“I can't give you no farm, nor horses and carriages, nor help in the
kitchen. It's bucklin' right down with our bare hands--me outside and
you in? And you only eighteen. See what little hands--If I could do it
all!”
“Your promise is broken,” she whispered. “I made you break it. You will
have to tell him now, or--we must go.”
“So be!” said Adam solemnly. “And God do so to me and more also, if I
have to hurt my little girl,--Emmy--wife!”
He folded her in his great arms clumsily--the man she had said was like
a mother. He was almost as ignorant as she, and more hopeful than he had
dared to seem, as to their worldly chances. But the love he had for her
told him it was not love that made her so bold. The first touch of
such love as his would have made her fear him as he feared her. And the
subtle pain of this instinctive knowledge, together with that broken
promise, shackled the wings of his great joy. It was not as he had hoped
to win the crown of life.
Paul, it may be supposed, had never liked to think of his mother's
elopement. It had been the one hard point to get over in his conception
of his father, but he could never have explained it by such a scene as
this. It would have hampered him terribly in his tale had he dreamed of
it. He passed over the unfortunate incident with a romancer's touch, and
dwelt upon his grandfather's bitter resentment which he resented as
the son of his mother's choice. The Van Eltens and Brodericks all fared
hardly at the hands of their legatee.
It was not only in the person of a hireling who had abused his trust
that Abraham had felt himself outraged. There were old neighborhood
spites and feuds going back, dividing blood from blood--even brothers of
the same blood. There was trouble between him and his brother Jacob, of
New York, dating from the settlement of their father's, Broderick Van
Elten's, estate; and no one knows what besides that was private and
personal may have entered into it. It was years since they had met,
but Jacob kept well abreast of his brother's misfortunes. A bachelor
himself, with no children to lose or to quarrel with, it was not
displeasing to him to hear of the breaks in his brother's household.
“What, what, what! The last one left him,--run off with one of his men!
What a fool the man must be. Can't he look after his women folks better
than that? Better have lost her with the others. Two boys, and Chrissy,
and the girl--and now the last girl gone off with his hired man. Poor
Chrissy! Guess she had about enough of it. Things have come out pretty
much even, after all! There was more love and lickin's wasted on Abe.
Father was proudest of him, but he couldn't break him. Hi! but I've
crawled under the woodshed to hear him yell, and father would tan him
with a raw-hide, but he couldn't break him; couldn't get a sound out
of him. Big, and hard, and tough--Chrissy thought she knew a man; she
thought she took the best one.”
With slow, cold spite Jacob had tracked his brother's path in life
through its failures. Jacob had no failures, and no life.
V
DISINHERITED
Proud little Emmy, heiress no longer, had put her spirit into her
farm-hand and incited him to the first rebellion of his life. They
crossed the river at night, poling through floating ice, and climbed
aboard one of those great through trains whose rushing thunder had made
the girlish heart so often beat. This was long before the West Shore
Line was built. Neither of them had ever seen the inside of a Pullman
sleeper. Emmy could count the purchased meals she had eaten in her life;
she had never slept in a hotel or hired lodging till after her marriage.
Hardly any one could be so provincial in these days.
Adam Bogardus was a plodder in the West as he had been in the East. He
was an honest man, and he was wise enough not to try to be a shrewd one.
He tried none of the short-cuts to a fortune. Hard work suited him best,
and no work was too hard for his iron strength and patient resolution.
But it broke the spirit of a man in him to see his young wife's despair.
Poverty frightened and quelled her. The deep-rooted security of her old
home was something she missed every day of her makeshift existence. It
was degradation to live in “rooms,” or a room; to move for want of means
to pay the rent. She pined for the good food she had been used to. Her
health suffered through anxiety and hard work. She was too proud to
complain, but the sight of her dumb unacceptance of what had come to
her through him undoubtedly added the last straw to her husband's mental
strain.
* * * * *
“It is hard for me to realize it as I once did,” said Paul, as the story
paused. “You make tragedy a dream. But there is a deep vein of tragedy
in our blood. And my theory is that it always crops out in families
where it's the keynote, as it were.”
“Never mind, you old care-taker! We Middletons carry sail enough to need
a ton or two of lead in our keel.”
“But, you understand?”--
“I understand the distinction between what I call your good blood, and
the sort of blood I thought you had. It explains a certain funny way you
have with arms--weapons. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” said Paul coldly. “I hate a weapon. I am always ashamed of
myself when I get one in my hand.”
“You act that way, dear!”
“God made tools and the Devil made weapons.”
“You are civil to my father's profession.”
“Your father is what he is aside from his profession.”
“You are quite mistaken, Paul. My father and his profession are one.
His sword is a symbol of healing. The army is the great surgeon of the
nation when the time comes for a capital operation.”
“It grows harder to tell my story,” said Paul gloomily;--“the short and
simple annals of the poor.”
“Now come! Have I been a snob about my father's profession?”
“No; but you love it, naturally. You have grown up with its pomp and
circumstance around you. You are the history makers when history is most
exciting.”
“Go on with your story, you proud little Dutchman! When I despise you
for your farming relatives, you can taunt me with my history making.”
Paul was about two years old when his parents broke up in the Wood
River country and came south by wagon on the old stage-road to Felton.
Whenever he saw a “string-bean freighter's” outfit moving into Bisuka,
if there was a woman on the driver's seat, he wanted to take off his hat
to her. For so his mother sat beside his father and held him in her arms
two hundred miles across the Snake River desert. The stages have been
laid off since the Oregon Short Line went through, but there were
stations then all along the road.
One night they made camp at a lonely place between Soul's Rest and
Mountain Home. Oneman Station it was called; afterwards Deadman Station,
when the keeper's body was found one morning stiff and cold in his bunk.
He died in the night alone. Emily Bogardus had cause to hate the man
when he was living, and his dreary end was long a shuddering remembrance
to her, like the answer to an unforgiving prayer.
The station was in a hollow with bare hills around, rising to the
highest point of that rolling plain country. The mountains sink below
the plain, only their white tops showing. It was October. All the wild
grass had been eaten close for miles on both sides of the road, but over
a gap in the Western divide was the Bruneau Valley, where the bell-mare
of the team had been raised. In the night she broke her hopples and
struck out across the summit with the four mules at her heels. Towards
morning a light snow fell and covered their tracks. Adam was compelled
to hunt his stock on foot; the keeper refusing him a horse, saying he
had got himself into trouble before through being friendly with the
company's horses. He started out across the hills, expecting that the
same night would see him back, and his wife was left in the wagon camp
alone.
* * * * *
“I know this story very well,” said Paul, “and yet I never heard it but
once, when mother decided I was old enough to know all. But every word
was bitten into me--especially this ugly part I am coming to. I wish
it need not be told, yet all the rest depends on it; and that such an
experience could come to a woman like my mother shows what exposure and
humiliation lie in the straightest path if there is no money to smooth
the way. You hear it said that in the West the toughest men will be
chivalrous to a woman if she is the right sort of a woman. I'm afraid
that is a romantic theory of the Western man.
“That night, before his team stampeded, as he sat by the keeper's fire,
father had made up his mind that the less they had to do with that man
the better. He may have warned mother; and she, left alone with the
brute, did not know the wisdom of hiding her fear and loathing of him.
He may have meant no more than a low kind of teasing, but her suffering
was the same.
“Father did not come. She dared not leave the camp. She knew no place to
go to, and in his haste, believing he would soon be with her again, he
had taken all their little stock of funds. But he had left her his gun,
and with this within reach of her hand in the shelter of the wagon hood,
without fire and without cooked food, she kept a sleepless watch.
“The stages came and went; help was within sound of her voice, but she
dared make no sign. The passengers were few at that season, always
men, on the best of terms with the keeper. He had threatened--well, no
matter--such a threat as a more sophisticated woman would have smiled
at. She was simple, but she was not weak. It was a moral battle between
them. There were hours when she held him by the power of her eye alone;
she conquered, but it nearly killed her.
“One morning a man jumped down from the stage whose face she knew. He
had recognized my father's outfit and he came to speak to her, amazed
to find her in that place alone. There was no need to put her worst fear
into words; he knew the keeper. He made the best he could of father's
detention, but he assured her, as she knew too well, that she could not
wait for him there. He was on his way East, and he took us with him as
far as Mountain Home. To this day she believes that if Bud Granger had
led the search, my father would have been found; but he went East to
sell his cattle, the snows set in, and the search party came straggling
home. The man, Granger, had left a letter of explanation, inclosing one
from mother to father, with the keeper. He bribed and frightened him,
but for years she used to agonize over a fear that father had come back
and the keeper had withheld the letter and belied her to him with some
devilish story that maddened him and drove him from her. Such a fancy
might have come out of her mental state at that time. I believe that
Granger left the letter simply to satisfy her. He must have believed my
father was dead. He could not have conceived of a man's being lost in
that broad country at that season; but my father was a man of hills and
farms, all small, compact. The plains were another planet to him.
“The letter was found in the keeper's clothing after his death; no
one ever came to claim it of his successor. Somewhere in this great
wilderness a tired man found rest. What would we not give if we knew
where!
“And she worked in a hotel in Mountain Home. Can you imagine it! Then
Christine was born and the multiplied strain overcame her. Strangers
took care of her children while she lay between life and death. She had
been silent about herself and her past, but they found a letter from one
of her old schoolmates asking about teachers' salaries in the West, and
they wrote to her begging her to make known my mother's condition to
her relatives if any were living. At length came a letter from
grandfather--characteristic to the last. The old home was there, for her
and for her children, but no home for the traitor, as he called father.
She must give him up even to his name. No Bogardus could inherit of a
Van Elten.
“She had not then lost all hope of father's return, and she never
forgave her father for trying to buy her back for the price of what she
considered her birthright. She settled down miserably to earn bread for
her children. Then, when hope and pride were crushed in her, and faith
had nothing left to cling to, there came a letter from Uncle Jacob, the
bachelor, who had bided his time. Out of the division in his brother's
house he proposed to build up his own; just as he would step in and buy
depreciated bonds to hold them for a rise. He offered her a home and
maintenance during his lifetime, and his estate for herself and her
children when he was through. There were no conditions referring to our
father, but it was understood that she should give up her own. This,
mainly, to spite his brother, yet under all there was an old man's plea.
She felt she could make the obligation good, though there might not be
much love on either side. Perhaps it came later; but I remember enough
of that time to believe that her children's future was dearly paid for.
Grandfather died alone, in the old rat-ridden house up the Hudson. He
left no will, to every one's surprise. It might have been his negative
way of owning his debt to nature at the last.
“That is how we came to be rich; and no one detects in us now the crime
of those early struggles. But my father was a hired man; and my mother
has done every menial thing with those soft hands of hers.” A softer one
was folded in his own. Its answering clasp was loyal and strong.
“Is _this_ the story you had not the courage to tell me?”
“This is the story I had the courage to tell you--not any too soon,
perhaps you think?”
“And do you think it needed courage?”
“The question is what you think. What are we to do with Uncle Jacob's
money? Go off by ourselves and have a good time with it?”
“We will not decide to-night,” said Moya, tenderly subdued. But, though
the story had interested and touched her, as accounting for her lover's
saddened, conscience-ridden youth, it was no argument against teaching
him what youth meant in her philosophy. The differences were explained,
but not abolished.
“It was spite money, remember, not love money,” he continued, reverting
to his story. “It purchased my mother's compliance to one who hated her
father, who forced her to listen, year after year, to bitter, unnatural
words against him. I am not sure but it kept her from him at the last;
for if Uncle Jacob had not stepped in and made her his, I can't help
thinking she would have found somehow a way to the soft place in his
heart. Something good ought to be done with that money to redeem its
history.”
“You must not be morbid, Paul.”
“That sounds like mother,” said Paul, smiling. “She is always jealous
for our happiness; because she lost her own, I think, and paid so
heavily for ours. She prizes pleasure and success, even worldly success,
for us.”
“I don't blame her!” cried Moya.
“No; of course not. But you mustn't both be against me, and Chrissy,
too. She is so, unconsciously; she does not know the pull there is on
me, through knowing things she doesn't dream of, and that I can never
forget.”
“No,” said Moya. “I am sure she is perfectly unconscious. We exchanged
biographies at school, and there was nothing at all like this in hers.
Why was she never told?”
“She has always been too strained, too excitable. Every least incident
is an emotion with her. When she laughs, her laugh is like a cry.
Haven't you noticed that? Startle her, and her eyes are the very eyes of
fear. Mother was wise, I think, not to pour those old sorrows into her
little fragile cup.”
“So she emptied them all into yours!”
“That was my right, of the elder and stronger. I wouldn't have missed
the knowledge of our beginnings for the world. What a prosperous fool
and ass I might have made of myself!”
“Morbid again,” said Moya. “You belong to your own day and generation.
You might as well wear country shoes and clothes because your father
wore them.”
“Still, if we have such a thing in this country as class, then you and I
do not belong to the same class except by virtue of Uncle Jacob's money.
Confess you are glad I am a Bevier and a Broderick and a Van Elten, as
well as a Bogardus.”
“I shall confess nothing of the kind. Now you do talk like a _nouveau_
Paul, dear,” said Moya, with her caressing eyes on his--they had paused
under the lamp at the top of the steps--“I think your father must have
been a very good man.”
“All our fathers were,” Paul averred, smiling at her earnestness.
“Yes, but yours in particular; because _you_ are an angel; and your
mother is quite human, is she not?--almost as human as I am? That
carriage of the head,--if that does not mean the world!”--
“She has needed all her pride.”
“I don't object to pride, myself,” said the girl, “but you dwell so upon
her humiliations. I see no such record in her face.”
“She has had much to hide, you must remember.”
“Well, she can hide things; but one's self must escape sometimes. What
has become of little Emily Van Elten who ran away with her father's
hired man? What has become of the freighter's wife?”
“She is all mother now. She brought us back to the world, and for our
sakes she has learned to take her place in it. Herself she has buried.”
“Yes; but which is--was herself?”
“And you cannot see her story in her face?”
“Not that story.”
“Not the crushing reserve, the long suspense, the silence of a sorrow
that even her children could not share?”
“I know her silence. Your mother is a most reticent woman. But is she
now the woman of that story?”
“I don't understand you quite,” said Paul. “How much are we ourselves
after we have passed through fires of grief, and been recast under the
pressure of circumstances! She was that woman once.”
“The saddest part of the story to me is, that your father, who loved her
so, and worked so hard for his family, should have served you all the
better by his death.”
“Oh, don't say that, dear! Who knows what is best? But one thing we do
know. The sorrow that cut my mother's life in two brought you and me
together. It rent the stratum on which I was born and raised it to the
level of yours, my lady!”
“I shall not forget,” whispered Moya with blissful irony, “that you are
the Poor Man's son!”
VI
AN APPEAL TO NATURE
The autumn days were shortening imperceptibly and the sunsets had
gained an almost articulate splendor: cloud calling unto cloud, the west
horizon signaling to the east, and answering again, while the mute dark
circle of hills sat like a council of chiefs with their blankets drawn
over their heads. Soon those blankets would be white with snow.
Behind the Post where the hills climb toward the Cottonwood Creek
divide, there is a little canon which at sunset is especially inviting.
It hastens twilight by at least an hour during midsummer, and in autumn
it leads up a stairway of shadow to the great spectacle of the day--the
day's departure from the hills.
The canon has its companion rivulet always coming down to meet the
stage-road going up. As this road is the only outlet hillward for all
the life of the plain, and as the tendency of every valley population is
to climb, one thinks of it as a way out rather than a way in. Higher up,
the stage-road becomes a pass cut through a wall of splintered cliffs;
and here it leads its companion, the brook, a wild dance over boulders,
and under culverts of fallen rock. At last it emerges on what is
called The Summit; and between are green, deep valleys where the little
ranches, fields and fences and houses, seem to have slid down to the
bottom and lie there at rest.
A party of young riders from the post had gone up this road one evening,
and two had come down, laughing and talking; but the other two remained
in the circle of light that rested on the summit. Prom where they sat
in the dry grass they could hear a hollow sound of moving feet as the
cattle wandered down through folds of the hills, seeking the willow
copses by the water. On the breast of her habit Moya wore the blossoms
of the wild evening primrose, which in this region flowers till the
coming of frost. They had been gathered for her on the way up, and as
she had waited for them, sitting her horse in silence, the brown owls
gurgled and hooted overhead from nest to nest in the crannies of the
rocks.
“You need not hold the horses,” she commanded, in her fresh voice.
“Throw my bridle over your saddle pommel and yours over mine.--There!”
she said, watching the horses as they shuffled about interlinked. “That
is like half the marriages in this world. They don't separate and they
don't go astray, but they don't _get_ anywhere!”
“I have been thinking of those 'two in the Garden,'” mused Paul, resting
his dark, abstracted eyes on her. “Whether or no your humble servant has
a claim to unchallenged bliss in this world, there's no doubt about your
claim. If my plans interfere, I must take myself out of the way.”
“Oh, you funny old croaker!” laughed the girl. “Take yourself out of the
way, indeed! Haven't you chosen me to show you the way?”
“Moya, Moya!” said Paul in a smothered voice.
“I know what you are thinking. But stop it!” she held one of her crushed
blossoms to his lips. “What was this made for? Why hasn't it some work
to do? Isn't it a skulker--blooming here for only a night?”
“'Ripen, fall, and cease!'” Paul murmured.
“How much more am I--are you, then? The sum of us may amount to
something, if we mind our own business and keep step with each other,
and finish one thing before we begin the next. I will not be in a hurry
about being good. Goodness can take care of itself. What you need is to
be happy! And it's my first duty to make you so.”
“God knows what bliss it would be.”
“Don't say 'would be.'”
“God knows it is!”
“Then hush and be thankful!” There was a long hush. They heard the far,
faint notes of a bugle sounding from the Post.
“Lights out,” said Moya. “We must go.”
“You haven't told me yet where our Garden is to be,” he said.
“I will tell you on the way home.”
When they had come down into the neighborhood of ranches, and Bisuka's
lights were twinkling below them, she asked: “Who lives now in the
grandfather's house on the Hudson?”
“The farmer, Chauncey Dunlop.”
“Is there any other house on the place?”
“Yes. Mother built a new one on the Ridge some years ago.”
“What sort of a house is it?”
“It was called a good house once; but now it's rather everything it
shouldn't be. It was one of the few rash things mother ever did; build a
house for her children while they were children. Now she will not change
it. She says we shall build for ourselves, how and where we please.
Stone Ridge is her shop. Of course, if Chrissy liked it--But Chrissy
considers it a 'hole.' Mother goes up there and indulges in secret
orgies of economy; one man in the stable, one in the garden--'Economy
has its pleasures for all healthy minds.'”
“Economy is as delicious as bread and butter after too much candy. I
should love to go up to Stone Ridge and wear out my old clothes. Did any
one tell me that place would some day be yours?”
“It will be my wife's on the day we are married.”
“That is where your wife, sir, would like to live.”
“It is a stony Garden, dear! The summer people have their places nearer
the river. Our land lies back, with no view but hills. For one who has
the world before her where to choose, it strikes me she has picked out a
very humble Paradise.”
“Did you think my idea was to travel--a poor army girl who spends
her life in trunks? Do we ever buy a book or frame a picture without
thinking of our next move? As for houses, who am I that I should be
particular? In the Army's House are many mansions, but none that we
can call our own. Oh, I'm very primitive; I have the savage instinct to
gather sticks and stones, and get a roof over my head before winter sets
in.”
To such a speech as this there was but one obvious answer, as she rode
at his side, her appealing slenderness within reach of his arm. It did
not matter what thousands he proposed to spend upon the roof that should
cover her; it was the same as if they were planning a hut of tules or a
burrow in the snow.
“It is a poor man's country,” he said; “stony hillsides, stony roads
lined with stone fences. The chief crop of the country is ice and stone.
In one of my grandfather's fields there is a great cairn which Adam
Bogardus, they say, picked up, stone by stone, with his bare hands, and
carted there when he was fourteen years old. We will build them into the
walls of our new house for a blessing.”
“No,” said Moya. “We will let sleeping stones lie!”
VII
MARKING TIME