A YEAR LATER
Susan had quite formed a habit, of late, of taking the precaution, at
the end of her day's work in her school-room, to peep from the window
to see whether the coast were clear so that she could go forth
without danger of being joined on the way home by her objectionable
suitor, Joe Houghton, who lived and worked just across the road from
her new school, at his uncle's famous old homestead, White Oak Farm;
or by some adoring pupil who might be lingering about to walk to the
trolley station with her, as some among the older boys and girls were
apt to do. The sentimental girls were even more trying than the big,
blushing, silent boys. There had been a time, ages and ages ago,
when she had loved all her pupils quite maternally and had been so
humbly grateful for their devotion to her! But now, she only wanted
to be let alone; to keep to herself. It was almost the only desire
she had left; for all capacity for feeling anything, except weariness
and listlessness, seemed to have died within her.
She had shrunk from the return of the spring, the anniversary of her
great tragedy, lest its old exhilarating effect upon her might bring
back her power to feel, to suffer. But it did not stir a drop of her
blood; her heart remained like lead in her breast; as though some
tension had snapped, leaving her soul a dead weight.
The new school position which she had secured this year was at White
Oak Station, a hamlet eight miles from her home, in a neighbourhood
in which she had been quite unacquainted.
To-day when she peeped from the school-room window to reconnoitre,
there was not, as far as she could see, a single boy, girl, or man in
sight.
Joe Houghton, however, could not be depended upon to give her fair
warning by exposing himself to view; her constant efforts to elude
him had only made him cunning in his pursuit of her. So, in letting
herself out of the school-house door, she moved cautiously, without
noise, and instead of taking the public road, crept like a burglar
around to the back of the little building, intending to cross a field
to another road which would add a half mile to her walk to the
trolley station. She knew that by doing this she ran the risk of
missing her trolley car home and of being obliged to wait an hour for
the next one. That, however, would not be so wearisome as Joe
Houghton's company on the long mile to the station.
She reached the back of the school-house unobserved, she was sure,
and as, with a sigh of relief at her escape, she turned toward the
adjoining field, there in front of her, scowling at her, stood Joe
Houghton!
He was not quite forty years of age, but from over-work his tall,
bony frame was stooped like an old man's. His gaunt face was tanned
and his hands red and rough. His countenance, though not evil, was
usually sulky when not actually scowling. The most objectionable
thing about him in Susan's eyes was the way his false teeth wriggled
about, "as though," she thought, "they didn't want to stay on the
job!"
As a concession to the fact that he was come a-courting, he wore his
best (and only) suit: of cheap material and bad cut; and a brilliant
lavender necktie that he had bought at Woolworth's.
Joe Houghton was reputed to have amassed a very comfortable bank
account; but money to him was not what the dictionary proclaims it,
"a medium of exchange"; he never exchanged it for anything if he
could help it. The one great dissipation of his whole life was the
accumulation and hoarding of wealth.
"That's the time I caught you; ain't?" he said, pointing an accusing
finger at Susan as she stopped short at sight of him. His words were
playful, but his tone and look were sullen.
Without answering, she turned and walked back to the front of the
school-house to take the main road.
Joe, however, kept at her side.
"What the hell makes you ac' so menschenshy*, anyhow, Miss Susie?" he
demanded.
* Bashful with men.
She walked rapidly, without replying.
"Say, Miss Susan, I got somepin awful particular to tell you this
after!" he pleaded.
"But you've had my answer so often," she said, wearily. Though her
voice had lost none of its sweetness and drawling softness, it was
lifeless.
"No, I ain't had your answer a'ready!" growled Joe. "You ain't said
Yes yet; and Yes is a-goin' to be your answer! You make up your mind
to that!"
"You seem to have made up your mind so firmly," she said, sweetly,
"that my mind doesn't seem to matter."
"Well, anyhow, it ain't that question I want to bother you with this
after. It's somepin else I got reference to."
Susan manifested no curiosity.
"Somepin awful important to me and you," he added.
"That doesn't seem possible," said Susan, mildly.
"You mean," said Joe, frowning with the mental effort to which this
retort challenged him, "that me and you ain't got no interests in
common?"
"I've not noticed any."
"Well, you'll notice 'em some day, you bet you! It's about my Uncle
George's will I want to tell you. I went to Middleburg yistiddy to
tend the reading of the will. That's some important to you, ain't
it?"
"Why should it be?"
"Because some day what's mine will be yourn."
"But if you were mine, I should certainly wish, for your immortal
soul's sake, that your Uncle George had died a bankrupt!"
Joe, to whom money was a holy thing, his only religion, felt cold at
such blasphemy.
"It's temptin' Providence to say sich things!" he frowned.
"Can 'Providence' be tempted? What a funny expression it is, by the
way--'tempting Providence!' Religion sometimes seems to me the most
humorous thing in all the world!"
"Och, don't talk so outlandish!" he brusquely admonished her. Joe,
like Mark Antony, was "no orator," but "a plain, blunt man," who did
not stand on ceremony. "Don't you want fur me to tell you about
Uncle George's will?"
"Why should I?"
"Say, what makes you ac' so ugly to me? Don't I treat you right?"
"As right as you know how, Mr. Houghton."
"Well, I can't do better'n that, can I?"
"No--that's the trouble."
"You mean," he demanded with puckered brow, "that I don't know how to
treat a lady right?"
"You're so bright, Mr. Houghton, in seeing through my remarks!"
"Yes," said Joe, complacently, "I always was wery smart that way.
But I guess you mean," he added, suspiciously, "that I ain't tony
enough to suit you."
"You don't have to suit me."
"But you got to suit _me_! And you got to take interest in Uncle
George's will. Uncle George done awful mean by me! What do you
think he up and done yet, Miss Susan? He's inherited to my
half-brother, Sidney, this here farm here, that I've worked on like a
dog for five years, improvin' the land so much that I've near doubled
the crops! And now the whole place of twelve hundred waluable acres,
with house and all, goes to Sid and I got to get _out_!-- and lose
all the profits of my own work! Yes, anyhow! The will says Sid's
got to come here and make White Oak Farm his home and keep up the
place, because seven generations of Houghtons has lived here. Sid
he's to be sich a gentleman farmer, the will says. Now what do you
think of that? Ain't it dirty mean that I got to get off my farm?"
Susan could almost have found it in her heart to pity the man at her
side for the tragic suffering she knew this fact meant to him.
"I'm sorry!" she said, sympathetically.
"The will inherits to Sid (besides White Oak Farm) two thirds of the
_es_tate worth near a million, and to me only one third," complained
Joe. "To be sure," he admitted, "it ain't as if I hadn't of expected
Sid to get the big share; but I did think Uncle George would give the
_farm_ to me that I've worked on so hard! But my folks always did
have it in fur me! None of 'em ever did think I was good enough fur
'em to 'sociate with!--though it's them that always kep' me down. My
father left me run wild when I was little and never bothered about
me; and then when he married again, my step-mother she had so ashamed
of me, she was all the time pokin' me out of sight whenever she had
comp'ny. She'd make me eat in the kitchen with the hired help and
she wouldn't never speak to me. Her and Sid and Uncle George, all of
'em, had always ashamed of me. And my father _he_ didn't care!"
Joe spoke with exceeding bitterness, and for the first time in her
acquaintance with him, Susan found herself feeling some sympathy for
him.
"One thing in that there will," he continued, "ain't so bad fur me,
fur all. If Sid's son dies----"
"He has a son?"
"Yes," answered Joe on a deep tragic note that made Susan vaguely
wonder. "And if his kid dies, White Oak Farm goes to _my_ son, so's
the family name'll be kep' on at the ol' homestead."
Susan whimsically reflected that Joe was quite incapable of plotting
the heir's murder for the sake of his own son's inheritance. "It
must take rather heroic courage to commit some kinds of crime!" she
thought. "And only debased cowardice for the kind Sidney committed!"
"Now my half-brother, Sidney, he's altogether different to what I am
yet," Joe went on. "He's a elegant swell, Sid is," he sneered.
"From a little kid a'ready, he was always awful genteel. You'd never
take him fur my brother, Miss Susan, if you ever met up with him;
which you're likely to do soon, fur he's comin' here right aways to
White Oak to live at the ol' homestead."
Susan's detached self, which seemed, in these days, always to be
looking on, with a dull surprise, at her dead other self, noticed,
just now, how strangely unmoved this news found her. Joe might have
been speaking (as he supposed he was) of someone she had never seen!
"Sid, he kep' on the right side of Uncle George by marryin' awful
good; a wery tony swell with money of her own. A perfec' lady, so
they say. I never seen her. She must be, though, if she satisfied
Uncle George's elegant tastes! Gosh, but Sid'll be ashamed to have
to interdooce her to _me_!"
Susan made no comment as they walked side by side over the country
highroad in the warm, bright April afternoon, past woods and fields
just beginning to show a down of tender green.
"Well, ain't it a dirty, mean shame, me havin' to get off my farm fur
my stuck-up half-brother to move in, that never done a stroke of work
on the place; nor nowheres else did he never do no work of no kind!"
"I wonder," the young school teacher found her brain speculating,
"whether he _could_ get any more negatives into that sentence!"
"Sid _he_ can't make good on the farm; he don't know nothin' about
farmin'. He don't know nothin' about nothin', except the rules of
society and stylish clo'es and how to squander money and such like.
He even fell down on that there dead easy cinch Uncle George got
him--diplomacy--in Europe. Got all balled up tryin' to work it! His
wife didn't hit it off good with a dukess or a czaress or whatever.
Anyhow, the two of 'em (Mrs. Sid and the dukess or what) had words
and Sid he had to cut out and come home."
Susan laughed--a little low ripple of quite mirthless laughter.
"What's so funny?" asked Joe, puzzled. "Sid's mom and Uncle George
took it awful serious. Me, too, fur if he'd stayed over there on his
job, I might of stayed on the farm. _Don't_ you think they done me
dirt?"
"It's not right," Susan answered, perfunctorily. "It's not right (in
fact, it's quite grotesque) that a man, after he's dead, should
control twelve hundred acres of the earth's surface, decreeing to
whom it shall belong for two generations. It's not right that your
step-brother, who does not work, should reap where others sow. It's
not right that a third of a million dollars that you never worked for
should fall into your hands, while my valuable services in this
township are paid for at fifty dollars a month! I'm afraid, Mr.
Houghton, I can't get warmed up over your wrongs. Are you going to
move away?" she asked, hopefully.
"Not if I can help it--don't you worry!"
"I'll try not to."
"I'm in hopes Sid'll hire me fur his tenant-farmer and leave me live
in the tenant-farmer's cottage on the place and keep on workin' the
farm on shares fur him, like what I done fur Uncle George. I don't
believe he will, though. He'd hate so to have a brother like me,"
Joe growled, "livin' close by, so's he'd have to interdooce me,
still, if I chanced along, to his grand friends!"
Susan noted, without any great interest in the phenomenon, the
strange psychology of the born miser who, with ample means to go
where he would, preferred to work slavishly for a brother who looked
down upon him, rather than lose the few thousand dollars, the fruits
of his own labour which, in the transfer of the property, would
accrue to his brother instead of to him.
"Sid'll soon find out that a good, honest farmer ain't so easy
found," said Joe. "So mebby he'll _have_ to leave me stay on."
It was not, Susan knew, that Joe was without pride or sensitiveness,
of a kind. But these sentiments were overborne by his avarice.
His next words, however, made her doubt whether avarice was the only
or the strongest motive he had for wishing to remain where he was not
wanted.
"I want to be Johnny-on-the-spot to watch Sid 'waste his substance in
riotous living,'" he chuckled, maliciously. "Till ten years a'ready
_he_ won't have no money left of all his big fortune. I know him.
He'll blow it in! I tell you," he said, wickedly gloating, "you'll
see the day when my swell brother comes to me beggin' fur the price
of a meal ticket. Then watch what _I'll_ do! And say! it won't go
so long, neither, till I get him in my power!"
"In your power!" smiled Susan, skeptically. It sounded so
melodramatic.
"You needn't to grin! I got my little plans all right, all right!"
Susan was silent.
"One good thing, Miss Susan, you won't have near the housework to do,
us livin' in the tenant's cottage, as what you'd of had if White Oak
Farm had of been willed to me and I'd of stayed on in the big house.
My housekeeper she's always growlin' about how much work it makes in
such a big house, even though we do close off all but just the couple
rooms we use. Yes, me, I'll be awful glad when I got a wife oncet
and don't have to fuss with no hired help no more."
"Won't it be worse to have to fuss with a wife? You can't discharge
your wife as you can your hired housekeeper."
"But my first wife, she never bothered me any about the housework
bein' too heavy. And a man's wife can't up and leave like hired
help's always doin'."
"Oh, yes, she can, in these days. A few do."
"Not the kind of a woman _I'll_ marry," said Joe, confidently. "I
wouldn't tie up with no sich loose-moralled person."
"See that you don't!"
"_You_ don't hold no sich loose views, do you? Don't you think
marriage is awful sakerd?"
"Sacred to become a man's permanent housekeeper who can't throw up
her job if she doesn't like it? Sacred? Ha!" Susan laughed--almost
with amusement.
"A wife's a man's partner," argued Joe.
"His equal partner? With some rights over their earnings and
property?"
"Well, to be sure, the husband's the head of the wife. The _Bible_
says so. You believe the Bible, don't you?"
"I don't believe nonsense."
"Oh, hell, Miss Susan, ain't you afraid somepin'll happen you, sayin'
sich blasphemous things?"
Susan thought to herself, "Afraid?--of something happening to
me?--when everything has happened that can ever matter!"
But when Joe Houghton had left her at the station and she was alone,
during her long hour's ride home to Reifsville, she found that his
announcement of his brother's immediately coming to live in the
neighbourhood of her school did seem to matter to her. She had
suffered so horribly; her present insensibility was such a blessed
respite; she dreaded so unspeakably any possible thing which might
revive her pain! Could she remain as callous at sight of Sidney
Houghton as everything else had found her since the birth of her dead
baby?
It was just one year ago to-day that she had gone to her lover's
rooms to plead with him for their coming child. And three days after
that futile visit to him she had read the newspaper announcement of
his sudden marriage to Miss Laura Beresford.
Then for two days and nights she had suffered the prolonged torture
of a tedious and terribly difficult premature child-birth.
She had never seen her dead baby. She had been unconscious at its
birth; and for many weeks afterward she had lain at death's door in
the delirium of child-bed fever.
When, after long, dreary, hopeless weeks of illness and suffering,
she had become strong enough to ask questions about the baby, the
answers of her shocked and stricken family had seemed to her strange,
evasive. Her sister Addie had told her it was a girl; her mother,
tearfully, but with a note of heart-broken pride, that it was "a fine
boy"; Lizzie that it was "a seven months' blue baby and couldn't have
lived anyhow." That enigmatical "anyhow" had vaguely troubled her
through all her convalescence.
"Just to think," Addie would mourn as she waited upon her, "that a
man with such nice manners at him as what Sidney always had, would go
and ac' like this here! Don't it beat all? I wouldn't of thought it
of him! How he must have ashamed of hisself now!"
"_Him_ ashamed!" Lizzie would sniff. "Nothing doing! He ain't the
pertikkler _kind_!"
Susan's deepest bitterness against her "betrayer" lay in the fact
that she must be thankful that her baby was dead; that she, whose
longing for a child had been a passion, had been cheated of its
fulfilment; that the ecstasy which her child would have been to her
had been turned into a frenzy of horror lest her coming baby should
be alive!--born "out of wedlock"; an outcast; her innocent child made
to suffer all its life long because of its parents' selfishness and
weakness! That her motherhood had been thus perverted and
distorted--for this she knew that never while she breathed could she
forgive Sidney Houghton.
It did not seem very strange to her that Miss Beresford, in spite of
that encounter with her at Sidney's rooms, had, after all, married
him.
"It isn't very much worse than what I did for love of him! And of
course he lied to her about me."
Strangely enough, the Schrekengusts' desperate efforts to conceal
their darling's "disgrace" had been successful. A doctor had been
"fetched" from another town and they themselves had been her only
nurses. The very length and severity of her illness had precluded
any suspicion in Reifsville as to its true cause, especially as no
least rumour of scandal had been previously aroused.
The consternation produced in the family by Susan's inquiry, as soon
as she was able to walk out of doors, for the grave of her baby, had
revealed to her poignantly how deeply her family felt her "ruin."
"But we didn't give you away to folks by makin' a grave yet to show!"
her father had explained to her. "Nobody knows nothing! Nor they
_ain't_ to, neither!"
"Didn't you have an undertaker?"
"Och, no," her mother had sadly told her. "Pop he tended to all
hisself."
"But where did you bury her? I want at least to go to the spot where
she lies!" Susan had pleaded (the consensus of opinion seeming to
favour the assumption, in lieu of any positive statement, that the
baby had been a girl).
"I couldn't say just the spot," her father had replied, "but--well,
it's anyhow in the orchard over."
She knew she was morbid to regret so much that she could not have
even the doubtful solace of visiting her child's grave.
Six months had passed before she had been able to take up teaching
again. Her position at Reifsville had been filled, and she had
secured the country school at White Oak Station.
Joe Houghton being one of the school directors who had elected her,
and White Oak Farm being so conveniently just across the road from
her school-house, the young widower, with a year-old baby on his
hands, had, from the first hour of their acquaintance, pursued her
assiduously with his unwelcome attentions.
Susan realized, with an utter indifference to the fact, that she had
come out from her illness much better looking than she had ever been;
her abundant hair, all lost through her terrible fever, had come in
again in thick gold-brown curls; her wasted flesh seemed to have been
renewed in a clearer, softer texture; all the angles of her slender
frame were now softly rounded; she bloomed and glowed with health and
youth.
But her soul remained heavy and dead.
She had not taken up again, after her recovery, any of the old
threads of her life. The few choice, intimate, and very precious
friendships she had made at school had been dropped; forever, she
believed. Her friends' letters, persistent, anxious, importunate,
remained unanswered. She had ceased to feel any interest in them.
They belonged so absolutely to that other life, now dead, in which
she had met and known and loved Sidney Houghton; a life so different
from that of her own home; in which she had found colour, joy, music,
culture, and had made them her own. That was all over now. Sidney
had robbed her of everything of worth that she had attained through
hard work, against adverse circumstances. She seemed to have lost
all power to feel, to care for any one, for anything.
She had found Joe Houghton to be all that Sidney had once told her he
was--crude, miserly, "grouchy." He was of a very jealous disposition
and given to fits of sullenness which made Susan feel that his young
wife must have found a blessed escape in death. He was, of course,
his own worst enemy, an unhappy creature, his only joy and comfort in
life being his passion for hoarding money. He loved his baby boy and
was proud of him, but the child caused him more suffering than
happiness; for while he had quarrelled with one housekeeper after
another for neglecting the boy, he was morbidly jealous of any one
for whom the child manifested more fondness than he showed for his
father.
Over against these trying characteristics could be named a few
uninteresting virtues. He was scrupulously honest and truthful; much
as he loved gain, there was no stake high enough to lure him from the
strictest integrity. And although a highly sexed individual, he was
quite puritanically virtuous.
Susan thought, during her homeward drive, what an ideal setting for a
man of Sidney Houghton's tastes White Oak Farm would be and what
delight he would take in that beautiful old home which had been so
religiously preserved in all its primitive quaintness of architecture
and furniture, by so many generations of his family. He had once
told her how the Houghtons had always prided themselves in being the
only family of English extraction in all the Pennsylvania Dutch
township of White Oak. Their social life had of course (he had
explained) been confined exclusively to that of the near-by city of
Middleburg. Their immediate neighbourhood knew them only by sight.
Joe had one day persuaded her to come over to the farm to see his
baby (little dreaming of the bitterness in her soul as she had held
the pretty child on her breast!) and he had shown her all over the
truly lovely house, unlocking the closed-off rooms with their old
woven rugs brought over to America in colonial days, their carved
four-posted beds, pier tables, davenports, and old portraits of
colonial dignitaries. As she reflected that all these rare things
were now the possession of Sidney Houghton she thought of that one
pathetic little suit of furniture which she and Sidney had chosen
together for their future home and which he had afterward pawned in
order to carry on his courtship with Miss Laura Beresford--even while
she, Susan, was still paying for it out of her hard-earned little
salary.
"Did he know at the time," she dully wondered, "that we would never
use it in a home of ours? Did he get me to buy it just for his own
use in his college rooms?"
He had not kept the promise he had made to her about the
furniture--that day she had gone to him to plead with him for their
child's sake----
"I shall pay you back every dollar of it!" he had said. "It may take
me a long time, but I shan't let you lose what you paid for it,
Susan."
When, during her illness, several letters had come to her, dunning
her for the sum still unpaid on the furniture, her father had given
Sidney Houghton's address to the creditor and told him to collect the
amount from him. But the creditor had returned the information that
Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Houghton were in Denmark and that Mr. Houghton's
mother repudiated the bill.
The furniture had been bought in Susan's name. So, when she was
recovered from her long illness, she sold her parlour furniture to be
able to meet this debt and her large doctor's bill.
When this afternoon she got off the trolley car and walked listlessly
through Reifsville toward her home, she was still wondering whether a
possible, and probably unavoidable, encounter with the new occupant
of White Oak Farm would shock her back into sensibility.