"WAS--WAS MY PAPA HERE THEN?"
Two years of favourable weather and good fortune with her livestock saw
the money Elizabeth had invested in hogs doubled and trebled, and later,
when the Johnson land was again offered for sale, she was able to buy it
for cash and have the place well stocked after it was done. Silas
Chamberlain, who watched Elizabeth with the same fatherly interest he had
felt when her child was born, and who glowed with secret pride at the way
in which she had won her way back into the country society about them,
came in often and offered his measure of good-natured praise. He had
prophesied the first time she had cooked for harvest hands that she would
become a famous cook, but he had not expected to find her a famous farmer.
What was still more astonishing to the old man was that she had become
noted in quite other ways. The move she had made in going to meeting the
first Sunday after John's departure, and Hepsie's explanation of it, had
worked to her advantage in reestablishing her in the community as one of
its factors, and opened to her the opportunity to wield the influence
which Luther had pointed out to her the best educated woman in a community
should wield. She took a class in the little Sunday school at the
schoolhouse, not so much because she was an enthusiastic churchwoman as
because it was the place where contact could be had. Elizabeth belonged to
no church, but Elizabeth could turn the conversation of the church
members, among whom she mingled, from gossip to better things, and there
was not a quilting bee nor an aid society meeting in the country around to
which she was not invited, and which she did not raise to a higher
standard by her presence.
The snubs which the neighbour women were at first anxious to deliver fell
flat in the quiet unconsciousness with which they were met. Elizabeth felt
that much of the treatment she received was given in righteous
indignation, and pursued the policy when possible to do so of not seeing
it, and when it must be met to meet it with perfect good humour. She kept
her credit good among the men with whom she bartered for young stock, and
there began to creep in a better feeling for her within the first six
months after she assumed the care of the farm and the problematical
position of a "grass widow" in the neighborhood. Doctor Morgan, Hepsie,
Jake, and Luther were splendid assets in the race with public feeling, and
Silas saw his young neighbour's affairs straighten out with chuckles of
delight. He watched her manoeuvre with her business deals and saw the
cool-headedness of them with growing enthusiasm. He passed Nathan on his
way to the field one spring morning and noticed that Nathan was using a
seeder from the Hunter farm. It was bright with a coat of freshly dried
paint.
"That's what she borrowed my brushes for last week," he exclaimed to
Nathan. "Ever see anything like 'er?" he asked admiringly. "Takes care of
everything. Did you ever see th' likes of them hogs? She's made more money
sellin' that land an' buyin' of it back 'n most of us old heads 'll make
in five year. Everything she touches seems t' have a wad stuck under it
somewheres."
Elizabeth was more than merely successful in money matters; she was a
reorganized woman from the standpoint of health also. She was no more the
weary, harassed woman who had churned, baked, and cooked for shellers, and
had so nearly found an early grave. The satisfaction of working
unrestrained, of resting when nature and woman's constitution demanded,
and the whole matter of living without fear, had given her a sound and
healthy body and a mind broader and less liable to emotional bias. The
principle which she had demanded from her husband in their last
conversation she put into practice. Hepsie ruled the house very much as if
it were her own. Elizabeth knew from experience the dreariness of
housework where all individuality is denied the worker. Hepsie came and
went as the exigencies of the work permitted, and there was always a horse
provided for her journeys away from the place; in fact, Hepsie was much
more free than her mistress had been in her first three years in the same
house. Elizabeth demanded good service, but she gave good service also,
and from being a good joke to work for the grass widow, it came to be
recognized that the Hunter farm was a good place to live, and when the
spring came around the men who had worked there the season before always
presented themselves for fresh hiring.
Two years more passed, and Master Jack Hunter was seven years old. On his
seventh birthday his mother dressed him and herself carefully and rode
over to the lonely graveyard. She did not go flower-laden. Rather, she
went as was her custom, to spend an hour with the quiet dead in silent
thought. Hugh Noland's sacrifice had not been in vain. The life he had
laid down had, whatever its mistakes and weaknesses, been a happy one to
himself, and had carried a ray of cheer to all with whom it had come in
contact, while his death had pointed toward an ideal of purity, in spite
of failures. That brief period during which Elizabeth had been compelled
to live a double life for his sake had held many lessons, and had forever
weaned her from duplicity of any sort. Those special hours--the hours
spent beside Hugh Noland's grave--were spent in searching self-inquiry, in
casting up accounts, in measuring herself against the principles with
which she struggled. People had gone out of her wrestlings; principles
remained. Here Elizabeth meditated upon the fact that because the
neighbourhood sentiment and discussion centred around their home, she and
John Hunter had missed a golden opportunity in not having become a force
for good during those first years of their marriage.
The hour spent beside Hugh's grave was her sacrament. There she went to
renew her faith in her own powers, which Hugh's interest and estimates had
first taught her to recognize; there she went to renew her vows of higher
living, and there to contemplate the freedom which Hugh Noland had given
her. But for the land and stock which gave her an independent income she
would have been as tearful, worn, and despondent as many of the women
about her. Her heart was very tender toward Hugh as she sat beside his
grave to-day. She held his letter--the only one he had ever written,
her--in her hands. As she read it over, part of its last sentence, "and
will, I hope, help toward emancipating you from care," struck her
attention, and her eyes filled with tears.
"What is it, mamma? What hurts?" Jack asked, always quick to respond to
his mother's moods.
"Nothing, dear, but Uncle Hugh's letter. He wrote it just before he died.
He was very kind to me," she said, patting the face thrust up for a kiss.
"Was--was my papa here then?" the child asked, curious about the life he
could not remember, and trying to relate things as he heard of them in
their true relation to the father who was a mysterious personage and
therefore interesting.
When his mother did not answer, he crept closer and, laying his head
against her arm, said wistfully:
"Mamma, will my papa ever come back to us?"
"I don't know, Jack," she answered quietly. "Perhaps. If he don't, you
shall go and see him when you are a big boy. Now run away, and leave mamma
a chance to think for a whole ten minutes."
The child ran off to the horses, and Elizabeth faced the life she led. A
curious thing was made plain to her in that hour--namely, that Hugh, whom
she remembered tenderly, was but a memory, while John Hunter, the father
of her child, whom she had no other cause to love, was a living force in
her life, and that at the child's simple question a longing flamed up, and
a feeling that she wished he were there. She remembered him as he would
ride with his hat in his hand, his fair, soft hair wind-blown about his
temples, and she would have been glad to go forth to meet him and try anew
to build a life together which would be livable to both.
A long time she pondered, and the impulse to write to him came over her,
but that impulse was followed by retrospection, and as one thing after
another arose out of the past in solemn procession, closing with the
unloved and unwished-for child which she had lost five years ago, she knew
that she would not open a correspondence. At that point, and with the
memory of the sweltering day and the unnecessary churning, her tender
memory of Hugh, who had made her free and economically independent, welled
up in her in one glad tide of thanksgiving, and she thought of her mother
and the thousands of other women on these Kansas prairies who had not been
saved from such a fate by being made independent landowners, and she
pondered on their fate till she longed for a way out for all women who
were mothers.
"This income could have set John free too, if he would only have thought
it over," she said to herself. "He need not have been burdened with us
while he was getting his depths in the business world," she concluded.
Wherever Elizabeth's thoughts turned to-day, John was the centre of them.
Elizabeth had never been resentful toward her husband, and the
never-ceasing cause of speculation and comment in the neighbourhood had
been upon the fact that though she lived apart from him, she never seemed
to think of divorce. Elizabeth's attitude toward John was that of a mother
who waits for a child to find the real light on a situation. She rarely
heard from him, and never directly. She knew of some of his affairs
through Doctor Morgan, with whom John corresponded when business required,
but she wrote regularly to Mrs. Hunter, who had gone to her son the second
year he had been away, and who had written to her at that time. Elizabeth
had been glad of so simple a means of keeping the link unbroken between
him and his child. It had been no part of her plan to separate Jack from
his father. She would not ask John to return, but she wished him to have
such knowledge of his son as his temper would permit. She wrote such
details of the home and the child as would interest them, knowing that
John would read the letters. Somehow, to-day she wished that she could
write to him direct, but as she thought she shook her head.
"It cannot be," she said aloud.
"Mamma, if you don't come we won't have time to go for the mail," Jack
called.
The pleasant afternoon had waned; Elizabeth Hunter gazed about her in
astonishment; it was indeed late.
She stooped and passed her hand over the name cut in the marble slab.
"Hugh Noland, aged twenty-nine."
"Hugh Noland, dear," she said aloud, "you have set me financially free,
but there is another kind of freedom I have got to win for myself. I've
got to tell John the things that we wanted to tell and were too cowardly
to do. If we ever come together again I shall tell it out, if all this
country gets to hear it. Jack can better afford to take the disgrace of it
than to have a mother who carries it about with her as a secret. Without
honesty no other virtue is a virtue at all."
Elizabeth's eyes were full of tears as she voiced her vow, but there was a
sense of relief welling up within her that she had not known in all the
five years Hugh had lain here. She stood very quiet till her emotions were
under control and her sunny self in command again, then she blew a kiss at
Aunt Susan's grave and went to the waiting child and with him rode a merry
race toward Colebyville.