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THE DESERT AND THE SOWN
By Mary Hallock Foote
CONTENTS
I. A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS
II. INTRODUCING A SON-IN-LAW
III. THE INITIAL LOVE
IV. “A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT”
V. DISINHERITED
VI. AN APPEAL TO NATURE
VII. MARKING TIME
VIII. A HUNTER'S DIARY
IX. THE POWER OF WEAKNESS
X. THE WHITE PERIL
XI. A SEARCHING OF HEARTS
XII. THE BLOOD-WITE
XIII. CURTAIN
XIV. KIND INQUIRIES
XV. A BRIDEGROOM OF SNOW
XVI. THE NATURE OF AN OATH
XVII. THE HIDDEN TRAIL
XVIII.THE STAR IN THE EAST
XIX. PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS
XX. A STATION IN THE DESERT
XXI. INJURIOUS REPORTS CONCERNING AN OLD HOUSE
XXII. THE CASE STRIKES IN
XXIII.RESTIVENESS
XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER
XXV. THE FELL FROST
XXVI. PEACE TO THIS HOUSE
I
A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS
It was an evening of sudden mildness following a dry October gale.
The colonel had miscalculated the temperature by one log--only one, he
declared, but that had proved a pitchy one, and the chimney bellowed
with flame. From end to end the room was alight with it, as if the
stored-up energies of a whole pine-tree had been sacrificed in the
consumption of that four-foot stick.
The young persons of the house had escaped, laughing, into the fresh
night air, but the colonel was hemmed in on every side; deserted by
his daughter, mocked by the work of his own hands, and torn between the
duties of a host and the host's helpless craving for his after-dinner
cigar.
Across the hearth, filling with her silks all the visible room in his
own favorite settle corner, sat the one woman on earth it most behooved
him to be civil to,--the future mother-in-law of his only child. That
Moya was a willing, nay, a reckless hostage, did not lessen her father's
awe of the situation.
Mrs. Bogardus, according to her wont at this hour, was composedly doing
nothing. The colonel could not make his retreat under cover of her real
or feigned absorption in any of the small scattering pursuits which
distract the female mind. When she read she read--she never “looked at
books.” When she sewed she sewed--presumably, but no one ever saw her
do it. Her mind was economic and practical, and she saved it whole, like
many men of force, for whatever she deemed her best paying sphere of
action.
It was a silence that crackled with heat! The colonel, wrathfully
perspiring in the glow of that impenitent stick, frowned at it like
an inquisitor. Presently Mrs. Bogardus looked up, and her expression
softened as she saw the energetic despair upon his face.
“Colonel, don't you always smoke after dinner?”
“That is my bad habit, madam. I belong to the generation that
smokes--after dinner and most other times--more than is good for us.”
Colonel Middleton belonged also to the generation that can carry a
sentence through to the finish in handsome style, and he did it with a
suave Virginian accent as easy as his seat in the saddle. Mrs. Bogardus
always gave him her respectful attention during his best performances,
though she was a woman of short sentences herself.
“Don't you smoke in this room sometimes?” she asked, with a barely
perceptible sniff the merest contraction of her housewifely nostrils.
“Ah--h! Those rascally curtains and cushions! You ladies--women,
I should say--Moya won't let me say ladies--you bolster us up with
comforts on purpose to betray us!”
“You can say 'ladies' to me,” smiled the very handsome one before him.
“That's the generation _I_ belong to.”
The colonel bowed playfully. “Well, you know, I don't detect myself, but
there's no doubt I have infected the premises.”
“Open fires are good ventilators. I wish you would smoke now. If you
don't, I shall have to go away, and I'm exceedingly comfortable.”
“You are exceedingly charming to say so--on top of that last stick,
too!” The colonel had Irish as well as Virginian progenitors. “Well,” he
sighed, proceeding to make himself conditionally happy, “Moya will never
forgive me! We spoil each other shamefully when we're alone, but of
course we try to jack each other up when company comes. It's a great
comfort to have some one to spoil, isn't it, now? I needn't ask which it
is in your family!”
“The spoiled one?” Mrs. Bogardus smiled rather coldly. “A woman we had
for governess, when Christine was a little thing, used to say: 'That
child is the stuff that tyrants are made of!' Tyrants are made by the
will of their subjects, don't you think, generally speaking?”
“Well, you couldn't have made a tyrant of your son, Mrs. Bogardus. He's
the Universal Spoiler! He'll ruin my striker, Jephson. I shall have to
send the fellow back to the ranks. I don't know how you keep a servant
good for anything with Paul around.”
“Paul thinks he doesn't like to be waited on,” Paul's mother observed
shrewdly. “He says that only invalids, old people, and children have any
claim on the personal service of others.”
“By George! I found him blacking his own boots!”
Mrs. Bogardus laughed.
“But I'm paying a man to do it for him. It upsets my contract with that
other fellow for Paul to do his work. We have a claim on what we pay for
in this world.”
“I suppose we have. But Paul thinks that nothing can pay the price of
those artificial relations between man and man. I think that's the way
he puts it.”
“Good Heavens! Has the boy read history? It's a relation that began when
the world was made, and will last while men are in it.”
“I am not defending Paul's ideas, Colonel. I have a great sympathy with
tyrants myself. You must talk to him. He will amuse you.”
“My word! It's a ticklish kind of amusement when _we_ get talking. Why,
the boy wants to turn the poor old world upside down--make us all stand
on our heads to give our feet a rest. Now, I respect my feet,”--the
colonel drew them in a little as the lady's eyes involuntarily took the
direction of his allusion,--“I take the best care I can of them; but
I propose to keep my head, such as it is, on top, till I go under
altogether. These young philanthropists! They assume that the Hands and
the Feet of the world, the class that serves in that capacity, have got
the same nerves as the Brain.”
“There's a sort of connection,” said Mrs. Bogardus carelessly. “Some
of our Heads have come from the class that you call the Hands and Feet,
haven't they?”
The colonel admitted the fact, but the fact was the exception. “Why,
that's just the matter with us now! We've got no class of legislators.
I don't wish to plume myself, but, upon my word, the two services are
about all we have left to show what selection and training can do. And
we're only just getting the army into shape, after the raw material that
was dumped into it by the civil war.”
“Weren't you in the civil war yourself?”
“I was--a West Pointer, madam; and I was true to my salt and false to my
blood. But, the flag over all!--at the cost of everything I held dear
on earth.” After this speech the colonel looked hotter than ever and a
trifle ashamed of himself.
Mrs. Bogardus's face wore its most unobservant expression. “I don't
agree with Paul,” she said. “I wish in some ways he were more like other
young men--exercise, for instance. It's a pity for young men not to love
activity and leadership. Besides, it's the fashion. A young man might
as well be out of the world as out of the fashion. Blood is a strange
thing,” she mused.
The colonel looked at her curiously. In a woman so unfrank, her
occasional bursts of frankness were surprising and, as he thought, not
altogether complimentary. It was as if she felt herself so far removed
from his conception of her that she might say anything she pleased, sure
of his miscomprehension.
“He is not lazy intellectually,” said the colonel, aiming to comfort
her.
“I did not say he was lazy--only he won't do things except to what he
calls some 'purpose.' At his age amusement ought to be purpose enough.
He ought to take his pleasures seriously--this hunting-trip, for
instance. I believe, on the very least encouragement, he would give it
all up!”
“You mustn't let him do that,” said the colonel, warming. “All that
country above Yankee Fork, for a hundred miles, after you've gone fifty
north from Bonanza, is practically virgin forest. Wonderful flora
and fauna! It's late for the weeds and things, but if Paul wants game
trophies for your country-house, he can load a pack-train.”
Mrs. Bogardus continued to be amused, in a quiet way. “He calls them
relics of barbarism! He would as soon festoon his walls with scalps, as
decorate them with the heads of beautiful animals,--nearer the Creator's
design than most men, he would say.”
“He's right there! But that doesn't change the distinction between men
and animals. He is your son, madam--and he's going to be mine. But, fine
boy as he is, I call him a crank of the first water.”
“You'll find him quite good to Moya,” Mrs. Bogardus remarked
dispassionately. “And he's not quite twenty-four.”
“Very true. Well, _I_ should send him into the woods for the sake of
getting a little sense into him, of an every-day sort. He 'll take in
sanity with every breath.”
“And you don't think it's too late in the season for them to go out?”
There was no change in Mrs. Bogardus's voice, unconcerned as it was; yet
the colonel felt at once that this simple question lay at the root of
all her previous skirmishing.
“The guide will decide as to that,” he said definitely. “If it is, he
won't go out with them. They have got a good man, you say?”
“They are waiting for a good man; they have waited too long, I think.
He is expected in with another party on Monday, perhaps, Paul is to meet
the Bowens at Challis, where they buy their outfit. I do believe”--she
laughed constrainedly--“that he is going up there more to head them off
than for any other reason.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, it's very stupid of them! They seem to think an army post is part
of the public domain. They have been threatening, if Paul gives up the
trip, to come down here on a gratuitous visit.”
“Why, let them come by all means! The more the merrier! We will quarter
them on the garrison at large.”
“Wherever they were quartered, they would be here all the time. They are
not intimate friends of Paul's. _Mrs._ Bowen is--a very great friend.
He is her right-hand in all that Hartley House work. The boys are just
fashionable young men.”
“Can't they go hunting without Paul?”
“Wheels within wheels!” Mrs. Bogardus sighed impatiently. “Hunting trips
are expensive, and--when young men are living on their fathers, it
is convenient sometimes to have a third. However, Paul goes, I half
believe, to prevent their making a descent upon us here.”
“Well; I should ask them to come, or make it plain they were not
expected.”
“Oh, would you?--if their mother was one of the nicest women, and your
friend? Besides, the reservation does not cover the whole valley. Banks
Bowen talks of a mine he wants to look at--I don't think it will make
much difference to the mine! This is simply to say that I wish Paul
cared more about the trip for its own sake.”
“Well, frankly, I think he's better out of the way for the next
fortnight. The girls ought to go to bed early, and keep the roses in
their cheeks for the wedding. Moya's head is full of her frocks and
fripperies. She is trying to run a brace of sewing women; and all those
boxes are coming from the East to be 'inspected, and condemned' mostly.
The child seems to make a great many mistakes, doesn't she? About every
other day I see a box as big as a coffin in the hall, addressed to some
dry-goods house, 'returned by ----'”
“Moya should have sent to me for her things,” said Mrs. Bogardus. “I am
the one who makes her return them. She can do much better when she is
in town herself. It doesn't matter, for the few weeks they will be
away, what she wears. I shall take her measures home with me and set the
people to work. She has never been _fitted_ in her life.”
The colonel looked rather aghast. He had seldom heard Mrs. Bogardus
speak with so much animation. He wondered if really his household was so
very far behind the times.
“It's very kind of you, I'm sure, if Moya will let you. Most girls think
they can manage these matters for themselves.”
“It's impossible to shop by mail,” Mrs. Bogardus said decidedly. “They
always keep a certain style of things for the Western and Southern
trade.”
The colonel was crushed. Mrs. Bogardus rose, and he picked up her
handkerchief, breathing a little hard after the exertion. She passed
out, thanking him with a smile as he opened the door. In the hall she
stopped to choose a wrap from a collection of unconventional garments
hanging on a rack of moose horns.
“I think I shall go out,” she said. “The air is quite soft to-night. Do
you know which way the children went?” By the “children,” as the colonel
had noted, Mrs. Bogardus usually meant her daughter, the budding tyrant,
Christine.
“Fine woman!” he mused, alone with himself in his study. “Splendid
character head. Regular Dutch beauty. But hard--eh?--a trifle hard in
the grain. Eyes that tell you nothing. Mouth set like a stone. Never
rambles in her talk. Never speculates or exaggerates for fun. Never runs
into hyperbole--the more fool some other folks! Speaks to the point or
keeps still.”
II
INTRODUCING A SON-IN-LAW
The colonel's papers failed to hold him somehow. He rose and paced the
room with his short, stiff-kneed tread. He stopped and stared into the
fire; his face began to get red.
“So! Moya's clothes are not good enough. Going to set the people to
work, is she? Wants an outfit worthy of her son. And who's to pay for
it, by gad? Post-nuptial bills for wedding finery are going to hurt poor
little Moya like the deuce. Confound the woman! Dressing my daughter
for me, right in my own house. Takes it in her hands as if it were
her right, by----!” The colonel let slip another expletive. “Well,”
he sighed, half amused at his own violence, “I'll write to Annie. I
promised Moya, and it's high time I did.”
Annie was the colonel's sister, the wife of an infantry captain,
stationed at Fort Sherman. She was a very understanding woman; at least
she understood her brother. But she was not solely dependent upon his
laggard letters for information concerning his private affairs. The
approaching wedding at Bisuka Barracks was the topic of most of the
military families in the Department of the Columbia. Moya herself had
written some time before, in the self-conscious manner of the newly
engaged. Her aunt knew of course that Moya and Christine Bogardus had
been room-mates at Miss Howard's, that the girls had fallen in love with
each other first, and with visits at holidays and vacations, when the
army girl could not go to her father, it was easily seen how the
rest had followed. And well for Moya that it had, was Mrs. Creve's
indorsement. As a family they were quite sufficiently represented in
the army; and if one should ever get an Eastern detail it would be very
pleasant to have a young niece charmingly settled in New York.
The colonel drew a match across the top bar of the grate and set it
to his pipe. His big nostrils whitened as he took a deep in-breath. He
reseated himself and began his duty letter in the tone of a judicious
parent; but, warming as he wrote, under the influence of Annie's
imagined sympathy, he presently broke forth with his usual arrogant
colloquialism.
“She might have had her pick of the junior officers in both branches.
And there was a captain of engineers at the Presidio, a widower, but an
awfully good fellow. And she has chosen a boy, full of transcendental
moonshine, who climbs upon a horse as if it were a stone fence, and has
mixed ideas which side of himself to hang a pistol on.
“I have no particular quarrel with the lad, barring his great burly
mouthful of a name, Bo--gardus! To call a child Moya and have her fetch
up with her soft, Irish vowels against such a name as that! She had a
fond idea that it was from Beauregard. But she has had to give that up.
It's Dutch--Hudson River Dutch--for something horticultural--a tree,
or an orchard, or a brush-pile; and she says it's a good name where it
belongs. Pity it couldn't have stayed where it belongs.
“However, you won't find him quite so scrubby as he sounds. He's very
proper and clean-shaven, with a good pair of dark, Dutch eyes, which he
gets from his mother; and I wish he had got her business ability with
them, and her horse sense, if the lady will excuse me. She runs the
property and he spends it, as far as she'll let him, on the newest
reforms. And there's another hitch!--To belong to the Truly Good
at twenty-four! But beggars can't be choosers. He's going to settle
something handsome on Moya out of the portion Madame gives him on his
marriage. My poor little girl, as you know, will get nothing from me but
a few old bits and trinkets and a father's blessing,--the same
doesn't go for much in these days. I have been a better dispenser than
accumulator, like others of our name.
“I do assure you, Annie, it bores me down to the ground, this
humanitarian racket from children with ugly names who have just chipped
the shell. This one owns his surprise that we _work_ in the army! That
our junior officers teach, and study a bit perforce themselves. His own
idea is that every West Pointer, before he gets his commission, should
serve a year or two in the ranks, to raise the type of the enlisted man,
and chiefly, mark you, to get his point of view, the which he is to
bear in mind when he comes to his command. Oh, we've had some pretty
arguments! But I suspect the rascal of drawing it mild, at this stage,
for the old dragon who guards his Golden Apple. He doesn't want to poke
me up. How far he'd go if he were not hampered in his principles by the
fact that he is in love, I cannot say. And I'd rather not imagine.”
The commandant's house at Bisuka Barracks is the nearest one to the
flag-pole as you go up a flight of wooden steps from the parade ground.
These steps, and their landings, flanked by the dry grass terrace of the
line, are a favorite gathering place for young persons of leisure at
the Post. They face the valley and the mountains; they lead past the
adjutant's office to the main road to town; they command the daily
pageant of garrison duty as performed at such distant, unvisited posts,
with only the ladies and the mountains looking on.
Retreat had sounded at half after five, for the autumn days grew short.
The colonel's orderly had been dismissed to his quarters. There was no
excuse, at this hour, for two young persons lingering in sentimental
corners of the steps, beyond a flagrant satisfaction in the shadow
thereof which covered them since the lighting of lamps on Officers' Row.
The colonel stood at his study window keeping his pipe alive with slow
and dreamy puffs. The moon was just clearing the roof of the men's
quarters. His eye caught a shape, or a commingling of shapes, ensconced
in an angle of the steps; the which he made out to be his daughter,
in her light evening frock with one of his own old army capes over her
shoulders, seated in close formation beside the only man at the Post who
wore civilian black.
The colonel had the feelings of a man as well as a father. He went back
to his letter with a softened look in his face. He had said too much; he
always did--to Annie; and now he must hedge a little or she would think
there was trouble brewing, and that he was going to be nasty about
Moya's choice.
III
THE INITIAL LOVE
“Let us be simple! Not every one can be, but we can. We can afford to
be, and we know how!”
Moya was speaking rapidly, in her singularly articulate tones. A reader
of voices would have pronounced hers the physical record of unbroken
health and constant, joyous poise.
“Hear the word of your prophet Emerson!” she brought a little fist down
upon her knee for emphasis, a hand several sizes larger closed upon it
and held it fast. “Hear the word--are you listening? 'Only _two_ in the
Garden walked and with Snake and Seraph talked.'”
The young man's answer was an instant's impassioned silence. Too close
it touched him, that vital image of the Garden. Then, with an effect of
sternness, he said,--
“Have we the right to do as we please? Have we the courage that comes of
right to cut ourselves off from all those calls and cries for help?”
“_I_ have,” said the girl; “I have just that right--of one who knows
exactly what she wants, and is going to get it if she can!”
He laughed at her happy insolence, with which all the youth and nature
in him made common cause.
“I shouldn't mind thinking about your Poor Man,” she tripped along, “if
he liked being poor, or if it seemed to improve him any; or if it were
only now and then. But there is so dreadfully much of him! Once we
begin, how should we ever think about anything else? He'd rise up and
sit down with us, and eat and drink with us, and tell us what to wear.
Every pleasure of our lives would be spoiled with his eternal 'Where do
_I_ come in?' It was simple enough in _that_ garden, with only those
two and nobody outside to feel injured. But we are those two, aren't
we? Isn't everybody--once in a life, and once only?” She turned her face
aside, slighting by her manner the excessive meaning of her words. “I
ask for myself only what I think I have a right to give you--my absolute
undivided attention for those first few years. They say it never lasts!”
she hastened to add with playful cynicism.
Young Bogardus seemed incapable under the circumstances of any adequate
reply. Free as they were in words, there was an extreme personal shyness
between these proud young persons, undeveloped on the side of passion
and better versed in theories of life than in life itself. They had
separated the day after their sudden engagement, and their nearest
approaches to intimacy had been through letters. Naturally the girl was
the bolder, having less in herself to fear.
“That is what _I_ call being simple,” she went on briskly. “If you
think we can be that in New York, let us live there. _I_ could be simple
there, but not with you, sir! That terrible East Side would be shaking
its gory locks at us. We should feel that we did it--or you would! Then
good-by to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!”
“You are my life, liberty, and happiness, and I will be your almoner,”
said Paul, “and dispense you”--
“Dispense _with_ me!” laughed the girl. “And what shall I be doing while
you are dispensing me on the East Side? New York has other sides. While
you go slumming with the Seraph, I shall be talking to the Snake! Now,
_do_ laugh!” she entreated childishly, turning her sparkling face to
his.
“Am I expected to laugh at that?”
“Well, what shall we do? Don't make me harden my heart before it has had
time to soften naturally. Give my poor pagan sympathies a little time to
ripen.”
“But you have lived in New York. Did you find it such a strain on your
sympathies?”
“I was a visitor; and a girl is not expected to have sympathies. But to
begin our home there: we should have to strike a note of some sort.
How if my note should jar with yours? Paul, dear, it isn't nice to
have convictions when one is young and going to be married. You know it
isn't. It's not poetic, and it's not polite, and it's a dreadful bore!”
The altruist and lover winced at this. Allowing for exaggeration, which
was the life of speech with her, he knew that Moya was giving him a bit
of her true self, that changeful, changeless self which goes behind all
law and “follows joy and only joy.” Her voice dropped into its sweetest
tones of intimacy.
“Why need we live in a crowd? Why must we be pressed upon with all this
fuss and doing? Doing, doing! We are not ready to do anything yet. Every
day must have its dawn;--and I don't see my way yet; I'm hardly awake!”
“Darling, hush! You must not say such things to me. For you only to look
at me like that is the most terrible temptation of my life. You make
me forget everything a man is bound--that I of all men am bound to
remember.”
“Then I will keep on looking! Behold, I am Happiness, Selfishness, if
you like! I have come to stay. No, really, it's not nice of you to act
as if you were under higher orders. You are under my orders. What right
have we to choose each other if we are not to be better to each other
than to any one else?--if our lives belong to any one who needs us, or
our time and money, more than we need it ourselves? Why did you choose
me? Why not somebody pathetic--one of your Poor Things; or else save
yourself whole for all the Poor Things?”
“Now you are 'talking for victory,'” he smiled. “You don't believe we
must be as consistent as all that. Hearts don't have to be coddled
like pears picked for market. But I'm not preaching to you. The heavens
forbid! I'm trying to explain. You don't think this whole thing with me
is a pose? I know I'm a bore with my convictions; but how do we come by
such things?”
“Ah! How do I come not to have any, or to want any?” she rejoined.
“Once for all, let me tell you how I came by mine. Then you will know
just where and how those cries for help take hold on me.”
“I don't wish to know. Preserve me from knowing! Why didn't you choose
somebody different?”
He looked at her with all his passion in his eyes. “I did not choose.
Did you?”
“It isn't too late,” she whispered. Her face grew hot in the darkness.
“Yes; it is too late--for anything but the truth. Will you listen,
sweet? Will you let the nonsense wait?”
“Deeper and deeper! Haven't we reached the bottom yet?”
“Go on! It's the dearest nonsense,” she heard him say; but she detected
pain in his voice and a new constraint.
“What is it? What is the 'truth'?”
“Oh, it's not so dreadful. Only, you always put me in quite a different
class from where I belong, and I haven't had the courage to set you
right.”
“Children, children!” a young voice called, from the lighted walk above.
Two figures were going down the line, one in uniform keeping step beside
a girl in white who reefed back her skirts with one hand, the other was
raised to her hair which was blowing across her forehead in bewitching
disorder. Every gesture and turn of her shape announced that she was
pretty and gay in the knowledge of her power. It was Chrissy, walking
with Lieutenant Lane.
“Where are you--ridiculous ones? Don't you want to come with us?”
“'Now who were they?'” Paul quoted derisively out of the dark.
“We are going to Captain Dawson's to play Hearts. Come! Don't be
stupid!”
“We are not stupid, we are busy!” Moya called back.
“Busy! Doing what?”
“Oh, deciding things. We are talking about the Poor Man.”
“The poor men, she means.” Christine's high laugh followed the
lieutenant's speech, as the pair went on.
“He _is_ a bore!” Moya declared. “We can't even use him for a joke.”
“Speaking of Lane, dear?”
“The Poor Man. Are you sure that you've got a sense of humor, Paul?
Can't we have charity for jokes among the other poor things?”
Paul had raised himself to the step beside her. “You are shivering,” he
said, “I must let you go in.”
“I'm not shivering--I'm chattering,” she mocked. “Why should I go in
when we are going to be really serious?”
Paul waited a moment; his breath came short, as if he were facing a
postponed dread. “Moya, dear,” he began in a forced tone, “I can't help
my constraints and convictions that bore you so, any more than you can
help your light heart--God bless it--and your theory of class which to
me seems mediaeval. I have cringed to it, like the coward a man is when
he is in love. But now I want you to know me.”
He took her hand and kissed it repeatedly, as if impressing upon her
the one important fact back of all hypothesis and perilous efforts at
statement.
“Well, are you bidding me good-by?”
“You must give me time,” he said. “It takes courage in these days for
a good American to tell the girl he loves that his father was a hired
man.”
He smiled, but there was little mirth and less color in his face.
“What absurdity!” cried Moya. Then glancing at him she added quickly,
“_My_ father is a hired man. Most fathers who are worth anything are!”
“My father was because he came of that class. His father was one before
him. His mother took in tailoring in the village where he was born. He
had only the commonest common-school education and not much of that.
At eleven he worked for his board and clothes at my Grandfather Van
Elten's, and from that time he earned his bread with his hands. Don't
imagine that I'm apologizing,” Paul went on rapidly. “The apology
belongs on the other side. In New York, for instance, the Bogardus blood
is quite as good as the Bevier or the Broderick or the Van Elten; but
up the Hudson, owing to those chances or mischances that selected our
farming aristocracy for us, my father's people had slipped out of
their holdings and sunk to the poor artisan class which the old Dutch
landowners held in contempt.”
“We are not landowners,” said Moya. “What does it matter? What does any
of it matter?”
“It matters to be honest and not sail under false colors. I thought
you would not speak of the Poor Man as you do if you knew that I am his
son.”
“Money has nothing to do with position in the army. I am a poor man's
daughter.”
“Ah, child! Your father gives orders--mine took them, all his life.”
“My father has to take what he gives. There is no escaping 'orders.'
Even I know that!” said Moya. A slight shiver passed over her as she
spoke, laughing off as usual the touch of seriousness in her words.
“Why did you do that?” Paul touched her shoulder. “Is it the wind? There
is a wind creeping down these steps.” He improved the formation slightly
in respect to the wind.
“Listen!” said Moya. “Isn't that your mother walking on the porch?
Father, I know, is writing. She will be lonely.”
“She is never lonely, more or less. It is always the same loneliness--of
a woman widowed for years.”
“How very much she must have cared for him!” Moya sighed incredulously.
What a pity, she thought, that among the humbler vocations Paul's father
should have been just a plain “hired man.” Cowboy, miner, man-o'-war's
man, even enlisted man, though that were bad enough--any of these he
might have been in an accidental way, that at least would have been
picturesque; but it is only the possession of land, by whatsoever means
or title, that can dignify an habitual personal contact with it in the
form of soil. That is one of the accepted prejudices which one does not
meddle with at nineteen. “Youth is conservative because it is afraid.”
Moya, for all her fighting blood, was traditionally and in social ways
much more in bonds than Paul, who had inherited his father's dreamy
speculative habit of thought, with something of the farm-hand's distrust
of society and its forms and shibboleth.
Paul's voice took a narrative tone, and Moya gave herself up to
listening--to him rather more, perhaps, than to his story.
Few young men of twenty-four can go very deeply into questions of
heredity. Of what follows here much was not known to Paul. Much that he
did know he would have interpreted differently. The old well at Stone
Ridge, for instance, had no place in his recital; and yet out of it
sprang the history of his shorn generation. Had Paul's mother grown up
in a houseful of brothers and sisters, governed by her mother instead
of an old ignorant servant, in all likelihood she would have married
differently--more wisely but not perhaps so well, her son would loyally
have maintained. The sons of the rich farmers who would have been her
suitors were men inferior to their fathers. They inherited the vigor and
coarseness of constitution, the unabashed materialism of that earlier
generation that spent its energies coping with Nature on its stony
farms, but the sons were spared the need of that hard labor which their
blood required. They supplied an element of force, but one of great
corruption later, in the state politics of their time.
IV
A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT
In the kitchen court called the “Airy” at Abraham Van Elten's, there
was one of those old family wells which our ancestors used to locate so
artlessly. And when it tapped the kitchen drain, and typhoid took the
elder children, and the mother followed the children, it was called the
will of God. A gloomy distinction rested on the house. Abraham felt the
importance attaching to any supreme experience in a community where life
runs on in the middle key.
A young doctor who had been called in at the close of the last case
went prying about the premises, asking foolish questions that angered
Abraham. It is easier for some natures to suffer than to change. If the
farmer had ever drunk water himself, except as tea or coffee, or mixed
with something stronger, he must have been an early victim, to his own
crass ignorance. He was a vigorous, heavy-set man, a grand field for
typhoid. But he prospered, and the young doctor was turned down with
the full weight and breadth of the Van Elten thumb, or the Broderick;
Abraham's build was that of his maternal grandmother, Hillotje
Broderick.
On the Ridge, which later developed into a valuable slate quarry,
there was a spring of water, cold and perpetual, flowing out of the
trap-formation. Abraham had piped this water down to his barns and
cattle-sheds; it furnished power for the farm-work. But to bring it to
the house, in obedience to the doctor's meddlesome advice, would be an
acknowledgment of fatal mistakes in the past; would raise talk and blame
among the neighbors, and do away with the honor of a special visitation;
would cost no trifle of money; would justify the doctor's interference,
and insult the old well of his father and his father's father, the
fountain of generations. To seal its mouth and bid its usefulness cease
in the house where it had ministered for upwards of a hundred years was
an act of desecration impossible to the man who in his stolid way loved
the very stones that lined its slimy sides. The few sentiments that had
taken hold on Abraham's arid nature went as deep as his obstinacy and
clung as fast as his distrust of new opinions and new men. The question
of water supply was closed in his house; but the well remained open and
kept up its illicit connection with the drain.
Old Becky, keeper of the widower's keys, had followed closely the
history of those unhappy “cases;” she had listened to discussions,
violent or suppressed, she had heard much talk that went on behind her
master's back.
Employers of that day and generation were masters; and masters are meant
to be outwitted. Emily, the youngest and last of the flock, was now a
child of four, dark like her mother, sturdy and strong like her father.
On an August day soon after the mother's funeral, Becky took her little
charge to the well and showed her a tumbler filled, with water not
freshly drawn.
“See them little specks and squirmy things?” Emmy saw them. She followed
their wavering motion in the glass as the stern forefinger pointed.
“Those are little baby snakes,” said Becky mysteriously. “The well is
full of 'em. Sometimes you can see 'em, sometimes you can't, but they're
always there. They never grow big down the well; it's too dark 'n' cold.
But you drink that water and the snakes will grow and wriggle and
work all through ye, and eat your insides out, and you'll die. Your
mother”--in a whisper--“she drunk that water, and she died. Your sister
Ruth, and Dirck, and Jimmy, they drunk it, and they died. Now if Emmy
wants to die”--Large eyes of horror fastened on the speaker's face.
“No--o, she don't want to die, the Loveums! She don't want Becky to have
no little girl left at all! No; we mustn't ever drink any of that bad
water--all full of snakes, ugh! But if Emmy's thirsty, see here! Here's
good nice water. It's going to be always here in this pail--same water
the little lambs drink up in the fields. Becky 'll take Emmy up on the
hill sometime and show where the little lambs drink.”
Grief had not clouded the farmer's oversight in petty things. He noticed
the innocent pail on the area bench, never empty, always specklessly
clean.
“What is this water?” he asked.
Becky was surly. “Drinking water. Want some?”
“What's it doing here all the time?”
“I set it there for Emmy. She can't reach up to the bucket.”
Abraham tasted the water suspiciously. The well-water was hard, with
a tang of iron. The spring soft, and less cold for its journey to the
barn.
“Where did you get this water?”
“Help yourself. There's plenty more.”
“Becky, where did this water come from? Out o' the well?”
Becky gave a snort of exasperation. “Sam Lewis brought it from the barn!
I'm too lame to be histin' buckets. I've got the rheumatiz' awful in my
back and shoulders, if ye want to know!”
“Becky, you're lying to me. You've been listening to what don't concern
you. Now, see here. You are not going to ask the men to carry water for
you. They've got something else to do. _There's_ your water, as handy as
ever a woman had it; use that or go without.”
Abraham caught up the pail and flung its contents out upon the grass,
scattering the hens that came sidling back with squawks of inquiring
temerity.
When next Emmy came for water, the old woman took her by the hand in
silence and led her into the dim meat-cellar, a half-basement with one
low window level with the grass. There was the pail, safe hidden behind
the soft-soap barrel.
“I had to hide it from your pa,” Becky whispered. “Don't you never let
him know you're afraid o' the well-water. He drunk it when he was a
little boy. He don't believe in the snakes. But _there wa'n't none
then_. It's when water gets old and rotten. You can believe what Becky
says. _She_ knows! But you mustn't ever tell. Your father 'd be as mad
as fire if he knowed I said anything about snakes. He'd send me right
away, and some strange woman would come, and maybe she'd whip Emmy.
Emmy want Becky to go?” Sobs, and little arms clinging wildly to Becky's
aproned skirts. “No, no! Well, she ain't goin'. But Emmy mustn't tell
tales or she might have to. Tattlers are wicked anyway. 'Telltale tit!
Your tongue shall be slit, and all the little dogs'--There! run now!
There's your poppy. Don't you never,--never!”
Emmy let her eyes be wiped, and with one long, solemn, secret look of
awed intelligence she ran out to meet her father. She did not love him,
and the smile with which she met him was no new lesson in diplomacy. But
her first secret from him lay deep in the beautiful eyes, her mother's
eyes, as she raised them to his.
“Ain't that wonderful!” said Becky, with a satisfied sigh, watching her.
“Safe as a jug! An' she not five years old!” For vital reasons she had
taught the child an ugly lesson. Such lessons were common enough in her
experience of family discipline. She never thought of it again.
That year which took Emmy's mother from her brought to the child her
first young companion and friend. Adam Bogardus came as chore-boy to
the farm,--an only child himself, and sensitive through the clashing
of gentle instincts with rough and inferior surroundings; brought up
in that depressed God-fearing attitude in which a widow not strong,
and earning her bread, would do her duty by an only son. Not a natural
fighter, she took what little combativeness he had out of him, and made
his school-days miserable--a record of humiliations that sunk deep and
drove him from his kind. He was a big, clumsy, sagacious boy, grave
as an old man, always snubbed and condescended to, yet always trusted.
Little Emmy made him her bondslave at sight. His whole soul blossomed in
adoration of the beautiful, masterful child who ordered him about as her
vassal, while slipping a soft little trustful hand in his. She trotted
at his heels like one of the lambs or chickens that he fed. She brought
him into perpetual disgrace with Becky, for wasting his time through her
imperious demands. She was the burden, the delight, the handicap, the
incentive, and the reward of his humble apprenticeship. And when he was
promoted to be one of the regular hands she followed him still, and got
her pleasure out of his day's work. No one had such patience to tell
her things, to wait for her and help her over places where her tagging
powers fell short. But though she bullied him, she looked up to him
as well. His occupations commanded her respect. He was the god of the
orchards and of the cider-making; he presided at all the functions of
the farm year. He was a perfect calendar besides of country sports in
their season. He swept the ice pools in the meadow for winter sliding,
after his day's work was done. He saved up paper and string for
kite-making in March. He knew when willow bark would slip for April's
whistles. In the first heats of June he climbed the tall locust-trees
to put up a swing in which she could dream away the perfumed hours.
At harvest she waited in the meadow for him to toss her up on the
hay-loads, and his great arms received her when she slid off in the
barn. She knelt at his feet on the bumping boards of the farm-wagon
while he braced himself like a charioteer, holding the reins above
her head. He threshed the nut-trees and routed marauding boys from her
preserves, and carved pumpkin lanterns to light her to her attic chamber
on cold November nights, where she would lie awake watching strange
shadows on the sloping roof, half worshiping, half afraid of her idol's
ugliness in the dark.
These were some of Paul's illustrations of that pastoral beginning, and
no doubt they were sympathetically close to the truth. He lingered
over them, dressing up his mother's choice instinctively to the little
aristocrat beside him.
When Emmy grew big enough to go to the Academy, three miles from the
farm, it was all in the day's work that Adam should take her and fetch
her home. He combined her with the mail, the blacksmith, and other
village errands. Whoever met her father's team on those long stony hills
of Saugerties would see his little daughter seated beside his hired man,
her face turned up to his in endless confiding talk. It was a face, as
we say, to dream of. But there were few dreamers in that little world.
The farmers would nod gravely to Adam. “Abraham's girl takes after her
mother; heartier lookin', though. Guess he'll need a set o' new tires
before spring.” The comments went no deeper.
Abraham was now well on in years; he made no visits, and he never drove
his own team at night. When his daughter began to let down her frocks
and be asked to evening parties, it was still Adam who escorted her.
He sat in the kitchen while she was amusing herself in the parlor. She
discussed her young acquaintances with him on their way home. The
time for distinctions had come, but she was too innocent to feel
them herself, and too proud to accept the standards of others. He was
absolutely honest and unworldly. He thought it no treachery to love her
for herself, and he believed, as most of us do, that his family was as
good as hers or any other.
It would be hard to explain the old man's obliviousness. Perhaps he had
forgotten his own youth; or class prejudice had gone so deep with him as
to preclude the bare thought of a child of his falling in love with one
of his “men.” His imagination could not so insult his own blood. But
when the awakening came, his passion of anger and resentment knew no
bounds. To discharge his faithless employee out of hand would be the
cripple throwing away his crutch. Though he called Adam _one_ of his
men, and though his pay was that of a common laborer, his duties had
long been of a much higher order. Abraham had made a very good bargain
out of the widow's son. Adam knew well that he could not be spared, and
pitied the old man's helpless rage. He took his frantic insults as part
of his senility, and felt it no unmanliness to appease it by giving his
promise that he would speak no more of love to Emmy while he was taking
her father's wages. But Emmy did not indorse this promise fully. To her
it looked like weakness, and implied a sort of patience which did
not become a lover such as she wished hers to be. The winter wore on
uncomfortably for all. Towards spring, Becky's last illness and passing
away brought the younger ones together again, and closer than before.
Adam kept his promise through days and nights of sickroom intimacy; but
though no word of love was spoken, each bore silent witness to what was
loveliest in the other, and the bond between them deepened.
Then spring came, and its restlessness was strong upon them both. But it
was Emmy to whom it meant action and rebellion.
They stood on the orchard hill one Sunday afternoon at the pause of the
year. Buds were swelling and the edges of the woods wore a soft blush
against the vaporous sky. The bare brown slopes were streaked with snow.
A floe of winter ice, grinding upon itself with the tide, glared yellow
as an old man's teeth in the setting sun. From across the river came
the thunder of a train, bound north, two engines dragging forty cars of
freight piled up by some recent traffic-jam; it plunged into a tunnel,
and they waited, listening to the monster's smothered roar. Out it
burst, its breath packed into clouds, the engines whooped, and round
the curve where a point of cedars cut the sky the huge creature unwound
itself, the hills echoing to its tread.
Emmy watched it out of sight, and breathed again. “Hundreds, hundreds
going every day! It seems easy enough for everybody else. Oh, if I were
a man!”
“What do you want I should do, Emmy?” Adam knew well what man she was
thinking of.
“_I_ want? Don't you ever want things yourself?”
“When I want a thing bad, I gen'ly think it's worth waiting for.”
“People don't get things by waiting. I don't know how you can stand
it,--to stay here year after year. And now you've tied yourself up with
a promise, and you know you cannot keep it!”
“I'm trying to keep it.”
“You couldn't keep it if you cared--really and truly--as some do!” She
dropped her voice hurriedly. “To live here and eat your meals day after
day and pass me like a stick or a stone!”
The slow blood burned in Adam's face and hammered in his pulses. His
blue eyes were bashful through its heat. “I don't feel like a stick nor
a stone. You know it, Emmy. You want to be careful,” he added gently.
“Would going away look as if I cared?”
“Why--why don't you ask me to go with you?” The girl tried to meet his
eyes. She turned off her question with a proud laugh.
“Be--careful, child! You know why I can't take you up on that. Would
you want we should leave him here alone--without even Becky? You're only
trying me for fun.”
“No; I am not!” Emmy was pale now. Her breast was rising in strong
excitement. “If we were gone, he would know then what you are worth to
him. Now, you're only Adam! He thinks he can put you down like a boy. He
won't believe I care for you. There's only one way to show him--that
is, if we do care. In one month he would be sending for us back. Then we
could come, and you would take your right place here, and be somebody.
You would not eat in the kitchen, then. Haven't you been like a son to
him? And why shouldn't he own it?”
“But if he won't? Suppose he don't send for us to come back?”
“Then you could strike out for yourself. What was Tom Madden, before
he went away to Colorado, or somewhere--where was it? And now everybody
stops to shake hands with him;--he's as much of a man as anybody. If you
could make a little money. That's the proof he wants. If you were rich,
you'd be all right with him. You know that!”
“I'd hate to think it. But I'll never be rich. Put that out of your
mind, Emmy. It don't run in the blood. I don't come of a money-making
breed.”
“What a silly thing to say! Of course, if you don't believe you can, you
can't. Who has made the money here for the last ten years?”
“It was his capital done it. It ain't hard to make money after you've
scraped the first few thousands together. But it's the first thousand
that costs.”
“How much have you got ahead?”
Adam answered awkwardly, “Eleven hundred and sixty odd.” He did not like
to talk of money to the girl who was the prayer, the inspiration, of his
life. It hurt him to be questioned by her in this sordid way.
“You earned it all, didn't you?”
“I've took no risks. Here was my home. He give me the chance and he
showed me how. And--he's your father. I don't like to talk about his
money, nor about my own, to you.”
“Oh, you are good, good! Nobody knows! But it's all wasted if you
haven't got any push--anything inside of yourself that makes people know
what you are. I wish I could put into you some of my _fury_ that I
feel when things get in my way! You have held yourself in too long. You
can't--_can't_ love a girl, and be so careful--like a mother. Don't you
understand?”
“Stop right there, Emmy! You needn't push no harder. I can let go
whenever you say so. But--do _you_ understand, little girl? Man and wife
it will have to be.”
Emmy did not shrink at the words. Her face grew set, her dark eyes full
of mystery fixed themselves on the slow-moving ice-floe grinding along
the shore.