To be present and assisting at the coming of a life or the passing of a soul was the highest excitement and most precious pleasure these women knew; but this was a height to be attained only after many years of wifehood. And what novitiate of suffering experience—years, knowledge—might fitly prepare for these mysteries! The taking up and laying down of the burden, the beginning and the ending of the spinning—for, from our first moments, our hands are bound to the loom; we must weave our own webs, but Fate doles out the thread and Circumstance dyes the fabric, not as we will, but as Destiny designs, and Death spares no pattern, however lovely, but stops the shuttle when our reel of thread is spun.
By what holy purification, by what fastings, by what soul-searchings may we prepare to enter Nature's holy of holies? Surely, ere entering the meanest hut of clay and wattles wherein life springs or withers, we should put the shoes from off our feet.
But of all this Mrs. Warner recked nothing. It was not the spirit she was interested in, but the body it was casting off; the gasping lips, and not the vital breath that already almost eluded them.
Mrs. Holder sank rapidly. The women began to gather in; Mrs. Warner maintained her place as chiefest in the synagogue, and put aside, with judicial firmness, all hands but her own. Most of the women congregated in the kitchen, where they eyed the scanty furniture and whispered of Myron's hard-heartedness, for she did not weep. She was feeling bitterly her impending loneliness and isolation, for deep down in her heart there yet lived that marvellous tenderness for kith and kin that takes so much to kill. Of a verity, "blood is thicker than water." The woman dying so fast in that inner room was her grandmother, the woman who had borne for her father what she had borne for My. She clasped My in her arms and hid her face in his curls. Mrs. Holder's voice came fitfully through the half-closed door to the women outside. Mrs. Warner came to the door just as Mrs. Deans entered the kitchen, hurrying in from the outer air, and bringing a new excitement with her to intensify the suspense. Mrs. Warner beckoned and whispered:
"She's speaking of hearing music and singing, now; they mostly don't last long after that."
"They," not "we"! Oh, strange race of dying people, that are set apart from all men by death's approach, that we never identify with ourselves! Oh, weird world to which they go, which doubtless we shall never enter! Oh, dreary passage they must tread, upon whose threshold we shall never stand! Oh, awful pang of severance they must endure, which we will never have to bear—and yet
"Fear not then, Spirit, Death's disrobing hand;'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour;The transient gulf—dream of a startling sleep!"
Mrs. Deans and Mrs. Warner entered the room. Mrs. Deans' experienced eye told her how nearly time was ended for the dying woman. She turned to the kitchen.
"You better come in, Myron," she said.
Myron, with her child in her arms, entered, fearful yet of her grandmother denying her; but the old woman's eyes held no knowledge of her presence now. They wandered from one to the other of the throng of women impartially, and then as they fastened upon the child and lightened, as eyes might do which behold long-lost ones once dear, she held out wavering arms to the child.
"Jed, my own little lad," she said.
Myron went swiftly forward and laid My by her grandmother's side. He nestled to her lovingly, and she muttered tender words to him, calling him "Jed" and caressing him with fluttering fingers. He clasped his warm arms about hers, in which the blood was already chilling, and smilingly fell asleep, and a little later sleep came to her also.
It was the night after her grandmother's death, and Myron Holder, with a sinking heart, had watched the form of the last visitor pass out of the gate. The early dusk of winter enveloped the house and promised a long, dreary night—a night of terror she was to endure alone, for the Jamestown women had gone each to her own house and left her with her dead and her child. Her imagination, stored with transmitted superstitions, peopled each familiar corner with horrors. She saw in every flickering light a death fire, in every shadow a shroud; each breath of wind spoke of ghostly visitants, each sound seemed to herald a light. She lit the lamp in the kitchen, and proceeded to undress My and put him in his cradle for the night, pausing to listen between each movement.
She had been anticipating and fearing this ordeal for days; now that it had come upon her, she sickened at heart.
The definite darkness of night set in, and the child slept. She began to hear soft stirrings succeeded by shuddering silences. Beset by a thousand fears, she pursued the worst possible plan: she constrained herself to absolute inaction, and sat—her hands clasped in her lap—an image of fear. The silence about her gradually gave way to a babel of weird voices, through which there suddenly sounded the muffled pat-patting of light footsteps. As she became conscious of this definite sound, all the imaginary murmurs died, and she found herself in deep silence, broken only by the muffled repetition of the soft sound that chilled her heart. This noise, which she recognized as actually existent, stood out against the background of those imaginary fears with frightful distinctness. All the time of fear which had passed seemed now to have been but an interval of listening for what had come.
At this moment, the flame of the little lamp which had been for some time burning palely suddenly flared up—once—twice; grew for an instant bluish, then went out, leaving her, in the acme of her terror, in darkness. She closed her eyes and listened to the soft sounds—coming now at intervals only, but linked each to each by fear of the last and anticipation of the next, forming a chain that bound her in the Place of Fear. But at last silence fell again, a silence most horrible. She felt impelled to open her eyes, and did so, gazing with wide lids straight into the gloom; there was nothing there. For a moment her heart was reassured: then came the thought of that open door behind her; slowly she turned her head. Does any one live who has not, at one time or other, recognized that it may require, under certain circumstances, the supremest effort of will to look behind one?
That effort Myron Holder made, but sustained the gaze but a moment; for, gleaming from the death chamber, nay, from the very couch of death, shone two balls of livid light. With a moan of extreme terror, Myron slid from her chair and, catching at the boy's cradle, fell helpless to the floor.
Homer Wilson did not stand long knocking at the cottage door: his heart misgave him when he saw there was no light. Homer had returned from town late that night; his mother had told him of Mrs. Holder's death. She said no word of Myron, and Homer forebore to question. As he passed his father's and mother's room that night, he heard his mother close the shutters and say:
"It's a mighty spooky night. I wouldn't like to be in Myron Holder's shoes, a-settin' death-watch all alone over a woman I had worried into her grave."
Homer's heart stood still. Could it be possible those women had left Myron alone? Surely not! When it was customary for five or six to go and stay over night in the house where death was? Surely not! And yet—"The hags!" said Homer to himself, and went down stairs.
He was soon on the road, with a lantern. He recalled the death of his sister, and remembered how the neighbor women had sat whispering together in the brilliantly lighted kitchen, brewing tea for themselves, and now and then stealing on tip-toe to look in upon the silent one.
Arriving at the gate, the darkness of the cottage gave color to all his vague fears of ill to Myron. As he crossed the little garden, slinking cats, drawn by their ghoulish instincts to the house of death, fled before the light, but pausing as he passed, followed to the threshold, their breath white in the frosty air, their phosphorescent eyes gleaming in the dark.
When he saw Myron, lying prostrate and silent, his first sensation was one of relief. He had feared that she had fled into the desolate night; he realized that she had been frightened and had fainted. Raising her in his arms, he called her name softly. Her senses were already reasserting themselves. She soon stirred, looking up at him with eyes of blank terror, which faded slowly into wonderment as she recognized him. She held her hands up to him, and pressed closer to the shelter of his breast. He caught both her hands in one of his, and groped for a chair with the other. In turning, his eyes caught a vision of the open door of the death chamber. He saw dimly the couch, with its rigid burden, and saw those dreadful glaring eyes. For a moment, he caught his breath. Myron, seeing the direction of his gaze, clung shudderingly to him, and hid her face on his arm. An instant more, and Homer perceived the outline behind those gleaming spots.
"It's a brute of a cat," he said; and Myron, understanding all at once the origin of the sound, broke down in sobs of relief. She caught up the lantern, whilst he went in and seized the bristling creature, crouching upon the corpse, and flung it out among its lurking companions.
"How is it you are in the dark?" asked Homer.
"The lamp went out," she answered. "There's some oil in the cupboard."
He held the lantern, whilst she filled and re-lit the lamp. Then he explained his presence.
"How good you are!" said Myron.
"Good?" he said, his eyes fastening upon her forlorn figure bending over the cradle, for My was stirring.
"Good?" Then he burst forth, "What beasts these women are to leave you alone!"
"It was dreadful," she said, trembling. "The darkness, the noises, the loneliness—those eyes, andher!" looking towards the inner room. Then suddenly she caught his sleeve: "Don't leave me till daylight, will you? Oh, don't! I can't stay alone; I am frightened! I—oh, don't leave me, will you?"
"Leave you? Of course not. I wish——," he checked himself abruptly. It was on his tongue to say, "I wish I might never leave you," but a sense of her absolute isolation smote him so keenly that the words stuck in his throat. Had he spoken then, how many things might have been different, for Myron, in her utter loneliness, was ready to cling to any outstretched hand.
"I'm going to make you some tea," he said.
Going to the bedroom door, he closed it, took his lantern out to the little "lean-to" woodshed, and split up some bits of lightwood; with these he roused the dying fire to life. With much precision, he put on the kettle, and when it boiled asked in a matter-of-fact way for the tea.
Myron rose, with My half awake in her arms, and went to the pantry-shelf to get it. It was chill there; she wrapped her apron about My's bare toes. He soon went to sleep again, and Myron Holder and Homer Wilson sat down together to drink the tea. Her eyes rested upon him, as if well content, and he noted this with delight. The truth was they dared not yet stray elsewhere, lest the spectres he had banished might jibber at her from the dusky corners of the room.
Love is served on strange altars, and the sacrifice of a heart was again proffered in that lonely cottage, whose atmosphere was chill with the dreadful influence of death, whose silence was broken by the soft breathing of a child of shame. Homer looked upon the woman of his heart and loved her. When the first breaking of the skies ushered in the dawn, he left.
The women returned early, for it was considered an honorable thing to have the ordering of a funeral—to be able to speakex cathedraof the mode of procedure.
Mr. Muir came. The last ghastly toilet for the grave was made. Nothing remained but to wait for the morrow, when the funeral was to be.
The women looked at her curiously when they came that morning, and Mrs. Warner expressed the sentiment of the rest when she said: "That Myron Holder is bad clean through. Any other woman would have been drove crazy last night; but look at her! She's a hardened one!" Mrs. Warner did not consider that this speech cast any reflection upon herself and her friends who had subjected a woman to an ordeal calculated to drive her crazy.
Night sank slowly down; and once more the women, departing, cast wondering glances at Myron's pale face, steadfast in the knowledge that she would have some one near her to chase those horrid visions away.
When Homer arrived, she was sitting beside her sleeping child, sewing upon an old black skirt of her grandmother's that some of the women, with an eye to funeral effects, had pinned up to suit her shorter stature, and bade her sew, that she might be properly clothed on the morrow. The work was nearly done, and the needle hung loosely between her listless fingers. Her eyes ached for lack of sleep; every joint trembled from fatigue; every nerve tingled from overstrain.
She greeted Homer more by a gesture than by speech, and perceiving her exhaustion, he insisted upon her resting. She made some demur, but he overruled it with a word. She rose a little unsteadily, and bent over My.
"Where do you want him taken?" asked Homer, and lifted him in his arms.
She led the way to the little bedroom off the kitchen, opposite to the one in which in which her grandmother lay.
Homer laid My down upon the blue and white checked counterpane—spun in England by Myron's mother.
"Good-night!" he said. "Good-night, Myron!"
"Good-night!" she answered in almost a whisper, for she was inexpressibly weary. Almost before he had reached the next room, she had sunk down upon her bed.
It was broad daylight when Myron awoke and rose, chilled and stiff. Utter weariness had overcome the discomfort of her cramped position; she had slept as she had first thrown herself down; she shivered, as one does who has slept in his clothes. The morning air was cold, and the window-panes glistened with frost.
Hurrying out to the kitchen, she found Homer had done what he could for her comfort before leaving. The stove held a glowing mass of hardwood embers; evidently the fire had been well banked up before he stole away at dawn. The kettle stood singing on the stove; the table was drawn up by the fire, and awkwardly set out with dishes for her solitary breakfast.
* * * * * *
The hour of the funeral was at hand.
Mr. Muir, determined to have nothing to blame himself for in regard to his bargain, had come dressed in his official broadcloth. His horses stood outside the gate in all the panoply of sable plumes and black fly-netting, the latter surely superfluous, but ornamental. These horses looked as if they had never appeared before a less stately equipage than a hearse, yet every one had seen them pass that very morning dragging an unpainted lumber-wagon. They looked as if they had never known a baser burden than "stained cherry with mahogany finish, plated handles and bevelled glass," yet an unplaned pine box had constituted their load that morning; and as they passed, each on-looker had said, to the other, "There goes old Mrs. Holder's shell."
"Who's Myron Holder goin' with?" said Gamaliel Deans to his mother, as they drove along to the village the day of Mrs. Holder's funeral.
"I don't know," answered his mother. "Mrs. Warner's took a mighty lot to do with everything, so like's not she'll take her."
"Seems to me Mrs. Warner's been putting herself forward some," suggested Gamaliel, diplomatically.
"Indeed she has," agreed Mrs. Deans; "enough sight more'n she's got any call for—considerin' all things."
They passed the little graveyard, silent beneath the light snow.
"Is there any track?" asked Mrs. Deans, looking across the white expanse, with her hands shielding her rheumy eyes.
"Yes," said Gamaliel, "the shell was took out this morning; you can see it from here." He gazed interestedly across to where the corner of an unpainted pine box showed as the terminus of an ugly black track which the wheels of Mr. Muir's wagon had scarred upon the snow.
They drove on without further speech. The first snow had fallen in the night. It lay now white and untrodden, over field and lane, over bush and tree, over house and barn. The air seemed spaced in vistas of cloudy whiteness, a purity which suffused itself in the atmosphere, and seemed to fill it with particles of impalpable white dust that the motionless air held in suspension. The trees glistened in the sun, whose rays were silver instead of gold. All the world was rimed with hoar frost—nature presented, in beautiful parable, the story of the iron hand in the velvet glove; for, despite the whiteness, the softness, and the silvery sun, it was intensely cold.
Presently through this white world there wended the gloomy little funeral, the more gloomy for the lack of any real grief. They reached the graveyard, where gaped an ugly brown gash, beside which the earth lay in frozen clods.
Mr. Frew's brief prayer was ended, and he departed, stamping his feet. There was the bustle as the coffin was lowered; then, one by one, the onlookers straggled away; one by one the vehicles departed, until Myron Holder was left alone by the grave—yet not wholly so, for My shivered in her arms, and old Clem Humphries was hastily pushing the earth atop the coffin. And presently Myron became aware that there was another patient one also, for Homer Wilson came to her side, carrying a buffalo robe in his arms. He laid it down on the frozen ground, and, taking her arm, drew her gently towards it. She looked mute thanks to him from eyes round which the slow tears lingered, rimming them with grief. He came nearer and held out his arms to My, but the child cowered closer to his mother, and looked at Homer from the vantage of her shoulder.
The little group embodied all the stages in life's progression. There was the child, cowering in a world already cold to him. There was the woman, bearing in her countenance the ineffaceable traces of woman's agony. There was the young man, strong in the choice of will and heart; the old man, drawing the last coverlet over the last sleep; and, severed from these by only a short depth of kindred substance, she who had passed, her bed rapidly rounding to a grave.
At last, Clem began patting the mound with the back of his spade; his work was nearly done. Each echoless blow struck upon Myron's heart; and, thinking of the shame she had wrought the dead woman, she dealt herself those blows that she had been accustomed to endure from her grandmother's bitterness.
Homer broke the silence, which seemed deepened instead of lightened by the thud-thud of the spade.
"Come, Myron," he said; "you better go home."
"Yes," she answered, heavily, "I may as well;" and she turned to the footpath that led across the graveyard to the road.
"Not that way," said Homer; "the horses are here."
"The horses!" she said; "the horses! Is your mother waitin' for me?"
"No," he answered, a little grimly. "No, she isn't; but I am, and the horses are."
He recalled the stormy little scene his mother had made but a little while ago: her contemptuous words when he asked her to wait; the scornful and bitter accusation she had flung at him; it had leaped forth from her lips like an arrow held long at the bowstring. It was barbed with all the poison of accumulated suspicion, and winged by the impulse of unreasoning anger, such as springs within mean breasts against hands that succor them; but it had reacted swiftly upon herself, for at the words something came into her son's eyes not good to see—a blending of surprise, indignation, denial, that paled his face, and made it implacable. Before it Mrs. Wilson faltered in her tirade, wavered in her steps, and finally turned and, crossing quickly to where Gamaliel was waiting for his mother, was soon seated with Mrs. Deans in the back seat. Gamaliel backed his horses slowly out of the throng, and they drove away.
The incident had not been unnoticed, but no comment had been made, although meaning looks, of which Homer now knew the interpretation, were exchanged. He had seen some such looks pass between his neighbors of late. A hot, impotent rage filled his heart against the false position in which he was placed, but it did not alter his determination.
"Are you waiting for anything, Homer?" Mr. Warner could not refrain from calling out before starting.
"Yes. What of it?" said Homer, turning round sharply. His brows were knit, his lips firm; an interrogation, not defiant, but direct, was expressed in every line of face and figure. "Yes," he said again, and unmistakable interrogation this time made the answer a question.
Mr. Warner shook the reins hastily over his horses.
"Oh, nothing—nothing," he said, "I was only wondering."
Homer turned away abruptly. "Better keep his wonderment to himself," he muttered, with a frown. "They better all keep their amazement to themselves or——" his hand clinched in a very suggestive fashion. Then he had gone for the buffalo robe for Myron to stand on, and as he gazed at her forlorn figure his anger changed to deep and abiding pity, to stern and righteous wrath. So Homer drove Myron home to the empty cottage, with Clem Humphries sitting in the bottom of the wagon, with his feet dangling over the tailboard, a quid of tobacco in his mouth, peace within his bosom. Clem was, as he expressed it, "a dollar to the good," and he was meditating unctuously upon the quantity of good Canadian Rye he could buy with the money, and speculating where he could beg, borrow, or (be it admitted) steal a jug. He had no mind to pay for one out of the dollar.
Mr. Prew, the minister, passed. He regarded Homer and Myron with incredulous horror, and returned Homer's somewhat brusque greeting in a very scandalized way. Clem took off his hat with a labored flourish; Mr. Prew returned his salute with condescending affability, and drove on to Mrs. Deans', where, presently, over hot soda-biscuits, doughnuts, and other good things, he praised Clem as "an humble, but very worthy old man."
"Humbugging old hypocrite!" ejaculated the "worthy old man," as soon as his pastor was out of hearing. "Miserable, designing old cuss he is. I'd like to use him for bait!" Then this humble follower relapsed into his reverie upon themodus operandiof getting a jug.
No other words were uttered during the ride. Homer and Myron were both silent; both knew that Homer had flung down the gauntlet to the gossips; both realized the import of the step; both pondered upon its significance from the village point of view.
Clem jumped off nimbly when they were opposite Mr. Muir's verdant veranda.
"You are not angry with me, Myron?" asked Homer.
"Oh, no," she cried; "you are so good to me."
"I'm good to you for my own sake," he answered. "Don't you see that? Don't you suppose I am looking out for my own happiness?" He paused. "Don't you think I am?" he resumed, an insistent note in his voice.
They were near the cottage, but she felt obliged to answer.
"But, Homer," she said, "I have no happiness to give anyone! What return can I make for this sacrifice?"
They were opposite the cottage. Clustered heads in the window of the Warner house showed how their return had been waited for; Homer discerned the white muslin rose in his mother's black bonnet, and if the sight made his face hard, it softened the touch of his hands as he lifted Myron down from the high seat, and then put the boy in her arms.
The little gate stood leaning against the fence. It had been lifted off its hinges, to leave free room for the coffin and its bearers to pass. Myron paused between the gate-posts; Homer bent above her.
"I will tell you some day," he said, "what you can give me."
"I WILL TELL YOU SOME DAY WHAT YOU CAN GIVE ME.""I WILL TELL YOU SOME DAY WHAT YOU CAN GIVE ME."
"Good-by," she said; and, turning, passed down the desolate garden, feeling remorseful that she had left him unthanked.
Homer, now that the tenderness evoked by her presence was left unsustained, felt a spiteful defiance waken in his heart. He walked slowly to his horses' heads, pretending to adjust the harness; then, after inspecting them with critical deliberateness, drove slowly past the curious eyes at the window.
"Might as well give them the full benefit of the sight," he said to himself; "it seems to strike them as interesting."
All day long, as he swung his axe in the woodland, he mused upon Myron as he had seen her last, with pure, uplifted brow and chin, as she said good-by.
He returned at night, calm, and braced, as he thought, to receive a storm of reproaches. He found a table "coldly furnished forth" for his supper; the kitchen was deserted, and from his mother's room came the hum of voices.
Mrs. Wilson expected to crush her son utterly by this isolation, but it was a treatment he could endure much longer than she could suffer to inflict it, for to women of her type the expression of anger in words is essential; any repression of speech is a physical pang. It was well, though, for this one night that it should be so, for Homer's calm was but as the brittle crust that forms on seething lava, that neither controls nor cools it; that melts at a touch, and offers no restraint to the force beneath. Too hot an anger yet filled his heart to admit of peaceful argument; his hand was too ready to clinch yet when he thought of Warner's tentative question. He ate his supper, smoked a peaceful pipe, and soon slept, dreaming, even as he had done all day, of the calm sweetness of those patient eyes.
Myron was having her first of solitude, passing it in brief watches of wakefulness and shorter spaces of sleep.
And in the lonely little graveyard a new-made mound was slowly whitening under the falling snow.
"This above all—to thine own self be true;And it must follow, as the night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any man."
"Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin, remaineth forever Remorse."
Winter lay white over the land—a bitter winter. The road, beaten to a glassy whiteness, glistened between unbroken plains of dull, lustreless white, for the fences were hidden by the heaviest snowfall ever known in Jamestown. The cold was intense; for twenty days the icicles had hung unmelted in the sun. The crows, tamed by hunger, flapped their sluggish wings over the barnyards. Here and there in the fields a black blotch showed where one of them had fallen, half-starved, half-frozen.
The foxes, grown bold amid the silence, came to pillage the henroosts in broad daylight. The rabbits, traced by their uneven tracks in the snow, were easy game; numbed by the cold, they were quickly overtaken. The sparrows clustered close together in the barns, winning their way in at every cranny.
The last year of Jed Holder's life, he had one day run into the cottage, excitedly calling to Myron and his mother to "Come out and see the sparrow—a real little English sparrow, a regular old-fashioned little spadger." Tears ran over his thin, browned face as he watched it upon the sharp ridge of the cottage roof. He could not cut his wood that day for listening to the familiar fluttering of its wings as it flitted hither and thither in the cottage garden, pushing its way inquisitively into the thickest branches of the privet bushes and bustling out indignantly when it found nothing there worthy of its impertinent scrutiny.
It eyed Jed with much friendliness. Two English exiles indeed these were—banished from the red-tiled cottages, the hop orchards, the old meadows, the sunken lanes, the hawthorns, the hollies; but in a few days there came another fluttering sparrow, and resemblance ceased between Jed and the important, bustling bird, busy now in building the nest. Ere the summer was gone there was a chattering little flight of them to swoop down among the placid hens and snatch the grain from their very mouths.
Now these birds were regarded by the farmers as a pest, and an overzealous government offered a bounty for their little feathered heads. Clem Humphries proved himself a valiant hunter of this puny prey. He boiled barley and then drew a stiff bristle through each grain. The sparrows ate and died, and Clem drank their blood-money.
But they still flourished. The cats waged war against them, and many a palpitant little breast was torn by their pointed teeth. The old Maltese cat at Deans' had perpetually a downy feather sticking to his cruel mouth, and his strong paws were ever stained with red. An ugly brute he was: half of one ear was gone; from the other, hung a tiny blue wool tassel fastened through a hole like an earring; his nose was always scarred and torn, and of his tail only an inch or two survived the teeth of the dogs with which he had waged war.
He lay in wait for the sparrows by the hour at the doorstep of the henhouse, and with depressed back and evil eye stole between the fowls as they pecked at the grain; then came a pounce, the hens flounced about hysterically, and the cat, with his captive, came out to sit in the woodshed and devour it at his leisure. The first time he caught a bird, he had tried to torment it after the tender manner of his kind; but at the first toss with his paws the terrified bird had soared far beyond his most vaulting ambition. But, alas, evil minds learn wisdom soon. It was long since then, and now he always gave them short shrift.
It was a bitter winter. The horses and cows were covered with exceptionally long hair, and the dogs were shaggy as bears. The hens straggled about with bleeding, frozen combs; the yellow feet of the ducks were white from frostbites; the turkeys' wings drooped dejectedly, and many died; the geese were disconsolate, their white plumage soiled and unsightly, for there was no water for them to bathe in.
The snowbirds twittered cheerily for a short space at noontide, but vanished as the day waned. Only where any crumbs or grain might be likely to fall, their tiny footprints were woven in delicate tracery on the snow.
The gulls flew over the village, until, their wings wearied, they turned them again to the lake, to rest upon a cake of ice. A long rest it proved to many, for their feet froze to the ice, and they uttered their hoarse cries as they strove in vain to rise.
It was a bitter winter. Every pond in Jamestown was frozen solid to the bottom. All day long there were slow processions of cattle passing to and from the lake.
The pumps were all frozen, and a great boiler stood on every kitchen stove, melting snow for household uses. The rats swarmed in the houses and the barns. Each person had tales to tell of frozen noses, frostbitten ears, numbed fingers, aching feet. Mrs. Wilson brewed "yarbs" and drank them all day long. Henry Deans grew stiffer and stiffer, and seemed shrunk to a mere shell. Bing White had already killed enough sparrows to buy him a pair of skates.
But in the midst of all the winter's white desolation, there glowed the hearth fires of home. Used to the cold, these hardy farmer folk defied it; and if they might not brave its blasts, stayed warm and close indoors.
There were tea-meetings and socials, temperance meetings and the half-yearly revivals, shooting matches with poultry as the prize, and raffles for turkeys. Then there was the threshing to be done, and the pig-killing, and next summer's fuel to cut in the woods.
The women sewed carpet-rags, patched quilts, and knitted mittens and heavy socks of homemade yarn. It was a terrible winter, and it was going hard with Myron Holder.
She had to endure all the rigors of the cold, all the solitude of shame, all the privations of poverty, all the terrors of night's loneliness, all the anxieties of motherhood, all the regrets of remorse, all the hopelessness of dead Hope, all the apprehensions of want: this in a solitary cottage, creaking at every blast, shivering in every wind, swaying in every storm.
Think of it, you holy women, who fare delicately, sleeping on soft couches, guarded and consoled, caressed and kept from all evil! For you are like Myron Holder in one thing: Not in suffering, nor shame, nor sorrow; not perhaps in humbleness of heart, nor meekness of spirit, nor in courage, in patience, in faithfulness, nor in hopelessness; not in poverty, nor in endurance; but with her you share, despite yourselves, a common womanhood. Remember that!
Remember also she bore upon her brow the marks of motherhood's crown of thorns. Remember who with tears washed Jesus' feet, and do not forget to whom, we are told, He said, "Neither do I condemn thee."
Homer Wilson, in defiance of his mother, public opinion, and Myron's own objections, had taken her ample wood for the winter. Old Mr. Carroll had given her a supply of flour and a ham, and hired her to clean up his house and whitewash his kitchen walls against the New Year.
She milked Mrs. Warner's cows at night and morn, receiving for this service a small can of milk daily. This was for My. No drop softened the harsh mullein tea she drank herself. Her life was inexpressibly desolate. The wind whistling over the cottage brought her the loneliness of the lost. Sometimes for days she saw no one to speak to, and, worse than all, she began to lack the necessaries of life. Flour means much, so does a ham; but for a woman and a young child more is needed. My began to look white, and at times his face had that expression we called "peaked."
Seeing this, Myron took a resolution. It cost her much, for her grandmother had often spoken of the disgrace of "going on the parish," as she put it; but the sight of My's face was too much for his mother, and she resolved to apply to the council for township aid.
It was a bitter day's cold when she came to this resolution. Pile the wood as high as she might in the stove, she could not banish the rime from the windows. The latch of the door stuck to her fingers every time she opened it. A tiny slanting rift of snow lay in the little bedroom, where it had crept in through the badly jointed windows.
It was Saturday. On Saturday nights the youths of Jamestown went courting. As twilight deepened into night, she heard the frequent jingle of sleigh-bells. They tingled through her heart and awakened a new loneliness in her breast. She sat always in the dark now, for oil cost money. She had but a lampful in the house, and that must be kept in case of emergency. The light from the hearth of the wood fire shot forth dusky little flashes into the darkness of the room. These feeble shafts were not strong enough to banish the hosts of shadows, but they so far prevailed as to leave them lurking in the corners of the room only. But there they held silent carnival—mocking at the lonely woman sitting silent within the wavering circle of the feeble light, stretching out impalpable arms to embrace her, extending icy fingers to touch her, waving their draperies over her head, and always biding their time, until weariness should drive her to her bed; then they sallied forth in their strength, and danced and gestured about her until sleep closed her eyes to fears.
My slept upon her knees. The sound of the latest sleigh-bells dying away left the silence seeming still more profound, as a momentary light intensifies the succeeding darkness. She heard footsteps crunching on the snow; then a knock.
"Come in," she said.
Despite herself, she felt a momentary hope flicker in her heart.
The door opened and, entering, Homer said:
"It's me, Myron; Homer Wilson."
So faint had been her hope that she scarce felt a sting in relinquishing it.
"Yes," she said. "Wait until I light the lamp."
She did so, and Homer came forward into the light, his broad shoulders seeming to fill the room as he stood, clad in a rough frieze coat that enveloped him from shoulder to heel. He took it off silently, laid it over the chair she had placed for him, and, going at once to her side, put his hands upon her shoulders.
"Well, Myron," he said, "do you remember asking what you could do to repay me for what I had done?"
"Yes," she said, knowing that her time of trial had come.
"Then," he said, bending over her, his face flushing, his tones vibrant, "I can tell you in a moment." He paused, to steady his voice. "Will you marry me, Myron?"
There was a moment of breathless suspense—an instant of absolute silence.
"No," she said, firmly enough; but her hands closed tremblingly upon his sleeve.
"Myron!" he ejaculated. "Myron! You do not mean it! Why—I love you, Myron!" he broke forth, with passion; "I will have you! Do you think I would be bad to you? Do you think I would be unkind to the boy? I can't stand to see you live like this!" He glanced at the bare room, which suddenly seemed to show all its gaunt corners, all its angles, all the scantiness of its meagre comforts. It was the very skeleton of a home.
"Myron!" He stopped—she was looking at him with words upon her lips.
"Listen," she said. "Do not be angry with me, but tell me one thing: Would you ask Suse Weaver to marry you, or Jenny Church, or Eliza Disney?"
"Why, Myron, they're married already," said he, in a maze.
"So am I," said Myron, throwing back her head so that her eyes met his, whilst the color flooded her face, giving it a dangerous and triumphant charm. "So am I. When he bade me be silent, he bade me be true. He swore that he would be. He explained to me how little the saying of marriage vows meant. He said it was the keeping of them that made the marriage. I have kept them. I believed his promise under the sky, whilst we were alone, was as true and binding as mine when I said I would be silent and do all he wished me to; and he taught me to see that in this twofold faith lay the real marriage, and not in words spoken before people. He told me the stars were truer witnesses than men. That heaven was nearer there, among the trees, than in the churches; and it did seem near—so near I almost entered in. I believed we were married as sacredly as though Mr. Prew had married us. Believing that, I gave myself to him. He has been false to his promise, but I will never be to mine. I thought myself married then. I will hold myself in marriage bonds until he comes—or death. For the rest, let him look to it!"
As she had spoken, Homer's face changed with her changing words, but the resignation of her last words inspired no calm in him; it woke instead a fierce resentment. He was to lose her. She was to continue to suffer the old ignominy; the village was still to have its victim—and all for a brute who had deliberately deluded and deserted her. Homer's next speech began with an impatient oath, but half stifled.
"Myron," he said, his tones so determined as to be almost harsh, "have you not realized yet how false his promises were? How wrong his persuasions? How utterly false and untrue all this fine talk about the 'stars as witnesses' and 'heaven being near' was? The stars are very convenient witnesses for curs of his stamp, being silent in face of any perjury. Do you not see the pit he prepared for you? Do you not fall, pierced by the stakes at the bottom? Do you not see that his promises are all lies? Can you not understand, then, that the rest of his twaddle was no better? Why will you continue to bind yourself with a wisp of straw? Your hands are free—give them to me!"
"I realize all—I see everything," she cried, "and feel—God! what have I not felt? But—oh, Homer, don't you see how it is? I could not kiss my child—I could not endure to see my own face as I bend over the well, if I thought of another man. Don't you see I would then be vile?"
"No, I don't," said Homer. "Marry me—you and the boy will have my name, and let me hear man or woman say one word against it!"
"I can't," she said.
"Marry me," he urged. "Let me take care of you. Let me show you what a man is. Let me give you a heart and a home. You are lonely, you will be lonely no more; defenseless, I will protect you; sad, I will make you happy; shamed, I will compel them to respect you. Myron"—he held out his arms—"marry me!"
Myron Holder had thought of this hour ever since the day of her grandmother's funeral. Her thoughts had all been of his pain. She had never realized how it might mean almost intolerable temptation to herself.
The contrast between the picture his words presented and her own life was poignant. She stayed a moment, gazing at that brighter scene, then put it by and turned herself to the reality that she had accepted as her bounden duty.
The sense of sacrifice with which she did this showed her how strong was the sorcery of the thought.
"No," she said.
"Myron," said Homer, paling, "don't you understand? I will take My as my own. I will give him a name in very truth. I—for My's sake, Myron!"
It was the supreme temptation. In a moment Myron saw what it meant, the materialization of her evil dream in the meadow—the stilling of the scandal that else must attach itself forever to My; the ending of all her own shame and solitude, or as much of it, at least, as appeared to other's eyes. But sorrow and shame teach subtle truths; etched clear upon the metal of this woman's soul, burned deep upon the tablets of her heart, their acids had graven the symbols of their teachings. Myron had battled against many fears, and knew, with the absolute certainty of conviction, that after the first triumph there would come a bitter reaction. She knew she would be forever at war with her own conscience. She knew that life held no prize high enough to pay for infidelity. There came suddenly athwart the dreary room the mirage of another scene: A wide stretch of sky and water, blended in a far-off blue, a mass of tossing tree-tops, a scent of fresh green ferns and flowering grasses, a swimming sense of light, exhilaration, freedom.... Homer was speaking. She did not hear his words; his voice was but an obligato to other tones that struck across it. She paid no more heed to Homer's voice than she had done that day to the rustle of the leaves, the whispering of the water far below....
"Trust me," a voice was saying in her ear. "Trust me, I will never leave you; believe me, I will never fail you. Why do you distrust me? You do not love me. Do you not understand this is the real church, more holy than any building made with hands. Do you not understand it is the mutual faith makes marriage, and not mere maundering words? Don't you? ... So long as you are true to me, you are in very truth my wife?" ... The voice ceased there, it had said enough.
The sky, the water, the tree-tops, and the fresh fragrance of the woodland weeds passed in an instant; but they had left behind an unfaltering resolution.
"No," she said; and so brief a time had sufficed for that retrospective vision that Homer did not remark any delay in her reply. Only his heart shrank, for something in her tone bespoke the finality of her decision.
The disappointment was cruel. He dropped into a chair and buried his face in his hands. She knelt before him, and pulling his hands from his face clasped them close against her breast. She looked up into his face from eyes that spoke of tears held back by bitterness.
"You understand, Homer?" she said. "If I cannot justify myself in my own eyes, I shall go mad. To do so, I must indeed remain as I am. I must act as though I were in very truth his wife. What does a wife do for her husband? Give up all? Have not I? Suffer? I have suffered. Obey him? I have obeyed him. Be true to him? I have chosen him before myself. Trust him? I have. I have trusted and waited. I will wait to the end."
She ceased.
Homer's eyes left her face, to look about the desolate room. The wood fire was dying for lack of attention, and the air was growing colder.
"But how am I to make it easier for you?" he asked, at length.
"You can't make it easier for me," she said. "'I have made my own bed,' as grandmother often said, and must lie on it. I went against the world's ways, and I suppose it's only right now to expect the world to be against me. No one can help me but him."
"Who is he, Myron?" asked Homer; and she saw a sly, venomous look light his eyes.
"Homer!" she said, her voice holding reproach and interrogation.
"Yes, I would," he said. "I would kill him as readily as I would set my heel on a snake.Widowsmarry!" There was an ugly emphasis on the word, an emphasis that held unconsciously somewhat of the derision of a sneer. But the sneer was turned against his own impotence.
"You are frightening me," said Myron, and the words brought him to himself.
He rose, drawing her to her feet beside him. "You are right, of course, Myron," he said. "But—this is the second time I have loved—you remember the girl I brought to the farm one day? Well, I loved her. She and I were to have been married, but I had to come back to the farm, and she changed her mind. Since then I have been a fool—worse, indeed. I have set aside everything for the sake of money. I was fast getting to be such another as old Haines or Jacob Latshem—all pocket and no heart. But I saw your courage, and it made me think shame of myself. You saved me—I thought to save you. It would seem as if I had offered you another shame. You know how little I care what people say of you! Poor girl, they can't say worse than they have done. So, will you let me do what I can to make things better for you? You know I have plenty. Will you let me be your friend, to help you, comfort you, and to see you and talk with you, as friend does with friend?"
"Dare you?" she asked.
"Try me," he answered.
She held out her hand. He took it. It trembled in his grasp.
"To think," she said, "of my having a friend!" The smile that lit her face transfigured it.
Homer put from him the desire that swelled within his heart to take her in his arms, and began, to talk of her position.
"You can't go on like this," he said.
"If it was only summer," sighed Myron.
"I'll tell you what," he went on, after a moment. "Clem Humphries and Ann Lemon have both applied for help to the township. They'll have to be boarded somewhere. Supposing I get them sent to you to board. The township would allow something for yourself also." Then he added, hastily, "Won't you let me give you enough to put you through the winter? Do, Myron."
"No," she said, answering his last proposition first, "but I would be so glad if they'd let me work for Clem and Ann."
"Well, I'll see about it," said Homer.
A day or two after that, the council, of which Homer was a member, met, and the applications of Ann Lemon and Clem Humphries were laid before them. Homer rose and made a formal proposition on the lines which he had suggested to Myron. It was carried at once. Mr. White was the other Jamestown member of the council, and he was much more concerned about getting home to take his cattle to the lake to water them than about anything else. He made no objection, and the other members of the council had matters relative to their own districts that they were anxious to have considered. The council meetings were open to every one, and the school-house was crowded with village people. Homer observed the looks that passed from one to another, and could not beat back the blood that reddened his swarthy cheeks as he put the formal motion before the council "on behalf of one Myron Holder."
"What about the kid? Don't it need any allowance?" a voice said in the corner of the room, and another answered, "Oh, Homer'll attend to that." A roar of laughter followed. Homer grew white enough when he heard this, and turned a look toward the corner whence the voices had come that made the group occupying it stir and shift about uneasily and start fragmentary conversations among themselves, as if to disarm that bitter look and disavow the speech that provoked it.
In this group Homer discerned Gamaliel Deans and Lou Disney, the latter the bully of the county. Lou and Gamaliel had been running together all winter, and rumor spoke not very flatteringly of their errands.
The meeting dragged along wearisomely to an end, and the men thronged out from the close, warm schoolroom, where the air was heavy with the fumes of tobacco and reeking with the moisture evaporating from the coats hung against the wall, for it had been snowing when the meeting began.
Night was just beginning to fall. It had ceased to snow, and the air was keen with intense frost, that crackled under foot and squeaked beneath the runners of the sleighs.
There was much stretching and talking and laughing as they went out, and Homer, among the first, heard his own name uttered, followed by a laugh. Then he heard Lou Disney's voice in a disjointed sentence—
"Pretty cheeky, that! First"—Homer lost the words here—"and then ask the council to keep 'em."
Homer turned in an instant, flinging himself through the crowd with the relentless impetus of fury. He swept the throng aside regardless of any obstacle, and seized Lou Disney's throat whilst the words still lingered on his lips, choking in that first fierce grasp the laugh that gurgled up to echo its own wit.
In a silence that appalled the crowd, used at such a time to much speech and few blows, Homer tore him from the door, to which, with the instinct of a fighter, he had put his back. Pressing him backward through the throng, Homer loosed him, with a curse, when fairly outside the straggling group.
"Now," said Homer, "eat your words, Disney, this minute—every lying syllable of them—or I'll thrash the soul out of you!"
Disney was no coward. The words had not left Homer's lips before he was tearing off his coat. The next moment they rushed at each other.
The fight was so fierce, so furious, so short, that few there could afterwards tell the story of it. Disney was the bigger man, and quite as clever with his hands as Homer; but the latter's arm was nerved by every insult Myron Holder had endured. As Disney sprang forward, he uttered her name, coupled with an epithet that simply maddened Homer. There was no resisting the fury of his attack.... Many hands dragged Homer from the man he had knocked insensible and bade fair to kill, if left alone.
He stood trembling, a great bruise darkening on his face, showing where Disney's first savage blow, aimed at the jaw, had fallen. Presently Gamaliel drove Lou off in his cutter, and the throng melted away. Clem Humphries lifted Homer's coat and brought it to him. The old sinner's face glowed with excitement and gratification.
CLEM LIFTED HOMER'S COAT AND BROUGHT IT TO HIM.CLEM LIFTED HOMER'S COAT AND BROUGHT IT TO HIM.
"You punched him well and he needed it bad," said he. "Never seen a man suffering for a licking more'n Lou Disney was; and he got the cure for his complaint without asking twice, he did. There's something," he went on, keeping pace with Homer, as the latter began to move away, "there's something so satisfying in seeing a man get what he wants, and get it like that, too, and—you should have seen Male Deans' eyes, sticking out like door-knobs, the boiled idiot!"
Clem paused in disgust, then went on again: "Why didn't you lick him, too? That would have been oncommon satisfactory!"
"There," said Homer hastily, "shut up, Clem! I'm going home." Whereupon he lengthened his stride and set forward at a pace which left Clem far behind, to make his way towards the other end of the village, with much complacency. His wicked old heart was full of pleasure. He had danced from one foot to the other, howling out a stream of encouragement and curses during the progress of the brief fight; had protested vigorously against the hands that pulled Homer from Disney, and had pushed Gamaliel Deans forward with all his might in Homer's way, hoping to enjoy a continuance of the battle. Failing this, he had gone along behind Disney and Gamaliel for some distance, reviling them as they drove off, until, remembering his religious principles, he had arrested himself in the delivery of a choice gibe, to slink behind the school-house corner until the crowd was gone.
"He woke up the wrong dog that time," chuckled Clem, thinking of Lou Disney, "and got bit."
Clem had a bitter grudge against Gamaliel Deans and every one connected with him. The day of old Mrs. Holder's funeral Clem had searched over all the barns he knew, in the hope of finding an empty jug that he could take to get his dollar's worth of whiskey in. But luck was against him. The cider-jars that had figured at the last threshings had seemingly all been carried away. He was quite disconsolate when, in the late afternoon, he returned to Mr. Muir's. He had hardly arrived there before Mrs. Muir sent him on an errand to Mrs. Deans. Having dispatched his message, Clem sought the barn, and the first thing his eyes lit upon was a fat and capacious brown jug. Gamaliel was in the barn mending harness, and to Clem's request replied that he might take it, adding that it was used at the last threshing.
Clem returned to the village late, partook of the somewhat meagre supper Mrs. Muir tendered him, and, going out at once, got his jug, rinsed it at the pump, and with it under his arm, trudged off to town to get it filled.
Now, unfortunately for Clem, it had not contained cider, but black oil, for the threshing machine. There was a thick coating of the oil within it, but the cold had fastened it stiff to the sides, and Clem's somewhat perfunctory wash with the icy water from the pump did not remove it. All unconscious of this, Clem proceeded upon his errand, got his whiskey, and started for Jamestown.
Manfully he resisted the temptation to take a drink. Clem knew his own weakness and the strength of his appetite when whetted by a taste. He hugged the jug close to him and trudged on. At length he reached Jamestown, and ensconced himself in the hay in Mr. Muir's stable-loft. But the alcohol had acted very differently from the water. It had completely dissolved the oil and incorporated it with itself. Clem's first long mouthful was his last.
The mixture was atrocious. Clem cursed till he exhausted himself, arose and broke the jug into the smallest fragments, and ever after hated Gamaliel Deans with a holy hatred, being firmly convinced that he had been intentionally tricked. Thus it was that Clem's delight was so genuine as he made his way to Mr. Muir's barn, where for the present his headquarters were. He entered, and, with a view to a supper of snacks from Mrs. Muir, proceeded to attend to the wants of the two black horses and the piebald mare, stopping to slap his brown old hands on his thin legs every now and then, ejaculating, "The boiled idiot!"—a pet expression of Clem's, not inexpressive of mental softness.
Clem moved about stiffly, and it was some time before he sought Mrs. Muir's kitchen door, his knobby old hands stiffened and glazed from holding the handle of the hay-fork. But not only had Clem accomplished his tasks in the barn, but eaten his supper, warmed himself and crawled off to his bed in the hay before Homer Wilson arrested his headlong walk. He had gone far beyond his farm—far, far beyond the farthest light of Jamestown. But at last, his strength leaving him suddenly, he paused and, reeling, turned towards home. It took him hours to retrace his steps.
The late dawn of the next wintry day fell upon Homer as he had flung himself down upon his bed, fully dressed, and with shining drops drying upon the livid bruise that disfigured his face.
"Piteous my rhyme isWhat while I muse of love and pain,Of love misspent, of love in vain,Of love that is not loved again;And is this all, then?As long as time is,Love loveth. Time is but a span,The dalliance space of dying man;And is this all immortals can?The gain was small, then.
"Love lovesforever;And finds a sort of joy in pain,And gives with naught to take again,And loves too well to end in vain;Is the gain small, then?Love laughs at 'never,'Outlives our life, exceeds the spanAppointed to mere mortal man:All which love is, and does, and can,Is all in all, then."
The talk that grew out of the fight at the school-house, the scandal that succeeded the talk, the gossip that spread the scandal, occupied the attention of the whole village for weeks, and the darkest shade possible was cast upon Homer's share of the affair. Every one felt it a species of self-justification to rail at Homer and excuse Disney, who had a devoted following among the young men of his own age and calibre. His manner was more fortunate than Homer's, though his intentions were far from being so generous.
Certain mental preoccupations had kept Homer somewhat apart from the men of his own age in the district—first, his ambitious dreams of a course at the commercial college, which led him to try to keep up his studies during the long summers when he was kept out of school to work; then came his absence in the city, when all his knowledge of the village filtered from the unready pen of his mother.
Upon his return to the farm his eyes were yet blinded by the glamour ofherhair, so that he found it sweeter to lie upon the grass, with his hands beneath his head, gazing up at the skies and thinking of her, than to join in any of the young people's enjoyments. He saw her eyes in every star, her hair in every moonbeam, her form in every graceful cloud. He felt her breath in every zephyr, he heard her voice in the rippling of the leaves, her laugh in the babble of the brook or the lapping of the lake.
Enchanted thus with his own imaginings, he made no effort to grasp the swiftly slipping cable of sympathy with his fellows. When his visions were dispelled and desecrated by her infidelity, well—he had made one or two futile snatches at the vanishing strand that had bound his heart and interests to those of his old school friends. But either it sped too fast from him, or he strove to grasp it too rudely, for he withdrew his hands from the task and found himself loath to make an effort in that direction again. This piteous outreaching for sympathy that is withdrawn sears the soul deeply, even as sliding ropes sear the hands; and yet we must not shrink from the lifeline that is to save us from the flames. We must endure the hurt to escape the greater peril. And it is better to live, even with torn and bleeding palms, than to shrivel in agonizing flames or suffocate in smothering smoke.
Withdrawn from temptation, Homer did not go forth to seek it, for he was nauseated of all desire. Thus there was no danger of his soul consuming in the evil fire of his own passions. But how nearly he had succumbed to the miasmatic exhalation that rose from the Slough of Despond into which his faculties had sunk! Now, indeed, he was winning his way out.
"Men may rise on stepping-stonesOf their dead selves to higher things."
But it is a painful progress, for each stone must be won from the strong edifice erected by ourselves to bar our way, of which each block is a passion, a sin or a folly, cemented together by selfishness and self-indulgence, based upon self-pity, garrisoned by prideful spirits that mock at our efforts. Driven from the ramparts, they throng about our feet to jostle us from our hard-won stepping-stones.
The Sir Galahads of life are much to be admired, and yet shall we not crown those also, who, having fallen, have again found firm footing—those strong souls, overcome once, that have struggled through all this and at last sprung to shore? Let us hope, at least, that they find those long-sought shores flowerful and pleasant.
Alas! Homer Wilson looked but upon a barren prospect, waste and drear, disappointing as the alkali lakes that mock the wanderer dying of thirst in the desert. Therefore it was not much wonder that he grew sad-faced and silent.
Had the woman he loved been happy, his life would not have been wholly desolate, for his love was of that unselfish type that desires rather the happiness of its beloved than its own gratification. But from Myron's desolate heart-fires there could come no joyful radiance. The only light her life diffused across his path was a pale glimmer of dying hope, that illumined the sorrows of their separate ways. Myron was indeed relieved from the pressure of actual want, for Clem Humphries and Ann Lemon were domiciled with her; but of comfort or peace of heart she had none.
Neither Clem nor Ann had ever been compelled before to seek township aid, and, with the perversity of human nature, they agreed in associating Myron with their downfall, and persisted in regarding her as being in some way responsible for it. They both were devoted to stimulants—Clem's choice being whiskey, Ann's gin. When the monthly instalments of money from the council arrived, they both, with one accord, set to work to wheedle some of it from Myron, with a view of gratifying their spirituous desires. In this, however, they were entirely balked. Beneath Myron's meekness and patience an iron will was strengthening.
Homer had said: "Don't give either of them any money. I'll give Clem tobacco when he needs it, but don't you begin giving them the money, or there'll be no stop to it."
That was enough. No persuasion moved Myron after that, either to yielding or to anger.
"She be a fair devil for obstinateness," said Clem upon one of these occasions.
"Yes," agreed Ann, venomously, "and who be she to lord it over the likes of us? We're decent, if we be poor."
It was, however, only upon these occasions that Clem and Ann agreed at all. They quarrelled continually, taunting each other with a fondness for liquor, and each making mock of the hypocrisy the other displayed in going to church, much upon the principle of one negro calling another a "black nigger."
The remarks they indulged in were, to say the least, personal, and each displayed a fiendish aptitude for finding out the weak spots in the other's armor.
Ann still cherished the shreds and patches of youthful vanities, mouldy remnants of adornment with which she disfigured herself on high days and holidays. She had a little house in the village, and a lot with some plum trees upon it. In summer she made shift to live very comfortably, what with the plums, and her chickens, and odd days' work. Indeed, she might easily have saved sufficient to keep her during the winter, but Ann was not of those who "go to the ant," and, after due consideration of her ways, become wise.
Her habit was, when she had a few dollars by her, to adorn herself with her best, go to town in the mail-wagon, get as much gin as she could for the money, and then give herself over to the enjoyment of her purchase. Upon these days it was no small excitement for the Jamestown children to watch the going and returning of Mr. Warner and his mail-wagon.
Long before mail-time Ann might be seen arranging her finery. She wore a black merino skirt, draggled into a tattered fringe at the bottom, and stained here and there by the drops that fell more swiftly as Ann's hand grew less steady. By some chance, she had once bought some bright blue ribbon from a peddler. She put two rows of this round her black skirt. Unfortunately the ribbon proved too short for the two rows, so that in the second one there was a hiatus of some twelve inches between the ends of the ribbon. This to some people might have been a somewhat insurmountable difficulty, but not to Ann. Catching her skirt just at that point where the ribbon failed to connect, she raised it gracefully with one hand, displaying the edge of a red flannel petticoat and a goodly length of robust limb. It is not recorded that she was ever seen so drunk as to forget herself sufficiently to loose her hold of the skirt, although upon several occasions she was carried helpless into her house, laid upon her bed, and left, as the good Samaritans of Jamestown expressed it, to "sober up and be ashamed of herself." Her bodice was only an ordinary calico one, but she covered its deficiencies by a black cashmere tippet of antiquated shape and ample size. It had a tassel between the shoulders, and certain lonely sparkles here and there showed that in the days of its youth and beauty it had been be-bugled. At the neck of this she pinned a knot of faded magenta ribbon, fastening it with a shell pin.
But the crowning glory of Ann's holiday toilet was her "front." This "front" was the only bit of false hair in Jamestown, and was regarded as an unholy thing, a direct manifestation of "the Devil and his works." Mrs. Deans always declared that Mrs. Wilson had "as good as owned up" that she would like a similar front; and indeed Mrs. Wilson, good woman, had been moved almost to defiance of public opinion by the evil fascinations of that sinful scrap of tousled hair. As a matter of fact, Ann's "front" was somewhat the worse for wear; the parting was a parting indeed, and several curls being gone at one side, there was a bare spot, where the black-net foundation showed. But Ann's bleared eyes looked out right jauntily from beneath this lopsided coiffure.
Perched upon her head was a bonnet. Originally covered with red silk, it had grown glossy and dark from much wear. Upon one side of it was stuck grotesquely a shapeless knot of black crape—limp, rusty, soiled by mud and weather, yet a symbol still of the loss of husband and child, and of a deeper loss than this—the loss of hope, the loss of self-respect, the loss of self-control, and the triumph of an evil appetite.
For long ago Ann had had a husband and a bonny daughter, and she herself was a big, buxom woman, fresh-colored and wholesome. But her husband died, and the daughter was carried home dead to her one day, with the water that had drowned her dripping from her long hair and leaving a dotted line upon the floor as it ran from the hand that hung over the edge of the rude bier.
Ann never "picked up" after that. Despite the admonitions of her Christian neighbors and their warnings against sinful repining, she yet dwelt ever upon her loss, seeking oblivion when she could in drink. Well, she was wrong, of course, but "the heart knoweth its own bitterness," and in the empty niches of her heart there perhaps lurked the shadow of an excuse for her.
In a certain old neckerchief, mottled with gay colors and bordered with purple, were tied a few tawdry relics, a string of black wooden beads, a knot of discolored blue ribbon that had clung to a tress of the drowned girl's hair, a dark pipe with the tobacco still in it, a waistcoat barred with bright stripes of yellow, a heavy plated watchguard—these were all that remained to Ann of the joy of life, and yet upon them fell as bitter tears as ever dimmed a diamond-set portrait or a pearl-clasped lock of hair.
This woman, for whose coming husband and child had once watched, was now an amusing spectacle for Jamestown boys. As Mr. Warner drove along the street Ann would go out and await his coming in all the dignity of conscious grandeur. She never started for town until she had enough to pay for her ride there and back, besides the money for her gin, for, as she often said, she wasn't much of a hand at walking.
Before getting into the mail-wagon, which was simply an ordinary two-seated light wagon, with a flat canopy upheld at the corners by iron rods, she paid Mr. Warner fifty cents, which was the fare to town and back. Then she mounted to the back seat, where she sat enthroned, her feet upon the canvas mail bag.
She enjoyed the drive thoroughly, nodding with much affability to every one they met, irrespective of whether she knew them or not, and saying, "Poor crittur! Who be he, I wonder. He don't know me," when any one failed to return her salute.
At the door of the Post-Office Ann got out, having paid no heed to the gingerly hints Mr. Warner had given her about getting out when they came to the town limits.
"Wouldn't you like to stretch a bit, Mrs. Lemon, before we get into town?" he would say, tentatively.
"No, I ain't a mite stiffened up to-day," she would reply.
"Because I'll stop and let you out if you'd rather," Mr. Warner continued.
"Oh, I wouldn't put you to no trouble," Ann demurred, politely.
"It wouldn't be no trouble," he would feebly protest.
But Ann only said: "I'm all right, Mr. Warner. No rheumatics in my knees, thank Providence and red flannels! I can sit, walk, or ride with the best of them yet." Then, animated by sudden concern for him: "But look here, if you're crippled up, jest get out and walk alongside and I'll drive. Do now, just reach the reins acrost here. I can drive as straight as a string."
But this ordering of affairs was still less to his liking; so, resigning himself to the inevitable and comforting himself with the thought of the fifty cents, he drove on to the Post-Office.
Here Ann alighted, and then began making inquiries as to the precise time of leaving, which side of the street he would be on, whether any one else was going, besides many other details that suggested themselves to her as legitimate excuses for prolonging the conversation, during which she surveyed Warner haughtily. Finally she sailed off, with, a last imperative injunction "to be punkshul."
When she returned, she was usually pretty far gone. She rolled in her walk, and fiery glances shot from her eyes. The tippet was usually screwed around, so that the tassel depended like an epaulet upon one shoulder, and the magenta ribbon did duty upon the other. Her bonnet had a trick, that amounted to a habit, of cocking itself hilariously over one ear, and the "front" usually pointed straight at the other.