*VII*
*MR. FLYNN STEPS INTO THE BREACH*
After putting forth a feeble straggle on the morning of the funeral, the
pale winter sun retired for good as the north wind began to herd the
drift over vast white steppes. Though fire had been kept up all night
in Merrill's cabin by Mrs. Flynn, who had come in to perform the last
offices, a pail of water had frozen solid close to the stove. After a
quarter of an hour in the oven, a loaf of bread yet showed frost
crystals in its centre at breakfast; a drop of coffee congealed as it
fell in the saucer.
It was, indeed, the hardest of weather. By noon a half-inch of ice
levelled the window-panes with the sash; pouring through the key-hole a
spume of fine drift laid a white finger across the floor. Outside, the
spirit thermometer registered forty-five below. The very air was
frozen, blanketing the snow with lurid frost clouds. Yet, though a pair
of iridescent "sun-dogs" gave storm warnings, a score of Canadian
settlers, men and women, assembled for the service in the cabin.
Severe, silent, they sat around on boards and boxes, eying Mrs. Leslie
and other English neighbors with great disfavor, inwardly critical of
the funeral arrangements. For ceremony and service had been stripped of
the lugubrious attributes which gave mournful satisfaction to the
primitive mind. Helen herself, in her quiet grief, was a
disappointment; and she wore no black or other grievous emblem. Worse!
The casket-lid was screwed down, and, filched of their prerogative of
"viewing the corpse," they turned gloomy faces to the theological
student who had come out from Lone Tree.
Here was an additional disappointment. Afterwards, in the stable, it
was held that he had not improved the occasion. Of Morrill, who had
been so lax in his attendance at occasional preachings as to justify a
suspicion of atheism, he could have made an edifying text, thrilling his
hearers with doubts as to whether the man was altogether fallen short of
grace. But there was none of this. Just a word on the brother's sunny
nature and brave fight against wasting sickness, and he was passed
without doubt of title to mansions in the skies.
"I don't call that no sermon," Hines growled, as he thrust a frosty bit
into his pony's mouth. "Missed all the good points, he did."
"Never heerd the like," said Shinn, his neighbor, nearest in disposition
as well as location. "Not a bit of crape for the pall-bearers. I know
a person that ain't going to be missed much."
"I've heerd," another man said, "as he doubted the Scriptures. If that
is so--Is it true as the Roman priest was with him at the last?"
Hines despondently nodded. "We'll hope for the best," he said, with an
accent that murdered the hope.
Shinn, however, who never could compass the art of suggestion, gave
plainer terms to his thought. "There ain't a doubt in my mind. It's a
warning to turn from the paths he trod."
"You needn't be scairt." From the gloom of the far corner, where he was
harnessing the team that was to draw the burial sleigh, Bender's voice
issued. "You needn't be scairt. There ain't a damn one of you
travelling his trail."
Ensued a silence, then Hines snarled, "No, an' I ain't agoing to follow
him on this. If you fellows want to tag after priests' leavings, you
kin. I'm pulling my freight for home."
"You're what?"
Hines quailed as Bender's huge body and blue-scarred face materialized
from the gloom. "I said as 'twas too cold to go to the grave."
"You did, eh? Well, you're going. Not that your presence is necessary,
but just because you ain't to be allowed to show disrespect to a better
man than yourself. Tie up that hoss. You're agoing to ride with me.
An' if there's any other man as thinks his team ain't fit to buck the
drifts"--his fierce eyes searched for opposition--"he'll find room in my
sleigh."
So with Hines--albeit much against his will--heading the procession, a
long line of sleighs sped through the mirk drift to the lonely acre
which had been set apart for the _long_ sleep. A few posts and a single
wire marked it off from white wastes, and through these the drift flew
with sibilant hiss, piling against the mounded grave which Flynn and
Carter had thawed out and dug, inch by inch, with many fires, these last
two days. And there was small ceremony. King Frost is no respecter of
persons, freezes alike the quick and the dead. Removing his cap to
offer a short prayer, the student's ears turned deathly white; while he
rubbed them with snow, the mourners spelled one another with the
shovels, working furiously in vain efforts to warm chilled blood.
Roughly filled, the grave was left to be smoothed in warmer season; the
living fled, leaving the dead with the drift, the frost, the wind, stern
ministers of the illimitable.
No woman had dared the weather. Lying in the bottom of a sled, under
hides and blankets, with hot stones at hands and feet, Helen had gone
home with Mrs. Leslie. Coming back from the grave she formed the
subject of conversation between Flynn and Carter, who rode together.
To Flynn's inquiry Carter replied that, as far as he was aware, she had
no private means. Her father, a physician in good practice in a New
England town, had lived up to every cent of his income, and the
insurance he carried had been mortgaged to start the brother out West.
"Not having any special training," Carter finished, "she had to choose
between a place in a store or keeping house for him."
"It's no snap in them sthores," Flynn sighed. "Shmall pay an' big
temptations, they're telling me." Then, giving Carter the tail of his
eye, he added, "But there'll be nothing else for it--now?"
"Oh, I don't know," Carter mused. "Flynn, are you and the other married
folks around here going to let your families grow up in ignorance?
Ain't it pretty nigh time you was forming a school district?"
In the slit between his cap and scarf the Irishman's eyes twinkled like
blue jewels. Affecting ignorance, however, he answered, "An' phwere
would we be after getting a teacher in this frozen country?"
"Miss Morrill."
Flynn subdued his laugh out of respect to the occasion. "Jest what's in
me own mind. An' there'll be no lack av children for the same school,
me boy, when you--There, don't be looking mad! 'Tis after the order of
nature; an' I'm not blaming ye, she's sweet as she's pretty. Putting
you an' me out av the question, I'd do it for her. An' it shouldn't be
so hard--if we can corral the bachelors. But lave thim to me."
And Flynn went about it with all the political sagacity inherent in his
race. "We'll not be spreading the news much," he told the married men
to whom he broached the subject. "Not a word till we get 'em in
meeting, or they'll organize an' vote us down."
Accordingly the summons to gather in public meeting was issued without
statement of purpose, a mystery that brought out every settler for
twenty miles around. An hour before time, some fifty men, rough-looking
fellows in furs, arctic socks, moose-skins, and moccasins, crowded into
the post-office, which, as most centrally located, was chosen for the
meeting.
The expected opposition developed as soon as the postmaster, who
presided, mentioned "eddycation."
"More taxation!" a bachelor roared. "You're to marry the girls an'
we're to eddycate the kids!"
"Right you are, Pete!" others chorused.
But Flynn was ready. "Is that you, Pete Ross?" He transfixed the
speaker with his blue twinkle. "An' yerself coorting the Brown girl so
desprit that she don't get time to comb her hair anny more?
"An' you, Bill MacCloud," he went on, as Peter, growling that he "wasn't
married yet," carried his blushing face behind the stove, "you that's
galloping your ponies so hard after the Baker girl. Twins it was, twice
running, in her mother's family, an' well ye know it. A public school
ain't good enough for you, Bill? Which is to be--a governess, or a young
ladies' siminery?"
So, one after another, Flynn smote the bachelors. Had a man so much as
winked at a girl, it made a text for a sermon that was witty as
_risque_.
Yet he was so good-tempered about it that by the time he had finished
grilling the last victim the first-cooked were joining their laughter to
that of the married men.
Then Flynn turned his eloquence upon a common evil. Everywhere the best
of the land had passed into the hands of non-resident speculators, who
hindered settlement and development by holding for high prices. "Was it
a question of increased taxation?" Flynn asked. Then let the
non-residents pay. Under the law they could expend eight hundred
dollars on a building. Well, they would distribute the contracts among
themselves--one man cut logs, another hew them, a third draw them, and
so on! Every man should have a contract, an' who the divil would care
if taxes were raised on the speculators.
It was his closing argument, however, that finished the bachelors. "Now
me an' Jimmy have spotted a teacher, a right smart young woman--"
A howl of applause cut him short--the bachelors would call it settled!
Thus it came to pass that as, a week or so after the funeral, Carter was
driving Helen from Leslie's back to her cabin, a deputation consisting
of Mr. Flynn and Mr. Glaves was heading in the same direction.
All that week the cabin had stood, fireless, a mournful blot on the
snowscape, but though she was only to be there for the hour required to
pack her belongings, Carter had swept out the drift that morning and put
on the fires. So the place was cosey and warm. Yet, with all its
cheer, on entering, she relapsed into the first passionate grief. For
nothing is so vividly alive as the things of a dead person, and
everywhere her glance fell on objects her brother had used. Divining
the cause, Carter left her to have her cry out on pretence of stable
chores, and when he returned she was busily packing.
So while she worked he talked, explaining her affairs as related to
himself through his partnership with Morrill. Their cattle were worth
so much, but as it would require a summer's grazing to fit them for
market, he would advance the money on her share. He did not mention the
fact that he would have to borrow it himself at usurer's interest. As
to the homestead: Land was unsalable since the bottom fell out of the
boom, but in any case it was advisable to hold for the values that would
accrue with the coming of the railroad. He would rent it, on settler's
terms, paying roadwork and taxes for use of the broken land.
As, kindly thoughtful for her interests, he ran on, she rose from her
packing, grasped his hand impulsively, squeezed his arm to her bosom.
"You have been so good!" The sunsets in her cheeks, the softness of her
glance, her touch, almost upset his reason. But he resisted a mad
impulse.
"Nonsense!" he said, when he could trust himself to speak. "I'm going
to make money off you."
"Really?" she asked, smiling.
"Really," he smiled back.
"I--wish you could," she sighed. "But I am afraid you are saying that
to please me. Well, you know best. Do as you please."
Had he done as he pleased, the question of their mutual interests would
have been simply solved. But the time was not ripe. He was too shrewd
to mistake gratitude for love.
"Now," he said, resolutely thrusting away temptation, "if it's any of my
darn business--what are your plans?"
"My plans?" Leaning on the table beside him, she gazed dreamily upon
the frosted panes. The question forced in upon her the imminence of
impending change and brought a feeling of strong revulsion. The ties
that death forges are stronger than those of life. It was inexpressibly
painful, just then, to think of leaving the land which held her recent
dead.
"My plans!" she mused, knitting her brows. "I haven't any--yet. Of
course I have relatives, back East. But as father did not like them, I
hardly know more than their names. I shall have to do something, but
Mrs. Leslie is so good. She won't hear of me leaving until spring. I
have heaps of time to plan."
But having bucked trail all morning, the solution of her immediate
future just then heralded its arrival by the groan of frosty runners.
"Me an' Jimmy," Mr. Flynn explained, after he had introduced his
co-trustee, "is a depytation. Being as it's the only crop the frost
won't nip, Silver Creek is going to raise a few legislators. We want
the young lady to teach our school."
"But," Helen objected, when she had assimilated the startling news, "I
never taught school."
"You'll nivir begin younger," Flynn comforted; to which he added, "An'
it's the foinest training agin the time ye'll have a few av your own."
Mr. Glaves solemnly contemplated the blushing candidate. "You kin sum,
ma'am--an' spell?"
"Oh yes," she assured him. "I graduated from high-school."
"You don't say!" Both trustees regarded her with intense admiration,
and Glaves said, "We didn't expect to get that much for our money, so
we'll jest have you go a bit easy at first, lest there'll be some
sprained intellec's among the kiddies."
*VIII*
*WHEN APRIL SMILED AGAIN*
"We'll begin right soon on the building," Mr. Glaves had said at
parting. So when the mercury began to take occasional flights above
zero in the last days of February, a gang turned loose in the bush. For
two weeks thereafter falling trees and the bell-like tinkle of a
broadaxe disturbed the forest silence. Then spring rode in on the back
of a Chinook wind and caught them hauling. Ensued profanity. Thawing
quickly, the loose snows slid away from the packed trails, causing the
sleds to "cut off"; the bush road was mottled with overturned loads.
Also the brilliant sun turned the snowscape into one huge reflector.
Faces frizzled. Dark men took the colors of raw beefsteak, fair men
peeled and cracked like over-ripe tomatoes. Yet they persisted, and one
day in early April stood off to look on their finished work. "Chinked,"
sod-roofed, plastered, the log school-house gleamed yellow under the
rays of the dying sun--education, the forerunner of civilization, had
settled in the land.
As his cabin was nearest the school, the honor of boarding the teacher
fell to the postmaster; and though her choice caused heart-burnings
among others who had coveted the distinction, it was conceded wise. For
not only did the Glaves's establishment boast the only partitioned room
in the Canadian settlement, but his wife, a tall, gaunt woman, excelled
in the concoction of carrot-jams, turnip-pies, choke-cherry jellies, and
other devices by which skilled housewives eke out the resources of an
inhospitable land.
In the middle of April school opened; a dozen small thirsters after
knowledge arranged themselves in demure quiethood before authority that
was possessed of its own misgivings. Teacher and scholars regarded one
another with secret awe. But this soon wore off and they toiled
amicably along the road which winds among arithmetical pitfalls and
grammatical bogs to academic glories. It was milestoned by deputations,
that road, said visitations generally consisting of one person--mostly
unmarried and very red in the face--who inquired if the "kids was
minding their book," then went off chuckling at his own hardihood. Also
it seemed as though all the stray cattle for fifty miles around headed
for the school. Helen grew quite expert in ringing variations on the
fact that she "had not seen a strawberry steer with a white patch on the
left flank." Her smile always accompanied the answer, and the owners of
the hypothetical estrays would carry away a vision of a golden and
glorified school-ma'am. What of these pleasant interests, and an
unexpected liking which she had developed for the work itself, she
became very happy in a quiet way as time dulled the edge of her sorrow.
But during the three months that preceded school opening the fates had
not been idle. Attending strictly to their knitting, they had run a
tangled woof in and out the warp of several lives.
"She's so good!" Helen had exclaimed, in her gratitude of Mrs. Leslie;
but analysis of that lady's motives would have shown them not altogether
disinterested.
Excluding a certain absence of principle that was organic, and therefore
hardly chargeable against her till philosophers answer the question,
"Can the leopard change his spots or the Ethiop his skin?" Mrs. Leslie
was not fundamentally vicious. Like the average of men and women, she
would have preferred to have been good, and, given a husband whom she
feared and loved, she might have developed into a small Puritan mightily
jealous for their mutual prestige. Lacking this, however, she was as a
straw in a corner, ready to rise at the first wind puff. If, so far,
she had lived in the fear of Mrs. Grundy, her conformity inhered in two
causes--no man in her own set had stirred her nature, and, till Helen
came, the winds of Opportunity had blown away from Carter.
What drew her to him she herself could hardly have said; and if the
cause is to be found outside of the peculiar texture of her own nature,
it must be in the natural law which makes opposites attract. Nature
wars incessantly against the stratification which precedes social decay.
Whether of blood or water, she abhors stagnation. Her torrential floods
cleanse the backwaters of languid streams; passionate impulses, such as
Mrs. Leslie's, provide for the injection into worn-out strains of the
rich corpuscles that bubble from the soil. Carter's virile masculinity,
contrasting so strongly with the amiable effeminacy of her own set,
therefore attracted Mrs. Leslie, and, having now lassoed Opportunity--in
the shape of Helen--she hitched the willing beast and drove him tandem
with inclination.
Either by intuition or knowledge subtly wormed from himself or others,
she learned Carter's habits, and no matter the direction of the drives
which she and Helen took together, it was pure accident if they did not
come in touch with him. Also at intervals they called at his cabin,
after one of which visits Mrs. Leslie put the house-cleaning idea into
Helen's head, insinuating it so cleverly that the girl actually thought
that it originated with herself.
"Did you _ever_ see anything _so_ untidy?" she exclaimed, as on that
occasion they drove homeward. "Harness, cooking-pots, provisions, all
in a tangle. Bachelors are such grubby creatures! But really, my dear,
he deserves to be comfortable. Couldn't we do something?--hire some one
to--"
If she had counted on the girl's grateful enthusiasm, it did not fail
her. "Let's do it ourselves!" she exclaimed. "I'd love to!"
So, in Carter's absence, the two descended upon the cabin with soap,
pails, and hot water. Mrs. Leslie, the delicate, white-armed woman who
kept a girl to do her own work, rolled up her sleeves and fell to work
like a charwoman; and it is doubtful if she were ever happier than while
thus expending, in service, her reserve of illegal feeling. There was,
indeed, something pitiful in her tender energy. When, the cleaning
done, she sat demurely mending a rent in Carter's coat, she might have
been the young wife of her imaginings.
Her sentimental expression moved Helen to laughter. "You look _so_
domestic!" she tittered. "So soft and contemplative. One would
think--"
Mrs. Leslie was too clever for transparent denial. "I don't care," she
answered. "I like him. He's awfully dear." And her expressed
preference affected Helen--helped to break down the last barriers of
caste feeling between herself and Carter. Till then she had always
maintained a slight reserve towards him, but when, coming in
unexpectedly, he caught them at their labors, she was as free and frank
with him as she had ever been with a man of her old set. The change
expressed itself in her hand-shake at parting, though it fell far short
of Mrs. Leslie's lingering pressure.
In his surprise at the quantity and quality of the latter, Carter may
have returned it, or Mrs. Leslie may have mistaken the reaction of her
own grip for answer. Anyway, she thought he did, and on the way home
plead weariness as an excuse to indulge luxurious contemplations. She
fed on his every look, tone, accent, coloring them all with her own
feeling, an indulgence for which she would pay later; indeed, she was
even then paying, in that it was eating away her weak moral fibre as
acid eats a metal, preparing her for greater licenses. At first,
however, she was timorous--content with small touches, accidental
contacts, the physical sense of nearness when, as often happened, they
coaxed him to take them for a drive behind his famous ponies.
But such slight fare could not long suffice for her growing passion.
Having observed, outwardly, the laws of social morality only because, so
far, they had consorted with inclination; knowing, inwardly, no law but
that of her own pleasure, it was only a question of time until she would
become desperate enough to balance reputation against indulgence.
This came to pass a couple of months after Helen had opened up school,
and would have happened sooner but that even a reputation cannot be
given away without a bidder. Not that Carter was ignorant or
indifferent to her feeling. Two thousand years have failed to make man
completely monogamous and he is never displeased at a pretty woman's
preference. A condition had interposed between the fire and the tow.
In every man's life there comes a time when, for the moment, he is
impervious to the call of illicit passion. A first pure love bucklers
him like a shining aegis, and while certain pure eyes looked out upon
Carter from earth, air, and sky, wherever his fancy strayed, he would
not barter a sigh for the perishable commodity Elinor Leslie offered.
Having, however, formed her judgments of men from the weak masculinity
about her, she could not realize this. Imagining that he would come at
the crook of her finger, she tried to recapture Opportunity.
"Mr. Carter was so kind and considerate of Helen that I think we ought
to take him up," she said to her husband one day; and Leslie, whose
good-natured stupidity lent itself to every suggestion, readily agreed.
Unfortunately for her scheme, Carter proved unfelicitously blind to his
interest--as she saw it. Negatively, he refused to be "taken up,"
offering good-natured excuses to all of Leslie's invitations. So
nothing was left but the occasional opportunities afforded by Helen's
week-end visits. And these did not always lend themselves to Mrs.
Leslie's purpose. When Molyneux brought her up--as happened half the
time--he made full use of his monopoly; while Carter, in his turn, often
drove her down to see Jenny in Lone Tree.
To do the young lady justice, she held a fairly even balance between
those, her two cavaliers. According to the canons of romance she ought
to have fallen so deeply in love with one as to hate the other. Instead
she found herself liking them both.
There was, of course, a difference in the quality of her feeling.
Strange feminine paradox! she was drawn to Molyneux by the opposite of
the qualities on which she based her feeling for Carter. At heart woman
is a reformer, and once convinced of his sincerity towards herself, the
fact that Molyneux was reputed something of a sinner increased rather
than lessened her interest. She experienced the joys of driving the lion
in leading-strings, ignoring the danger of the beast turning upon her
with rending fangs. Feeling her power, she tried to exercise it for his
good, and felt as virtuous over the business as if it were not a form of
vanity, and a dangerous one at that. Anyway, she rode and drove with
him so much that spring and summer that she practically annihilated Mrs.
Leslie's chances of seeing Carter.
That lady could, however, and did observe him in secret. Riding from
home while Leslie was busy seeding, she would make a wide detour,
keeping the lowlands, and so bring up, unobserved, in a poplar clump
that afforded a near view of Carter's fields.
One day will example a score of others. It was, as aforesaid,
seeding-time. Stripped of her snowy bodice, the earth lay as some brown
virgin, her bosom bared to man's wooing and the kisses of the sun and
rain. From her covert Mrs. Leslie could see his ox-team slowly crawling
upon the brown fields which, as yet, had known no bearing yoke. Those
days love was suggested by everything in nature. The air quivered in
passionate lines down the horizon. Warmth, light, love were
omnipresent. By every slough the mallard brooded. Overhead the wild
goose winged northward to bring forth her kind on the rim of polar seas.
Prairie cocks primped and ruffled on every knoll before their admiring
hens. To her it seemed that birds and beasts, flesh and fowl were
happier than she in their matings. Passionately, with bursting sighs,
she strained at her chains, wildly challenging the marriage institution
which has slowly evolved from the travail of a thousand generations.
Hers was the old struggle between the flesh and the spirit, the struggle
that gave the sexless desert its hermit population. With this
difference: Ancestry had bequeathed to her no spirit. She had nothing
to pit against the flesh but her own unruly inclination. For her the
battle offered no meed of victory in the form of chastity triumphant.
The "dice of God were loaded"; she was striving against the record of
foolish or vicious fathers. And she played so hard! At times, little
heathen in spite of her culture, her eyes looked out upon him from the
spring greenery with the tender longing of a mother deer; again they
blazed with baffled fires; often she threw herself down in a passion of
tears. So, feeding upon its very privations, her distemper waxed until,
one June evening, it burst all bounds.
Returning through late gloaming with his weekly mail, Carter came on her
holding her horse by the trail. Her voice, low yet vibrant, issued from
the gloom.
"I'm afraid I shall have to trouble you for a ride, Mr. Carter; my
saddle-girth has burst."
"Your hand is wet. It's blood!" he exclaimed, as he handed her in.
"I fell on a sharp stone. Will you please tie this handkerchief."
Bending to comply, he saw that the wound was clean-cut, and this may
have caused him to examine the girth before he threw the saddle on
behind. Then he knew--was certain as though he had seen her slash it
with the penknife that lay in the scrub near by.
Picking up a stone, he pounded the severed edges on the wheel-tire;
pounded them to a frazzle while she looked on, her pupils dilated in the
half light, large, soft, black as velvet, intensifying a curious mixture
of expectation and content. But if she read consent in the pains he was
at with her excuse, alarmed surprise displaced expectation when,
climbing in, he drove on without a word.
She glanced up, tentatively, once, twice, a dozen times at the erect
figure, but always he stared ahead. Again and again her scarlet lips
trembled, but she choked; sound halted on its bitten thresholds. Once
she touched his arm, but he drew sharply away and his hand rose and
flung beaded sweat from his brow. So, for a tumultuous age it seemed to
her, they whirled through the gathering night, rattled on until a slab
of light burst through the darkness.