A SUMMER AT HOME.
Until the present summer Mauney had never gone back to the farm at
Lantern Marsh, so that now, with his new mental outlook, he was for
the first time enjoying it. William was living on his father’s place
and renting the old McBratney property to an Englishman. Time had
brought about changes. William was no longer the insupportable person
he had once been. His wife Evelyn had adapted herself, cheerfully, to
her circumstances. She found no time now to indulge her former love of
gramophones and motoring. The two were living happily together, while the
wonted sombreness of the old home was gratefully relieved by the shrill
voices of two healthy children. William, once the scoffer, was now proud
of his brother, while Mauney had learned a tolerance that made William’s
bad English even lovably picturesque.
“Well, Maun,” William would say, “you’ve got the book learning fer the
hull crowd. But while you’ve been a-studyin’ I’ve been raisin’ a family,
an’ there ain’t no good o’ us two tryin’ to argue which is the best. But
I’ll take the family every time!”
Then Mauney would laugh and reply, “There’s nothing like being happy,
Bill, whatever you have to do to get there.”
He felt that he himself was very gradually arriving. Ahead lay the
treasures of history to be expounded to a new generation. With his own
hands he was to lift before their eyes the ideals which he had won. It
took no more than this glorious prospect to make him very content.
There was sadness, though, in every memory of Lantern Marsh. Time after
time during the summer months, thoughts rushed unbidden upon him to shake
his being—those family sentiments of past scenes, pathetic differences
of opinion, once so important, but now so irrevocable and small. The
eye of retrospect sees with a tender sight. Mauney kept fancying that
his father’s big form must soon appear at the lane entrance carrying a
whiffletree, or his harsh voice be heard swearing at his horses. The man
had lived up to his light. Experience forgave him his faults. But now
Seth Bard, with all his gruffness and strength, was silent and vanished.
Once he had seemed the most immovable body on earth, the one great,
availing magnitude. But even the winds that blew from unseen quarters
across the desolate marsh were more enduring than he.
And Mauney’s sadness found a strange kind of comfort as he gazed upon
that never-ending swamp. It had been there always. Since he had known
anything he had known that swamp—bleak and horrid and fascinating, as
changing as the phases of his own life; never the same for two days in
succession, and yet always the same. On sunny afternoons, great, white
clouds hung over it and the blue of the sky lay mirrored in the long,
narrow strips of water far out. Then would come the disturbing breezes,
growing into winds that moved the trees and reed banks, then into the
hurricane that transformed it all, till it vibrated like a living and
suffering being, its green acres of sedge whipped to a surface like shot
silk, its channels churned to a muddy red, the moving sky glaring with
storm, and the stunted hemlocks, huddling frantically together along its
edges. This old swamp, hated and loved, defeated, but eternal, was relic
of all that Mauney regretted in those sad hours that came upon him during
the summer months.
But these remembrances were being pushed back farther and farther out
of sense, while the vital events of life occupied him more and more.
Coming into the house, tired, but satisfied, after the day’s work in the
hayfield, he would sit quietly on the kitchen verandah, watching the
sun sink beyond the corner of the big, dark barn. The sound of crickets
filled the air with a metallic vibration. His contentment was as deep as
the gulf of crimson sky above him, and his happiness as much a-quiver as
the air. As he sat here, lulled into grateful meditation, perhaps Evelyn
would interrupt him.
“I’ll bet a dollar, Maun, you’re in love!” she would venture.
And he would wonder if it was possible that any love was ever quite as
wonderful as his for Freda. Never since human life began had any woman
been as dear as she was to him. She was so real. There was not an atom of
dissimulation about her. Freda—who had flashed upon him like a blinding
light, who had believed in him—had become constant in his thoughts. Freda
was the great reality. Nothing could daunt him, nothing could make him
one little bit unhappy, so long as he knew that ultimately he would
possess her.
But he purposely refrained from seeing her much. The few calls that he
made at her home were in response to her invitations, and he fancied that
she understood well enough the reasons for his restraint.
The hot harvest season passed very tardily. The August sun grew more
intense as the long, sultry days drew out. There was never even a cloudy
day to remove the accumulating tension of the heat. The grey, baked earth
cracked into deep fissures. The wells dried up, and even the waters of
the marsh sank, day by day, until at the end of the month they were
entirely gone. There was no greenness anywhere; the rushes and sedges
were burnt into amber shades, with yellow fuzz that blended dully with
the parched meadows. And the creatures of the swamp were either silent or
departed. Mauney missed them.
The farmers began to talk ruin. William Henry McBratney, passing the
lane on a visit from Beulah, pulled up his horse to discuss the weather
with Mauney. His evil face, the more evil because of its senile wasting,
was painfully worried, and his mad, dim eyes sparkled in accord with his
feelings.
“Well, sir, Maun,” he said, striking his knee with his sprawling, bony
palm, “I’ve seed a good many dry spells, but nothing like this. It’s nigh
onto fifty years since me and my first missus settled here. But, sir, I
tell you what! This here harvest has been the driest ever.”
“But I think we’ll get rain, don’t you?” asked Mauney.
“No, sir, I don’t,” affirmed the old man, with an expression of settled
gloom. “Every mornin’ I’ve been a-looking for a cloud or two, but that
sky, sir, I tell yuh, couldn’t hold a cloud. It’s too damned hot fer to
hold a single cloud! An’, if we don’t get rain the cattle’s goin’ to die.”
“But, my dear sir,” persisted Mauney, “rain is bound to come. Did you
ever see it fail?”
“All I’m sayin’ is, that since I come here—me an’ the missus—that there
marsh hain’t never onct dried up that way. Yer father, Seth, never seed
it like that, I tell yuh. No, sir. An’ if it’s me ye’r askin’ I’d deny
that there’ll be any rain. Leastways, I’d hev to see it to believe it!”
Such logic was more depressing than convincing.