David slept peacefully that night, like a man who has reached the end
of long suspense. When he threw his shutters open late, he found that
the storm had finished its work and gone and that the weather had
settled stinging cold. The heavens were hyacinth, the ground white with
snow; and the sun, day-lamp of that vast ceiling of blue, made the
earth radiant as for the bridal morn of Winter. So HIS thoughts ran.
"Gabriella! Gabriella!" he cried, as he beheld the beauty, the purity,
the breadth, the clearness. "It is you--except the coldness, the
cruelty."
All day then those three: the hyacinthine sky, the flashing lamp, the
white earth, with not one crystal thawing.
It being Saturday, there was double work for him. He knocked up the
wood for that day and for Sunday also, packed and stored it; cut double
the quantity of oats; threw over twice the usual amount of fodder. The
shocks were buried. He had hard kicking to do before he reached the
rich brown fragrant stalks. Afterwards he made paths through the snow
about the house for his mother; to the dairy, to the hen-house. In the
wooden monotony of her life an interruption in these customary visits
would have been to her a great loss. The snow being over the cook's
shoe-tops, he took a basket and dug the vegetables out of the holes in
the garden.
In the afternoon he had gone to the pond in the woods to cut a drinking
place for the cattle. As he was returning with his axe on his shoulder,
the water on it having instantly frozen, he saw riding away across the
stable lot, the one of their neighbors who was causing him so much
trouble about the buying of the farm. He stopped hot with anger and
watched him.
In those years a westward movement was taking place among the
Kentuckians--a sad exodus. Many families rendered insolvent or bankrupt
by the war and the loss of their slaves, while others interspersed
among them had grown richer by Government contracts, were now being
bought out, forced out, by debt or mortgage, and were seeking new homes
where lay cheaper lands and escape from the suffering of living on,
ruined, amid old prosperous acquaintances. It was a profound historic
disturbance of population, destined later on to affect profoundly many
younger commonwealths. This was the situation now bearing heavily on
David's father, on three sides of whose fragmentary estate lay rich
neighbors, one of whom especially desired it.
The young man threw his axe over his shoulder again and took a line
straight toward the house.
"He shall not take advantage of my father's weakness again," he said,
"nor shall he use to further his purposes what I have done to reduce
him to this want."
He felt sure that this pressure upon his father lay in part back of the
feeling of his parents toward him. His expulsion from college and their
belief that he was a failure; the fact that for three years repairs had
been neglected and improvements allowed to wait, in order that all
possible revenues might be collected for him; even these caused them
less acute distress than the fear that as a consequence they should now
be forced so late in life to make that mournful pilgrimage into strange
regions. David was saddened to think that ever at his father's side sat
his mother, irritating him by dropping all day into his ear the half
idle, half intentional words which are the water that wears out the
rock.
The young man walked in a straight line toward the house, determined to
ascertain the reason of this last visit, and to have out the
long-awaited talk with his father. He reached the yard gate, then
paused and wheeled abruptly toward the barn.
"Not to-day," he said, thinking of Gabriella and of his coming visit to
her now but a few hours off. "To-morrow! Day after to-morrow! Any time
after this! But no quarrels to-day!" and his face softened.
Before the barn door, where the snow had been tramped down by the stock
and seeds of grain lay scattered, he flushed a flock of little birds,
nearly all strangers to each other. Some from the trees about the yard;
some from the thickets, fences, and fields farther away. As he threw
open the barn doors, a few more, shyer still, darted swiftly into
hiding. He heard the quick heavy flap of wings on the joists of the
oats loft overhead, and a hawk swooped out the back door and sailed low
away.
The barn had become a battle-field of hunger and life. This was the
second day of famine--all seeds being buried first under ice and now
under snow; swift hunger sending the littler ones to this granary, the
larger following to prey on them. To-night there would be owls and in
the darkness tragedies. In the morning, perhaps, he would find a
feather which had floated from a breast. A hundred years ago, he
reflected, the wolves would have gathered here also and the cougar and
the wildcat for bigger game.
It was sunset as he left the stable, his work done. Beside the yard
gate there stood a locust tree, and on a bough of this, midway up, for
he never goes to the tree-tops at this season, David saw a cardinal. He
was sitting with his breast toward the clear crimson sky; every twig
around him silver filigree; the whole tree glittering with a million
gems of rose and white, gold and green; and wherever a fork, there a
hanging of snow. The bird's crest was shot up. He had come forth to
look abroad upon this strange wreck of nature and peril to his kind.
David had scarcely stopped before him when with a quick shy movement he
dived down into one of his ruined winter fortresses-a cedar dismembered
and flattened out, never to rise again.
The supper that evening was a very quiet one. David felt that his
father's eyes were often on him reproachfully; and that his mother's
were approvingly on his father's. Time and again during the meal the
impulse well-nigh overcame him to speak to his father then and there;
but he knew it would be a cruel, angry scene; and each time the face of
Gabriella restrained him. It was for peace; and his heart shut out all
discord from around that new tenderer figure of her which had come
forth within him this day.
Soon even the trouble at home was forgotten; he was on his way through
the deep snow toward her.