CHAPTER VIII.—ALBERT’S PLANS.
It became generally known, before Sunday came again, that Albert was to take the farm, and that Seth was to go to the city—known not only along the rough, lonesome road leading over the Burfield hills, which had once been a proud turnpike, with hospitable taverns at every league, and the rumbling of great coaches and the horn of the Postboy as echoes of its daily life of bustle and profit, and now was a solitary thoroughfare to no place in particular, with three or four gaunt old farmhouses, scowling in isolation, to the mile—not only on this road, and at the four corners below, but even at Thessaly people learned of the coming change as if by magic, and discussed it as a prime sensation. It need not be added that the story grew greatly in telling—grew too ponderous to remain an entity, and divided itself into several varying and, ultimately, fiercely conflicting sections.
The Misses Cheesborough had the best authority for saying that Albert had acted in the most malignant and shameful manner, seizing the farm, and turning poor Seth out of doors, and it was more than a suspicion in their minds that the feeble old father would soon be railroaded off to an asylum.
On the other hand, Miss Tabitha Wilcox, who by superior vigor and resource held her own very well against the combined Misses Cheesbrough, knew, absolutely knew, that Albert had behaved most handsomely, paying off all the mortgages, making a will in favor of John and Seth, and agreeing to send Seth to College, and what was more, Miss Tabitha would not be surprised, though some others might be, if the public-spirited Albert erected a new library building in Thessaly as a donation to the village.
Between these two bold extremes there was room for many shades of variation in the story, and many original bents of speculation. Down at the cheese factory they even professed to have heard that a grand coal deposit had been surreptitiously discovered on the Fairchild farm, and that Albert was merely the agent of a syndicate of city speculators who would presently begin buying all the land roundabout. Old Elhanan Pratt did not credit this, but he did write to his son in Albany, a clerk in one of the departments, to find out if a charter for a railroad near Thessaly had been applied for. The worst of it was, neither John nor Seth would talk, and as for Albert, he had gone back to New York, leaving his wife behind.
On the farm the fortnight following the funeral passed without event. In the lull of field labor which precedes haying time, there was not much for Seth to do. He went down to the river several times on solitary fishing trips; it seemed to him now that he was saying farewell not only to the one pastime which never failed him in interest or delight, but to the valley itself, and the river. How fond he was of the stream, and all its belongings!
More like home than even the old farmhouse on the hill seemed some of these haunts to which he now said good-bye—the shadowed pool under the butternut tree, with its high steep bank of bare clay where, just under the overhanging cornice of sod, the gypsy swallows had made holes for their nests, and at the black base of which silly rock bass lay waiting for worms and hooks; the place further up where the river grew sharply narrow, and deep dark water sped swiftly under an ancient jam of rotting logs, and where by creeping cautiously through the alders, and gaining a foothold on the birch which was the key to the obstructing pile, there were pike to be had for the throwing, and sometimes exciting struggles with angry black bass, who made the pole bend like a whip, and had an evil trick of cutting the line back under the logs; and then the broader stretch of water below the ruined paper mill’s dam, where the wading in the thigh-deep rifts was so pleasant, and where the white fish would bite in the swift water almost as gamely as trout, if one had only the knack of playing his line rightly in the eddies.
A score of these spots Seth had known and loved from the boyhood of twine and pin hooks; they seemed almost sacredly familiar now, as he wandered up and down the stream, dividing his attention between the lures and wiles of the angler’s art and musings on the vast change of scene which was so close before him. Ah, how fair were the day dreams he had idly, fondly built for himself here in these old haunts, with kingfishers and water rats for sympathizers, and the ceaseless murmur of the water, the buzz of the locusts in the sun, the croak of the frogs among the reeds, for a soft inspiring chorus of accompaniment to his thoughts!
Now these dreams were really to come true; he was actually going to the city, to wear decent clothes, to mingle as much as he chose with men of wisdom and refinement, to attain that one aim and vision of his life, a place on a great paper!
It was only here by the river, rod in hand, that he seemed able to fully realize the beatitude of the vista. So as often as he could he came, and if there was a ground note of sorrow at leaving these nooks, this dear old river, there was also a triumphant song of exaltation in the air, the water, the sunshine, which he could not hear on the farm.
Partly because these excursions generally led him from the house before she made her appearance mornings, partly because he felt vaguely that his own victory over fate involved disappointment for her, Seth did not see much of Isabel during her husband’s absence. So far as he knew, she had taken the news of Albert’s determination to move into the country quietly enough. Neither by word or sign had she discovered to Seth any distaste for the prospect. But none the less he had a half-guilty conviction that she did not like it, and that she must blame him, or at least have some feeling against him, for it. She had spoken so earnestly to him about the curse of existence in the country; it was not conceivable to him that she should suddenly accept for herself without protests or repining, the very life she had thus commiserated with him about.
Yet it seemed after all that he was mistaken. It was the evening after Albert’s return, and Annie had come over after supper, ostensibly to borrow a wrapper-pattern from Isabel, but really, it need not be doubted, to hear the news.
What news there was to be given out the eldest brother dispensed to the family circle, after Alvira had cleared away the “tea-things.”
That domestic had a clear idea of making one in the circle, and, hastening in from the kitchen without her apron, drew up a chair to sit with the others, and enjoy the revelations which, from Albert’s manner during supper, all felt to be impending. But the invasion of city manners, which she and Milton had deplored and ridiculed for a fortnight back, had an unsuspected bitterness in its train for her. The lawyer looked at her coolly, as he struck a match on the under side of the mantel-piece, and asked: “Hadn’t you better go out, Alvira, and see that the chickens don’t get into the kitchen?”—and she flounced out again, with nose in air, and black eyes flashing.
Albert lighted his cigar, put an arm chair down near the old rocker in which his father sat and took his seat. Near the open door, overlooking the farmyard and the barns, and full in the light from the west, sat Miss Sabrina, knitting, and Isabel, with a paper. At the latter’s feet, on a hassock, was Annie, and Seth sat on the doorstep.
“Father,” said Albert, “things have been arranged in New York so that I can speak, now, about the plans which I hinted of ten days ago.”
The old man nodded his head, and said plaintively, “Whatever yew think best, Albert, s’long as the boys git a fair shaow.”
“You needn’t worry about that. My business is settled now, I think, so that I can live here six or eight months in the year, say from March till October, running down occasionally, perhaps, but making this my residence. I will take up all the mortgages—perhaps buy back some of the old farm, may be all of it. There are three or four ways in which this can be equitably arranged—we’ll talk of those in detail later on, some day when John can come up. I will have the carpenters here in a few days, to look over the house, and figure on putting it in first-class repair. The barns will have to be new throughout. There must be new machinery, new fences, and a pretty thorough weeding out of the cattle. We shall want a carriage house—but then its no use of enumerating, there is so much to be done. We will put some money into horseflesh down on Long Island, and see if something can’t be done in the way of a stock-farm. I’m thinking of a trout pond, up beyond the orchard, in the ravine there, too.”
“Oh, Albert, this is what I’ve be’n prayin’ for this thirty year!” It was Sabrina who spoke. There were tears of joy in her eyes.
Lemuel Fairchild seemed rather dazed, not to say dismayed, at the prospect thus bewilderingly unfolded. “It’ll cost a heap o’ money, Albert,” he said at last, rather dubiously, “an’ I dunnao’ ’baout yer gittin’ it back agin.”
“That will be my look out,” said the lawyer, confidently. “At any rate, Isabel and I will make a good home for you and Aunt Sabrina, as long as you both live. It will be a pleasant change for us both. As for Seth—”
There was a pause, and Annie nestled closer to Isabel, with a soft “Oh yes, about Seth.”
“As for Seth, it’s time he saw something of life besides grubbing here like a farm-hand. We will try and get along without him here. I’ve talked the matter over with a friend of mine, the proprietor of the Tecumseh Chronicle and he is willing to give him a start there, under the most favorable conditions. The salary will be small at first, of course, but I will supplement it with enough to give him a decent living, if he is frugal. After that of course it all depends on himself.”
Seth stood up, as these last words were spoken, and replied, stammeringly. “You needn’t be afraid of my not trying hard, Albert. I’m sure I’m very grateful to you. It’s more than I dared expect you would do for me.” He pushed his way past the women to shake hands with his brother, and say again “It’s so good of you.”
Albert received these expressions of gratitude benevolently, adding some words of advice, and concluding with “You had better get ready to start as early next week as you can. One of the Chronicle men is going on a vacation, and its Workman’s idea that you would be handy in his absence. You could go, say, Wednesday, couldn’t you?”
“So far as getting ready is concerned, I don’t know that there is anything to do which couldn’t be done in a day. But—but—”
“Of course you will need some things. I’ll talk with you about that in the morning. We’ll drive down to Thessaly day after to-morrow together.” Albert rose with this to go out and see Milton, and the family interview was at an end.
Miss Sabrina hurried out to the kitchen, impatient to begin discussing with Alvira, as had been her wont for years, this new development in the affairs of the household.
CHAPTER IX.—AT “M’TILDY’s” BEDSIDE.
Lemuel Fairchild sat still, smoking his wooden pipe, and looking absently, straight ahead, into the papered wall. This habit of gazing at nothing was familiar to them all, and when, at Isabel’s suggestion, the three young people started for a stroll through the orchard path, they left him entirely without ceremony. This was growing to be the rule; no one in the family now consulted him, or took the trouble to be polite to him. He seemed to have become in his own house merely an article of animated furniture, of not much more importance than the rough-furred sickly old cat who dozed his life away back of the stove.
He sat thus in solitude for some time, blankly studying the grotesque patterns in the old-fashioned wall-paper, and drawing mechanically at the pipe in his mouth, unconscious that no smoke came. Thus Miss Sabrina found him when, after a more than ordinarily sharp passage at arms with Alvira, she returned from the Kitchen.
“I swaow! thet girl gits wuss tempered ’n’ more presumin’ ev’ry day o’ her life,” she exclaimed.
“Who—Annie?” asked her brother, rousing himself as if from a nap.
“Annie! nao! who’s talkin’ abaout her?”
“Oh nothin’, unly I was thinkin’ ’baout Annie—‘baout her ’n’ Seth, yeh knaow,” answered Lemuel, apologetically.
“Well, what abaout ’em?” The query was distinctly aggressive in tone.
“Oh, nothin’ much. I was sort o’ thinkin’—well, you knaow S’briny, haow Sissly used to lot on their makin’ a match of it—’n’ I was kine o’ wond’rin’ ef this here notion o’ Seth’s goin’ away wouldn’t knock it all in th’ head.”
“Well?” Miss Sabrina’s monosyllabic comment had so little of sympathy or acquiescence in it, that Lemuel continued in an injured tone and with more animation, not to say resolution:
“Well, I’ve hed kine of an idea o’ goin’ over ’n’ talkin’ it over with M’tildy. Mebbe that’ll be the best thing to dew.”
“Oh you think so, dew yeh? Thet’s all th’ pride you’ve got lef’, is it? I think I see myself goin’ hangin’ raound Matildy Warren, beggin’ her to let her granddaughter marry a Fairchild! I’m ashamed of yeh, Lemuel.”
“I don’ see, much, what ther’ is to be ashamed on.” He added, with the faintest shadow of a grin on his face. “’N’ b’twixt you ’n’ me, I don’t see ’s there’s so blamed much fur me to be praoud abaout, nuther. ‘Tain’t’s if I was goin’ to ask a favor o’ M’tildy, at all. She ’n’ Sissly used to talk ‘baout the thing’s if ’twas settled. ’N’ now’t she’s gone, ’n’ Seth’s talkin’ o’ quittin’ th’ farm, seems to me it’d be the sensible thing to kind o’ fine aout ef M’tildy wouldn’t offer th’ young folks her farm, ef they’d stay.”
“Very well, sir. Hev’ yer own way,” answered Miss Sabrina, with stern formality. “You allus would hev yer own way—and yeh kin go muddle things up to yer heart’s content, for all o’ me!”
Lemuel watched his sister march to the stairs door and close it decisively behind her. He was accustomed of old to this proof of her wrath; as far back as he could remember it had been Sabrina’s habit to figuratively wash her hands of unpleasant complications on the ground-floor by slamming this self-same door, and going up to sulk in her own room. She did it as a young girl, in the first months of her disagreements with his young wife; it seemed to him a most natural proceeding now, when they were both old, gray-headed people.
Just now, it was a relief to him that she had gone, for if she had stayed he might not have had the courage to put his thoughts into actions. As it was he took his hat from its nail back of the kitchen door, and started across-lots for the Warren homestead.
There was no danger of not finding Mrs. Warren at home. For seven or eight years she had scarcely stirred beyond her own door, and for the past eighteen months she had been bed-ridden. The front door was opened to Mr. Fairchild by a young slip of a girl, one of the brood of daughters with which a neighboring poor family was weighted down, and all of whom had been driven to seek work at any price among the farmers of the vicinity. It seemed as if there was a Lawton girl in every other farmhouse the whole length of the Burfield road.
The girl ushered him into the gloomy hall, gloomier than ever now in the gathering twilight, and unceremoniously left him there, while she went to announce his presence. He heard through a door ajar at the end of the hall a thin, querulous voice ask, “Which one of the Fairchilds is it?” and the girl’s reply “The old man.”
Then the servant returned to him and with a curt “Come ahead,” led him to the mistress of the house, who lay in her bed-home, in a recess off the living room.
Mrs. Matilda Warren had never been what might be called a popular woman in the neighborhood. She and her husband, the latter dead now for many years, had come from Massachusetts. They were educated people in a sense, and had not mingled easily with their rougher neighbors. The widow Warren had, after her daughter’s escapade, carried this exclusiveness to a point which the neighborhood found disagreeable. Gradually she had grown into the recluse habit, and younger generations on the hillside, eking out the gossip of their elders with fancies of their own, born of stray glimpses of her tall, gaunt figure and pale face, came to regard her with much that same awe which, two centuries before, reputed witches had for children, young and old.
Something of this feeling Lemuel himself was conscious of, as he stood before her. The coverlet came up close under her arms. She wore a wrapper-dress of red flannel. As he entered she raised herself, with an evidently cruel effort, upon her elbow, dragging the pillow down to aid in supporting her shoulder. She panted with this exertion as she confronted him. Her scanty white hair was combed tightly back from her forehead, and bound in place with a black-velvet band; a natural parting on the side of the hair gave the withered face a suggestion of juvenile jauntiness, in grotesque, jarring contrast with the pale blue eyes which glittered from caverns of dark wrinkles, and the sunken, distorted mouth. She had changed so vastly since their last meeting that Lemuel stood bewildered and silent, staring at her.
She spoke first. “I’m trying to think—it must be twenty year since we’ve met, Lemuel Fairchild.”
“Nigh onto that, M’tildy,” he replied, turning his hat in his hands.
“I didn’t expect ever to lay eyes on you again, I couldn’t come to you, and wouldn’t if I could, and I didn’t dream you would ever show your face here.” The aged woman said this in a high, sharp voice, speaking rapidly and with an ungracious tone.
Lemuel fidgetted with his hat and moved his feet uneasily on the dog-skin rug. “Yeh needn’t be afeered, M’tildy, I wouldn’t hev come naow ef it hadn’t been somethin’ partikler ’baout Annie.”
The invalid raised her shoulder from the pillow with a sudden movement, and bent her head forward. “What’s happened to her? Is she hurt? Tell me, quick!”
“Oh nao, they ain’t nothin’ th’ matter with her. It’s unly ’baout her ’n’ Seth. I kine o’ thought we ought to talk it over ’n’ see haow the land lay. That’s all.”
“Oh that’s it, is it? Samantha!”
Betrayed out of her shrewdness by the suddenness of the summons the servant girl made her immediate appearance through the hall door.
“Yes, I knew you were listening, you huzzy,” said Mrs. Warren grimly. “You get along up stairs, go into Annie’s room, an’ make a noise of some sort on the melodeon till I call you. Not too much noise, mind; jest enough so I can know you’re up there.” As the girl left the room, the invalid explained: “What she don’t hear, the rest of the Lawtons won’t know. That family’s as good as a detective force for the whole county.” Then, in a less amiable tone: “You might as well set down. What is it about my girl an’ Seth?”
As Lemuel awkwardly seated himself near the bedside and prepared to answer, a wailing, discordant series of sounds came from the floor above. The knowledge that the girl was creating this melancholy noise to order, and on his account, confused his thought and he found himself stating the case much more baldly than he had intended. “The fact is,” he said, stroking his hat over his knee, “Seth’s thinkin’ o’ goin’ away to Tecumsy—Albert’s got him a place there—’n’ so I s’pose it’ll be all up b’twixt him ’n’ Annie.”
The grandmother never took those light, searching eyes off her visitor’s face. He felt himself turning uncomfortably red under their malevolent gaze, I and wished she would speak. But she said nothing. At last he explained, deferentially:
“I thought it’d only be right to tell yeh. I know Sissly ’n’ you use to talk abaout th’ thing. Th’ way she use to talk, speshly jis’ ’fore she died, it ’peared ‘s if you tew hed it all settled. But Albert’s goin’ to take th’ farm, it seems, ’n’ Seth, he’s fig’rin’ on goin’ away to be a neditor, ’n’ it looks to me’s if th’ hull plan’d fell threw.”
Still no reply from the bed. He added, helplessly “Don’t it kind o’ seem so to you, M’tildy?”
The wretched discords from the chamber above mocked him. The witch-like eyes from the shadows of the recess began to burn him. It was growing into the dusk, but the eyes had a light of their own, a cold, steely, fierce light. Would she never speak? How he regretted having come!
“I’ll tell you what seems to me, Lemuel Fairchild,” she said at last, not speaking so rapidly now, and putting a sharp, finishing edge on each of her words. “It seems to me that there’s never been but one decent, honorable, likely human bein’ in your whole family an’ she came into it by the mistake of marrying you. I blame myself for not remembering the blood that was in you all, an’ for thinking that this youngest son of yours was different from the rest. I forgot that he was a Fairchild like the others, an’ I forgot what I owed that family of men, so mean and cowardly and selfish that they have to watch each other like so many hyenas. An’ so you’ve come to tell me that Seth has turned out like his father, like his uncle, like all of his name, eh? The more fool I, to need to be told it!”
Lemuel’s impulse was to rise from his chair, and bear himself with offended dignity, but the glitter in the old woman’s eyes warned him that the attempt would be a failure. He scowled, put his hat on the other knee, crossed his legs, pretended to be interested in the antics of a kitten which was working havoc with a ball of yarn at his feet. Finally he said:
“You ain’t fair to Seth. He’s a good boy. He ain’t said nothin’ nor done nothin’ fer yeh to git mad at. Fer that matter, you never was fair to any of us, ’cept Sissly.”
“Fair! Fair!” came the answer promptly, and in a swifter measure. “Hear the man! Why, Lemuel Fairchild, you know that you cheated your own brother out of the share in that farm that was his by all rights as much as yours. You know that your father intended you both to share alike, that he died too suddenly to make a new will and that you grabbed everything under a will made when your brother William was thought to be too sickly to ever raise. You know that you let him grow up an idle, worthless coot of a fellow, an’ then encouraged him—yes, don’t deny it, encouraged him I say—to make a fool of my daughter, and run away with her.
“You knew I wouldn’t look at him as a suitor for Jenny; but you thought I would be soft enough, once they were married, to give him my farm, an’ you counted on getting it away from him afterwards, just as your father got the Kennard farm before you. You egged him on into the trouble, an’ you let him die in it, without help. Oh I know you, Lemuel Fairchild—I know your breed!
“Your wife was a good woman—a million times better than you deserved. She knew the wrongs that had been done me, an’ Annie, an’ her poor ne’er-do-well of a father before her; she was anxious to make them good, not I. It was she who talked, year after year, when she ran over here on the sly to visit me, of squaring everything by the young folk’s marriage. For a long time I didn’t like it. I distrusted the family, as, God knows, I had reason to. But all that I heard of Seth was in his favor. He was hardworking, patient, even-tempered, so everyone said. What little I saw of him I liked. An’ I felt sorry for him, too, knowing how dear he was to his mother, and yet how helpless she was to give him advantages, an’ make something besides a farm-drudge out of him. So little by little, I gave in to the idea, an’ finally it became mine almost as much as Cecily’s.
“As for Annie, I don’t know how much she has grown to care for him; I’m afraid she’s known about our talks, and lotted on ’em, though if anything has passed between them she would have told me. For she’s a good girl—a good girl—and she’ll stand by me, never fear, and say as I say now, that it’s good riddance! D’ye mind? Good riddance to bad rubbish—to your whole miserable, conniving, underhanded family! There ain’t an honest hair in your head, Lemuel Fairchild, and there never was. And you can go back to them that sent you, to your old catamaran of a sister and your young sneak of a son, and tell ’em what I think of them, and you, and the whole caboodle of you, that ruined and killed my Jane, and made me a broken old woman before my time, and now tries to break my grand-daughter’s heart! And the longest day you Jive, don’t ever let me lay eyes on you again. That’s all!”
Lemuel groped his way out again through the dark hall, to the front door. The groaning discords from upstairs rose to a triumphant babel of sound as he knocked against the hat-rack, and fumbled for the latch, as if to emphasize and gloat over his discomfiture. The cold evening air, after the sweltering heat of the sick-room, was a physical relief, but it brought no moral comfort.
Old Lemuel was much pained, and even more confused, by the hard words to which he had had to listen. They presented a portrait of himself which he felt to be in no way a likeness, yet he could not say wherein a single line should be altered. He knew that he was not a bad man; he felt conscious of having done no special wrong, intentionally, to anybody; he had always tried to be fair and square and easy-going with everybody: yet the mischief of it was that all these evil things which the witchlike M’tildy had piled at his door were of indubitable substance, and he could not prove, even to himself, much less to her, that they did not belong there. It was a part of the consistently vile luck of his life that all these malignant happenings should be charged up against him, and used to demonstrate his wickedness. He had not enough mental skill or alertness to sift the unfair from the true in the indictment she had drawn, or to put himself logically in her place, and thus trace her mistakes. He only realized that all these events which she enumerated had served to convince Mrs. Warren that he was a villain. The idea was a new one to him, and it both surprised and troubled him to find that, as he thought the matter over he could not see where she was particularly wrong. Yet a villain he had certainly never intended to be—never for a moment. Was this not cruelly hard luck?
And then there was this business about Seth. He had meant it all in the friendliest spirit, all with the best of motives. And how she had snapped him up before he had a chance to explain, and called him a scoundrel and his boy a sneak, and driven him from the house! Here was a muddle for one—and Sabrina had said he would make a muddle of it, as he had of everything else, all through his life. The lonely, puzzled, discouraged old man felt wofully like shedding tears, as he approached his own gate—or no, it was Albert’s gate now—and passed the young people chatting there, and realized what a feeble old fool they all must think him.
CHAPTER X.—THE FISHING PARTY.
The young people were arranging, as Lemuel slunk past them in the dark, a fishing party for the following day. The proposal had been Isabel’s—she had a fertile mind for pleasure planning—and Annie and Seth were delighted with it. They would take a basket of food, and make the tea over a fire in the woods, and the two women could take turns in playing at fishing with a little rod which Seth had made for himself as a boy. It would be an ideal way of bidding good-bye to Seth, said his pretty sister-in-law, and Annie, feeling more deeply both the significance of saying good-bye and the charm of having a whole day to herself along the river and in his company, had assented eagerly.
As for Seth, this sudden accession of feminine interest in, and concern for, him was extremely pleasant and grateful. The very suggestion of the trip, in his honor, was like a sweet taken in advance from the honeyed future which he was so soon to realize. Long that night, after he had walked over to the Warren gate with Annie, and returned to the unlathed attic where Milton lay already snoring, he thought fondly of the morrow’s treat.
The morning came, warm but overcast, with a soft tendency of air from the west. “It couldn’t have been better if it had been made to order,” Seth said enthusiastically, when Isabel made her appearance before breakfast. “It will be good fishing and good walking, not too hot and not wet.”
Albert smiled a trifle satirically when the project was unfolded to him—with that conceited tolerance which people who don’t fish always extend to those who do. “You’ll probably get wet and have the toothache” he said to his wife, but offered no objection.
The lunch was packed, the poles were ready, the bait-can stood outside the shed door, breakfast was a thing of the past, and Isabel sat with her sunhat and parasol—but Annie did not come. Seth fidgeted and fumed as a half-hour went by, then the hour itself. It was so unlike Annie to be late. He made an errand to the hay-barn, to render the waiting less tedious, and it was there that Milton found him, rummaging among some old harness for a strap.
“Annie’s come over,” said Milton, “I heerd her say somethin’ ’baout not goin’ fishin’, after all. Looks ’sif she’d be’n cryin’ tew. I tole ’em I’d fetch yeh.”
Seth came out into the light, slapping the dust off his hands. “What’s that you say? Why isn’t she going?”
“I dunnao nothin’ more ’n I’ve told yeh. Ask her yerself. I ’spose she’s be’n cryin’ at the thought of yer goin’. That’ll be the eend o’ ev’rythin’ atwixt you two, won’t it?”
“Oh, do mind your own business, Milton!” Seth said, and hurried across the barnyard to where the two young women stood, on the doorstep. “Why aren’t you going, Annie? What’s the matter?” he called out as he approached.
Poor Annie looked the picture of despair. Her face bore the marks of recent tears and she hung her head in silence. Isabel answered for her.
“Going? Of course she is going. It would be ridiculous not to go, now that everything’s arranged. Get the things together, Seth, and let us make a start.”
“But Milton said she wasn’t going,” persisted Seth.
“Dear, dear, how downright you are! Don’t I tell you that she is going, that there is nothing the matter, that we are waiting for you?” And there was nothing more to be said.
The sun came out before the trio had gone far, but not before they had begun to forget the cloud at the start. The grass in the pastures was not quite dry yet, but wet feet were a part of the fun of the thing, Isabel said gaily. The meadow larks careened in the air about them, and the bobolinks, swinging on the thistle tops, burst into chorus from every side as the sunlight spread over the hill-side. There were robins, too, in the juniper trees beyond the white-flowering buckwheat patch, Seth pointed out, too greedy to wait till the green berries ripened. A flock of crows rose from the buckwheat as they passed and who could help smiling at Isabel’s citified imitation of their strident hawing? They came upon some strawberries, half-hidden in the tall grass beside the rail-topped wall, and Isabel would gather them in her handkerchief, to serve as dessert in their coming al fresco dinner, and Annie helped her, smiling in spite of herself at the city lady’s extravagant raptures.
When they stopped to rest, in the fresh-scented shadow of the woods, and sat on a log along the path, two wee chipmunks came out from the brake opposite and began a chirping altercation, so comical in its suggestions of human wrangling that they all laughed outright. The sound scared away the tiny rodents in a twinkling, and it banished as swiftly the restraint under which the excursion had begun.
From that moment it was all gayety, jesting, enjoyment. Isabel was the life of the party; she said the drollest things;—passed the quaintest comments,—revealed such an inexhaustable store of spirits that she lifted her companions fairly out of their serious selves. Seth found himself talking easily, freely, and even Annie now and again made little jokes, at which they all laughed merrily.
The fisherman’s judgment as to the day was honored in full measure. The fish had never bitten more sharply, the eddies had never carried the line better. It seemed so easy, to let the line wander back and forth between the two currents, to tell when the bait was grabbed underneath, and to haul out the plunging, flapping beauty, that Isabel was all eagerness to try it, and Seth rigged the little pole for her, baited the hook self-sacrificingly with his biggest worm, which he had thought of in connection with a certain sapient father of all pike further up the river, and showed her where and how to cast the line.
Alas, it was not so simple, after all, this catching of fish.
First she lost a hook on a root; then it seemed to her that ages passed in which nothing whatever happened and this was followed by the discovery that her hook had entirely been stripped of bait without her suspecting it. At last there came a bite, a deep, determined tug, which she answered with a hysterical pull, hurling through the air and into the thistles far back of her a wretched little bull-head which they were unable to find for a long time, and which miserably stung her thumb with its fin when she finally did find it.
After this exploit Annie must try, and she promptly twitched her line into the tree overhead. And so the day went forward, with light-hearted laughter and merriment, with the perfect happiness which the sunshine and color and perfume of June can bring alone to the young.
They grew a trifle more serious at dinner time. It was in the narrow defile where the great jam of logs was, and where the river went down, black and deep, under the rotting wood with a vicious gurgle. Just above the jam there was a mound, velvety now with new grass, and comfortably shaded—a notable spot for dinner and a long rest, and then the girls could watch to much advantage Seth’s fishing from the logs, of which great things were prophesied. Here then the cloth was spread on the grass, the water put on over a fire lighted back of the mound, and the contents of the basket laid in prandial array. It was in truth a meagre dinner, but were appetites ever keener or less critical?
Once during the forenoon, when allusion was made to Seth’s coming departure, Isabel had commanded that nothing be said on that subject all day long. “Let us not think of it at all,” she had said, “but just enjoy the hours as if they would never end. That is the only secret of happiness.” But now she herself traversed the forbidden line.
“How strange it will all seem to you, Seth,” she mused, as she poured out the tea. “As the time draws near, don’t you almost dread it?”
“What I’ve been thinking most about to-day is your coming to the farm to live. It can’t be that you are altogether pleased—after what I’ve heard you say.”
“Oh yes, why not?” said Isabel. “My case is very different from yours. I shall be just as idle as I like. I shall have horses, you know and a big conservatory, and a piano, and all that. We shall have lots of people here all summer long—just think what fishing parties we can make up!—and whenever it gets stupid we can run down to New York. Oh, I’ve got quite beyond the reconciled stage now. I am almost enthusiastic over it. When you come back in a year’s time, you won’t know the place. It will have been transformed into a centre of fashion and social display. I may get to have a veritable salon, you know, the envy and despair of all Dearborn County. Fancy Elhanan Pratt and Sile Thomas in evening dress, with patent leather pumps and black stockings, scowling at Leander Crump, with a crushed hat under his arm, whom they suspect of watering his milk! Oh, we shall be gay, I assure you.”
Seth looked at her attentively, puzzled to know how much of this was badinage, how much sincerity. She smiled archly at him—what a remarkably winning smile she had!—and continued:
“Then Annie will be company for me, too. I mean to bring her out, you know, and make her a leader of society. In a year’s time when you come back and I introduce you to her, you won’t be able to credit your senses, her air will be so distingué, and her tastes so fastidious.”
She ceased her gay chatter abruptly, for Annie had turned away and they could see that her eyes were filling with tears.
Seth bethought him of those earlier tears, the signs of which had been so obvious when they started, and it was natural enough to connect the two.
“Something has happened, Annie,” he said. “Can’t you tell us what it is?”
And then he bit his tongue at having made the speech, for Annie turned a beseeching look at him, then at Isabel, and burst into sobs.
“Isn’t it reason enough that you are going away?” said Isabel. “What more could you ask?”
“No, it isn’t that alone,” protested Annie through her tears. Her pride would not brook the assumption. “There is something else; I can hardly tell you—but—but—my grandmother has suddenly taken a great dislike to Seth; if she knew where I was she would be very angry: I never deceived her, even indirectly, before, but I couldn’t bear not to come after I got to the house, and if I’ve done wrong—”
“Now, now dear” cooed Isabel, leaning over to take Annie’s hands, “what nonsense to talk of wrong; come now, dry your eyes, and smile at us, like a good girl. You are nervous and tired out with the task of tending your grandmother—that’s all—and this day in the woods will do you a world of good. Don’t let us have even the least little bit of unhappiness in it.”
Seth watched his sister-in-law caress and coax away Annie’s passing fit of gloom, with deep enjoyment. The tenderness and beauty of the process were a revelation to him; it was an attribute of womanhood the existence of which he had scarcely suspected heretofore, in his untutored, bucolic state. Annie seemed to forget her grief quickly enough, and became cheerful again; in quaint docility she smiled through her tears at Isabel’s command, and the latter was well within the truth when she cried: “There! You have never looked prettier in your life!”
Seth nodded acquiescence, and returned the smile. But somehow this grief of Annie’s had bored him, and he felt rather than thought that his country-cousin, even in this radiant moment, was of slight interest compared with the city sister-in-law, who not only knew enough not to cry herself, but could so sweetly charm away tears from others.
Seth tested all the joints of his pole, and changed the hook and baited it with studious care, before he climbed out on the jam. Gingerly feeling his way from log to log, he got at last upon the wet mossy birch which projected like a ledge at the bottom of the pile. The women watched his progress from the mound, and gave a little concerted shout of triumph when, at the very first cast of his line into the froth of the dark eddy, it was caught and dragged swiftly across the stream, and a handsome pike a moment later paid the penalty.
“That’s by far the biggest yet, isn’t it?” Annie asked.
“Wait, there are bigger yet. Watch this!”
The line, thrown in again, had been sharply jerked and was now being drawn upstream under the logs. Seth moved down to the end of the birch, stooping under the jutting heap of logs above, to be able to play the pole sidewise, and save the fish. It was a difficult position to stand in; he held the rod far forward with one hand, and grasped a bough above for support as he leaned out over the stream.
The thing snapped—exactly how it was no one knew—a log released from its bondage shifted position, a dozen others rolled over it rumbling, and the women held their breath affrighted as they saw, without moving, the whole top of the jam tremble, lift a jagged end or two, and then collapse with a hollow noise. As they found voice to scream, the water was covered with floating debris, and the air filled with a musty fungus-like smell.
There was no sign of Seth.
The roar of the falling timber had scarcely died away before Annie had left the mound, had torn her way through the alders at the bottom, and stood panting on the wet slimy rocks at the edge of the stream. She hardly heard the frightened warning which Isabel, pale and half-fainting, called out to her:
“Keep away from the water, Annie! You’ll surely be drowned!”
She was painfully intent upon another thing, upon the search for some indication of her cousin. The logs were moving but slowly in the current, and were heaped so irregularly that no clear survey of the whole surface could be had. There seemed an eternity of suffering in every second which she spent thus, scanning the scene. Could the crush of logs have killed him? Even if he had escaped that, would he not be drowned by this time? The grinding of the logs against each other, the swash of the water at her feet, Isabel’s faint moaning on the mound above, seemed to her dazed terror a sort of death dirge.
Oh, joy! She caught sight of something in cloth between two great tree-trunks, drenched, covered with the red grime of rotten wood, motionless; but it was Seth. His face she could not see, nor whether it was under water or not. She walked boldly into the stream—kneedeep at the outset, and the slippery rocks shelving off swiftly into unknown brown-black depths—but there was no hesitation. A halfdozen steps, and she disappeared suddenly beneath the water. Isabel wrung her hands in despair, too deep now to find a voice; but Annie had only slipped on the treacherous slates, and found her footing again. The water came to her shoulders now, and was growing deeper steadily.
With a strength born of desperation she clambered up on the birch, which floated nearest her, and pulled herself along its length, swaying as it rolled in the current under her weight, but managing to keep on top. It was nothing short of miraculous to Isabel’s eyes, the manner in which she balanced herself, clambered from log to log, overcame all the obstacles which lay between her and the inanimate form at the other side. The distance was not great, and a swimmer would have made nothing of the feat, but for a girl encumbered with heavy wet skirts, and in deep water for the first time, it was a real achievement.
At last she reached Seth—her progress had covered three minutes, and seemed to her hours long—and, throwing herself across both logs, with a final effort lifted his head upon her shoulder.
“He is alive!” she said to Isabel, feebly now, but with a great sigh of relief.
The city woman ran down at this, all exultation. At Annie’s suggestion, she tied their two shawls together, fastened one end to a pole, and managed to fling the other over to the rescuer; it was easy work after that to draw the logs to the bank, and then Annie, standing knee-deep again in the water, made shift to get the heavy dead weight safe on land. The two women tugged their burden through the alders, and up to the place where the dinner dishes still lay, with scarcely a word. Then exhausted, excited, overjoyed, Isabel threw herself in Annie’s arms and they both found relief in tears.
Seth had been struck on the head and stunned by the first falling log; how much he had been in the water or how near he had been to drowning could not be discovered.
He presently opened his eyes, and a smile came almost instantaneously to his face as he realised that his head was resting in Isabel’s lap, that he was muffled up in her shawl, and that she was looking down upon him anxiously, tenderly. A second sufficed to bring the whole thing to his mind, or at least the facts that he had gone under with the logs and by some agency had been landed here safe and comfortable, if not dry—and to bring also the instinctive idea that it would be the intelligent part to lie still, and be petted and sympathised with.
Isabel scarcely returned his smile. She had not recovered from her fright.
“Oh, Seth,” she asked earnestly, “Are you hurt? Do you feel any pain?”
“Not a bit” he replied—“only dizzy like. By George! How they did come down though. I must have had a pretty narrow squeak of it. Funny—I don’t remember coming out at all.”
She smiled now. “I should think not. You lay perfectly senseless way out there among the logs. We fished you out, and dragged you up here. I feel like a heroine in a Crusader’s romance, really!”
It entered Seth’s mind to say something nice in reply, that she looked like one, or that they were not equal in those benighted ages to producing such women, or something of that sort; but his tongue did not seem to frame the words easily and as he looked up at her he grew shy once again, and felt himself flushing under her smile, and only said vacuously, “Mightly lucky I wasn’t alone, isn’t it?” Annie appeared on the scene now, her clothes steaming from the heat of the fire, over which she had endeavoured to dry them, and her teeth displaying a spasmodic tendency to knock together between sentences. She too was full of solicitude as to Seth’s condition, and to satisfy this he reluctantly sat up, stretched his arms out, felt of the bump on his forehead, beat his chest, and finally stood erect.
“I’m all right, you see” he said—“only, bo-o-o, I’m cold,” and he made for the fire, upon which Annie had heaped brushwood, which crackled and snapped now, giving forth a furious heat.
They stood about the fire for a considerable time. Isabel was opposite Seth, rather ostentatiously drying sundry damp places in her dress which had come in contact with the rescued man’s dripping hair and clothes. He was so interested in watching her, and in thinking half-regret fully, half-jubilantly, that she had been put to this discomfort in saving his life, that he failed to notice how completely drenched his cousin had been. The conversation turned entirely, of course, upon the recent great event, but it was desultory and broken by long intervals of silence, and somehow Seth did not get any clear idea of how he was saved, much less of the parts the two women had respectively played in the rescue.
It would be unfair to say that Isabel purposely misrepresented anything; it is nearer the truth to describe her as confounding her own anxiety with her companion’s action. At all events, the narrative to be gleaned from her scattering descriptions and exclamations had the effect of creating in Seth’s mind the impression that he could never be sufficiently grateful to his sister-in-law.
As for Annie, the whole momentous episode had come so swiftly, had been so imperative, exhaustive in its demands of all her faculties, and then had so suddenly dwindled to the unromantic conditions of drying wet clothes at a brush fire, that her thoughts upon it were extremely confused. She scarcely took part in the conversation. Perhaps she felt vaguely that her own share in the thing was not made to stand forth with all the prominence it deserved, but she took it for granted that, in his first waking moments, while he was alone with Isabel, Seth had been told the central fact of her going into the water for him, and, if he was not effusively grateful, why—it was not Seth’s way to be demonstrative. Besides she said to herself, she did not want to be thanked.
Still, late that night, long hours after Seth had said good-night to her at the Warren gate, and she had almost guiltily stolen up to her room without braving her grandmother’s questions, Annie could not go to sleep for thinking:—
“He might at least have looked some thanks, even if he did not speak them.”
Three days later, Seth departed for the city. It was not a particularly impressive ceremony, this leave-taking, not half so much as he had imagined it would be.
He had risen early, dressed himself in one of the two new, ready-made, cheap suits Albert had bought for him at Thessaly and packed all his possessions in the carpet satchel which had been in the family he knew not how long—and still found, when he descended the stairs, that he was the first down. It was a dark, rainy morning, and the living room looked unspeakably desolate, and felt disagreeably cold. He sat for a long time by a window pondering the last copy of John’s Banner, and trying to thus prepare his mind for that immense ordeal of daily newspaper work, that struggle of unknown, titanic proportions, now close before him.
Alvira at last came in to lay the breakfast table.
“Hello, you up already?” was all she said; but he felt she was eyeing him furtively, as if even thus soon he was a stranger in the house of his birth.
Aunt Sabrina next appeared. “There! I knew it ’d rain,” she exclaimed. “I told Alviry so last night. When th’ cords on th’ curtains git limp, yeh can’t fool me ’baout it’s not rainin’. ’N’ Seth, I hope you’ll go to Church regular whatever else you dew. ’N’ ef yeh could take a class in th’ Sunday schewl, it’d go a long ways tow’rd keepin’ yeh aout o’ temptation. Will yeh go to th’ Baptist Church, think? Th’ Fairchilds ’v’ allus be’n Baptists.”
The breakfast passed in constrained silence, save for Albert, who delivered a monologue on the evils of city life, and the political and ethical debauchery of the press, to which Seth tried dutifully to pay attention—thinking all the while how to say goodbye to Isabel, how to invest his words with a fervor the others would not suspect.
When the time came, all this planning proved of no avail. He found himself shaking hands as perfunctorily with her as with her husband, and his father and aunt. Only the latter kissed him, and she did it with awkward formality.
Then he climbed into the buggy where Milton and the carpet bag were already installed, and, answering in kind a chorus of “Good-byes” drove out into the rain—and the World.