Mrs. Benderby proved herself a most satisfactory addition to the family. Just at first there was a ripple on the surface because Pegeen jealously resented any infringement of her rights in the matter of seeing to Archibald, but the two had that out promptly and satisfactorily.
“It’s this way, Peg,” the man explained seriously. “Mrs. Benderby needs something to do. She’ll feel dependent and unhappy if she isn’t allowed to make herself useful, and the only way she can make herself useful is by cooking and washing dishes. It’s different with you. Cooking and dish washing were the least of the things you did for me. You did them mighty well. I can’t deny that, but you’ve fed my heart and washed the cobwebs out of my eyes, and you can afford to turn the cooking and dish washing over to somebody else. I want you free to go with me anywhere at any time. Your job is seeing to my heart and soul, Peggy O’Neill. As long as you can do that why should you give a hoot who sees to my meals and dishes?”
“I’m a pig! I’m a horrid little pig,” Peg always repented as enthusiastically as she did everything else. “I’ll go and tell Mrs. Benderby so right now. I was perfectly snippy to her about coddling your eggs this morning, but she can coddle away just as she wants to, as long as she gets them right. You’ve got to have themrightthough, and, please, I’d so much rather plan what you’re going to have for meals. I can do it better. Honestly I can.”
“I haven’t a doubt of it,” said Archibald. “Plan away—only don’t grudge Mrs. Benderby the cook stove and the dish pan.”
All went smoothly after that. There was more time for the neighboring expeditions, for long walks and drives, for picnics, in which Jimmy Dawes was usually included. He was Pegeen’s humble slave, although he would have suffered tortures rather than admit it. He haunted the shack; but, ostensibly, his devotion was for Archibald and the offerings he laid at that amused young man’s feet were many. He brought Archibald pailfuls of red raspberries. Pegeen adored red raspberries. He presented Archibald with bunches of pink roses from Grandmother Dawes’ garden. Pegeen was daft about pink roses. He caught fish for Archibald’s breakfast. Fish was the thing Pegeen liked best for breakfast. But to Peg, herself, the boy was painstakingly off-hand and brusk, giving her plainly to understand that she was only a girl and must be kept in her place. She submitted meekly and wound him around her finger, after the immemorial fashion of girls, even of very small girls.
She wound Archibald around the same slim finger. He was what Peg would have called “lonesomey” round the heart, during these long summer days, and Pegeen was good for lonely hearts. A world in which she loved and petted and companioned and made merry couldn’t be such a very forlorn place; and making her happy was a consoling and satisfactory occupation.
The child’s thin little face had filled out. The old anxious look had gone from her eyes. The promise of beauty was fast finding fulfilment.
“Have you noticed how lovely Peggy is, now-a-days?” Nora Moran asked Archibald one afternoon, when he and she met in the Village store, while Peg waited outside on Zip.
“She was always lovely.”
The Smiling Lady laughed at his quick protest.
“Always,” she agreed, “but she’s getting lovelier by the minute. One of these days she will be wonderfully beautiful. There’s an exquisite delicacy about her.”
“But she’s perfectly strong and well.”
Archibald’s voice held a note of alarm.
“Absolutely. I didn’t mean that she looked frail—but she’ll never be the buxom, dashing kind. Her beauty won’t jump at you. It will haunt you. I think that Irish type is the loveliest in the world—the black hair and the deep blue eyes and the clear skin and the flush that comes and goes—and when you add the sweetness of Peg’s mouth and the love in her eyes and the freckles on her impertinent little nose—I rather think those freckles are fading, though. They’ll soon be gone.”
“I’d miss them,” Archibald said regretfully. “And I hope she won’t be a raving, tearing beauty. She’d break her heart because she couldn’t see to all the sighing swains. I’m afraid sheisheaded that way, though. I’ve noticed it myself—and she’s better than good to look at. She has a way with her.”
He talked lightly; but he didn’t believe that the black-haired, blue-eyed type was the loveliest the world had to show. There was a certain reddish gold hair that was neither brown nor auburn; and there were eyes that were sometimes the color of sea water over sand and sometimes violet and sometimes darkly gray— Still, Pegeenwasblooming like a wild rose. There was no doubt about that.
Jimmy noticed it, too. He commented upon it one day when Pegeen and he had left Archibald smoking lazily, after a picnic lunch, and had gone off in search of berries for dessert.
“You’re better looking than you used to be, Peg,” he said, staring critically at her across a blueberry bush from which they were stripping the fruit.
“Uh-huh,” agreed Pegeen. Her mouth being full of berries, she was temporarily incapable of more eloquent assent.
Jimmy felt that he ought to snub her, for her soul’s good; but really—in that pink sun-bonnet— Oh, well girls were funny.
“What are you going to do when Mr. Archibald goes off and gets married?” he asked abruptly.
Pegeen choked over her mouthful of berries and looked at him, in wide-eyed dismay.
“Jimmy Dawes, it isn’t so,” she cried.
“Silly!” Jimmy’s tone was kindly contemptuous. Girls always went off half-cocked. “I didn’t say he was going right off now and get married. I just asked you what you’d do when he did.”
“Maybe he won’t.” She tried to feel hopeful; but Jimmy wouldn’t allow it.
“Maybe nothing! Of course he will.”
Peggy sat back on her heels and put her pail down. She had lost all interest in berrying.
“Oh, Jimmy,” she sighed. “Whatever’d you make me think about that for? Everything’s so nice just as it is.”
“Yes; but you’ll be getting married yourself some day. Then what’d he do?”
She thought it over.
“Well, if he’d wait till I grow up he could marry me and then I could go right on seeing him.”
“Catch him waiting!” Jimmy’s emphasis was scornful. It implied disrespect for Pegeen’s charms; but she was not offended.
“No; I suppose not,” she agreed. “It’d be an awfully long time and he’d be as old as anything. Well, anyway, he isn’t keeping company with anybody now; and when he does go off and get married, I’ll just have to do the best I can. Let’s go back. My pail’s full.”
As they stood up, side by side, the boy looked down at the girl and a sudden red warmed the brown of his face.
“I’ll tell you what, Peg,” he said. “You grow up and marry me.”
“I’d love to.”
The cheerful promptness of the consent was most flattering; but, even at fifteen, the wooer felt that something was lacking. For a moment he hesitated, looking down into the frank blue eyes. Then he laughed and took Peg’s pail of berries.
“Well, don’t you forget it. That’s all,” he said with masterful gruffness, as he turned away to find the trail. He had never carried her pail before. Somewhere back in Pegeen’s brain a disconcerting idea took form. Jimmy was growing up. He’d be going away to school next, and Mr. Archibald would get married and have a wife to see to him.
She followed Jimmy’s sturdy figure down the hill with lagging steps and her face was very sober when they joined Archibald under the trees.
“Tired?” he asked.
She smiled at him; but the attempt wasn’t altogether successful.
“No, I’m not tired,” she said; “but, someway or other, I feel lonesome.”
He pulled her down on the grass and she curled up comfortably beside him; but the subdued mood lasted.
“What’s the matter, Peg?” Archibald asked, as they stood in the doorway of the shack, late that afternoon. He was in his riding clothes and off to Pisgah to have Zip shod; but he stopped to put a finger under Pegeen’s chin and turn her face up to his.
“Something’s wrong, dear. Tell me about it.”
Her long black lashes dropped over her woeful eyes, the wild rose flush came into her cheeks, her lips quivered.
“Why, Peg!”
She hid her face against the front of his riding coat.
“It isn’t anything,” she said with a little sob in her voice. “Honestly, it isn’t anything—only I’ll be so—l-lonesome, when somebody else sees to you.”
For a moment he had a helpless sense of being a bungling man. Then he sat down on the doorstep and pulled her down beside him.
“Now see here, Peg,” he said with simple seriousness. “You are too sensible to spoil our happiness by worrying over things that may never happen or over things that aren’t going to happen for a long time. One of these days you’ll be going away to school. I’m going to attend to that, and then you’ll be growing up and traveling in Europe and going out in society and I’ll need somebody to see to me in the off times when you’re too busy. And then you’ll be falling in love with some fine chap and getting married and you’d feel mighty bad if you had to go off knowing that there wasn’t anybody to see to me properly after you were gone. Now wouldn’t you?”
“Y-y-yess,” faltered Peg. Her eyes were perceptibly more cheerful. The bits about school and Europe had appealed to her imagination.
“There you are,” Archibald summed up triumphantly. “Of course I don’t need any one else to see to me now, and I’m not going to have anybody, and nobody could ever take your place; but when you do go away to school and to Europe and all that, you’d rather have me married to somebody than leave me all at loose ends, now wouldn’t you?”
Pegeen performed one of her amazing about-face movements.
“You’d have to be married,” she said firmly. “I wouldn’t budge a step, unless you were.”
Archibald laughed.
“Well, then, that’s all right; but there’s no use bothering about it as long as you and I can be together; and there’s small chance of my marrying at all, Pegeen.”
The laughter had died out of him and he stood looking down the Valley with eyes that did not see the meadows or the distant hills.
“You see, it’s this way, Peg. I can’t have the girl I want and there’s no other.”
There was pain in his voice and Pegeen slipped a small hand into his. Not a word did she say; but the grip of the little brown hand and the sympathy in the great eyes were comforting things. He shook off the blue devils and smiled down at her.
“So that’s how it is, Pegeen—and now I’m going to the blacksmith’s.”
Down in Pisgah, he found public opinion, as represented by the men loafing about the smithy, in a ferment. There had been another barn burning during the previous night and, though the value of the property destroyed had been small, the fire seemed to have been the proverbial last straw. Some of the bolder and younger spirits of the community were outspoken in their determination to defy the law and take the matter into their own hands.
“If there ain’t proof, then guesswork’ll have to do,” one of them said to Archibald when he entered protest against the wild talk; and even the older and more conservative men in the crowd nodded assent. The camel’s back was broken. Valley patience had given out. No name was mentioned; but there was no doubt as to the direction in which the guesswork would point; and Archibald rode home, puzzling over the degree of his responsibility for Ezra Watts. He was inclined to think with the rest of the community, that Ezra was the barn burner; yet, though the suspected man had been closely watched, nothing had been discovered to connect him with the fires, except that sometimes he had been seen abroad on the nights when they occurred. More than that was needed for justification of rough handling and if the law could not reach Ezra, the best thing that could happen for both him and the community would be for him to go away before any violent outbreak could occur. Probably he would be only too glad to go, if he were warned of the danger and given money to smooth his way.
Archibald ate his late supper absent-mindedly and spent his evening, as usual, with Pegeen and Wiggles and his pipe. Mrs. Benderby always dozed in the kitchen after her supper dishes were washed, and Spunky, like her big cousins of the jungle, always answered the call to good hunting when the night closed in; but Pegeen and Wiggles and the man they loved kept each other company in the living-room or on the doorstep and, whether they were merry or quiet, all three found content at the day’s end, in being together.
At their usual early bedtime, Pegeen rose and lighted the bedroom candles; but, instead of taking his candle, Archibald reached for his cap which hung beside the door. He had decided to see Ezra before he slept and send him away from the Valley, if any reasonable amount of persuasion or money would move him.
“I’m not sleepy, Peg,” he said. “No; nothing wrong. Never felt better. I’m just wide awake. Go to bed and don’t lie there listening for me. Wiggles and I are going to prowl.”
The drowsing dog whacked his tail sleepily against the floor, at the sound of his name, yawned elaborately, opened his eyes, and saw the cap in his master’s hand. Whereupon he forsook all idea of sleep and converted himself into a canine battering ram, until finally assured that he was invited to join in whatever the cap might mean.
The two went out into the warm, star-lit night; and Pegeen stood looking after them until the shadowy figures melted into the dark.
“I suppose it’s Her,” she said to herself, with a sigh, “but he didn’t seem so awfully, blue. I’m glad he took Wiggles.”
Wiggles was glad too, exuberantly glad. Night wandering was an unusual experience for him. In the early evening, he curled up close to his master or to the small girl who shared his allegiance and no temptation was strong enough to lure him beyond the sound of their voices or the touch of their hands. When they went off to bed, responsibility fell weightily upon him. A watch dog had no right to night roaming and Wiggles knew it. So, though sometimes his yellow body quivered with eagerness when distant night noises called him and his sharp nose sniffled excitedly at the scents that came to him on the night breeze, he kept faith with the sleepers in the shack and watched over them with unswerving fidelity as only a yellow mongrel dog knows.
But now he was out and away with a clear conscience and with his master for companion, and he made the most of the happy chance. Such frantic following of fresh smelly trails! Such wild yelping at stone walls where wood-chucks lurked! Such mad pursuit of little furry folk, going about their night business! Such excited returns to his master and futile efforts to tell him all about the things that, being only a man, he could not see or smell or hear!
“Larks, eh, Wiggles?” Archibald said laughingly, as the dog dashed back to him with the news of most prodigious occurrences further along the road.
Wiggles leaped up at him joyously, then, lighting on all four feet, stiffened and listened to something behind them. A moment later, the man’s duller ears caught the sound of galloping hoofs. He stepped out of the road, wondering idly that so many riders should be out; and, as a dozen men swept by him, he peered curiously through the gloom. The night veiled the men’s faces and they passed too quickly for recognition; but as they went, a laugh and an oath from one of them gave him a clue. Lem Tollerton’s voice! It had been loud enough and insistent enough at the smithy that afternoon to fix itself in Archibald’s memory; and as he heard it again a suspicion leaped into his brain. What had brought Lem Tollerton and his crew down the Valley? Ezra? Conviction came on the heels of the suspicion. Ezra, of course. Just what the night riders meant to do with the man, he did not know. Lem had talked of tar and feathers; but men did not carry tar and feathers on horseback. Whipping, probably. Archibald remembered Mr. Neal’s story of the Jew peddler and winced at the thought. Perhaps Ezra deserved a thrashing; but there was a slender chance that he was the wrong man.
With a sudden tightening of the jaw that meant action, Archibald turned from the road and swung himself over the wall.
“Come on, Wiggles,” he called. There was a little ring of excitement in his voice. “Maybe we can beat them to it, by the short cut.”
Wiggles was willing—delighted. He did not know just what the new game was and it interfered with his hunting; but, since his master wanted to run, run they would, and the meadow turf was softer than the road and altogether life had become gloriously eventful. He raced along beside the running man, with occasional side steps, when provocation proved too strong, and scurrying haste to catch up after each lapse. Together, the two came to the wall bordering the Back Road, climbed it and found themselves within sight of Ezra Watts’ cottage, but, just as they dropped from the wall, the same riders who had passed them ten minutes before clattered by them again.
Archibald stood still for a moment or two to regain the breath he had lost in his dash across fields. When he ran down the road, the horsemen had already stopped before the cottage and one of them was pounding on the door.
“Come out of that before we smoke you out.” It was Lem Tollerton’s voice again and the profanity with which he elaborated his command was more eloquent than decent. The riders were all yelling now, accusing, cursing, threatening. Drunk, every one of them—Archibald realized it with a sinking of the heart. Reasoning with drunken men was fruitless business and he was one man against twelve. Ezra did not count. Still he pelted on, with Wiggles at his heels. As he joined the group before the cottage, the door opened and Ezra appeared in the doorway. His face was livid with fear, and the picture he made in the light of the dark lantern which one of the riders carried was not one to rouse sympathy. If ever a criminal, face to face with retribution, looked the part, the cringing wretch in the doorway looked it.
“What d’ye want?” he snarled, his little ferret eyes searching this way and that for a chance of escape.
“You,” Lem Tollerton answered tersely. He seized the shrinking figure, jerked it down the steps, and handed it over to two men with ropes in their hands. Then, stepping back among the mounted men, he took a heavy horsewhip from one of them.
Archibald waited no longer.
“See here, men, this sort of thing doesn’t go in a civilized community,” he said. “You’d better stop feeling and do some thinking.”
The quiet voice was as cheerfully conversational as though the stage had not been set for melodrama; and the lean, nonchalant intruder to whom the night had suddenly given birth stood with his hands in his pockets and a half smile on his lips; but there was a look in his eyes that made the men nearest him glance apprehensively at the pockets and back away. Some of them pulled their hats low over their eyes. One or two wheeled their horses around, as though for flight; but Lem Tollerton was made of sterner stuff.
“You’ll get along better if you’ll take your own advice and do some thinking yourself,” he blustered. “We don’t want to do you any harm, Mr. Archibald, but this is our affair; and, if you don’t want to get hurt, you’d better not mix up in it. We’re out to give this d—d fire-bug a dressing down that he’ll remember and see him across the state line, and we’re going to do it.”
“What has he done?” Archibald asked, still cool, though his fighting blood was warming.
“Done? You know well enough what he’s done.”
“Where’s your proof?”
“Proof be damned. Get out of my way.”
Tollerton raised his whip as though to enforce his command and Archibald’s right hand came swiftly out of his pocket. There was no revolver in it; but as his clenched fist hit Lem Tollerton’s chin, that hulking worthy dropped as though he had been shot and lay still in the path. Archibald stooped, caught the whip from his hand, and backed against the cottage wall, while Wiggles, a ridge of upstanding hair along his back, his lips curled back angrily from his sharp white teeth, a low ominous growl sounding in his throat, crouched at his master’s feet. Archibald had forgotten Wiggles when he had figured that he would be one against twelve.
“Don’t be fools, boys,” the man against the wall pleaded. “I’ll promise to get Ezra out of the State for good, to-night. Maybe he’s guilty. Maybe he isn’t—but twelve to one isn’t a man’s game, any way you look at it. You’ll be glad you called it off, when morning comes.”
The men wavered uncertainly. Several of them made a threatening move forward. Archibald clutched the whip in the middle, with its heavy butt ready for action.
“I’m a friend of yours, boys,” he said grimly, “and I haven’t much use for Ezra; but I believe in fair play. I can’t lay you all out before you get me; but I’ll do all the damage I can; and if you don’t beat the life out of me, God’s my witness, I’ll drag every mother’s son of you into court and send him up, if it takes the rest of my life and my last penny to do it. You’d better think it over.”
For a moment, the men stood irresolute. Then one of them dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and galloped off down the road. The others followed promptly, only the two dismounted men lingering to look ruefully down at Lem Tollerton’s prostrate figure. As they hesitated, he groaned, put a hand to his head, opened his eyes—and closed them again.
“There’s a pump behind the house, Nick,” Archibald said. One of the men disappeared and came back with a gourd full of water which he dashed in Tollerton’s face. The treatment worked well. Lem sat up, looked around him, and staggered groggily to his feet.
“Well, what the—” he began; but his friends took him by the arms, led him to his horse and helped him to mount.
“Nothing doing, Lem,” Nick Bullard said soothingly. “Mr. Archibald’s going to take Watts out of the State to-night. That’s good enough. Let’s fade away.”
Limp, dazed, reeling in his saddle, but sober, Lem Tollerton looked at the man who still stood on the defensive, his back to the wall and his dog at his feet.
“That’s some little knockout of yours,” he said with a sheepish grin in which there was no malice. “Don’t tellmeyou was trained for a painter.”
He held out a hand as he spoke and Archibald, laughing, met the hand half way.
“It’s a useful thing to have a knockout in one’s fist,” he said genially. “Come over to the shack some evening and I’ll teach it to you.”
When the last of the riders had disappeared in the darkness, he turned to Ezra who cowered beside him, still shaking with fear.
“Well, Ezra, the whipping didn’t come off.”
In spite of himself there was contempt mixed with the kindness in his voice. “But you heard what I said about your leaving the State?”
“Uh,” grunted Ezra. Neither relief nor gratitude could move him to civility.
“That goes; but I’m willing to give you what money you’ll need for a month or two. Fifty dollars ought to see you through; and I’m ready to hand it over when I’ve put you on a train at Pittsfield; but if ever you show your face here again, the boys may do as they please with you.”
He stopped in astonishment; for the mention of the money had evidently wakened no interest and Ezra appeared to be listening not to him but to some sound from within the house. As Archibald leaned forward to see him more closely, he moved hurriedly toward the door.
“Come in here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
Archibald stepped into the house and waited while Ezra scratched a match on the wall and lighted a candle. The flickering tongue of flame left most of the room in darkness; but it threw its light upon a man who lay upon the bed—a man in even worse case than Ezra’s when Archibald had first found his way into the squalid little house—a bleared, bloated, dirty, unkempt hulk of a man who lay with closed eyes and breathed in short strangling gasps.
“He’s been like that ever since I found him last night,” Ezra said. “I was going for you anyway in the morning. Seemed as if something had orter be done and I didn’t know what.”
“Why didn’t you call Dr. Fullerton?” Archibald asked wonderingly.
“Well, you know how folks feel about the barn burnings and I didn’t know how Doc’d see his duty; but I thought you—”
“Who is he?”
Ezra looked back at the doors and windows and moved nearer to Archibald.
“It’s Mike O’Neill,” he whispered.
The name meant nothing to Archibald and his face showed it.
“The kid’s father,” Ezra explained.
“Pegeen’s father?” The man’s tone was amazed, unbelieving, protesting; but Ezra nodded his head.
“Uh huh. He’s been hanging around ever since spring. Crazy as a loon. Stayed in that old woodchopper’s hut on Bald Pate, daytimes, and went skulking around nights, stealing enough to live on and burning a barn now and then just for fun.”
“You’re sure?” Archibald’s heart cried out against the hideous thing. Peg’s father the barn burner, the petty thief, the miserable, sodden wreck that lay there on the dirty bed! It was unthinkable and yet Ezra’s voice and manner carried conviction.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure,” he was saying. “I’ve known ever since the Shaker fire. I’d suspicioned there was somebody around that nobody knew about; and one night I’d run into a man when I happened to be coming out of Miss Moran’s chicken house; but I didn’t see him rightly. I was sort of busy not being seen myself. Then, the night the Shaker barn burned, I caught him running away down the road just after the fire broke out. I knew him the minute I clapped eyes on him. ’Twus bright moonlight, you know. He ducked into the woods; but I trailed him up Bald Pate and then I come home and figgered things out. ’Twus plain as the nose on yer face that he’d been doing the barn burning; and, first off, I thought I’d tell folks and sort of clear things up for myself. But then I got to thinking about the kid and how bad she’d feel and there wuzn’t anybody to be upset be-cuzIwas a fire-bug and I didn’t give a damn what folks believed about me; so I just decided to keep things to myself. I went up and called turkey to O’Neill, though—told the crazy fool that I knew all about what he’d been doing and that I could have him hanged but that I wouldn’t if he’d let up on the barn business. I didn’t care how much he stole. He seemed to sense what I meant and blubbered around and said he wouldn’t light any more fires, only they looked so pretty when they burned and St. Michael had told him to come back here and burn all the barns, and Michael was his special saint so he didn’t want to contrary him. I told him I’d fix it up with Michael and then he quieted down and I come away. Looked as if he wasn’t too batty to keep a promise, until last night. Then Tibbits’ barn went up; and, as I wuz sneaking along through the woods so as nobody’d see me and think I’d been out doing the burning, I stumbled over this here bundle of rags. Just the way he is now, he wuz. I had a time getting him down here and then I didn’t know what to do next; but I figgered I’d better go and git you, in the morning.”
It was a long speech for Ezra. Never, to his own knowledge, had he strung so many words together at one time; and he stumbled through the story with a hang-dog air as though mortally ashamed to shift his vicious reputation to other shoulders.
Archibald listened with knitted brows.
“Poor Peg!” he said softly, under his breath. “Poor little Peg!”
Ezra shifted uneasily from one foot to the other and back again.
“What’s the good of her knowing?” he asked gruffly. Archibald looked at him in blank surprise.
“Why, she’ll have to know.”
“No, she won’t,” Ezra snapped it out in his most disagreeable manner. “He’s going to die. If he don’t, he’s too crazy to be left running around free. If he dies, you and Doc can bury him on the quiet; and, if he lives, you can chuck him into the asylum. She couldn’t do anything for him, if she knew. What’s the use bothering her?”
“But you—” Archibald began in bewilderment.
“Oh, I’d be moving along sometime, anyway. What’d I stay for? And what’d I care if they think they run me out? Kind of tickles me to have ’em think I burned their barns and stole ’em blind. No use white-washing me. It wouldn’t stick. I’ll light out; and then you can tell the kid some sort of fairy story that’ll let her down easy.”
He cleared his throat, sniffed unpleasantly, and drew his sleeve across his nose.
“She’s better than most,” he said.
Archibald looked into the dirty, repulsive face and humbled himself before the thing he saw in it.
Therewasa scrap of decent soul hidden deep down in Ezra Watts, as the Smiling Lady had said, and Peg had brought it to the surface. Here was a man capable of love and sacrifice.
“You’re a very good sort, Ezra,” Archibald said slowly. “I’d like to shake hands with you.”
He held out a friendly hand and Ezra clasped it in a furtive, embarrassed fashion, but with a look of satisfaction on his ugly face.
“You stood up to ’em fine.” It was his first word of appreciation, and it came haltingly. “I went out becuz I didn’t want ’em to come in here and find him; but things looked sort of bad for me until you come along.”
“You stood up to them better than I did, man.” Archibald’s voice was husky. Souls were surprising things. “It took more courage to face another man’s punishment than to fight another man’s battle. Now I’ll go for Dr. Fullerton. When he comes, we’ll decide what to do about Pegeen.”
“O’Neill’s dying,” the doctor said, as he stood by Michael’s bed, an hour later. “You must bring Peg. It will be better for her to know that he is dead than to be always imagining he’s alone and in trouble. And, in fairness to Ezra, we ought to tell the whole truth!”
He stopped and stood thinking for a moment, then shook his head decisively.
“No; that’s wrong. It’s fairer to Ezra to let him do the generous thing for love of Peg. It’d be a pity to let his first fine sentiment be still-born. Yes; on the whole, I believe we’d better let him go with his bad reputation intact. God bless him for a thieving, big-hearted, low-down scallawag!”
And so it was arranged. The doctor drove to Pittsfield with Ezra and put him on the midnight train.
“Get off when you feel like it,” he said, “and let Archibald or me hear from you if you’re in a hole so tight that you can’t squirm out of it. Hang it all, I’m actually glad I saved your life, Ezra.”
Ezra made no reply. His hour of expansiveness had passed and he had sunk back into his sullen quiet; but there were fifty dollars in cash and a check for five hundred more in his pocket; and somewhere back in his mind was an idea of raising chickens instead of stealing them. He had always liked chickens and now that he was a capitalist, he could indulge his fancies.
When the doctor reached the cottage on the Back Road once more, Archibald borrowed the car and went for Pegeen.
“You’ll have to hurry,” Doctor Fullerton said, after a moment’s examination of the man on the bed who had been given some semblance of cleanliness and order, and Archibald hurried. A half hour later he was back again, with a white-faced, great-eyed child who ran past the doctor and dropped on her knees beside the bed.
“Daddy!” she cried; and the love and yearning in her voice made the two men behind her bite their lips and look angry as men will when their hearts are touched.
“Daddy!”
The pleading voice found its way, somehow, to the fog-bound brain and Michael O’Neill’s soul turned back from its long journey, to look through sane eyes, into the tender child face, framed in wind-blown, black curls.
“Why, Pegeen,” he whispered feebly. “My little Peggy, of the curls!— But ’twas your mother I made the name for, Mary of the Curls! You’ve a look of her.”
The eyes that had been blue as Pegeen’s own, before the drink blurred them, closed and the lips that had, on some far-off day, wooed Mary of the Curls, settled into strange stillness, and Archibald, kneeling beside Peg, put his arm around her, drew her close and let her cry; while, stealing in from the outer dark, a lonely and forgotten yellow pup snuggled up to the sobbing child and nuzzled a cold wet nose into her hand.
Pegeen carried a sore heart for many a day after Michael O’Neill’s funeral.
“He wasn’t a very good father,” she said pitifully to Archibald, “and he wasn’t very good to Mother, but ’twas the drink that did it; and I think the drink’s just a sickness, don’t you? Mother had a picture of him, a little picture that she wore in a locket. He was young in it; and he looked so brave and glad and lovery. I like to think of him that way—but I loved him, even after he was—sick. It’s a poor time to stop loving folks when they’re bad, isn’t it? That’s when they need it the very most, and Daddy loved back real hard when he was sober.”
In comforting her, Archibald dulled the edge of his own heartache; and the two neighbored faithfully, even enthusiastically. Sometimes they drove. More often they rode; and, though Pegeen was not quite her old gay self, the visits were usually high-hearted adventures. Everything one did with Peg was more or less of an adventure. There was something about her that lent spice to the most prosaic of expeditions and Archibald found himself looking at the Valley through her eyes and loving it. He had laughed skeptically when the Smiling Lady had said that there were no uninteresting people, that there were only people one didn’t get at; but he began to believe that she had been right. There were delightful folk in the Valley and there were queer folk; but, delightful or queer, none of them bored him; and, when he remembered how often and how intolerably he had been bored in the old days, he was forced to believe that the difference was in him, not in the people around him. After all, types were much the same. He could cap every character in the Valley with a corresponding one in New York. Externals were different; but the inner men and women were the same. So the change must be in himself; but he doubted whether, thrown on his own resources, he could walk the new road even now.
“It’s Pegeen,” he said to himself. “She’s a universal solvent. If I had neighbored without her, I’d never have known these people as I know them now. She coaxes the best of every one out into the open where I can see it; and, after that the worst of him can’t fool me. Even the worst of him doesn’t look bad to me when I see it through Peg’s eyes. Funny, perhaps, or pitiful, or sad, but not bad. Yes; it’s Pegeen. She’s made me free ofherValley.”
All of which was modest and, in a degree, true; but, as a matter of fact, the Valley, having first accepted him on Pegeen’s recommendation, and looked him over with the tolerance she inspired, liked him for himself and showed him its friendly side.
“Thee has a pleasant way with thee, Son,” Eldress Martha of the Shakers said to him when he had sat on one of the straight-backed, rush-bottomed chairs in her stiff, spotless sitting-room, for an hour one summer afternoon, holding high converse with the little old lady whose spirit was so much bigger and stronger than her body.
“I could wish thee were with us and at peace.”
“I’ve been thinking lately that perhaps I’m on the road to peace, Eldress Martha,” he said gently.
She smiled. When she smiled, the great gray eyes that glowed so wonderfully in her thin white face melted into sweetness and the hint of fanaticism died out of her look.
“The roads are many, Son, but there are sign posts along all,” she said. “It is easy to know whether one is traveling toward the right goal.”
“There are brand new kittens,” announced Pegeen skipping joyously into the quiet shaded room and bringing a gust of the sunshiny outdoor world with her, “and the jam is heavenly this year, Eldress Martha. I tried three kinds, and I saw Sister Jane take honey out of the hives,—only I didn’t see it as close as I wanted to.”
She dropped down on the floor at the Eldress’ feet and leaned her head against the gray clad knee.
“I don’t see why bees should want to sting me.” Her voice held a note of injury. “But they do.”
Eldress Martha laughed. Her laugh was even better than her smile, a thing surpassingly girlish, and the tenderness in her face, as she laid her hand lightly on the child’s head and smoothed the shining black hair, gave Archibald a sudden twinge of heartache. It must be very lonely sometimes, on the spiritual heights, and this dear woman had walked there so long. He wondered whether she ever looked back to some far-away time of youth and counted the cost of the peace she had now.
But Pegeen was contented to take Eldress Martha’s human side without question. She had never been over-awed by Shaker asceticism. That was perhaps the reason why the sisters adored her. They were such simple, friendly folk in spite of their rules and visions.
“Brother Paul came to the garden,” Pegeen rubbed her cheek softly against the caressing hand, as she spoke, “and he told me a spandy new poem,—a lovely one. He’d met it coming down through the orchard and it isn’t a speck religious,—just summery and sweet and all about butterflies and birds and clouds.”
“And thee doesn’t callthat‘religious’?” asked Eldress Martha.
Pegeen recognized the gentle reproof with a smile.
“Why of course it is, when you stop to think about it—praising God and all his works and psalmy things like that,—but I meant it wasn’t anything you’d sing in church.”
“Brother Paul meets many poems that are not for church Worship.” The Eldress spoke quietly but a shadow of anxiety clouded the serenity of her face.
“Sometimes I wonder if the beauty of this world is not too much in his mind and heart,” she added. “Thee sees, child, it is good to love the beautiful things God has made; but always one must look through them to the Eternal Beauty.”
“Well, you don’t always have to say it,” Pegeen said comfortably. “I believe that being chuckfull of love for anything is worshiping God, even if you don’t think about Him at all when you’re doing it. I just adore St. Francis. Miss Moran’s Ellen told me about him. She likes St. Anthony best because he finds things for her when she’s lost them, but I think St. Francis was a perfect old darling. He did love everything so hard.”
“But he is a Popish Saint, child.” There was rebuke in the Eldress’ voice, but Pegeen looked up at her serenely.
“I’ll bet the birds and beasts didn’t carewhatchurch he belonged to,” she said, and Eldress Martha laughed once more.
“Thee has small respect for creeds, Peggy,” she said, “but thee has a great heart.”
The sisters crowded doors and windows to wave good-by as Pegeen and Archibald rode away down the street and the small girl turned to throw kisses to them until a bend of the road hid the East Family buildings from view. Then she settled back into her saddle to talk things over. They always talked a neighboring visit over. That was one of the best parts of it.
“Aren’t they the sweetest things?” she said beamingly. “I just wish I could give every single one of them a nice little baby of her own.”
Archibald gasped.
“Wouldn’t it rather shake up the community?” he asked gravely.
Pegeen considered the proposition. “Well, I suppose it would a little—not having marrying and giving in marriage in their religion you know—like Heaven—but shaking up wouldn’t hurt them, and I think it’s dreadful for so many perfectly darling women to miss having babies—and it’s a shame for the babies too because somebody else that isn’t half as nice will have to take them.
“I think it’s the lonesomest thing to go on cooking and sweeping and dusting and making jam and nobody to do it for but each other and God. Just think of the fun all those old ladies could have if the top floor was plumb full of babies growing up into nice Shakers. I guess it’d have to be grandbabies but then if they had grandbabies they’d have had babies sometime so that would be all right.
“I told Sister Jane how I felt about it She’s the pretty one with pink cheeks that tends the bees,—and she said they couldn’t very well have babies of their own, but that she could find it in her heart to wish they had a top floor of real cuddly orphan babies. She loves to cuddle things. That’s one reason why we’re such great friends; and, do you know, she’s gottwelvedresses all as good as can be. They all have to be gray but there aren’t any two the same shade and she gets a little change that way. I do love Sister Jane. She and I have splendid times together and she sort of spills over to me, when she isn’t feeling so awfully religious. When we went to see the kittens, after Brother Paul said his poem to us, she told me the Eldress didn’t like his writing poetry that wasn’t religious, and spending so much time out in the fields and woods instead of working when he’s the strongest, youngest man in the family. They were going to call him up about it; but Eldress Martha said ‘no’ she’d attend to the matter, and that settled it. I tell you when Eldress Martha says ‘no’ the Elders just pick up their coat tails and go away on their tippy toes. But Sister Jane says she thinks Eldress Martha’s worried about Brother Paul herself. She’s terribly fond of him and he isn’t very frequent in prayer lately and he doesn’t testify at all—but he certainly does write scrumptious poetry.”
“What was that you said about his meeting a poem in the orchard?” Archibald asked.
“Oh, that’s the way the Shakers always talk about their poetry. Lots of them write hymns. Eldress Martha writes lovely ones—and they always say they met them. They think the Lord gives them the poetry ready made, you know.”
“Direct inspiration: I see—Poor Brother Paul with his world beauty!”
Archibald looked as if he too were worried about the young poet. Little by little he was learning that the Happy Valley teemed with drama. This neighboring with Pegeen was interesting, extraordinarily interesting.
Day by day he grew more dependent upon this child’s companionship. Whether he rode or tramped or loafed or gardened or neighbored, he wanted her near. Even when, he painted, she usually sat beside him dreaming or busy with some quiet work but always ready with smiles and eager interest if he looked from his canvas to her face or spoke to her; and it was not possible to feel that the world was an altogether disappointing and lonely place when one had such a comrade. Wiggles, too, did his dog best in the line of companion plays and a yellow dog’s best of worship is a thing to warm the cockles of even the heaviest heart. There was a curious likeness between the child’s deep blue Irish eyes and the pup’s liquid brown eyes, during those long August days. Passionate devotion welling up from child heart and dog heart made the eyes kin.
The little garden in front of the shack was ablaze with August glory now and Pegeen’s face, as she bent over the flowers or knelt beside the borders making war on weeds, was a pleasant thing to see; but a sadness came into it, whenever she looked at the clumps of perennials striving lustily in preparation for another year. Archibald had said that he would come back to watch them bloom; but he had said that before Richard Meredith’s coming, and back in the darkest pigeonhole of Pegeen’s mind was a suspicion that she and Wiggles and Spunky and Mrs. Benderby and the horses and the neighbors and the garden all added together would never be able to make him happy, with Nora Moran away. She would not admit to herself in the daytime that the suspicion was there; but sometimes when she happened to waken in the night, she would take it out and cry over it a little, very quietly.
She and Archibald rode often to the Shaker village where Eldress Martha was in her element with work and responsibility, pouring upon her torrent-wise. Even on her busiest days she had time for Archibald. The friendship between the two, whose lives had run in grooves so different, was a real thing and the man went away from his hours with the tender-hearted, steel-willed old woman with an uplift of spirit. After all the needs of brave souls were much the same. Whether it was Eldress Martha with her religious faith and her life of the spirit or Dr. Fullerton with his agnosticism and bluff materialism, the test of the soul was its sincerity and courage. The doctor had put it in a nutshell, the night he had fought for Ezra Watt’s life and won. Playing the game was the thing. To choose a game in which one believes there was good and to play it for all there was in it—that was the life worth living. If love and laughter walked with the player, so much the better. If not,—still there was the game.
And the more Archibald went the Valley ways, the more he realized that, in one form or another, neighboring was the great game.—There in the valley—out beyond—wherever men and women worked and hoped and loved and suffered, there was call for players stout of heart, strong of will, great of soul, wise of brain. Once when a baby’s hand had curled round his finger, he had said to himself that neighboring was not the last word, that a man’s own meant more; but, during those Summer days when Pegeen and he went up and down the Valley, knocking at the doors of hearts and lives, he came to realize dimly that a man’s own reaches out beyond the doors of his home and that if he follows it to the soul heights and the love limits, he will find himself, walking there with the brotherhood of Man.
Ginsy Shalloway, who, by virtue of “sewing around,” had gained a shrewd knowledge of human nature and was prone to sharp criticism, voiced the general verdict when she admitted that “the artist man’s friendliness rang true.
“Seems as if he honestly liked folks and was real set on their liking him,” she said, when the matter came up for discussion at the ladies’ aid society. “I don’t know as I ever saw a city fellow with as few trimmings. He’s pleased as can be when he gets an invite to dinner and he eats so hearty, you’d think he didn’t get the right kind of victuals at home, if you didn’t know Peg. He was eating dinner up at Nelsons’ the other day when that big storm came up so sudden; and, if he didn’t pull off his coat and go out into the hay field with Martin and help to hustle the hay in. Real good help he was too, Martin says—stronger than you’d think and quick as a cat. And then the boys got to wrestling out in the barn; and if he didn’t lay them all out on their backs, as easy as rolling off a log. They were some surprised and ashamed; but he said he’d taken lessons of a Japanee and that the Japs beat the world for wrestling and that, if the boys would like to learn, he’d teach them all the tricks he knew.
“So now he’s got a sort of class down in an empty loft at Jim Neal’s and a lot of the boys go there twice a week. Mis’ Dawes says their Jim’s plumb crazy about it.”
Jimmy wasn’t the only boy who was crazy about the class in the barn loft. One by one they came trooping in, shyly and awkwardly at first; but soon with glad confidence and unbounded enthusiasm. Lem Tollerton dropped in one evening to learn the knock-out that had laid him low, and, in his wake, the young men of the Valley found their way to the loft. Archibald added gloves and foils to his equipment; and within a few weeks, wrestling, boxing, fencing and jiu-jitsu were epidemic.
“It beats all,” Martin Nelson, the father of four husky lads, confided to Mr. Colby. “My boys are poking and pounding each other all over the place, the minute they ain’t at work; but I don’t know as I ever saw them so good-natured. Seems as if they thought being knocked endways was a treat and they’re always and everlastingly talking about playing fair and not taking advantage and not losing temper and not poking here or punching there. I don’t know but what teaching them to fight’s going to take the fighting out of them. Anyway they ain’t hanging around the stores every evening cooking up trouble. They do say Lem Tollerton and his crowd are cutting out booze, because it gets at them and spoils their fighting.”
Now and again, one of the older men, drawn by curiosity, came to the class to look on. He seldom went away without having a bout with the gloves or a wrestling lesson and he usually came again. The crowd soon outgrew its quarters and Archibald went to Dr. Fullerton with a plan.
“The Valley needs a men’s and boys’ club,” he said. “Where can we have it and how will we run it? You know this community better than I do.”
“I’m not so popular with it, when it’s healthy,” the doctor said dryly. “You’re working as hard to make yourself solid as if you were running for office. Pity not to stand for something, with the pull you’ve got.” He dropped his banter and laid a friendly hand on the younger man’s shoulder.
“It’s a bully work, man. You’re doing more to humanize the Valley than the doves of peace could if they came in flocks. Nothing like beating an idea of honest sport into a fellow’s head for making a decent citizen of him. When he’s grasped the idea that there are some things no fellow can do, he’s got something to work on. I’m inclined to think that boxing will grip a boy’s soul when Sunday school fails. Now about this club, How much money will it take?”
“Oh, I’ll put up the money.” Dr. Fullerton shook his head.
“No, you won’t. That would be a mistake. Buy or rent a place if you want to fix it up; but organize a regular club and put some of your toughest specimens in as officers. Responsibility’s most as good for a fellow as boxing. Let the members pay the running expenses out of the dues. They’ll think more of the club if they have to do some hustling to keep it going. There’s that old house of Rankins’. It’s been empty ever since the old man died. Nephew it was left to lives out in Seattle. It’s a whaling big place, but you wouldn’t need to use it all and I’ve a notion you could get it for a song.”
Archibald told Pegeen about the club that night. She was all interest and encouragement; but there was a hint of mental reservation in her approval, and the man noticed it.
“Well, Peg, out with it!” he commanded. “What’s wrong with the scheme?”
She blushed at discovery and hesitated, then spoke her thought frankly, as she always did to him.
“There isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s splendid of you to do it and folks will be perfectly crazy about it—only I was just thinkink how it’s most always the men and the boys that get things done for them. I s’pose it’s because they won’t be good all by themselves the way women and girls will; but I don’t think that’s exactly fair, do you? It’s like giving prizes to the worst spellers.”
Archibald looked at her with a puzzled frown between his eyes.
“Why, Peg,” he began; then stopped and thought the proposition over. Suddenly, something that the Smiling Lady had once said to him came back to him and his face cleared.
“Pegeen, I’m a fool—just a plain, block-headed fool. This Valley doesn’t need a men’s and boys’ club. It needs a neighborhood house and you are going to give it one. There can be a men’s club and a boys’ club and a women’s club and a girls’ club, just for the fun of the thing; but there’ll be a big get-together club that will take all the others in. How’s that?”
Pegeen’s face was his answer. It was one rapture from brow to chin.
“It’ll be perfectly wonderful,” she said happily.
Then a shadow drifted across the rapture and she sighed.
“Well?” questioned the man.
“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking.”
“Thinking what?” he insisted.
She looked very uncomfortable, wriggled uneasily in her chair.
“It’s Miss Moran,” she said, at last. “She was always crazy to have a club, here in the Valley—a neighborhood house she called it just like you did. She used to talk and talk and plan and plan; but she didn’t have money enough. I was just thinking how lovely it would have been if—”
She was on the borderland of unspoken things and afraid to go further; but Archibald opened her way.
“See here, Peg,” he said abruptly. “You mustn’t make any mistake about my feeling for Miss Moran. I’m head over heels in love with her. You’re too clever not to know that and I don’t mind your knowing it; but, because I can’t marry her, is no reason why you and I shouldn’t talk about her exactly as we always did. If she’d like this club, there’s one more big reason for putting it across, and the more she helps with it, the better I’ll be satisfied; only you are giving the club house to the Valley. Just remember that. Now we’ll go and talk the thing over with Miss Moran.”
His frankness cleared the air for himself as well as for the child; and when they found the Smiling Lady on her veranda and told her about the plan, the vague chill that had seemed to envelop her melted quite away before their enthusiasm.
“Splendid!” she cried eagerly. “Splendid! How youhavecome on with your neighboring, Mr. Archibald! I prophesied you’d make something of him, Peggy.”
There was a ring of pride in the jesting voice, a glow of pride in the smiling face. Richard Meredith, watching her from the hammock, noticed both. She was glad for the Valley, but there was more gladness beyond that; gladness and pride and—yes, there was tenderness too. It meant much to her that her people were to have their neighborhood house; but it meant even more to her that this one man was to give it to them, that they had found their way to his heart, and that he was finding his way to theirs. Meredith’s face gave no sign of anything save civil interest; but he drew back a little further into the shadow of the vines that clambered over the veranda trellis, and watched the girl and the man who leaned toward each other in the white moonlight, talking eagerly and with an intimate understanding that was new to him but prehistoric to them.
They altogether forgot him, when they went into the lamp-lighted room to figure on changes in the club house; but, as he sat there in the shadow, feeling oddly old and tired, a little figure slipped out through the French windows and tucked herself cozily into the hammock beside him.
“Which do you think would be nicer to have—a piano or a phonograph?” Pegeen asked confidentially, gathering him, as a matter of course, into intimacy of discussion and planning.
The man smiled in the dusk. She was so small and sweet and friendly and—though that he could not know—so sure he needed seeing to.
“I’ll give you both, for your neighborhood house, Pegeen,” he said—but added quickly, “if Mr. Archibald doesn’t object.”
“Why, he’d beglad,” she insisted stoutly, though back in her own mind there was a doubt. “That’s perfectly sweet of you. Oh, dear, it does seem as if God must have been working on that club for years and years. Everything’s going so beautifully. Only Deacon Ransom’ll have a fit about the billiard table. He won’t fit hard enough to keep him away though, and Miss Moran says he’s just got to let Sally come. I wish she’d get a beau down there and run off with him. Honestly I do. I’d help—if he’s nice. Do you know, I think a piano and a phonograph’s an awful lot for you to give. I wouldn’t want anything but the phonograph, but you see the mothers are so proud if their daughters can play some pieces and when there’s an entertainment, they always want the girls to show off; so it seems as if we really did need a piano. I’m going to tell everybody that you thought it up all by yourself, and Miss Moran didn’t have a thing to do with it. I shouldn’t wonder if you’d think of lots of things like that after a while. It isn’t a bit hard, after you once get started—not if anybody’s nice inside, like you. I guess city folks have to get new glasses to see country folks right, and some of them don’t ever bother to do it; but the awfully nice ones, like you and Miss Moran and Mr. Archibald, do. And then, after they put on the new glasses, they see so many kind things to do that they work like the very old Scratch to catch up with themselves.”
Meredith pulled the child’s head down against his shoulder and rumpled the thick curls with a gentle hand.
“It’s late for me to be changing glasses or ways, Peg,” he said softly; and his voice matched the gray of his hair. “Do you think I could ever catch up with myself, if I didn’t have Miss Moran to help me?”
Peggy reached up and gave the hand on her hair a loving little pat.
“Why, it’d be as easy as can be for you,” she assured him. “If you ever begin neighboring—in earnest, you know—I bet you’ll be perfectly splendid at it. Of course it’d be lovely to have Miss Moran help—but she wouldn’t need to. She started Mr. Archibald, but look at him now! I get jealous of the neighbors sometimes just for a minute; and he’s done most of it all by himself. Miss Moran hasn’t helped him atall, since you came.”
“I’ve an idea she has kept right on helping him—in a way,” the man said slowly,—“and then he’s had you to see to him, Pegeen.”