow, though it had little of æsthetic charms at the time. They were passing along lanes now, between superb fields of corn, wherein ploughmen were at work. Kingbirds flew from post to post ahead of them; the insects called from the grass. The valley slowly outspread below them. The workmen in the fields were "turning out" for the night. They all had a word of chaff with McTurg.
Over the western wall of the circling amphitheatre the sun was setting. A few scattering clouds were drifting on the west wind, their shadows sliding down the green and purpled slopes. The dazzling sunlight flamed along the luscious velvety grass, and shot amidthe rounded, distant purple peaks, and streamed in bars of gold and crimson across the blue mist of the narrower upper Coollies.
The heart of the young man swelled with pleasure almost like pain, and the eyes of the silent older man took on a far-off, dreaming look, as he gazed at the scene which had repeated itself a thousand times in his life, but of whose beauty he never spoke.
Far down to the left was the break in the wall through which the river ran on its way to join the Mississippi. They climbed slowly among the hills, and the valley they had left grew still more beautiful as the squalor of the little town was hid by the dusk of distance. Both men were silent for a long time. Howard knew the peculiarities of his companion too well to make any remarks or ask any questions, and besides it was a genuine pleasure to ride with one who understood that silence was the only speech amid such splendors.
Once they passed a little brook singing in a mournfully sweet way its eternal song over its pebbles. It called back to Howard the days when he and Grant, his younger brother, had fished in this little brook for trout, with trousers rolled above the knee and wrecks of hats upon their heads.
"Any trout left?" he asked.
"Not many. Little fellers." Finding the silence broken, William asked the first question since he met Howard. "Le' 's see: you're a show feller now? B'long to a troupe?"
"Yes, yes; I'm an actor."
"Pay much?"
"Pretty well."
That seemed to end William's curiosity about the matter.
"Ah, there's our old house, ain't it?" Howard broke out, pointing to one of the houses farther up the Coolly. "It'll be a surprise to them, won't it?"
"Yep; only they don't live there."
"What! They don't!"
"Who does?"
"Dutchman."
Howard was silent for some moments. "Who lives on the Dunlap place?"
"'Nother Dutchman."
"Where's Grant living, anyhow?"
"Farther up the Coolly."
"Well, then, I'd better get out here, hadn't I?"
"Oh, I'll drive ye up."
"No, I'd rather walk."
The sun had set, and the Coolly was getting dusk when Howard got out of McTurg's carriage and set off up the winding lane toward his brother's house. He walked slowly to absorb the coolness and fragrance and color of the hour. The katydids sang a rhythmic song of welcome to him. Fireflies were in the grass. A whippoorwill in the deep of the wood was calling weirdly, and an occasional night-hawk, flying high, gave his grating shriek, or hollow boom, suggestive and resounding.
He had been wonderfully successful, and yet had carried into his success as a dramatic author as well as actor a certain puritanism that made him a paradox to his fellows. He was one of those actors who are always in luck, and the best of it was he kept and made use of his luck. Jovial as he appeared, he was inflexible as granite against drink and tobacco. He retained through it all a certain freshness of enjoyment that made him one of the best companions in the profession; and now, as he walked on, the hour and the place appealed to him with great power. It seemed to sweep away the life that came between.
How close it all was to him, after all! In his restless life, surrounded by the glare of electric lights, painted canvas, hot colors, creak of machinery, mock trees, stones, and brooks, he had not lost, but gained, appreciation for the coolness, quiet, and low tones, the shyness of the wood and field.
In the farmhouse ahead of him a light was shining as he peered ahead, and his heart gave another painful movement. His brother was awaiting him there, and his mother, whom he had not seen for ten years and who had lost the power to write. And when Grant wrote, which had been more and more seldom of late, his letters had been cold and curt.
He began to feel that in the pleasure and excitement of his life he had grown away from his mother and brother. Each summer he had said, "Well, now, I'll go homethisyear, sure." But a new play to be produced, or a new yachting trip, or a tour of Europe, hadput the home-coming off; and now it was with a distinct consciousness of neglect of duty that he walked up to the fence and looked into the yard, where William had told him his brother lived.
It was humble enough—a small white story-and-a-half structure, with a wing set in the midst of a few locust-trees; a small drab-colored barn with a sagging ridge-pole; a barnyard full of mud, in which a few cows were standing, fighting the flies and waiting to be milked. An old man was pumping water at the well; the pigs were squealing from a pen near by; a child was crying.
Instantly the beautiful, peaceful valley was forgotten. A sickening chill struck into Howard's soul as he looked at it all. In the dim light he could see a figure milking a cow. Leaving his valise at the gate, he entered and walked up to the old man, who had finished pumping and was about to go to feed the hogs.
"Good-evening," Howard began. "Does Mr. Grant McLane live here?"
"Yes, sir, he does. He's right over there milkin'."
"I'll go over there an—"
"Don't b'lieve I would. It's darn muddy over there. It's been turrible rainy. He'll be done in a minute, anyway."
"Very well; I'll wait."
As he waited, he could hear a woman's fretful voice and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill-temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm-scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heartsank. All the joy of the home-coming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the platform by the pump.
"Good-evening," said Howard, out of the dusk.
Grant stared a moment. "Good-evening."
Howard knew the voice, though it was older and deeper and more sullen. "Don't you know me, Grant? I am Howard."
The man approached him, gazing intently at his face. "You are?" after a pause. "Well, I'm glad to see you, but I can't shake hands. That damned cow had laid down in the mud."
They stood and looked at each other. Howard's cuffs, collar, and shirt, alien in their elegance, showed through the dusk, and a glint of light shot out from the jewel of his necktie, as the light from the house caught it at the right angle. As they gazed in silence at each other, Howard divined something of the hard, bitter feeling that came into Grant's heart, as he stood there, ragged, ankle-deep in muck, his sleeves rolled up, a shapeless old straw hat on his head.
The gleam of Howard's white hands angered him. When he spoke, it was in a hard, gruff tone, full of rebellion.
"Well, go in the house and set down. I'll be in soon's I strain the milk and wash the dirt off my hands."
"But mother—"
"She's 'round somewhere. Just knock on the door under the porch round there."
Howard went slowly around the corner of the house, past a vilely smelling rain-barrel, toward the west. A gray-haired woman was sitting in a rocking-chair on the porch, her hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on the faintly yellow sky, against which the hills stood, dim purple silhouettes, and on which the locust trees were etched as fine as lace. There was sorrow, resignation, and a sort of dumb despair in her attitude.
Howard stood, his throat swelling till it seemed as if he would suffocate. This was his mother—the woman who bore him, the being who had taken her life in her hand for him; and he, in his excited and pleasurable life, had neglected her!
He stepped into the faint light before her. She turned and looked at him without fear. "Mother!" he said. She uttered one little, breathing, gasping cry, called his name, rose, and stood still. He bounded up the steps, and took her in his arms.
"Mother! Dear old mother!"
In the silence, almost painful, which followed, an angry woman's voice could be heard inside: "I don't care! I ain't goin' to wear myself out fer him. He c'n eat out here with us, or else—"
Mrs. McLane began speaking. "Oh, I've longed to see yeh, Howard. I was afraid you wouldn't come till—too late."
"What do you mean, mother? Ain't you well?"
"I don't seem to be able to do much now 'cept sit around and knit a little. I tried to pick some berries the other day, and I got so dizzy I had to give it up."
"You mustn't work. Youneedn'twork. Why didn't you write to me how you were?" Howard asked, in an agony of remorse.
"Well, we felt as if you probably had all you could do to take care of yourself. Are you married, Howard?" she broke off to ask.
"No, mother; and there ain't any excuse for me—not a bit," he said, dropping back into her colloquialisms. "I'm ashamed when I think of how long it's been since I saw you. I could have come."
"It don't matter now," she interrupted gently. "It's the way things go. Our boys grow up and leave us."
"Well, come in to supper," said Grant's ungracious voice from the doorway. "Come, mother."
Mrs. McLane moved with difficulty. Howard sprang to her aid, and, leaning on his arm, she went through the little sitting room, which was unlighted, out into the kitchen, where the supper table stood near the cook-stove.
"How.—this is my wife," said Grant, in a cold, peculiar tone.
Howard bowed toward a remarkably handsome young woman, on whose forehead was a scowl, which did not change as she looked at him and the old lady.
"Set down anywhere," was the young woman's cordial invitation.
Howard sat down next his mother, and facing the wife, who had a small, fretful child in her arms. At Howard's left was the old man, Lewis. The supper was spread upon a gay-colored oil-cloth, and consisted of a pan of milk, set in the midst, with bowls at eachplate. Beside the pan was a dipper and a large plate of bread, and at one end of the table was a dish of fine honey.
A boy of about fourteen leaned upon the table, his bent shoulders making him look like an old man. His hickory shirt, like Grant's, was still wet with sweat, and discolored here and there with grease, or green from grass. His hair, freshly wet and combed, was smoothed away from his face, and shone in the light of the kerosene lamp. As he ate, he stared at Howard, as though he would make an inventory of each thread of the visitor's clothing.
"Did I look like that at his age?" thought Howard.
"You see we live just about the same as ever," said Grant, as they began eating, speaking with a grim, almost challenging, inflection.
The two brothers studied each other curiously, as they talked of neighborhood scenes. Howard seemed incredibly elegant and handsome to them all, with his rich, soft clothing, his spotless linen, and his exquisite enunciation and ease of speech. He had always been "smooth-spoken," and he had become "elegantly persuasive," as his friends said of him, and it was a large factor in his success.
Every detail of the kitchen, the heat, the flies buzzing aloft, the poor furniture, the dress of the people—all smote him like the lash of a wire whip. His brother was a man of great character. He could see that now. His deep-set, gray eyes and rugged face showed at thirty a man of great natural ability. He had more of theScotch in his face than Howard, and he looked much older.
He was dressed, like the old man and the boy, in a checked shirt, without vest. His suspenders, once gay-colored, had given most of their color to his shirt, and had marked irregular broad bands of pink and brown and green over his shoulders. His hair was uncombed, merely pushed away from his face. He wore a mustache only, though his face was covered with a week's growth of beard. His face was rather gaunt, and was brown as leather.
Howard could not eat much. He was disturbed by his mother's strange silence and oppression, and sickened by the long-drawn gasps with which the old man ate his bread and milk, and by the way the boy ate. He had his knife gripped tightly in his fist, knuckles up, and was scooping honey upon his bread.
The baby, having ceased to be afraid, was curious, gazing silently at the stranger.
"Hello, little one! Come and see your uncle. Eh? Course 'e will," cooed Howard, in the attempt to escape the depressing atmosphere. The little one listened to his inflections as a kitten does, and at last lifted its arms in sign of surrender.
The mother's face cleared up a little. "I declare, she wants to go to you."
"Course she does. Dogs and kittens always come to me when I call 'em. Why shouldn't my own niece come?"
He took the little one and began walking up anddown the kitchen with her, while she pulled at his beard and nose. "I ought to have you, my lady, in my new comedy. You'd bring down the house."
"You don't mean to say you put babies on the stage, Howard," said his mother in surprise.
"Oh, yes. Domestic comedy must have a baby these days."
"Well, that's another way of makin' a livin', sure," said Grant. The baby had cleared the atmosphere a little. "I s'pose you fellers make a pile of money."
"Sometimes we make a thousand a week; oftener we don't."
"A thousand dollars!" They all stared.
"A thousand dollars sometimes, and then lose it all the next week in another town. The dramatic business is a good deal like gambling—you take your chances."
"I wish you weren't in it, Howard. I don't like to have my son—"
"I wish I was in somethin' that paid better than farmin'. Anything under God's heavens is better 'n farmin'," said Grant.
"No, I ain't laid up much," Howard went on, as if explaining why he hadn't helped them. "Costs me a good deal to live, and I need about ten thousand dollars leeway to work on. I've made a good living, but I—I ain't made any money."
Grant looked at him, darkly meditative.
Howard went on: "How'd ye come to sell the old farm? I was in hopes—"
"How'd we come to sell it?" said Grant with terriblebitterness. "We had something on it that didn't leave anything to sell. You probably don't remember anything about it, but there was a mortgage on it that eat us up in just four years by the almanac. 'Most killed mother to leave it. We wrote to you for money, but I don't suppose you rememberthat."
"No, you didn't."
"Yes, I did."
"When was it? I don't—why, it's—I never received it. It must have been that summer I went with Bob Manning to Europe." Howard put the baby down and faced his brother. "Why, Grant, you didn't think I refused to help?"
"Well, it looked that way. We never heard a word from yeh, all summer, and when y' did write, it was all about yerself 'n plays 'n things we didn't know anything about. I swore to God I'd never write to you again, and I won't."
"But, good heavens! I never got it."
"Suppose you didn't. You might have known we were poor as Job's off-ox. Everybody is that earns a living. We fellers on the farm have to earn a livin' for ourselves and you fellers that don't work. I don't blame you. I'd do it if I could."
"Grant, don't talk so! Howard didn't realize—"
"I tell yeh I don't blame him! Only I don't want him to come the brotherly business over me, after livin' as he has—that's all." There was a bitter accusation in the man's voice.
Howard leaped to his feet, his face twitching.
"By God, I'll go back to-morrow morning!" he threatened.
"Go, an' be damned! I don't care what yeh do," Grant growled, rising and going out.
"Boys," called the mother, piteously, "it's terrible to see you quarrel."
"But I'm not to blame, mother," cried Howard, in a sickness that made him white as chalk. "The man is a savage. I came home to help you all, not to quarrel."
"Grant's got one o' his fits on," said the young wife, speaking for the first time. "Don't pay any attention to him. He'll be all right in the morning."
"If it wasn't for you, mother, I'd leave now, and never see that savage again."
He lashed himself up and down in the room, in horrible disgust and hate of his brother and of this home in his heart. He remembered his tender anticipations of the home-coming with a kind of self-pity and disgust. This was his greeting!
He went to bed, to toss about on the hard, straw-filled mattress in the stuffy little best room. Tossing, writhing under the bludgeoning of his brother's accusing inflections, a dozen times he said, with a half-articulate snarl:
"He can go to hell! I'll not try to do anything more for him. I don't care if heismy brother; he has no right to jump on me like that. On the night of my return, too. My God! he is a brute, a fool!"
He thought of the presents in his trunk and valise, which he couldn't show to him that night after what hadbeen said. He had intended to have such a happy evening of it, such a tender reunion! It was to be so bright and cheery!
In the midst of his cursings—his hot indignation—would come visions of himself in his own modest rooms. He seemed to be yawning and stretching in his beautiful bed, the sun shining in, his books, foils, pictures, around him to say good-morning and tempt him to rise, while the squat little clock on the mantel struck eleven warningly.
He could see the olive walls, the unique copper-and-crimson arabesque frieze (his own selection), and the delicate draperies; an open grate full of glowing coals, to temper the sea-winds; and in the midst of it, between a landscape by Enneking and an Indian in a canoe in a cañon, by Brush, he saw a sombre landscape by a master greater than Millet, a melancholy subject, treated with pitiless fidelity.
A farm in the valley! Over the mountains swept jagged, gray, angry, sprawling clouds, sending a freezing, thin drizzle of rain, as they passed, upon a man following a plough. The horses had a sullen and weary look, and their manes and tails streamed sidewise in the blast. The ploughman, clad in a ragged gray coat, with uncouth, muddy boots upon his feet, walked with his head inclined toward the sleet, to shield his face from the cold and sting of it. The soil rolled away black and sticky and with a dull sheen upon it. Near by, a boy with tears on his cheeks was watching cattle; a dog seated near, his back to the gale.
As he looked at this picture, his heart softened. He looked down at the sleeve of his soft and fleecy nightshirt, at his white, rounded arm, muscular, yet fine as a woman's, and when he looked for the picture it was gone. Then came again the assertive odor of stagnant air, laden with camphor; he felt the springless bed under him, and caught dimly a few soap-advertising lithographs on the walls. He thought of his brother, in his still more inhospitable bedroom, disturbed by the child, condemned to rise at five o'clock and begin another day's pitiless labor. His heart shrank and quivered, and the tears started to his eyes.
"I forgive him, poor fellow! He's not to blame."
Hewoke, however, with a dull, languid pulse, and an oppressive melancholy on his heart. He looked around the little room, clean enough, but oh, how poor! how barren! Cold plaster walls, a cheap wash-stand, a wash-set of three pieces, with a blue band around each; the windows rectangular, and fitted with fantastic green shades.
Outside he could hear the bees humming. Chickens were merrily moving about. Cow-bells far up the road were sounding irregularly. A jay came by and yelled an insolent reveille, and Howard sat up. He could hear nothing in the house but the rattle of pans on the back side of the kitchen. He looked at his watch, which indicated half-past seven. Grant was already in the field,after milking, currying the horses, and eating breakfast—had been at work two hours and a half.
He dressed himself hurriedly, in a negligé shirt, with a Windsor scarf, light-colored, serviceable trousers with a belt, russet shoes, and a tennis hat—a knockabout costume, he considered. His mother, good soul, thought it a special suit put on for her benefit, and admired it through her glasses.
He kissed her with a bright smile, nodded at Laura, the young wife, and tossed the baby, all in a breath, and with the manner, as he himself saw, of the returned captain in the war-dramas of the day.
"Been to breakfast?" He frowned reproachfully. "Why didn't you call me? I wanted to get up, just as I used to, at sunrise."
"We thought you was tired, and so we didn't—"
"Tired! Just wait till you see me help Grant pitch hay or something. Hasn't finished his haying yet, has he?"
"No, I guess not. He will to-day if it don't rain again."
"Well, breakfast is all ready—Howard," said Laura, hesitating a little on his name.
"Good! I am ready for it. Bacon and eggs, as I'm a jay! Just what I was wanting. I was saying to myself: 'Now if they'll only get bacon and eggs and hot biscuits and honey—' Oh, say, mother, I heard the bees humming this morning; same noise they used to make when I was a boy, exactly. Must be the same bees,—Hey, you young rascal! come here and have some breakfast with your uncle."
"I never saw her take to any one so quick," Laura said, emphasizing the baby's sex. She had on a clean calico dress and a gingham apron, and she looked strong and fresh and handsome. Her head was intellectual, her eyes full of power. She seemed anxious to remove the impression of her unpleasant looks and words the night before. Indeed, it would have been hard to resist Howard's sunny good-nature.
The baby laughed and crowed. The old mother could not take her dim eyes off the face of her son, but sat smiling at him as he ate and rattled on. When he rose from the table at last, after eating heartily and praising it all, he said, with a smile:
"Well, now I'll just telephone down to the express and have my trunk brought up. I've got a few little things in there you'll enjoy seeing. But this fellow," indicating the baby, "I didn't take him into account. But never mind: Uncle How.'ll make that all right."
"You ain't going to lay it up agin Grant, be you, my son?" Mrs. McLane faltered, as they went out into the best room.
"Of course not! He didn't mean it. Now, can't you send word down and have my trunk brought up? Or shall I have to walk down?"
"I guess I'll see somebody goin' down," said Laura.
"All right. Now for the hay-field," he smiled, and went out into the glorious morning.
The circling hills were the same, yet not the same as at night, a cooler, tenderer, more subdued cloak of color lay upon them. Far down the valley a cool, deep, impalpable,blue mist hung, beneath which one divined the river ran, under its elms and basswoods and wild grapevines. On the shaven slopes of the hill cattle and sheep were feeding, their cries and bells coming to the ear with a sweet suggestiveness. There was something immemorial in the sunny slopes dotted with red and brown and gray cattle.
Walking toward the haymakers, Howard felt a twinge of pain and distrust. Would Grant ignore it all and smile—
He stopped short. He had not seen Grant smile in so long—he couldn't quite see him smiling. He had been cold and bitter for years. When he came up to them, Grant was pitching on; the old man was loading, and the boy was raking after.
"Good-morning," Howard cried cheerily; the old man nodded, the boy stared. Grant growled something, without looking up. These "finical" things of saying good-morning and good-night are not much practised in such homes as Grant McLane's.
"Need some help? I'm ready to take a hand. Got on my regimentals this morning."
Grant looked at him a moment. "You look it."
Howard smiled. "Gimme a hold on that fork, and I'll show you. I'm not so soft as I look, now you bet."
He laid hold upon the fork in Grant's hands, who released it sullenly and stood back sneering. Howard struck the fork into the pile in the old way, threw his left hand to the end of the polished handle, brought it down into the hollow of his thigh, and laid out hisstrength till the handle bent like a bow. "Oop she rises!" he called laughingly, as the whole pile began slowly to rise, and finally rolled upon the high load.
"Oh, I ain't forgot how to do it," he laughed, as he looked around at the boy, who was eyeing the tennis suit with a devouring gaze.
Grant was studying him, too, but not in admiration.
"I shouldn't say you had," said the old man, tugging at the forkful.
"Mighty funny to come out here and do a little of this. But if you had to come here and do it all the while, you wouldn't look so white and soft in the hands," Grant said, as they moved on to another pile. "Give me that fork. You'll be spoiling your fine clothes."
"Oh, these don't matter. They're made for this kind of thing."
"Oh, are they? I guess I'll dress in that kind of a rig. What did that shirt cost? I need one."
"Six dollars a pair; but then it's old."
"And them pants," he pursued; "they cost six dollars, too, didn't they?"
Howard's face darkened. He saw his brother's purpose. He resented it. "They cost fifteen dollars, if you want to know, and the shoes cost six-fifty. This ring on my cravat cost sixty dollars, and the suit I had on last night cost eighty-five. My suits are made by Breckstein, on Fifth Avenue, if you want to patronize him," he ended brutally, spurred on by the sneer in his brother's eyes. "I'll introduce you."
"Good idea," said Grant, with a forced, mocking smile."I need just such a get-up for haying and corn-ploughing. Singular I never thought of it. Now my pants cost eighty-five cents, s'spenders fifteen, hat twenty, shoes one-fifty; stockin's I don't bother about."
He had his brother at a disadvantage, and he grew fluent and caustic as he went on, almost changing places with Howard, who took the rake out of the boy's hand, and followed, raking up the scatterings.
"Singular we fellers here are discontented and mulish, ain't it? Singular we don't believe your letters when you write, sayin', 'I just about make a live of it'? Singular we think the country's goin' to hell, we fellers, in a two-dollar suit, wadin' around in the mud or sweatin' around in the hay-field, while you fellers lay around New York and smoke and wear good clothes and toady to millionaires?"
Howard threw down the rake and folded his arms. "My God! you're enough to make a man forget the same mother bore us!"
"I guess it wouldn't take much to make you forget that. You ain't put much thought on me nor her for ten years."
The old man cackled, the boy grinned, and Howard, sick and weak with anger and sorrow, turned away and walked down toward the brook. He had tried once more to get near his brother, and had failed. Oh, God! how miserably, pitiably! The hot blood gushed all over him as he thought of the shame and disgrace of it.
He, a man associating with poets, artists, sought after by brilliant women, accustomed to deference even fromsuch people, to be sneered at, outfaced, shamed, shoved aside, by a man in a stained hickory shirt and patched overalls, and that man his brother! He lay down on the bright grass, with the sheep all around him, and writhed and groaned with the agony and despair of it.
And worst of all, underneath it was a consciousness that Grant was right in distrusting him. Hehadneglected him; hehadsaid, "I guess they're getting along all right." He had put them behind him when the invitation to spend summer on the Mediterranean or in the Adirondacks, came.
"What can I do? What can I do?" he groaned.
The sheep nibbled the grass near him, the jays called pertly, "Shame, shame," a quail piped somewhere on the hillside, and the brook sung a soft, soothing melody that took away at last the sharp edge of his pain, and he sat up and gazed down the valley, bright with the sun and apparently filled with happy and prosperous people.
Suddenly a thought seized him. He stood up so suddenly that the sheep fled in affright. He leaped the brook, crossed the flat, and began searching in the bushes on the hillside. "Hurrah!" he said, with a smile.
He had found an old road which he used to travel when a boy—a road that skirted the edge of the valley, now grown up to brush, but still passable for footmen. As he ran lightly along down the beautiful path, under oaks and hickories, past masses of poison-ivy, under hanging grapevines, through clumps of splendid hazel-nutbushes loaded with great sticky, rough, green burs, his heart threw off part of its load.
How it all came back to him! How many days, when the autumn sun burned the frost of the bushes, had he gathered hazel-nuts here with his boy and girl friends—Hugh and Shelley McTurg, Rome Sawyer, Orrin McIlvaine, and the rest! What had become of them all? How he had forgotten them!
This thought stopped him again, and he fell into a deep muse, leaning against an oak tree, and gazing into the vast fleckless space above. The thrilling, inscrutable mystery of life fell upon him like a blinding light. Why was he living in the crush and thunder and mental unrest of a great city, while his companions, seemingly his equals in powers, were milking cows, making butter, and growing corn and wheat in the silence and drear monotony of the farm?
His boyish sweethearts! their names came back to his ear now, with a dull, sweet sound as of faint bells. He saw their faces, their pink sunbonnets tipped back upon their necks, their brown ankles flying with the swift action of the scurrying partridge. His eyes softened, he took off his hat. The sound of the wind and the leaves moved him almost to tears.
A woodpecker gave a shrill, high-keyed, sustained cry, "Ki, ki, ki!" and he started from his revery, the dapples of the sun and shade falling upon his lithe figure as he hurried on down the path.
He came at last to a field of corn that ran to the very wall of a large weather-beaten house, the sight of whichmade his breathing quicker. It was the place where he was born. The mystery of his life began there. In the branches of those poplar and hickory trees he had swung and sung in the rushing breeze, fearless as a squirrel. Here was the brook where, like a larger kildee, he with Grant had waded after crawfish, or had stolen upon some wary trout, rough-cut pole in hand.
Seeing someone in the garden, he went down along the corn-row through the rustling ranks of green leaves. An old woman was picking berries, a squat and shapeless figure.
"Good-morning," he called cheerily.
"Morgen," she said, looking up at him with a startled and very red face. She was German in every line of her body.
"Ich bin Herr McLane," he said, after a pause.
"So?" she replied, with a questioning inflection.
"Yah; ich bin Herr Grant's Bruder."
"Ach, so!" she said, with a downward inflection. "Ich no spick Inglish. No spick Inglis."
"Ich bin durstig," he said. Leaving her pans, she went with him to the house, which was what he really wanted to see.
"Ich bin hier geboren."
"Ach, so!" She recognized the little bit of sentiment, and said some sentences in German whose general meaning was sympathy. She took him to the cool cellar where the spring had been trained to run into a tank containing pans of cream and milk; she gave him a cool draught from a large tin cup, and at his requestwent with him upstairs. The house was the same, but somehow seemed cold and empty. It was clean and sweet, but it showed so little evidence of being lived in. The old part, which was built of logs, was used as best room, and modelled after the best rooms of the neighboring "Yankee" homes, only it was emptier, without the cabinet organ and the rag-carpet and the chromos.
The old fireplace was bricked up and plastered—the fireplace beside which, in the far-off days, he had lain on winter nights, to hear his uncles tell tales of hunting, or to hear them play the violin, great dreaming giants that they were.
The old woman went out and left him sitting there, the centre of a swarm of memories, coming and going like so many ghostly birds and butterflies.
A curious heartache and listlessness, a nerveless mood came on him. What was it worth, anyhow—success? Struggle, strife, trampling on some one else. His play crowding out some other poor fellow's hope. The hawk eats the partridge, the partridge eats the flies and bugs, the bugs eat each other, and the hawk, when he in his turn is shot by man. So in the world of business, the life of one man seemed to him to be drawn from the life of another man, each success to spring from other failures.
He was like a man from whom all motives had been withdrawn. He was sick, sick to the heart. Oh, to be a boy again! An ignorant baby, pleased with a block and string, with no knowledge and no care of the great unknown! To lay his head again on his mother'sbosom and rest! To watch the flames on the hearth!—
Why not? Was not that the very thing to do? To buy back the old farm? It would cripple him a little for the next season, but he could do it. Think of it! To see his mother back in the old home, with the fireplace restored, the old furniture in the sitting room around her, and fine new things in the parlor!
His spirits rose again. Grant couldn't stand out when he brought to him a deed of the farm. Surely his debt would be cancelled when he had seen them all back in the wide old kitchen. He began to plan and to dream. He went to the windows, and looked out on the yard to see how much it had changed.
He'd build a new barn and buy them a new carriage. His heart glowed again, and his lips softened into their usual feminine grace—lips a little full and falling easily into curves.
The old German woman came in at length, bringing some cakes and a bowl of milk, smiling broadly and hospitably as she waddled forward.
"Ach! Goot!" he said, smacking his lips over the pleasant draught.
"Wo ist ihre goot mann?" he inquired, ready for business.
WhenGrant came in at noon Mrs. McLane met him at the door with a tender smile on her face.
"Where's Howard, Grant?"
"I don't know," he replied, in a tone that implied "I don't care."
The dim eyes clouded with quick tears.
"Ain't you seen him?"
"Not since nine o'clock."
"Where do you think he is?"
"I tell yeh I don't know. He'll take care of himself; don't worry."
He flung off his hat and plunged into the wash-basin. His shirt was wet with sweat and covered with dust of the hay and fragments of leaves. He splashed his burning face with the water, paying no further attention to his mother. She spoke again, very gently, in reproof:
"Grant, why do you stand out against Howard so?"
"I don't stand out against him," he replied harshly, pausing with the towel in his hands. His eyes were hard and piercing. "But if he expects me to gush over his coming back, he's fooled, that's all. He's left us to paddle our own canoe all this while, and, so far asI'mconcerned, he can leave us alone hereafter. He looked out for his precious hide mighty well, and now he comes back here to play big gun and pat us on the head. I don't propose to let him come that over me."
Mrs. McLane knew too well the temper of her son to say any more, but she inquired about Howard of the old hired man.
"He went off down the valley. He 'n' Grant had s'mwords, and he pulled out down toward the old farm. That's the last I see of 'im."
Laura took Howard's part at the table. "Pity youcan't be decent," she said, brutally direct as usual. "You treat Howard as if he was a—a—I do' know what."
"Will you let me alone?"
"No, I won't. If you think I'm going to set by an' agree to your bullyraggin' him, you're mistaken. It's a shame! You're mad 'cause he's succeeded and you hain't. He ain't to blame for his brains. If you and I'd had any, we'd 'a' succeeded too. It ain't our fault, and it ain't his; so what's the use?"
A look came into Grant's face which the wife knew meant bitter and terrible silence. He ate his dinner without another word.
It was beginning to cloud up. A thin, whitish, all-pervasive vapor which meant rain was dimming the sky, and Grant forced his hands to their utmost during the afternoon, in order to get most of the down hay in before the rain came. He was pitching from the load into the barn when Howard came by, just before one o'clock.
It was windless there. The sun fell through the white mist with undiminished fury, and the fragrant hay sent up a breath that was hot as an oven-draught. Grant was a powerful man, and there was something majestic in his action as he rolled the huge flakes of hay through the door. The sweat poured from his face like rain, and he was forced to draw his drenched sleeve across his face to clear away the blinding sweat that poured into his eyes.
Howard stood and looked at him in silence, remembering how often he had worked there in that furnace-heat,his muscles quivering, cold chills running over his flesh, red shadows dancing before his eyes.
His mother met him at the door, anxiously, but smiled as she saw his pleasant face and cheerful eyes.
"You're a little late, m' son."
Howard spent most of the afternoon sitting with his mother on the porch, or under the trees, lying sprawled out like a boy, resting at times with sweet forgetfulness of the whole world, but feeling a dull pain whenever he remembered the stern, silent man pitching hay in the hot sun on the torrid side of the barn.
His mother did not say anything about the quarrel; she feared to reopen it. She talked mainly of old times in a gentle monotone of reminiscence, while he listened, looking up into her patient face.
The heat slowly lessened as the sun sank down toward the dun clouds rising like a more distant and majestic line of mountains beyond the western hills. The sound of cow-bells came irregularly to the ear, and the voices and sounds of the haying-fields had a jocund, pleasant sound to the ear of the city-dweller.
He was very tender. Everything conspired to make him simple, direct, and honest.
"Mother, if you'll only forgive me for staying away so long, I'll surely come to see you every summer."
She had nothing to forgive. She was so glad to have him there at her feet—her great, handsome, successful boy! She could only love him and enjoy him every moment of the precious days. If Grant would only reconcile himself to Howard! That was the great thorn in her flesh.
Howard told her how he had succeeded.
"It was luck, mother. First I met Cook, and he introduced me to Jake Saulsman of Chicago. Jake asked me to go to New York with him, and—I don't know why—took a fancy to me some way. He introduced me to a lot of the fellows in New York, and they all helped me along. I did nothing to merit it. Everybody helps me. Anybody can succeed in that way."
The doting mother thought it not at all strange that they all helped him.
At the supper table Grant was gloomily silent, ignoring Howard completely. Mrs. McLane sat and grieved silently, not daring to say a word in protest. Laura and the baby tried to amuse Howard, and under cover of their talk the meal was eaten.
The boy fascinated Howard. He "sawed wood" with a rapidity and uninterruptedness which gave alarm. He had the air of coaling up for a long voyage.
"At that age," Howard thought, "I must have gripped my knife in my right hand so, and poured my tea into my saucer so. I must have buttered and bit into a huge slice of bread just so, and chewed at it with a smacking sound in just that way. I must have gone to the length of scooping up honey with my knife-blade."
The sky was magically beautiful over all this squalor and toil and bitterness, from five till seven—a moving hour. Again the falling sun streamed in broad banners across the valleys; again the blue mist lay far down the Coolly over the river; the cattle called from the hills in the moistening, sonorous air; the bells camein a pleasant tangle of sound; the air pulsed with the deepening chorus of katydids and other nocturnal singers.
Sweet and deep as the very springs of his life was all this to the soul of the elder brother; but in the midst of it, the younger man, in ill-smelling clothes and great boots that chafed his feet, went out to milk the cows,—on whose legs the flies and mosquitoes swarmed, bloated with blood,—to sit by the hot side of the cow and be lashed with her tail as she tried frantically to keep the savage insects from eating her raw.
"The poet who writes of milking the cows does it from the hammock, looking on," Howard soliloquized, as he watched the old man Lewis racing around the filthy yard after one of the young heifers that had kicked over the pail in her agony with the flies, and was unwilling to stand still and be eaten alive.
"So,so! you beast!" roared the old man, as he finally cornered the shrinking, nearly frantic creature.
"Don't you want to look at the garden?" asked Mrs. McLane of Howard; and they went out among the vegetables and berries.
The bees were coming home heavily laden and crawling slowly into the hives. The level, red light streamed through the trees, blazed along the grass, and lighted a few old-fashioned flowers into red and gold flame. It was beautiful, and Howard looked at it through his half-shut eyes as the painters do, and turned away with a sigh at the sound of blows where the wet and grimy men were assailing the frantic cows.
"There's Wesley with your trunk," Mrs. McLane said, recalling him to himself.
Wesley helped him carry the trunk in, and waved off thanks.
"Oh, that's all right," he said; and Howard knew the Western man too well to press the matter of pay.
As he went in an hour later and stood by the trunk, the dull ache came back into his heart. How he had failed! It seemed like a bitter mockery now to show his gifts.
Grant had come in from his work, and with his feet released from his chafing boots, in his wet shirt and milk-splashed overalls, sat at the kitchen table reading a newspaper which he held close to a small kerosene lamp. He paid no attention to any one. His attitude, curiously like his father's, was perfectly definite to Howard. It meant that from that time forward there were to be no words of any sort between them. It meant that they were no longer brothers, not even acquaintances. "How inexorable that face!" thought Howard.
He turned sick with disgust and despair, and would have closed his trunk without showing any of the presents, only for the childish expectancy of his mother and Laura.
"Here's something for you, mother," he said, assuming a cheerful voice, as he took a fold of fine silk from the trunk and held it up. "All the way from Paris." He laid it on his mother's lap and stooped and kissed her, and then turned hastily away to hide the tears that came to his own eyes as he saw her keen pleasure.
"And here's a parasol for Laura. I don't know how I came to have that in here. And here's General Grant's autobiography for his namesake," he said, with an effort at carelessness, and waited to hear Grant rise.
"Grant, won't you come in?" asked his mother, quiveringly.
Grant did not reply nor move. Laura took the handsome volumes out and laid them beside him on the table. He simply pushed them to one side and went on with his reading.
Again that horrible anger swept hot as flame over Howard. He could have cursed him. His hands shook as he handed out other presents to his mother and Laura and the baby. He tried to joke.
"I didn't know how old the baby was, so she'll have to grow to some of these things."
But the pleasure was all gone for him and for the rest. His heart swelled almost to a feeling of pain as he looked at his mother. There she sat with the presents in her lap. The shining silk came too late for her. It threw into appalling relief her age, her poverty, her work-weary frame. "My God!" he almost cried aloud, "how little it would have taken to lighten her life!"
Upon this moment, when it seemed as if he could endure no more, came the smooth voice of William McTurg:
"Hello, folkses!"
"Hello, Uncle Bill! Come in."
"That's what we came for," laughed a woman's voice.
"Is that you, Rose?" asked Laura.
"It's me—Rose," replied the laughing girl, as she bounced into the room and greeted everybody in a breathless sort of way.
"You don't mean little Rosy?"
"Big Rosy now," said William.
Howard looked at the handsome girl and smiled, saying in a nasal sort of tone, "Wal, wal! Rosy, how you've growed since I saw yeh!"
"Oh, look at all this purple and fine linen! Am I left out?"
Rose was a large girl of twenty-five or thereabouts, and was called an old maid. She radiated good-nature from every line of her buxom self. Her black eyes were full of drollery, and she was on the best of terms with Howard at once. She had been a teacher, but that did not prevent her from assuming a homely directness of speech. Of course they talked about old friends.
"Where's Rachel?" Howard inquired. Her smile faded away.
"Shellie married Orrin McIlvaine. They're 'way out in Dakota. Shellie's havin' a hard row of stumps."
There was a little silence.
"And Tommy?"
"Gone West. Most all the boys have gone West. That's the reason there's so many old maids."
"You don't mean to say—"
"I don'tneedto say—I'm an old maid. Lots of the girls are. It don't pay to marry these days." "Are you married?"
"Notyet." His eyes lighted up again in a humorous way.
"Not yet! That's good! That's the way old maids all talk."
"You don't mean to tell me that no young fellow comes prowling around—"
"Oh, a young Dutchman or Norwegian once in a while. Nobody that counts. Fact is, we're getting like Boston—four women to one man; and when you consider that we're getting more particular each year, the outlook is—well, it's dreadful!"
"It certainly is."
"Marriage is a failure these days for most of us. We can't live on a farm, and can't get a living in the city, and there we are." She laid her hand on his arm. "I declare, Howard, you're the same boy you used to be. I ain't a bit afraid of you, for all your success."
"And you're the same girl? No, I can't say that. It seems to me you've grown more than I have—I don't mean physically, I mean mentally," he explained, as he saw her smile in the defensive way a fleshy girl has, alert to ward off a joke.
They were in the midst of talk, Howard telling one of his funny stories, when a wagon clattered up to the door, and merry voices called loudly:
"Whoa, there, Sampson!"
"Hullo, the house!"
Rose looked at her father with a smile in her black eyes exactly like his. They went to the door.
"Hullo! What's wanted?"
"Grant McLane live here?"
"Yup. Right here."
A moment later there came a laughing, chattering squad of women to the door. Mrs. McLane and Laura stared at each other in amazement. Grant went outdoors.
Rose stood at the door as if she were hostess.
"Come in, Nettie. Glad to see yeh—glad to see yeh! Mrs. McIlvaine, come right in! Take a seat. Make yerself to home,do! And Mrs. Peavey! Wal, I never! This must be a surprise party. Well, I swan! How many more o' ye air they?"
All was confusion, merriment, hand-shakings as Rose introduced them in her roguish way.
"Folks, this is Mr. Howard McLane of New York. He's an actor, but it hain't spoiled him a bit asIcan see. How., this is Nettie McIlvaine—Wilson that was."
Howard shook hands with Nettie, a tall, plain girl with prominent teeth.
"This is Ma McIlvaine."
"She looks just the same," said Howard, shaking her hand and feeling how hard and work-worn it was.
And so amid bustle, chatter, and invitations "to lay off y'r things an' stay awhile," the women got disposed about the room at last. Those that had rocking-chairsrocked vigorously to and fro to hide their embarrassment. They all talked in loud voices.
Howard felt nervous under this furtive scrutiny. He wished that his clothes didn't look so confoundedly dressy. Why didn't he have sense enough to go and buy a fifteen-dollar suit of diagonals for everyday wear.
Rose was the life of the party. Her tongue rattled on in the most delightful way.
"It's all Rose and Bill's doin's," Mrs. McIlvaine explained. "They told us to come over and pick up anybody we see on the road. So we did."
Howard winced a little at her familiarity of tone. He couldn't help it for the life of him.
"Well, I wanted to come to-night because I'm going away next week, and I wanted to see how he'd act at a surprise-party again," Rose explained.
"Married, I s'pose," said Mrs. McIlvaine, abruptly.
"No, not yet."
"Good land! Why, y' mus' be thirty-five, How. Must 'a' dis'p'inted y'r mam not to have a young 'un to call 'er granny."
The men came clumping in, talking about haying and horses. Some of the older ones Howard knew and greeted, but the younger ones were mainly too much changed. They were all very ill at ease. Some of them were in compromise dress—something lying between working "rig" and Sunday dress. Most of them had on clean shirts and paper collars, and wore their Sunday coats (thick woollen garments) over roughtrousers. Most of them crossed their legs at once, and all of them sought the wall and leaned back perilously upon the hind legs of their chairs, eyeing Howard slowly.