CHAPTER XXV“THE WEIGHT OF A DOLLAREE AND OUT OF DEBT DON’T FORGET THAT”
Nathan Hornby moved promptly over to the Hunter farm, and established himself in Hugh’s old room upstairs.
The farm work prospered under Elizabeth’s management. She was fortunate enough to trade a young heifer with a calf at her side for Silas’s pony, and because feed was scarce she sold most of the stock, keeping only such as she desired to open farming with the next spring. The hogs were marketed early, and the few steers left when the cattle had been taken to Mitchell County were sold to the first buyer who offered a reasonable figure for them; the cows which gave evidence of increase were kept and the rest sold. Altogether money enough was raised to pay the note for the team and all the outstanding indebtedness except the note for five hundred dollars. The latter did not mature till May and could stand. The expense of feeding discouraged the farmers and prices dropped steadily all winter.
When April came the Johnson land was sold to a stranger, who came and offered to buy the west eighty of Elizabeth’s land. The five hundred would be due thenext month. The new neighbour coveted that eighty, and Elizabeth decided that if she could get a price warranting its sale she would sell, pay off the five hundred, and put the rest into calves while they were cheap. She offered the land for thirty-five dollars an acre. It was unheard of! No one had ever asked so much for land in that country, but the man wanted to add that land to his farm, and after some bargaining paid the price.
Frugal and cautious, Elizabeth paid the five hundred with the first check she drew against the price of the land. That left two thousand for calves and three hundred for running expenses. John had taken one horse out of the new team when he went away, and Elizabeth decided not to buy another, but to hire a horse in harvesting time. There were three full teams for the plows, besides the horse which had been hurt in the runaway. It had recovered and, though scarred and stiffened, could be used for ordinary work. She took good care to have it hitched beside a solid, trusty mate and treated gently to soothe its wild nature.
No word had come from John except when Doctor Morgan wrote him of the appraisement of the land. Then a curt letter had been received saying that whatever they did would be satisfactory to him and that when the deeds came he would sign them. Not to be outdone, Elizabeth bought the portion of land which did not have the house and buildings, agreeing to rent the home eighty until such time as he should choose to sell it, and expressing a desire, since Jack had been born there, to buy thehome if John should ever wish to part with it. To his suggestion that she use the home without rent—in fact, an offer of it as his share of support of the child—Elizabeth refused to listen.
“I’ll rent it of him as I would of anybody, Doctor,” she had replied, and made out a note on the spot.
John had written that he was in the commission business in Chicago, and did not say whether his mother was with him nor not. To Elizabeth he did not write, but to Jack he sent loads of toys and a sled at Christmas time.
Elizabeth had not attempted to communicate with John direct, but had rented his share of the land from him through Doctor Morgan. The sale of the west eighty gave her enough money to stock the place with every animal it would hold. When the girl began to look about her for calves, she found that because of the price of corn many farmers were selling their hogs at a sacrifice. Hogs were quick money. She invested in such as were ready for increase, and by harvest time there was a fine lot of pigs on the Hunter farm. Every cow had been milked, and the calves raised by hand so as to have the milk for the young pigs till the early corn could be gathered. Milking was hard work, but Elizabeth Hunter’s pride was up.
Elizabeth’s pride had had some sore pricks. In spite of every effort to avoid hearing the small talk regarding herself, Elizabeth had been obliged to listen to such portions as dribbled through from her mother, and an occasional remark from Sadie Hansen. Sadie Hansen’s life was areorganized one, but there were small lapses, and from force of habit she repeated things, though she was in the main about the kindest neighbour Elizabeth had. With Mrs. Farnshaw the case was different. She was Elizabeth’s mother, and certain privileges must be accorded her because of the relationship. When she chose to disapprove of the separation of her daughter from her husband, the daughter was compelled to recognize her right to protest, and often inadvertently to listen to the gossip which her mother urged as reasons for her objections. Mrs. Farnshaw came often and talked volubly. Elizabeth shielded herself as best she could from her mother’s prattlings, but had to endure many tearful complaints, for her mother was suffering much loneliness and discomfort since her daughter’s marriage. Josiah Farnshaw did not forget, nor let his wife forget, the disaffection of Elizabeth.
Once when Mrs. Farnshaw had gone beyond the mark where her daughter could receive it in silence, urging that Elizabeth call her husband home and submit herself to the matrimonial yoke, the girl turned upon her in annoyance:
“You’d have me just where you are yourself, ma. You say pa mistreats you—that’s just what was coming to me. If I didn’t have money enough that was all my own to live on, my husband would be sneering at me and keeping me in hot water all the time, exactly as pa sneers at you.”
“But you’re separated!” Mrs. Farnshaw cried.
“Yes,” the girl said slowly, “and because we are separated I can go to town if I like, I can go to church, I can go to see a neighbour, or my mother, without hating to ask for a horse to drive or being told when to come home, and when Jack is naughty I can talk to him without having anybody set his little will against mine and make it harder to deal with him. Oh, mother mine! Can’t you see that I’m happier than you are?”
“But, you’re livin’ apart and—and folks is a talkin’!” the mother exclaimed hopelessly.
“Let them talk. Their talk don’t hurt me, and it shouldn’t hurt you. They don’t talk before me.”
“But they talk behind your back, Lizzie,” Mrs. Farnshaw said with a wise nod of the head.
“They talked about us when John was here, ma, and they always talk about us; it doesn’t matter much what they talk about; they wouldn’t pay off the mortgage, nor the interest, nor raise Jack right, nor give me a chance to rest on washday. Some will say I was in the wrong, some that John was, and they all said that I was stuck-up and wouldn’t visit with them when it wasn’t so at all. They are looking to seewhowas wrong; I have reasoned outwhatwas wrong. It’s principles, not personalities, that get people into troubles that don’t seem to have any way out. Oh! can’t you see, ma, that I’m free, and the women that talk about me are just where they’ve always been. Free! and don’t forget that I’m out of debt. That’s more than you’ve got by staying with your husband, and you haven’t been able to keep peoplefrom talking after all. Free, and out of debt! Don’t forget it.”
“Well, you wouldn’t ’a’ been free, either, if Mr. Noland hadn’t ’a’ left you th’ money,” Mrs. Farnshaw replied.
Elizabeth dropped into a retrospective mood for a moment before she answered, and then said slowly:
“I know that. God in Heaven, how well I know it! And do you know I think about it every day—what could be done for the poor women on these hot Kansas prairies if there were some way to see that every girl that loves a man enough to marry him could have money enough to keep her if she couldn’t live under the work and children he crowds on her. I’m free, because I have money enough all my own to live on. That’s the weight of a dollar. Don’t forget that, you poor ma, who have never had a dollar except what has been doled out to you by the man you married. The weight of a dollar,” Elizabeth added meditatively, “that’s what it is!”
Mrs. Farnshaw, who had bought the groceries for her little family with the butter and eggs, and whose sugar had sometimes been short because there was a supply of Horse Shoe Plug to provide also, had no answer ready.
CHAPTER XXVI“WAS—WAS MY PAPA HERE THEN?”
Two years of favourable weather and good fortune with her livestock saw the money Elizabeth had invested in hogs doubled and trebled, and later, when the Johnson land was again offered for sale, she was able to buy it for cash and have the place well stocked after it was done. Silas Chamberlain, who watched Elizabeth with the same fatherly interest he had felt when her child was born, and who glowed with secret pride at the way in which she had won her way back into the country society about them, came in often and offered his measure of good-natured praise. He had prophesied the first time she had cooked for harvest hands that she would become a famous cook, but he had not expected to find her a famous farmer. What was still more astonishing to the old man was that she had become noted in quite other ways. The move she had made in going to meeting the first Sunday after John’s departure, and Hepsie’s explanation of it, had worked to her advantage in reestablishing her in the community as one of its factors, and opened to her the opportunity to wield the influence which Luther had pointed out to her the best educated woman in a community should wield. She took a classin the little Sunday school at the schoolhouse, not so much because she was an enthusiastic churchwoman as because it was the place where contact could be had. Elizabeth belonged to no church, but Elizabeth could turn the conversation of the church members, among whom she mingled, from gossip to better things, and there was not a quilting bee nor an aid society meeting in the country around to which she was not invited, and which she did not raise to a higher standard by her presence.
The snubs which the neighbour women were at first anxious to deliver fell flat in the quiet unconsciousness with which they were met. Elizabeth felt that much of the treatment she received was given in righteous indignation, and pursued the policy when possible to do so of not seeing it, and when it must be met to meet it with perfect good humour. She kept her credit good among the men with whom she bartered for young stock, and there began to creep in a better feeling for her within the first six months after she assumed the care of the farm and the problematical position of a “grass widow” in the neighborhood. Doctor Morgan, Hepsie, Jake, and Luther were splendid assets in the race with public feeling, and Silas saw his young neighbour’s affairs straighten out with chuckles of delight. He watched her manœuvre with her business deals and saw the cool-headedness of them with growing enthusiasm. He passed Nathan on his way to the field one spring morning and noticed that Nathan was using a seeder from the Hunter farm. It was bright with a coat of freshly dried paint.
“That’s what she borrowed my brushes for last week,” he exclaimed to Nathan. “Ever see anything like ’er?” he asked admiringly. “Takes care of everything. Did you ever see th’ likes of them hogs? She’s made more money sellin’ that land an’ buyin’ of it back ’n most of us old heads ’ll make in five year. Everything she touches seems t’ have a wad stuck under it somewheres.”
Elizabeth was more than merely successful in money matters; she was a reorganized woman from the standpoint of health also. She was no more the weary, harassed woman who had churned, baked, and cooked for shellers, and had so nearly found an early grave. The satisfaction of working unrestrained, of resting when nature and woman’s constitution demanded, and the whole matter of living without fear, had given her a sound and healthy body and a mind broader and less liable to emotional bias. The principle which she had demanded from her husband in their last conversation she put into practice. Hepsie ruled the house very much as if it were her own. Elizabeth knew from experience the dreariness of housework where all individuality is denied the worker. Hepsie came and went as the exigencies of the work permitted, and there was always a horse provided for her journeys away from the place; in fact, Hepsie was much more free than her mistress had been in her first three years in the same house. Elizabeth demanded good service, but she gave good service also, and from being a good joke to work for the grass widow, it came to be recognized that the Hunter farm was a good place to live, and when thespring came around the men who had worked there the season before always presented themselves for fresh hiring.
Two years more passed, and Master Jack Hunter was seven years old. On his seventh birthday his mother dressed him and herself carefully and rode over to the lonely graveyard. She did not go flower-laden. Rather, she went as was her custom, to spend an hour with the quiet dead in silent thought. Hugh Noland’s sacrifice had not been in vain. The life he had laid down had, whatever its mistakes and weaknesses, been a happy one to himself, and had carried a ray of cheer to all with whom it had come in contact, while his death had pointed toward an ideal of purity, in spite of failures. That brief period during which Elizabeth had been compelled to live a double life for his sake had held many lessons, and had forever weaned her from duplicity of any sort. Those special hours—the hours spent beside Hugh Noland’s grave—were spent in searching self-inquiry, in casting up accounts, in measuring herself against the principles with which she struggled. People had gone out of her wrestlings; principles remained. Here Elizabeth meditated upon the fact that because the neighbourhood sentiment and discussion centred around their home, she and John Hunter had missed a golden opportunity in not having become a force for good during those first years of their marriage.
The hour spent beside Hugh’s grave was her sacrament. There she went to renew her faith in her ownpowers, which Hugh’s interest and estimates had first taught her to recognize; there she went to renew her vows of higher living, and there to contemplate the freedom which Hugh Noland had given her. But for the land and stock which gave her an independent income she would have been as tearful, worn, and despondent as many of the women about her. Her heart was very tender toward Hugh as she sat beside his grave to-day. She held his letter—the only one he had ever written, her—in her hands. As she read it over, part of its last sentence, “and will, I hope, help toward emancipating you from care,” struck her attention, and her eyes filled with tears.
“What is it, mamma? What hurts?” Jack asked, always quick to respond to his mother’s moods.
“Nothing, dear, but Uncle Hugh’s letter. He wrote it just before he died. He was very kind to me,” she said, patting the face thrust up for a kiss.
“Was—was my papa here then?” the child asked, curious about the life he could not remember, and trying to relate things as he heard of them in their true relation to the father who was a mysterious personage and therefore interesting.
When his mother did not answer, he crept closer and, laying his head against her arm, said wistfully:
“Mamma, will my papa ever come back to us?”
“I don’t know, Jack,” she answered quietly. “Perhaps. If he don’t, you shall go and see him when you are a big boy. Now run away, and leave mamma a chance to think for a whole ten minutes.”
The child ran off to the horses, and Elizabeth faced the life she led. A curious thing was made plain to her in that hour—namely, that Hugh, whom she remembered tenderly, was but a memory, while John Hunter, the father of her child, whom she had no other cause to love, was a living force in her life, and that at the child’s simple question a longing flamed up, and a feeling that she wished he were there. She remembered him as he would ride with his hat in his hand, his fair, soft hair wind-blown about his temples, and she would have been glad to go forth to meet him and try anew to build a life together which would be livable to both.
A long time she pondered, and the impulse to write to him came over her, but that impulse was followed by retrospection, and as one thing after another arose out of the past in solemn procession, closing with the unloved and unwished-for child which she had lost five years ago, she knew that she would not open a correspondence. At that point, and with the memory of the sweltering day and the unnecessary churning, her tender memory of Hugh, who had made her free and economically independent, welled up in her in one glad tide of thanksgiving, and she thought of her mother and the thousands of other women on these Kansas prairies who had not been saved from such a fate by being made independent landowners, and she pondered on their fate till she longed for a way out for all women who were mothers.
“This income could have set John free too, if he would only have thought it over,” she said to herself. “Heneed not have been burdened with us while he was getting his depths in the business world,” she concluded.
Wherever Elizabeth’s thoughts turned to-day, John was the centre of them. Elizabeth had never been resentful toward her husband, and the never-ceasing cause of speculation and comment in the neighbourhood had been upon the fact that though she lived apart from him, she never seemed to think of divorce. Elizabeth’s attitude toward John was that of a mother who waits for a child to find the real light on a situation. She rarely heard from him, and never directly. She knew of some of his affairs through Doctor Morgan, with whom John corresponded when business required, but she wrote regularly to Mrs. Hunter, who had gone to her son the second year he had been away, and who had written to her at that time. Elizabeth had been glad of so simple a means of keeping the link unbroken between him and his child. It had been no part of her plan to separate Jack from his father. She would not ask John to return, but she wished him to have such knowledge of his son as his temper would permit. She wrote such details of the home and the child as would interest them, knowing that John would read the letters. Somehow, to-day she wished that she could write to him direct, but as she thought she shook her head.
“It cannot be,” she said aloud.
“Mamma, if you don’t come we won’t have time to go for the mail,” Jack called.
The pleasant afternoon had waned; Elizabeth Hunter gazed about her in astonishment; it was indeed late.
She stooped and passed her hand over the name cut in the marble slab. “Hugh Noland, aged twenty-nine.”
“Hugh Noland, dear,” she said aloud, “you have set me financially free, but there is another kind of freedom I have got to win for myself. I’ve got to tell John the things that we wanted to tell and were too cowardly to do. If we ever come together again I shall tell it out, if all this country gets to hear it. Jack can better afford to take the disgrace of it than to have a mother who carries it about with her as a secret. Without honesty no other virtue is a virtue at all.”
Elizabeth’s eyes were full of tears as she voiced her vow, but there was a sense of relief welling up within her that she had not known in all the five years Hugh had lain here. She stood very quiet till her emotions were under control and her sunny self in command again, then she blew a kiss at Aunt Susan’s grave and went to the waiting child and with him rode a merry race toward Colebyville.
CHAPTER XXVIITO DO OVER, AND TO DO BETTER, WAS THE OPPORTUNITY OFFERED
Elizabeth Hunter and her son were still breathing hard from rapid riding when they drew up in front of the post-office. Elizabeth dropped from the saddle, tossing her rein to Jack to hold till her return, and went inside. She was to remember this day and the dingy little window through which mail was passed. The postmaster was a new man and tossed the letters out carelessly; therefore he did not see the sudden start the girl gave as she began to gather them up.
John Hunter’s familiar handwriting stared at her from the top envelope.
Elizabeth thought of many things while she waited for the man to run through the newspapers and magazines. Half an hour ago she had registered a vow beside Hugh Noland’s grave. She was to be tested promptly. When all was handed out to her, she took the pile—Elizabeth’s magazines supplied the entire community with reading material, and were handed from house to house till as ragged as the tumble weeds of her native Kansas—and put them all in the canvas bag at Jack’s saddle horn. The letter was unopened. Something made her wait. Something said that John was asking to return—to do over, and to do better, was the opportunity offered to her. Her vow rose up before her; without the fulfillment of that vow there could be nobetter, that she recognized—and yet——
“JOHN HUNTER’S FAMILIAR HANDWRITING STARED AT HER FROM THE TOP ENVELOPE”
“JOHN HUNTER’S FAMILIAR HANDWRITING STARED AT HER FROM THE TOP ENVELOPE”
All through the long ride home she pondered upon the past and upon the possibilities of the future. Not till after Jack was safely tucked away in his bed, not till Hepsie had her supper work done and had gone upstairs and all the various members of her household had retired for the night, and she was certain of hours for uninterrupted thinking, did Elizabeth Hunter bring out the unopened letter and lay it on the table before her. Even then she renewed her vow before she broke the seal. Was he the old John, who would fly out impulsively and cover them all with disgrace if she told him? she asked herself many times. In a cold sweat of terror, she asked herself also if it were possible to build right in this new endeavour without telling John of the love which she had shown to Hugh; the temptation was terrible, but she was compelled to shake her head. The habit of openness and fair dealing would not hold her excused; there was no other way, she must tell it out. Carefully she went over all the things that would be lost if this story should be bruited abroad. Jack would be disgraced, she would be stripped of her influence in the neighbourhood, slain in the sight of her friends who had fought her battles for her because they believed in her, stripped of everything which had gone to make life worth the living, and she would place herself inthe power of a man whose only attitude toward the story might be one of self-righteous justification. Was it worth the price? Her own words rose up before her, “Without honesty no other virtue is a virtue at all.” Elizabeth pondered a long time, and again her own words rose up to confront her, “It does not matterwhois wrong, the thing that matters iswhatis wrong,” and for Elizabeth there was no escape. This had been the philosophy of her life; she was called upon to stand or fall on that ground. With her head bowed in acknowledgment, she drew the missive out of its envelope and began to read:
Dear Elizabeth: This letter will no doubt surprise you, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I might begin by saying that I was homesick for Jack—which is true—but I’m going to confess that I’m homesick for you too. Is there still hope? I would have written you long ago, but I went into things too heavy and lost the money I got for the cattle—and then I couldn’t. It would have looked like asking to come back to the land. As you know, I mortgaged the home eighty—it hurt some to do that, knowing you’d have to sign it—and began slower. I got along very well, but it was terribly tedious, and at last, after three years of steady work, and no debts, I couldn’t wait any longer, and put half of what I had on the Board of Trade proceedings.I won!Last Saturday I sold all I had, and now while I can come to you right, I want to ask if you will take me? Take me quick, if you are going to, before I do some reckless thing and lose it again. I hear you have prospered; that was why I had to wait so long. I often think of dear old Hugh, and his interest in some of the things about the neighbourhood, and I have been given to see while living in this rotten hole of a city how much I underestimated the people about us in Kansas. I would be glad to come back and live among them. Will you let me? A telegram will bring me to you on the next train.With love to both you and Jack, who will be seven years old this week,Affectionately,John.
Dear Elizabeth: This letter will no doubt surprise you, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I might begin by saying that I was homesick for Jack—which is true—but I’m going to confess that I’m homesick for you too. Is there still hope? I would have written you long ago, but I went into things too heavy and lost the money I got for the cattle—and then I couldn’t. It would have looked like asking to come back to the land. As you know, I mortgaged the home eighty—it hurt some to do that, knowing you’d have to sign it—and began slower. I got along very well, but it was terribly tedious, and at last, after three years of steady work, and no debts, I couldn’t wait any longer, and put half of what I had on the Board of Trade proceedings.I won!Last Saturday I sold all I had, and now while I can come to you right, I want to ask if you will take me? Take me quick, if you are going to, before I do some reckless thing and lose it again. I hear you have prospered; that was why I had to wait so long. I often think of dear old Hugh, and his interest in some of the things about the neighbourhood, and I have been given to see while living in this rotten hole of a city how much I underestimated the people about us in Kansas. I would be glad to come back and live among them. Will you let me? A telegram will bring me to you on the next train.
With love to both you and Jack, who will be seven years old this week,
Affectionately,John.
Affectionately,
John.
The tension was broken. Elizabeth laid the letter back with a smile. How like John to suggest a telegram! John never could wait. How well she knew his little weaknesses; the written characters of the missive had the flowing curves of haste in their running letters. He had written on the impulse of the moment, no matter how longthe desire had been in his heart. The very spontaneity of the confession was unpremeditated and worked in John Hunter’s favour. He had remembered Jack’s birthday too! That day seven years ago rose up in Elizabeth’s memory to plead for Jack’s father. She earnestly desired John’s presence, and yet—could it be done?
Far into the night Elizabeth Hunter sat with the letter before her, reading and rereading it, pondering upon the possibilities of the future, seeing them in the light of the past she had spent with him, wondering what sort of man her husband had become in the five years since she had seen him. The letter sounded as if those years might have been profitable ones. There was both the openness of real honesty and the reserve of real strength in the confession about his financial affairs. The most hopeful thing she found in the letter was the sentence about Hugh’s estimate of the neighbours among whom they had lived and the implied comparison regarding the city in which he now did business. Dear old John! Had Chicago business men tried the methods on him that he had thought it fair to apply to his dealings with her? In the midst of that question rose the one—would John Hunter feel the same toward Hugh Noland’s estimates when he was told the truth about his wife’s affection for Hugh, and of the weakness of both in the demonstrations of that affection? Well, it had to be told. Scandal would be hard to face with no denial possible. Doctor Morgan had known it all and still trusted her; likewise Luther; but Hepsie, and Jake, and Sadie? Besides, Jackwould have to know, and would suffer for things of which he was innocent! The girl wrestled with the subject till midnight, and long after. At last, to put it where she could not deceive herself, she wrote a simple statement of the whole thing and sealed it up with John’s address upon the envelope, and then raising her hand solemnly promised herself that this letter which contained the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth should be mailed as she had written it without being opened to change a word. She would answer John’s letter in one apart from this and send it by the same mail, but this letter she would send as it stood.
As she got up to go to bed, she picked up the bag in which they brought the mail and felt in it to see if anything were left. A small narrow book that opened endwise and had the name of the Bank of Colebyville on it was all. It was a fitting end to her considerations. She had never owned a checkbook till recent years. Because of its presence, she might yet be able to answer John Hunter as he wished. She thought long on her situation. There was no sleep in her. The larger, the universal, aspects of the question began to crowd in upon her mind.
“There is no other way,” she said. “A woman, to be free, must have money of her own. She must not be supported by a man.”
She stepped out on the porch and stood looking toward the east. The refreshing breeze which had sprung up cooled and invigorated her.
“The wind before the dawn! The beginning of a new day!” she said aloud.
Turning toward the kitchen, she began to pack a box which stood waiting on the end of the kitchen table. Doughnuts, cookies and pies had been left there to cool the evening before. Mrs. Farnshaw was to have threshers to cook for to-day, and Elizabeth had grown thoughtful of the mother, who was aging visibly. In such ways as she could, she spared her mother’s strength and gave her the comfort of frequent visits and companionship. In order to get the long eight-mile drive over before it became hot, it was necessary to get an early start, and Elizabeth, with Jack at her side, was on the road before the sun was fairly above the horizon.
About eight o’clock Mrs. Farnshaw turned at the sound of their feet on her doorstep. She set her cob basket on the floor, put the stove lid over the roaring fire, and turned to Jack with grandmotherly delight.
“You’re a real comfort, Lizzie,” she said, straightening up with Jack in her arms. “I never used t’ think you would be, but you are. I’m that tired that I’m ready t’ drop.”
“Anything more than usual?” Elizabeth asked, noting the fagged and heavy face, and the gathering tears.
“Oh, nothin’ more ’n ’as happened many a time; only ’e grows crosser, seems to me, as ’e grows older. He was particular bad last night, and I didn’t sleep none. It’s awful hot weather t’ lay awake.”
When Elizabeth did not reply, the mother said testily:
“Now I s’pose You’ll be thinkin’ that you don’t have t’ care for what a man says.”
Elizabeth laughed, but not in her usual merry way.
“Perhaps,” she said slowly. “I was thinking farther than that—I was wondering——” She paused to think and then broke out suddenly. “John’s written to ask if he can come back, and I was just wondering——”
Mrs. Farnshaw was all animation at once, her own troubles forgotten.
“You don’t say?” she exclaimed. “Now look here, Lizzie, you’re goin’ t’ let him come?”
Elizabeth had told her mother on the impulse of the moment after withholding the news from Nathan and even from Jack. The child had been wriggling out of his grandmother’s arms and had not heard what his mother said. Elizabeth waited till he was out of hearing. She half regretted having mentioned it. She was going to have to argue out her decision with her mother, and she had made no decision.
The mother’s accidental remark had produced the impulse to tell. Well, it was all right. It might be that she could decide better after discussing it with some one. Elizabeth looked at her mother doubtfully.
“I don’t know, ma. I may. It’s all owing to whether we can agree on the terms of starting over.”
“You ain’t goin’ t’ lay down rules t’ him?” the mother cried in amazement.
“Now’s my time to find out what rules he’s going to lay down to me at least,” Elizabeth said dryly.
“But I never heard of such a thing! Say, don’t you love ’im any more, Lizzie?”
“I—I think I do, ma,” Elizabeth said slowly. “But there’s the very trouble with women. They think they ought to love a man enough to take him without a definite understanding, and then they find that a woman’s love means mostly obedience to a man. Yes, I think I love him. But I’m going to know what he expects, and I’m going to tell him what I expect, and make no mistakes this time. We’ll know before we begin.”
“But he may not take you,” Mrs. Farnshaw said in a frightened whisper.
“I rather think I’m taking him,” Elizabeth said, beginning to unload the box of provisions she had brought. “You forget that I’m making my own living.”
“Thatdoesmake a difference,” Mrs. Farnshaw admitted.
“That makesallthe difference,” Elizabeth replied positively. “The longer I look at it the more convinced I am that the whole thing hinges right on that point. If we live together again I’ll know that it isn’t because he feels that having married me he must keep me in food and clothes, and he’ll know that it’s because I want to and not because I’ve got a child to be supported. I believe I love him; but if I didn’t know I could leave him in a minute if he made me do things that I wasn’t able to do I wouldn’t dare to say yes. Knowing that I don’t have to live with him if he begins to order me around, I think I’ll try it.”
“You’re a queer girl, Lizzie,” the mother said, puzzledand uncertain what to think of the philosophy she propounded. “You don’t seem to be afraid of men at all.”
“I don’t have to be, ma, because no man will ever again pay for my food and clothes. You are not to tell anybody, even the boys. I may not do it yet. I didn’t intend to tell you for a while, but you insisted on telling me what I was thinking about, and it popped right out at you.”
Elizabeth gave her mother a tender look and added: “I told you first when he asked me before,” which was a thing her mother could understand and appreciate. Elizabeth was considerate of the little mother whose life was hard, and who was afraid of a man.
At that point Elizabeth fell into a brown study. She argued for her own rights, knowing that only on that path could peace come to either herself or John, but she did not feel herself wholly worthy, and John wholly unworthy; she knew her weaknesses, and she knew she had wronged John Hunter as well as he had wronged her; she was willing to take him if he would be as willing to correct his faults and confess them as she was willing to do. She did not ask of John Hunter that he be always right in his actions toward her, but that he discuss their grievances and let them look together for better ways of settling what was right for each. She was so deep in her own thoughts that she did not hear Jack, who called to her from the door:
“Mamma, let’s go! Come on! They’re going right now, mamma!”
Elizabeth did not hear the child till he tugged at her skirts and exclaimed:
“Come on, mamma! Grandma won’t care. Come on!”
His mother looked down at the boy with a smile. How well she remembered the delights of threshing-day herself. She looked about the kitchen to see what had yet to be done.
“Wait a little, Jack. I’ve got to help get the table set and the dinner on to cook. You wouldn’t have me leave grandma to do all the work alone, would you?” she asked suggestively.
As Jack hesitated between his great desire to see the marvel of the stackyard and his desire to show as much manliness as his mother evidently expected of him, there was a noise on the doorstep and Hepsie came smilingly in.
“I followed you all on th’ pony,” she said. “I fixed it up with th’ boys yesterday t’ take a cold dinner to-day an’ let me come an’ help here. We’re lookin’ out that you don’t hurt yourself to-day, Mis Farnshaw,” she added, addressing the older woman.
“Now you can go to the threshing machine too, grandma!” Jack cried with delight. “Come on, let’s go right now!”
“Not now, Jack,” Elizabeth said. “Hepsie didn’t come to get the dinner alone.”
“Oh, yes, she did! She likes to,” Jack replied so confidently that they all laughed, and Hepsie fell on the child and hugged him.
“Of course I did, Jack. Grandma will show me what to do, and then she and mamma can take you out to see the machine go round and round like a big coffee mill, and maybe Jack can ride one of the horses.”
“Oh, Hepsie! Don’t put that into the child’s head,” Elizabeth interposed hastily. “I wouldn’t have him on one of those horses for anything.”
“Mamma says I spoil you, Jack. Run along now, and let me look after this dinner.”
As soon as the tables were set and the dinner on to cook, Elizabeth and her mother took the excited child and started to the barnyard. Mrs. Farnshaw was pulled along by the impatient grandson, and Elizabeth came at some distance behind, having stopped to glance in the chicken house as she went. The marvellous ant-hill called a stackyard would not permit Jack to wait for his mother.
Mr. Farnshaw saw them coming. He would gladly have avoided his wife and daughter, but Jack took things for granted and always insisted upon dragging his mother into his grandfather’s presence and mixing them up in the conversation. Elizabeth had dropped behind purposely, knowing her father’s feelings toward her, and did not hear Jack say persuasively:
“Grandpa, let Jack drive and make the horses go round.”
“No, no, Jack,” Mrs. Farnshaw said quickly. “Mamma said you could not go on the horsepower.”
Mr. Farnshaw gave his wife a look of disdain and, stooping, picked the child up. Mrs. Farnshaw gave alittle cry. When his own team came around, Mr. Farnshaw walked in front of it and started toward the platform on which Albert stood swinging a long whip.
The “near horse” of the Farnshaw team was a stolid and reliable mare, mother of many colts. She was so placed because it had been decided to put a young stallion of uncertain temper beside her.
The restive, irritable beast sustained his reputation by nipping angrily at Mr. Farnshaw as he dodged under the straps with which the horses were tied to the reach ahead. To have passed in front of this team unencumbered and alone when the power was in motion would have been foolhardy; but with Jack in his arms it was an act of mock-heroics typical of the whole bull-headed character of Josiah Farnshaw. He stumbled slightly in springing out of the horse’s way, and with Jack, who was a load, in his arms, was barely able to keep his feet.
A shout went up from every man who saw the occurrence, and Albert shut off the power in the endeavour to stop the machine.
Mr. Farnshaw sprang toward the inner corner of the triangular space occupied by the team, and as the machine slowly came to a full stop set Jack on the boards at Albert’s feet and turned toward the horses. The stallion threw a challenge at the man who had escaped its teeth, reared angrily, shook its black mane, and, with teeth exposed and ears laid back, prepared for another lunge. Not only Mrs. Farnshaw but every man on the ground called to Josiah Farnshaw to get out of the way of theinfuriated beast. Instead of heeding the frantic warnings, Mr. Farnshaw, determined to let his onlooking neighbours see that he was not afraid, sprang forward and struck the squealing animal a stinging blow on the nose with his fist. Taken by surprise, the horse set back so suddenly that he broke the straps with which he and his mate were fastened to the reach, falling against the mare, who was thoroughly frightened by her master’s menacing blow. The team behind them reared and snorted as the stallion sprang to its feet again.
Then a strange and terrible thing happened. The horse stopped and made ready for the plunge he had in mind. There were warning cries from every man in the stackyard, but there was no chance to escape. With a scream which struck terror to the hearts of the onlookers the brute sprang upon the man and sunk its teeth through flesh and bone alike as it grabbed the arm which was aiming a puny blow, and shook him as if he were a rag, flinging him against the ground under its feet, and shaking him as a dog shakes a rat it has captured. The men could not rush in, because the other horse was on the outside of the team and was kicking and struggling to free itself from the shrieking stallion. Every team attached to the machine was tearing at its moorings, and horrified as the men were they were obliged to attempt to control the other horses. The team immediately in front of the stallion broke away altogether, carrying away with it the reach to which it was fastened. Seeing his opportunity, Joe Farnshaw rushed into the space left open by the disappearanceof the other team, and with a well-directed blow from an iron bar he had snatched up, he staggered the horse so that it dropped the nerveless thing it had been shaking, and stood stunned and trembling, sight, sound, and all other matters of sense gone. The body was snatched away from in front of the tottering horse in time to save it from the heavy weight of the falling animal, which began to tremble, and then, losing control of its legs altogether, fell heavily toward the platform, dragging its mate to her knees as it went.
Elizabeth quieted her shrieking mother as best she could while she hugged her rescued child to her bosom, and the sons of Josiah Farnshaw helped the men to lay the broken body of their father upon an improvised stretcher to be removed to the house. Kind hands performed the little duties necessary on such occasions, and then the horrified men stayed on, gathered in little groups about the dead stallion in the stackyard.
When all was done and the family were reduced to that terrorizing state of idleness which comes to those who stand about their dead, Elizabeth took Jack and wandered out of the house to where she could see Joe standing near the well. Together they glanced across to the men standing around the torn and dismantled horsepower.
“Pa was like that horse, Joe,” Elizabeth said with a sudden gleam of insight. “They were both ruled by unbridled passions. Everything they did they mixed up with hate. You couldn’t touch either of them without having them lay back their ears.”
CHAPTER XXVIII“TILL DEATH DO YOU PART” CONSIDERED
The day after Josiah Farnshaw was buried, Elizabeth sat down to answer John’s letter. It was not easy to do, and she sat for a long time with her chin in her hand before she began to write. The death of her father related to the things of which she must speak. She began by telling him the circumstances of her father’s death and showed him that the tragedy had been the result of pride and the habit of domination, of an unwillingness to listen to advice, or to discuss necessary matters. Her brothers had urged that the stallion be left in the barn and that another horse be substituted, since by its outcries and prancings it would keep the strange horses nervous and irritable, but Mr. Farnshaw, having said in the beginning that the animal should be used, would not listen to anything that the family wished him to do in the matter. Mrs. Farnshaw had objected to Jack being placed upon the horsepower, but once having started to place him there, her husband would listen to no caution. Last but not least of those refusals to advise with those who knew as well as he what should be done had been the one of not heeding the cries of the men who had warned him not to approach the vicious brute. To dominatehad been the keynote of her father’s character; his death had been a fitting symbol of his overweening desire to pursue that phantom.
After enlarging upon the causes of the tragedy, she took up the matter of the refusal to listen to necessary explanations which had had so much to do with her separation from her husband.