The storm which the night had foreshadowed broke with violence before
dawn. At times during the night, the wind had howled about the little
building in a way which recalled to Nora one of the best-remembered
holidays of her childhood. She and her mother had gone to Eastborne for
a fortnight with some money Eddie had sent them shortly after his
arrival in Canada. The autumnal equinox had caught them during the last
days of their stay, and the strong impression which the wind had made
upon her childish mind had remained with her ever since.
Lying, wakeful through the long hours, staring wide-eyed out of the
little curtainless window into the thick darkness, thick enough to seem
palpable; the memory of how, on that far-off day she had passed long
hours with her nose flattened against the window of the dingy little
lodging-house drawing-room watching the wonder of the wind-lashed sea,
came back to her with extraordinary vividness.
The spectacle had filled her with a sort of terrified exultation. She
had longed to go out and stand on the wind-buffeted pier and take her
part in this saturnalia of the elements. She had something of the same
feeling now; a longing to leave her bed and go out onto the windswept
prairie.
Strangely enough, she had no sensation of fatigue or weariness either
bodily or mentally. Her mind, indeed, seemed extraordinarily active.
Little petty details of her childhood and of her life with Miss Wickham,
long forgotten, such as the day the gardener had cut his thumb, trooped
through her mind in an endless procession. She had a strange feeling
that she would never sleep again.
But just as the blackness without seemed turning into heavy grayness,
lulled possibly by the wind which had moderated its violence and had now
sunk to a moan not unpleasant, and by the rythmic breathing of the
sleeping man at her side, she fell asleep.
For several hours she must have slept heavily, indeed. For when she
awoke, it was to find the place at her side empty. Hurriedly dressing
herself, she went out into the living-room. That was empty, too. But the
lamp was lighted, the kettle was singing merrily on the stove and the
fire was burning brightly. And outside was a whirling veil of snow which
made it impossible to see beyond the length of one's arm.
Had she been marooned on an island in the ultimate ocean of the
Antartic, she could not have felt more cut off from the world she knew.
Well, it was better so.
She wondered what had become of Frank. Surely on a day like this there
could be nothing to do outside; and even if there were, nothing so
imperative as to take him away before he had had his breakfast. She felt
a little hurt at his leaving without a word.
Evidently, he expected to return soon, however. The table was laid for
two. She felt her face crimson as she saw that there was but one cup
left. One of them must drink from one of those horrible tin cans. She
did not ask herself which one it would be.
Partly to occupy herself and to take her thoughts away from the
recollection of the events of the evening before, and partly prompted by
a desire to have everything in readiness against her husband's return,
she busied herself with the preparations for breakfast.
There were some eggs and a filch of bacon which they had brought from
Winnipeg. She would make some toast, too. Very likely he didn't care for
it, they certainly never had it at Gertie's, but in _her house_---- She
smiled to think how quickly, in her mind, she had taken possession.
She was just beginning to think that she had been foolish to start her
cooking without knowing at all when he was going to return, when she
heard a great stamping and scraping of feet outside, and in another
moment Frank's snow-covered figure darkened the doorway.
"Getting on with the breakfast? That's fine!" he called.
"It's quite ready: wherever have you been? I wouldn't have imagined that
anyone could find a thing to do outside on a day like this."
"Oh, there's always something to do. But I just ran up to the Sharps'
for a minute. I knew old mother Sharp wouldn't keep her promise about
coming down to-day. She's all right, but she does hate to walk."
"Well, I'm sure I wouldn't blame anyone for choosing to stay indoors a
day like this. But what did you want to see her in such a hurry for?"
"Oh, nothin' particular; I sort of thought maybe you wouldn't mind
having a little milk with your tea on a gloomy morning like this," he
said shamefacedly.
"That was awfully good of you; thank you very much," she said with real
gratitude, as she thought of him tramping those two miles in the
blinding storm.
"Do you think we are in for a blizzard?" she asked when they were at the
table. To her unspeakable relief, she found that the one cup was
intended for her; he had waved her toward the one chair, apparently the
place of honor, contenting himself with one of the stools.
"N-o-o," he said, "I don't think so. It's beginning to lighten up a
little already. And besides, don't you remember that I foretold a
mildish winter?"
"I was forgetting that I had married a prophet," she smiled.
But all through the day the snow continued to fall steadily, although
the wind had died away and, at intervals, the sun shone palely. At
nightfall, it was still snowing.
The day passed quickly, as Nora found plenty to occupy herself with. By
supper time she felt healthfully tired, with the added comfortable
feeling that, for a novice, she had really accomplished a good deal.
The whole room certainly looked cleaner and the pots and pans, although
not shining, were as near to it as hot water and scrubbing could make
them. Fortunately, she had a quantity of fresh white paper in her trunk
which greatly improved the appearance of the shelves.
During the day Frank left the house for longer or shorter intervals on
various pretexts which she felt must be largely imaginary, trumped up
for the occasion. She was agreeably surprised to find that he was
sufficiently tactful to divine that she wanted to be alone.
While he was in the house he smoked his pipe incessantly and read some
magazines which she had unpacked with some of her books. But she never
glanced suddenly in his direction without finding that he was watching
her.
"I tell _you_, this is fine," he said heartily as he was lighting his
after-supper pipe. "Mrs. Sharp won't hardly know the place when she
comes over. She's never seen it except when I was housekeeper. She
doesn't think I'm much good at it. Leastways, she's always tellin' Sid
that if she dies, he must marry again right away as soon as he can find
anyone to have him, for fear the house gets to looking like this."
"That doesn't look like a very strong indorsement," Nora admitted.
The next day Nora woke to a world of such dazzling whiteness that she
was blinded every time she attempted to look out on it.
"You want to be careful," her husband cautioned her; "getting
snow-blinded isn't as much fun as you'd think. Even I get bad
sometimes; and I'm used to it. Looks like one of them Christmas cards,
don't it? Somebody sent Gertie one once and she showed it to us."
That afternoon, Mr. Sharp drove his wife down for the promised visit. As
in his judgment the two women would want to be alone, he proposed to
Frank to drive back home with him to give him the benefit of his opinion
on some improvements he was contemplating.
"You're only wasting your time," Mrs. Sharp had remarked grimly. "There
ain't going to be anything done to any of them barns before I get a
lean-to on the house. You'd think even a man would know that a house
that's all right for two gets a little small for seven," she added,
scornfully, to Nora.
"Are there seven of you?"
"Me and Sid and five little ones. If that don't make seven, I've
forgotten all the 'rithmetic I ever learned," said Mrs. Sharp briefly.
"And let me tell you, you who're just starting in, that having children
out here on the prairie half the time with no proper care, and
particularly in winter, when maybe you're snowed up and the doctor can't
get to you, ain't my idea of a bank holiday."
"I shouldn't think it would be," said Nora, sincerely shocked, although
she found it difficult to hide a smile at her visitor's comparison;
bank holidays being among her most horrid recollections.
Mrs. Sharp, despite a rather emphatic manner which softened noticeably
as her visit progressed, turned out to be a stout, red-faced woman of
middle age who seemed to be troubled with a chronic form of asthma. She
was as unmistakably English as her husband. But like him, she had lost
much of her native accent, although occasionally one caught a faint
trace of the Cockney. She had two rather keen brown eyes which, as she
talked, took in the room to its smallest detail.
"Well, I declare, I think you've done wonders considering you've only
had a day and not used to work like this," she said heartily. "When Sid
told me that Frank was bringing home a wife I said to myself: 'Well, I
don't envy her _her_ job; comin' to a shack that ain't been lived in for
nigh unto six months and when it was, with only a man runnin' it.'"
"You don't seem to have a very high opinion of men's ability in the
domestic line," said Nora with a smile.
"I can tell you just how high it is," said Mrs. Sharp with decision. "I
would just as soon think of consultin' little Sid--an' he's goin' on
three--about the housekeepin' as I would his father. It ain't a man's
work. Why should he know anything about it?"
"Still," demurred Nora, "lots of men look after themselves somehow."
"Somehow's just the word; they never get beyond that. Of course I knew
Frank would be sure to marry some day. And with his good looks it's a
wonder he didn't do so long ago. Most girls is so crazy about a
good-lookin' fellow that they never stop to think if he has anything
else to him. Not that he hasn't lots of good traits, I don't mean that.
But," she added shrewdly, "you don't look like the silly sort that would
be taken in by good looks alone."
"No," said Nora dryly, "I don't think I am."
After that, until the two men returned, they talked of household
matters, and Nora found that her new neighbor had a store of useful and
practical suggestions to make, and, what was even better, seemed glad to
place all her experience at her disposal in the kindliest and most
friendly manner possible, entirely free from any trace of that patronage
which had so maddened her in her sister-in-law.
"Now mind you," called Mrs. Sharp, as she laboriously climbed up to the
seat beside her husband as they were driving away, "if Frank, here, gets
at all upish--and he's pretty certain to, all newly married men do--you
come to me. I'll settle him, never fear."
Frank laughed a little over-loudly at this parting shot, and Nora
noticed that for some time after their guests had gone, he seemed
unusually silent.
As for the Sharps, they also maintained an unwonted silence--which for
Mrs. Sharp, at least, was something unusual--until they had arrived at
their own door.
"Well?" queried Sharp, as they were about to turn in.
"It beats me," replied his wife. "Why, she's a lady. But she'll come out
all right," she finished enigmatically, "she's got the right stuff in
her, poor dear!"
In after years, when Nora was able to look back on this portion of her
life and see things in just perspective, she always felt that she could
never be too thankful that her days had been crowded with occupation.
Without that, she must either have gone actually insane, or, in a frenzy
of helplessness, done some rash thing which would have marred her whole
life beyond repair.
After she found herself growing more accustomed to her new life--and,
after all, the growing accustomed to it was the hardest part--she
realized that she was only following the universal law of life in
paying for her own rash act. The thought that she was paying with
interest, being overcharged as it were, was but faint consolation: it
only meant that she had been a fool. That conviction is rarely soothing.
Then, too, she gradually began to look at the situation from Frank's
point of view. He had certainly acted within his rights, if with little
generosity. But she had to acknowledge to herself that the obligation to
be generous on his part was small. She could hardly be said to have
treated him with much liberality in the past.
She had used him without scruple as a means to an end. She had made him
the instrument for escaping from a predicament which she found
unbearably irksome. That she had done so in the heat of passion was
small palliation. For the present, at least, she wisely resolved to make
the best of things. It could not last forever. The day must come when
she could free herself from the bonds that now held her.
It was characteristic of her unyielding pride, of her reluctance to
confess to defeat, that the thought of appealing to her brother never
once entered her head.
For this reason, it was long before she could bring herself to write the
promised letter to Eddie. What was there to say? The things that would
have relieved her, in a sense, to tell, must remain forever locked in
her own heart. In the end, she compromised by sending a letter confined
entirely to describing her new home. As she read it over, she thanked
the Fates that Eddie's was not a subtile or analytical mind. He would
read nothing between the lines. But Gertie? Well, it couldn't be helped!
It was some two months after her marriage that she received a letter
from Miss Pringle in answer to the one she had written while she was
still an inmate of her brother's house.
Miss Pringle confined herself largely to an account of her Continental
wanderings and her bloodless encounters with various foreigners and
their ridiculous un-English customs from which she had emerged
triumphant and victorious. Mrs. Hubbard's precarious state of health had
led her into being unusually captious, it seemed. Miss Pringle was more
than ever content to be back in Tunbridge Wells, where all the world
was, by comparison, sane and reasonable in behavior.
When it came to touching upon her friend's amazing environment and
unconventional experiences, Miss Pringle was discretion itself. But if
her paragraphs had bristled with exclamation points, they could not, to
one who understood her mental processes, have more clearly betrayed her
utter disapproval and amazement that English people, and descendants of
English people, could so far forget themselves as to live in any such
manner.
Replying to this letter was only a degree less hard than writing to
Eddie. Nora's ready pen faltered more than once, and many pages were
destroyed before an answer was sent. She confined herself entirely to
describing the new experience of a Canadian winter. Of her departure
from her brother's roof and of her marriage, she said nothing whatever.
In accordance with her resolution to make the best of things, she set
about making the shack more comfortable and homelike. There were many of
those things which, small in themselves, count for much, that her busy
brain planned to do during the time taken up in the necessary
overhauling. This cleaning-up process had taken several days,
interrupted as it was by the ordinary daily routine.
To her unaccustomed hand, the task of preparing three hearty meals a day
was a matter that consumed a large amount of time, but gradually, day by
day, she found herself systematizing her task and becoming less
inexpert. To be sure she made many mistakes; once, indeed, in a fit of
preoccupation, while occupied in rearranging the bedroom, burning up
the entire dinner.
Upon his return, her husband had found her red-eyed and apologetic.
"Oh, well!" he said. "It ain't worth crying over. What is the saying?
'Hell wasn't built in a day'?"
Nora screamed with laughter. "I think you're mixing two old saws. Rome
wasn't built in a day and Hell is paved with good intentions."
"Well," he laughed good-naturedly, "they both seem to hit the case."
He certainly was unfailingly good-tempered. Not that there were not
times when Nora did not have to remind herself of her new resolution and
he, for his part, exercise all his forbearance. But in the main, things
went more smoothly than either had dared to hope from their inauspicious
beginning.
The thing that Nora found hardest to bear was that he never lost a
certain masterful manner. It was a continual reminder that she had been
defeated. Then, too, he had a maddening way of rewarding her for good
conduct which was equally hard to bear, until she realized that it was
perfectly unconscious on his part.
For example: after she had struggled for a week with her makeshift
kitchen outfit, small in the beginning but greatly reduced by her
destructive outburst on the night of their arrival, he had, without
saying a word to her of his intentions, driven over to Prentice and laid
in an entire new stock of crockery and several badly needed pots and
pans.
Nora had found it hard to thank him. If they had been labeled "For a
Good Child" she could not have felt more humiliated. And what was
equally trying, he seemed to have divined her thoughts, for his smile,
upon receiving her halting thanks, had not been without a touch of
malicious amusement.
On the other hand, all her little efforts to beautify the little house
and make it more livable met with his enthusiastic approval and support.
He was as delighted as a child with everything she did, and often, when
baffled for the moment by some lack of material for carrying out some
proposed scheme, he came to the rescue with an ingenious suggestion
which solved the vexed problem at once.
And so, gradually, to the no small wonder of her neighbor, Mrs. Sharp,
the shack began to take on an air of homely brightness and comfort which
that lady's more pretentious place lacked, even after a residence of
thirteen years.
Curtains tied back with gay ribands, taken from an old hat and
refurbished, appeared at the windows; the old tin syrup cans, pasted
over with dark green paper, were made to disgorge their mouldy stores
and transform themselves into flower-pots holding scarlet geraniums;
even the disreputable, rakish old rocking chair assumed a belated air of
youth and respectability, wearing as it did a cushion of discreetly
patterned chintz; and the packing-box table hid its deficiencies under a
simple cloth. All these magic transformations Nora had achieved with
various odds and ends which she found in her trunk.
Not to be outdone, Frank had contributed a well-made shelf to hold
Nora's precious books and a sort of cupboard for her sewing basket and,
for the crowning touch, had with much labor contrived some rough chairs
to take the place of the packing-box affairs of unpleasant memory.
As has been said, Mrs. Sharp came, saw and wondered; but she had her own
theory, all the same, which she confided to her husband.
All these little but significant changes, the result of their
co-operative effort, had not been the work of days, but of weeks. By the
time they had all been accomplished, the winter was practically over and
spring was at hand. Looking back on it, it seemed impossibly short,
although there had been times, in spite of her manifold occupations,
when it had seemed to Nora that it was longer than any winter she had
ever known. She looked forward to the coming spring with both pleasure
and dread.
Through many a dark winter day she had pictured to herself how beautiful
the prairie must be, clad in all the verdant livery of the most
wonderful of the seasons. And yet it would mean a new solitude and
loneliness to her, her husband, of necessity, being away through all the
long daylight hours. She began to understand Gertie's dread of having no
one to speak to. She avoided asking herself the question as to whether
it was loneliness in general or the particular loneliness of missing her
husband that she dreaded.
But she was obliged to admit to herself that the winter had wrought more
transformations than were to be seen in the little shack.