THE SECOND GENERATION
The younger generation does not want instruction.
It is perfectly willing to instruct if anyone will listen to it.
--_The Education of Otis Yeere._
The second generation gave little thought to what was filling the minds of
the first settlers tonight. The company was a large one and a dozen years
later more than one young matron remembered Thaine Aydelot's birthday
party as the beginning of a romance that ended happily for her.
"Jo, you are the queen of the ball tonight," Todd Stewart, Junior,
declared, as he led her to the cool veranda after their fourth dance
together.
Jo looked the part in the moonlight, as in the lamplight.
"Oh, no, I'm not. Leigh Shirley is Thaine's favorite, and his choice is
queen tonight," Jo said coquettishly.
"Darn him! We all know who his choice is, all right," Todd said. "But, Jo,
can't a fellow have half a chance, anyhow? You know, you can't help
knowing a lot of us would fight for you."
He caught her hand in his and she did not resist at once.
"Oh, Jo, I know one fellow, anyhow--"
"Look at Thaine now," Jo interrupted him, as Thaine came near the open
window. "Todd, do you know why he thinks so much of Leigh Shirley?"
"Of Leigh? Does he? I hope he does. He shows good taste, anyhow.
Everybody from Little Plum Creek clear to Northfork likes Leigh."
Jo's eyes flashed.
"She must be very popular."
"Oh, not as they like you, Jo. You must know the difference between you
two, a real beauty and a sweet little girlie."
"She's not so sweet. She tries to attract and doesn't know how," Jo
declared, for jealousy belongs to the dominant.
Todd Stewart's sense of justice was strong, even in his infatuation.
"Why, Jo, you mustn't be jealous of Leigh. She's the girl the boys can't
make like them. She's the funniest, settest little creature. And yet, she
is a cute child. But you are our pride, you know, and to me--well, let me
take you home tonight, and I'll tell you about my pride."
"I don't care for your pride, if you all admire the cute child." Jo
withdrew her hand from his. "Here comes Thaine now. I think you'd better
take Leigh home. Thaine will take me, I'm sure. But I'll go to
refreshments with you," she added, for she knew how to play on more than
one string.
"Why, Josephine, my queen, my queen, where are you hiding? I've danced an
extra, waiting for you. Todd Stewart, I'll have to kill you yet tonight.
What do you mean by breaking up my party?"
Thaine caught Jo's arm and with a mock thrust at Todd he whirled her into
the house.
"Did you really miss me?" Jo's big dark eyes were fastened on Thaine's
face. "More than tongue can tell. Who wouldn't miss you?" Thaine's eyes
were shining mischievously.
"Leigh Shirley wouldn't," Jo said softly and half sadly.
Something impenetrable dropped before Thaine's face.
"Let's go out to the honeysuckle arbor and not dance now. I'm so tired,"
Jo murmured, with a sweet pleading in her voice.
"I fixed it just for you," Thaine declared as he led the way to the
moonlit lawn and shadowy seat.
"You are so good to me, Thaine. What makes you do so many things just for
me? I know you don't really care for me. You are so different from most
farmers' sons." Jo's head drooped a little and she put one hand on his
arm.
"I can't help being good to folks. It's just the angel in me," Thaine
declared. Then he added seriously, "I wish I could do something for you,
Jo. All the boys are wild about you tonight. You are a picture."
She was beautiful at the moment, and as she lifted her eyes to his
something in their shining depths spoke witchingly to the youth of
nineteen, untrained in ways of feminine coquetry. He was only a country
boy, unskilled in social tactics, but a combination of timidity and good
breeding shaped his ideals and his action.
"I don't care for all the boys," Jo murmured.
"Then we are hopelessly bankrupt," Thaine declared. "Isn't this a
wonderful night?"
"Yes, and father and mother are going home so early," Jo said.
"Well, your whole wardrobe is over here; why not stay all night? You can
help Rosie and mother and me tomorrow. There are plenty of Benningtons
left at your home without you, and mother will want you," Thaine urged.
"Do you want me to?" Jo asked softly.
"Tremendously. We'll eat all the ice cream that's left when the crowd goes
and have the empty mansion all to ourselves," Thaine declared.
"We are to dance the last dance together too," Jo reminded him.
"Let's run in now. The crowd doesn't miss me, but I'm host, you know, and
they're gasping for you. They'll be scouring the premises if we wait
longer."
As Thaine lifted Jo to her feet there was a glitter of tears in her bright
eyes. And because the place was shadowy and sweet with honeysuckle
perfume, and the moonlight entrancing, and Jo was very willing, and tears
are ever appealing, he put his arm around her and drew her close to him,
and kissed her on each cheek.
Jo's face was triumphant as they met Leigh Shirley at the dining room
door.
"What's the next case on docket, Leigh?" Thaine asked, dropping Jo's arm.
Jealousy has sharp eyes, but even jealousy could hardly have found fault
with the friendly and indifferent look on Thaine's face.
"Why, it's my first with you, Leigh. Who's your partner, Jo?" Thaine
continued.
Two or three young men claimed the honor, and the music began.
"Mrs. Aydelot, Thaine has asked me to stay all night," Jo said, as the
figures were forming.
"It will please us all," Virginia said graciously, and Jo tripped away.
When the strains of music for the last dance began Jo looked for Thaine,
but he was nowhere to be found. She waited impatiently and the angry
glitter in her eyes was not unbecoming her imperious air.
Bo Peep did not wait long, for he was getting tired. Half a dozen young
men rushed toward Jo as she stood alone. But Todd Stewart let no
opportunity escape him. And the dance began. A minute later Thaine came in
with Leigh Shirley. Smiling a challenge at Todd, he caught Leigh's hand
and swung into the crowd on the floor.
The older guests were already gone. The music trailed off into a weird,
rippling rhythm, with young hearts beating time to its melody and young
feet keeping step to its measure. Then the tired, happy company broke into
groups. Good-bys and good wishes were given again and again, and the party
was over.
The couples took their way up or down the old Grass River trail or out
across the prairie by-roads, with the moon sailing serenely down the west.
Everybody voted it the finest party ever given on Grass River. And nobody
at all, except his mother and Jo Bennington, noticed that Thaine had not
left Leigh Shirley's side from his first dance with her late in the
evening until the time of the good-bys.
As the guests were leaving Thaine turned to Jo, saying:
"I'm sorry about that last dance, but I'll forgive Todd this last time.
Rosie cut her hand on a glass tumbler she dropped and I was helping Leigh
to tie it up when old Bo Peep started the music. Here's the girl I'm to
take home. Got your draperies on already. The carriage waits and the black
steed paws for us by the chicken yard gate. Good-night, gentle beings."
And taking Leigh's arm, he led her away.
"Gimpke is as awkward as a cow," Jo Bennington declared, "and too stupid
to know what's said to her."
But Rosie Gimpke, standing in the shadows of the darkened dining room, was
not too stupid to understand what was said about her. And into her stolid
brain came dreams that night of a fair face with soft golden brown hair
and kindly eyes of deep, tender blue. Stupid as she was, the woman's
instinct in her told her in her dreams that the handsome young son of her
employer might not always look his thoughts nor dance earliest and
oftenest with the girl he liked best. But Rosie was dull and slept heavily
and these things came to her sluggish brain only in fleeting dreams.
Thaine and Leigh did not hurry on their homeward way. And Jo Bennington,
wide awake in the guest room of the Aydelot house, noted that the moon was
far toward the west when Thaine let himself in at the side door and
slipped up stairs unheard by all the household except herself.
"Let's go down by the lake," Thaine suggested as he and Leigh came to the
edge of the grove. "It's full to the bridge, and the lilies are wide open
now. Are you too sleepy to look at them? You used to draw them with chalk
all along the blackboard in the old schoolhouse up there."
"I'm never too sleepy to look at water lilies in the moonlight," Leigh
replied, "nor too tired to paint them, either. Lilies are a part of my
creed. 'Consider the lilies, how they grow.'"
"With their long rubbery stems, up out of mud mostly," Thaine said
carelessly. "I pretty nearly grew fast along with them down there, till I
learned how to gather them a better way."
The woodland shadows were thrust through with shafts of white moonbeams,
giving a weird setting to the silent midnight hour. The odor of woods'
blossoms came with the moist, fresh breath of the May night. There was a
little song of waters gurgling down the spillway that was once only a dry
draw choked with wild plum bushes. The road wound picturesquely through
the grove to a bridged driveway that separated the lakelet into two parts.
A spread of silvery light lay on this driveway and Thaine checked his
horse in the midst of it while the two looked at the waters.
"It's all just silver or sable. There's no middle tone," Leigh said,
looking at the sparkling moonbeams reflected on the face of the lake and
the darkness of the shadowed surface beyond them.
"Isn't there pink, or creamy, or something softer in those lilies right by
the bank? I'm no artist, but that's how it looks to a clod-hopper," Thaine
declared.
"You are an artist, or you wouldn't catch that, where most anybody would
see only steely white and dead black. It is the only color in this black
and white woodsy place," Leigh insisted, looking up at Thaine's face in
the shadow and down at her own white dress.
"There's a bit of color in your cheeks," Thaine said, as he studied the
girl's fair countenance, all pink and white in the moonlight.
"Oh, not the pretty blooming roses like Jo Bennington has," Leigh said,
smiling frankly and folding her hands contentedly in her lap.
Thaine recalled the seat under the honeysuckle, and Jo Bennington's
pleading eyes, and bewitching beauty, and the touch of her hand on his
arm, and her willingness to be kissed. He was flattered by it all, for Jo
was the belle of the valley, and Thaine thought himself in love with her.
He knew that the other boys, especially Todd Stewart, Jr., envied him. And
yet in this quiet hour in the silent grove, with the waters shimmering
below them, the gentle dignity of the sweet-faced girl beside him, with
her purity and simplicity wrapping her about, as the morning mists wrapped
the far purple notches on the southwest horizon, gave to her presence
there an influence he could not understand.
Thaine had never kissed any girl except Jo, had never cared enough for any
other girl to think about it. But tonight there suddenly swept through his
mind the thought of the joy that was waiting for some man to whom Leigh
would give that privilege, and without any self-analysis (boys at nineteen
analyze little) he began to hate the man who should come sometime to claim
the privilege.
"Leigh, don't you ever feel jealous of Jo?" He didn't know why he asked
the question.
Leigh gave a little laugh.
"Ought I?" she inquired, looking up. "She hasn't anything I want."
The deep violet eyes under the long lashes were beautiful without the
flashing and sparkle of Jo Bennington's coquettish gaze.
"That was an idiotic thing to ask," Thaine admitted. "Why should you, sure
enough?"
"I wish I had some of those lilies." Leigh changed the subject abruptly.
"Hold the horse, then, and I'll get them. I keep a hooked knife on a long
stick hidden down here on purpose to cut them for me mummy, on occasion."
Thaine jumped out of the buggy and ran down to the end of the driveway
where the creamy lilies lay on the dark waters near the bank.
"Be careful of your dress," he said, as he came back and handed a bunch of
blossoms with their trailing wet stems up to Leigh. "Do you remember your
Prince Quippi off in China, and your love letters, with old Grass River
for postal service? Will you send me a letter down the old Kaw River when
I go to the Kansas University this fall?"
"A sunflower letter like I used to send to Quippi?" Leigh asked.
"Any kind of a letter. I'll miss you more than anything here, except my
beloved chores about the farm," Thaine responded.
"Jo will write all the letters you'll have time to answer," Leigh
asserted.
"Oh, she says she's going to Lawrence too, if her pa-paw is elected County
Treasurer. We'll be in the University together. You'll just have to write
to me, Leighlie."
"Not unless you go to China. I'll send you a letter there like I used to
send to Prince Quippi." There was a sudden pathos in her tone.
"Will you? Oh, Leigh, will you?" Thaine asked, gaily, looking down into
her face, white and dainty in the soft light. "Quippi never answered one
of them, but I would if I was over there, and I may go yet. There's no
telling."
Leigh looked up with her eyes full of pain.
"Why, I didn't mean to tease you," Thaine declared.
"Thaine, Pryor Gaines is to start to China tomorrow. He's been planning it
for weeks and weeks. He's going to be a missionary and he'll never come
back again--and--and there is so much for me to do when he is gone. He has
been such a kind helper all these years. His refined taste has meant so
much to me in the study of painting, and I need him now."
Thaine gave a low whistle of surprise. Leigh's eyes were full of tears,
but Thaine would not have dared to take her in his arms, as he had taken
Jo Bennington.
"Little neighbor, we've been playmates nearly all our lives. Can't I help
you in some way?" he asked gently.
"Yes, you can," Leigh replied in a low voice. "There are some things I
must do for Uncle Jim and when you are doing _for_ people you can't tell
them nor depend on their advice. When Pryor is gone, may I ask you
sometimes what to do? I won't bother you often."
Asher Aydelot had declared that Alice Leigh was the prettiest girl in Ohio
in her day.
The pink-tinted creamy lilies looking up from the still surface of the
lakelet were not so fair as the pink-tinted face of Alice Leigh's
daughter, framed in the soft brown shadows of her hair with a hint of gold
in the ripples at the white temples. And behind the face, looking out
through long-lashed violet eyes, was loving sacrifice and utter
self-forgetfulness.
Thaine was nineteen and wise to give advice. A sudden thrill caught his
pulse, mid-beat.
"Is that all? Can't I _do_ something?" he asked eagerly.
"That's a great deal. And nobody can _do_ for anybody. We have to _do_ for
ourselves."
"You are not doing anything for Uncle Jim, then, I am to understand,"
Thaine said.
But Leigh ignored his thrust, saying:
"When Pryor leaves, he doesn't want to say good-by to anybody, not even to
Uncle Jim. He says China is only a little way off, just behind the purple
notches over there. I'm going to take him to the train tomorrow and then
I'm going on to Wykerton on business. After that, I may need lots of
advice."
"Wykerton's a joint-ridden place, but John Jacobs has put a good class of
farmers around it. He's such an old saloon hater, Hans Wyker'd like to
kill him. But say, why not tell me now what you are about, so I can be
looking up references and former judicial decisions handed down in similar
cases?" Thaine asked lightly.
"Because it's too long a story, and I must get Pryor to the eight o'clock
limited," Leigh said.
The crowing of chickens in a far away farmyard came faintly at that
moment, and Thaine with a strange new sense of the importance of living,
sent the black horses cantering down the trail to the old Cloverdale Ranch
house.
Jo Bennington slept late. She had been up late. She had danced often and
she had waited for Thaine's homecoming. Yet, when she came downstairs in
a white morning dress all sprinkled with little pink sprays, there was
hardly a hint of weariness in her young face or in her quick footsteps.
"I'm glad you stayed, Jo," Mrs. Aydelot greeted her. "This is 'the morning
after the night before,' and, as usual, the desertions equal the wounded
and imprisoned. Asher and the men had to go across the river early to look
after the fences and washouts on the lower quarter. And Rosie Gimpke
decided to go home this morning as soon as breakfast was done. So it is
left for us to get the house over the party. Not so easy as getting ready
for it, especially without help."
"Where's Thaine?" Jo asked carelessly, though her face was a tattler.
"He took some colts over to John Jacobs' ranch. He had Rosie ride one and
he rode another and led two. They were a sight. I hoped you might see them
go by your window. Thaine had his hat stuck on like a Dutchman's and he
puffed himself out and made up a regular Wyker face as he jogged along.
And Rosie plumped herself down on that capering colt as though she shifted
all responsibility for accidents upon it. The more it pranced about, the
firmer she sat and the less concerned she was. I heard Thaine calling out,
'Breakers ahead!' as he watched her bring it back into the road in front
of him with a sort of side kick of her foot."
"What made Gimpke leave?" Jo asked, to cover her disappointment.
"She cut her hand badly last night. She insisted at first that she would
help me today and go home later to stay till it gets well. Then she
suddenly changed her mind. Possibly it was the spare-room bed," Virginia
said laughing. "When I told her not to wake you when she made up the other
beds, she suddenly got homesick, her hand grew worse and she flew the
premises. I'll run up and attend to that bed while you finish your
breakfast," and Virginia left the room.
At that moment young Todd Stewart appeared on the side porch before the
dining room door.
"Thaine stopped long enough to ask me to come over and move furniture for
his mother," Todd sang out. "He doesn't think you were made to lift
cupboards and carry chairs downstairs."
"Oh, it's his mother he's thinking about," Jo said with pretty petulance.
In truth, she was angry with Thaine for taking Leigh home last night and
for leaving home today.
"No, it's his mother he's ceased to love," Todd said, coming inside. "He
said he'd quit the old home and was moving his goods up to Wolf Creek for
keeps. And with that fat tow-headed Gimpke girl sitting on the frisky bay
colt as unconcerned as a bump on a log, it was the funniest sight I ever
saw."
Jo tossed her head contemptuously.
"Say, Curly Locks, Curly Locks, you ought to always sit on a cushion and
sew a fine seam and wear a dress to breakfast with those little pink
du-dads scattered over it."
"Not if I was a farmer's wife," Jo responded quickly.
"Oh, Jo, do you really want to be a city girl?" Todd's face was frankly
sorrowful. "Could you never be satisfied on a farm?"
"I don't believe I ever could," Jo said prettily.
"Thaine's a farmer all right, Jo."
"He isn't going to be one always," Jo broke in quickly. "He's going to the
Kansas University and there's no telling after that."
"No, he's just going to Wykerton, that's all. Nay, he have went. Him and
him fraulein. And say, there's another pretty fraulein went up the trail
just ahead of the Aydelot horse party. A sweetheart of a girl whom Thaine
Aydelot took home after all last night."
"I don't care where Thaine goes," Jo cried.
"And you don't care for a farmer anyhow," Todd said suavely.
"Oh, that depends on how helpful he is," Jo responded tactfully.
Todd sprang up and began to fling the chairs about with extravagant energy
in his pretense of being useful.
"Let's help Mrs. Aydelot as swift as possible. It's hot as the dickens
this morning, and the prognostics are for a cyclone before twelve hours.
It's nearly eleven of 'em now. I'll take you home when we are through.
Thaine isn't the whole of Grass River and the adjacent creeks and
tributaries and all that in them is."