said, curling her fingers about her thumb, and striking the arm of her
chair with the soft side of the resultant fist, after the manner of
women.
Her companion laughed.
"Not every person, I hope; not this one, at least." He drew the
photograph from his breast pocket and held it toward her. She took it
from him, and looked at it absently an instant.
"What a pretty girl!" she said, handing it back to him. "Your sister?"
The young man flushed. "No; my fiancée."
She held out her hand and took the card again, looking at it with fresh
eyes.
"A _very_ pretty girl," she said. "What is her name?"
"Elizabeth Arnold."
"Where does she live?"
Palmerston mentioned a village in Michigan. His companion gave another
glance at the picture, and laid it upon the arm of the chair. The young
man rescued it from her indifference with a little irritable jerk. She
was gazing unconsciously toward the horizon.
"Don't you intend to congratulate me?" he inquired with a nettled laugh.
She turned quickly, flushing to her forehead. "Pardon me. I said she was
very pretty--I thought young men found that quite sufficient. I have
never heard them talk much of girls in any other way. But perhaps I
should have told you: I care very little about photographs, especially
of women. They never look like them. They always make me think of paper
dolls."
She halted between her sentences with an ungirlish embarrassment which
Palmerston was beginning to find dangerously attractive.
"But the women themselves--you find them interesting?"
"Oh, yes; some of them. Mrs. Dysart, for instance. As soon as she
learned I had no mother, she invited me to a mothers' meeting. I thought
that very interesting."
"Very sensible, too. They are mostly childless mothers, and a sprinkling
of motherless children will add zest to the assemblage."
They both laughed, and the young man's laugh ended in a cough. The girl
glanced uneasily toward the bank of fog that was sweeping across the
valley.
"Mr. Palmerston," she said, "the fog is driving in very fast, and it is
growing quite damp and chilly. I think you ought to go home. Wait a
minute," she added, hurrying into the tent and returning with a soft
gray shawl. "I am afraid you will be cold; let me put this about your
shoulders."
She threw it around him and pinned it under his chin, standing in front
of him with her forehead on a level with his lips.
"Now hurry!"
A man does not submit to the humiliation of having a shawl pinned about
his shoulders without questioning his own sanity, and some consciousness
of this fact forced itself upon Palmerston as he made his way along the
narrow path through the greasewood. He had removed the obnoxious
drapery, of course, and was vindicating his masculinity by becoming very
cold and damp in the clammy folds of the fog which had overtaken him;
but the shawl hung upon his arm and reminded him of many things--not
altogether unpleasant things, he would have been obliged to confess if
he had not been busy assuring himself that he had no confession to
make. He had done his duty, he said to himself; but there was something
else which he did not dare to say even to himself--something which made
him dissatisfied with his duty now that it was done. Of course he did
not expect her to care about his engagement, but she should have been
sympathetic; well-bred women were always sympathetic, he argued,
arriving at his conclusion by an unanswerable transposition of
adjectives. He turned his light coat collar up about his throat, and the
shawl on his arm brushed his cheek warmly. No man is altogether
colorblind to the danger-signals of his own nature. Did he really want
her to care, after all? he asked himself angrily. He might have spared
himself the trouble of telling her. She was absorbed in herself, or,
what was the same, in that unsavory fraud whom she called father. The
young man unfastened the flap of his tent nervously, and took himself in
out of the drenching mist, which seemed in some way to have got into his
brain. He was angry with himself for his interest in these people, as
he styled them in his lofty self-abasement. They were ungrateful,
unworthy. His eye fell upon two letters propped up on his table in a
manner so conspicuous as to suggest a knowledge of his preoccupation--as
if some one were calling him out of his reverie in an offensively loud
voice. He turned the address downward, and busied himself in putting to
rights the articles which John had piled up to attract his tardy notice.
He would read his letters, of course, but not in his present mood: that
would be a species of sacrilege, he patronizingly informed his restive
conscience.
And he did read them later, after he had carefully folded the gray shawl
and placed it out of his range of vision--half a score of closely
written pages filled with gentle girlish analysis of the writer's love
and its unique manifestations, and ending with a tepid interest in the
"queer people" among whom her lover's lot was cast. "It is very hard, my
dear," she wrote, "to think of you in that lonely place, cut off from
everybody and everything interesting; but we must bear it bravely,
since it is to make you strong and well."
Palmerston held the letter in his hand, and looked steadily through the
tent window across the sea of fog that had settled over the valley.
"After all, she is not selfish," he reflected; "she has nothing to gain
by saving Dysart, except"--he smiled grimly--"her rascally father's good
name."
* * * * *
The rains were late, but they came at last, blowing in soft and warm
from the southeast, washing the dust from the patient orange-trees and
the draggled bananas, and luring countless green things out of the brown
mould of the mesa into the winter sun. Birds fledged in the golden
drought of summer went mad over the miracles of rain and grass, and
riotously announced their discovery of a new heaven and a new earth to
their elders. The leafless poinsettia flaunted its scarlet diadem at
Palmerston's tent door, a monarch robbed of all but his crown, and the
acacias west of the Dysart dooryard burst into sunlit yellow in a
night.
The rains had not been sufficient to stop work on the tunnel, and John
watched its progress with the feverish eagerness of an inexperienced
gambler. Now that it was fairly under way, Brownell seemed to lose
interest in the result, and wandered, satchel in hand, over the
mountain-side, leaving fragments of his linen duster on the thorny
chaparral, and devising new schemes for the enrichment of the valley, to
which his daughter listened at night in skeptical silence. Now and then
his voice fell from some overhanging crag in a torrent of religious
rapture, penetrating the cabin walls and trying Mrs. Dysart's pious soul
beyond endurance.
"Now listen to that, Emeline!" said John, exultantly, during one of
these vocal inundations. "He's a-singin' the doxology. Now _I_ believe
he's a Christian."
Mrs. Dysart averted her face with a sigh of long-suffering patience.
"Singin' is the easiest part of the Christian religion, Jawn. As for
that,"--she jerked her head toward the source of vocal supply,--"it's
soundin' brass; that's what I'd say if I was settin' in judgment, which
I thank our heavenly Fawther I'm not."
"Well, there goes Mr. Palmerston and the girl, anyway," said John, with
eager irrelevance; "they seem to be gettin' pretty thick."
Mrs. Dysart moved toward the open window with piously restrained
curiosity.
"I'm sorry for that girl," she said; "she's got one man more'n she can
manage now, without tacklin' another."
"Oh, well, now, Emeline, young folks, will be young folks, you know."
There was in John's voice something dangerously near satisfaction with
this well-known peculiarity of youth.
"Yes; and they'll be old folks, too, which most of 'em seems to forget,"
returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after the retreating
couple.
Mrs. Dysart was right. Sidney Palmerston and his companion were not
thinking of old age that winter day. The mesa stretched a mass of purple
lupine at their feet. There was the odor of spring, the warmth of
summer, the languor of autumn, in the air. As they neared the cañon the
path grew narrow, and the girl walked ahead, turning now and then, and
blocking the way, in the earnestness of her speech. They had long since
ceased to talk of the tunnel; Sidney had ceased even to think of it. For
weeks he had hardly dared to think at all. There had been at first the
keen sense of disappointment in himself which comes to every confident
soul as it learns the limitations of its own will; then the
determination, so easy to youth's foreshortening view, to keep the
letter of his promise and bury the spirit out of his own sight and the
sight of the world forever; then the self-pity and the pleading with
fate for a little happiness as an advance deposit on the promise of
lifelong self-sacrifice; then the perfumed days when thought was lulled
and duty became a memory and a hope. Strangely enough, it was always
duty, this unholy thing which he meant to do--this payment of a debt in
base metal, when the pure gold of love had been promised. But ethics
counted for little to-day as he followed a figure clad in blue serge
down the path that led from the edge of the cañon to the bed of the
stream. Budding willows made a green mist in the depths below them, and
the sweet, tarry odors of the upland blew across the tops of the
sycamores in the cañon and mingled with the smell of damp leaf-mould and
the freshness of growing things.
The girl paused and peered down into the cañon inquiringly.
"Do you think of leaping?" asked Palmerston.
She smiled seriously, still looking down. "No; I was wondering if the
rainfall had been as light in the mountains as it has been in the
valley, and how the water-supply will hold out through the summer if we
have no more."
Palmerston laughed. "Do you always think of practical things?" he asked.
She turned and confronted him with a half-defiant, half-whimsical smile.
"I do not think much about what I think," she said; "I am too busy
thinking."
As she spoke she took a step backward and tripped upon some obstacle in
the path.
Palmerston sprang forward and caught her upraised arm with both hands.
"I--I--love you!" he said eagerly, tightening his grasp, and then
loosening it, and falling back with the startled air of one who hears a
voice when he thinks himself alone.
The young woman let her arm fall at her side, and stood still an
instant, looking at him with untranslatable eyes.
"You love me?" she repeated with slow questioning. "How can you?"
Palmerston smiled rather miserably. "Far more easily than I can explain
why I have told you," he answered.
"If it is true, why should you not tell me?" she asked, still looking at
him steadily.
Evasion seemed a drapery of lies before her gaze. Palmerston spoke the
naked truth:
"Because I cannot ask you to love me in return--because I have promised
to marry another woman, and I must keep my promise."
He made the last avowal with the bitter triumph of one who chooses death
where he might easily have chosen dishonor.
His listener turned away a little, and looked through the green haze of
the cañon at the snow of San Antonio.
"You say that you love me, and yet you intend to marry this other girl,
who loves you, and live a lie?" she asked without looking at him.
"My God! but you make it hard!" groaned Palmerston.
She faced about haughtily.
"I make it hard!" she exclaimed. "I have been afraid of you--not for
myself, but for--for others, about something in which one might be
mistaken. And you come to me and tell me this! You would cheat a woman
out of her life, a girl who loves you--who promised to marry you because
you told her you loved her; who no doubt learned to love you because of
your love for her. And this is what men call honor! Do you know what I
intend to do? I intend to write to this girl and tell her what you have
told me. Then she may marry you if she wishes. But she shall know. You
shall not feed her on husks all her life, if I can help it. And because
I intend to do this, even if--even if I loved you, I could never see you
again!"
Palmerston knew that he stood aside to let her pass and walk rapidly out
of the cañon.
The call of insects and the twitter of linnets seemed to deepen into a
roar. A faint "halloo" came from far up the mountain-side, and in the
distance men's voices rang across the cañon.
A workman came running down the path, almost stumbling over Palmerston
in his haste.
"Where's the old man--where's Dysart?" he panted, wiping his forehead
with his sleeve. "We've struck a flow that's washing us into the middle
of next week. The old professor made a blamed good guess this time,
sure."
Marg'et Ann
It was sacrament Sabbath in the little Seceder congregation at Blue
Mound. Vehicles denoting various degrees of prosperity were beginning to
arrive before the white meeting-house that stood in a patch of
dog-fennel by the roadside.
The elders were gathered in a solemn, bareheaded group on the shady side
of the building, arranging matters of deep spiritual portent connected
with the serving of the tables. The women entered the church as they
arrived, carrying or leading their fat, sunburned, awe-stricken
children, and sat in subdued and reverent silence in the unpainted pews.
There was a smell of pine and peppermint and last week's gingerbread in
the room, and a faint rustle of bonnet strings and silk mantillas as
each newcomer moved down the aisle; but there was no turning of heads or
vain, indecorous curiosity concerning arrivals on the part of those
already in the pews.
Outside, the younger men moved about slowly in their creased black
clothes, or stood in groups talking covertly of the corn planting which
had begun; there was an evident desire to compensate by lowered voices
and lack of animated speech for the manifest irreverence of the topic.
Marg'et Ann and her mother came in the farm wagon, that the assisting
minister, the Rev. Samuel McClanahan, who was to preach the "action
sermon," might ride in the buggy with the pastor. There were four wooden
chairs in the box of the wagon, and the floor was strewn with
sweet-scented timothy and clover. Mrs. Morrison and Miss Nancy
McClanahan, who had come with her brother from Cedar Township to
communion, sat in two of the chairs, and Marg'et Ann and her younger
sister occupied the others. One of the boys sat on the high spring seat
with his brother Laban, who drove the team, and the other children were
distributed on the hay between their elders.
Marg'et Ann wore her mother's changeable silk made over and a cottage
bonnet with pink silk strings and skirt and a white ruche with a wreath
of pink flowers in the face trimming. Her brown hair was combed over her
ears like a sheet of burnished bronze and held out by puff combs, and
she had a wide embroidered collar, shaped like a halo, fastened by a
cairngorm in a square setting of gold.
Miss Nancy McClanahan and her mother talked in a subdued way of the Fast
Day services, and of the death of Squire Davidson, who lived the other
side of the creek, and the probable result of Esther Jane Skinner's
trouble with her chest. There was a tacit avoidance of all subjects
pertaining to the flesh except its ailments, but there was no long-faced
hypocrisy in the tones or manner of the two women. Marg'et Ann listened
to them and watched the receding perspective of the corn rows in the
brown fields. She had her token tied securely in the corner of her
handkerchief, and every time she felt it she thought regretfully of
Lloyd Archer. She had hoped he would make a confession of faith this
communion, but he had not come before the session at all. She knew he
had doubts concerning close communion, and she had heard him say that
certain complications of predestination and free will did not appear
reasonable to him. Marg'et Ann thought it very daring of him to exact
reasonableness of those in spiritual high places. She would as soon have
thought of criticising the Creator for making the sky blue instead of
green as for any of His immutable decrees as set forth in the Confession
of Faith. It did not prevent her liking Lloyd Archer that her father and
several of the elders whom he had ventured to engage in religious
discussion pronounced him a dangerous young man, but it made it
impossible for her to marry him. So she had been quite anxious that he
should see his way clear to join the church.
They had talked about it during intermission last Sabbath; but Marg'et
Ann, having arrived at her own position by a process of complete
self-abnegation, found it hard to know how to proceed with this stalwart
sinner who insisted upon understanding things. It is true he spoke
humbly enough of himself, as one who had not her light, but Marg'et Ann
was quite aware that she did not believe the Catechism because she
understood it. She had no doubt it could be understood, and she thought
regretfully that Lloyd Archer would be just the man to understand it if
he would study it in the right spirit. Just what the right spirit was
she could not perhaps have formulated, except that it was the spirit
that led to belief in the Catechism. She had hoped that he would come to
a knowledge of the truth through the ministrations of the Rev. Samuel
McClanahan, who was said to be very powerful in argument; but he had
found fault with Mr. McClanahan's logic on Fast Day in a way that was
quite disheartening, and he evidently did not intend to come forward
this communion at all. Her father had spoken several times in a very
hopeless manner of Lloyd's continued resistance of the Holy Spirit, and
Marg'et Ann thought with a shiver of Squire Atwater, who was an
infidel, and was supposed by some to have committed the unpardonable
sin. She remembered once when she and one of the younger boys had gone
into his meadow for wild strawberries he had come out and talked to them
in a jovial way, and when they were leaving, had patted her little
brother's head, and told him, with a great, corpulent laugh, to "ask his
father how the devil could be chained to the bottomless pit." She did
not believe Lloyd could become like that, but still it was dangerous to
resist the Spirit.
Miss Nancy McClanahan had a bit of mint between the leaves of her
psalm-book, and she smelled it now and then in a niggardly way, as if
the senses should be but moderately indulged on the Sabbath. She had on
black netted mitts which left the enlarged knuckles of her hands
exposed, and there was a little band of Guinea gold on one of her
fingers, with two almost obliterated hearts in loving juxtaposition.
Marg'et Ann knew that she had been a hardworking mother to the Rev.
Samuel's family ever since the death of his wife, and she wondered
vaguely how it would seem to take care of Laban's children in case
Lloyd should fail to make his peace with God.
When they drove to the door of the meeting-house, Archibald Skinner came
down the walk to help them dismount. Mrs. Morrison shook hands with him
kindly and asked after his sister's cough, and whether his Grandfather
Elliott was still having trouble with his varicose veins. She handed the
children to him one by one, and he lifted them to the ground with an
easy swing, replacing their hats above their tubular curls after the
descent, and grinning good-naturedly into their round, awe-filled,
freckled countenances.
Miss Nancy got out of the wagon backwards, making a maidenly effort to
keep the connection between the hem of her black silk skirt and the top
of her calf-skin shoes inviolate, and brushing the dust of the wagon
wheel from her dress carefully after her safe arrival in the dog-fennel.
Marg'et Ann ignored the chair which had been placed beside the wagon for
the convenience of her elders, and sprang from the wheel, placing her
hands lightly in those of the young man, who deposited her safely beside
her mother and turned toward her sister Rebecca with a blush that
extended to the unfreckled spaces of his hairy, outstretched hands, and
explained his lively interest in the disembarkation of the family.
Laban drove the team around the corner to a convenient hitching-place,
and the women and children went up the walk to the church door. Mrs.
Morrison stopped a moment on the step to remove the hats of the younger
boys, whose awe of the sanctuary seemed to have deprived them of
volition, and they all proceeded down the aisle to the minister's pew.
The pastor and the Rev. Samuel McClanahan were already in the pulpit,
their presence there being indicated by two tufts of hair, one black and
the other sandy, which arose above the high reading-desk; and the elders
having filed into the room and distributed themselves in the ends of the
various well-filled pews, the young men and boys followed their example,
the latter taking a sudden start at the door and projecting themselves
into their places with a concentration of purpose that seemed almost
apoplectic in its results.
There was a deep, premonitory stillness, broken only by the precentor,
who covertly struck his tuning-fork on the round of his chair, and held
it to his ear with a faint, accordant hum; then the minister arose and
spread his hands in solemn invocation above the little flock.
"Let us pray."
Every one in the house arose. Even old Mrs. Groesbeck, who had sciatica,
allowed her husband and her son Ebenezer to assist her to her feet, and
the children who were too small to see over the backs of the pews
slipped from their seats and stood in downcast stillness within the high
board inclosures.
After the prayer, Mr. Morrison read the psalm. It was Rouse's version:--
"I joy'd when to the house of God,
Go up, they said to me.
Jerusalem, within thy gates
Our feet shall standing be.
Jerus'lem as a city is
Compactly built together.
Unto that place the tribes go up,
The tribes of God go thither."
The minister read it all and "lined out" the first couplet. Then the
precentor, a tall, thin man, whose thinness was enveloped but not
alleviated by an alpaca coat, struck his tuning-fork more openly and
launched into the highly rarefied atmosphere of "China," being quite
alone in his vocal flight until the congregation joined him in the more
accessible regions of the second line.
Marg'et Ann shared her psalm-book with Laban, who sat beside her. He had
hurt his thumb shelling seed corn, and his mother had made him a clean
thumb-stall for Sabbath. It was with this shrouded member that he held
the edge of the psalm-book awkwardly. Laban's voice was in that
uncertain stage in which its vagaries astonished no one so much as its
owner, but he joined in the singing. "Let all the people praise Thee"
was a command not to be lightly set aside for worldly considerations of
harmony and fitness, and so Laban sang, his callow and ill-adjusted
soul divided between fears that the people would hear him and that the
Lord would not.
Marg'et Ann listened for Lloyd Archer's deep bass voice in the Amen
corner.
She wished his feet _were_ standing within the gates of Jerusalem, as he
so resonantly announced that they would be. But whatever irreverence
there might be in poor Laban refusing to sing what he did not dream of
doubting, there was no impiety to these devout souls in Lloyd Archer's
joining with them in the vocal proclamation of things concerning which
he had very serious doubts.
Not that Jerusalem, either new or old, was one of these things; the
young man himself was not conscious of any heresy there; he believed in
Jerusalem, in the church militant upon earth and triumphant in heaven,
and in many deeper and more devious theological doctrines as well.
Indeed, his heterodoxy was of so mild a type that, viewed by the
incandescent light of to-day, which is not half a century later, it
shines with the clear blue radiance of flawless Calvinism.
If the tedious "lining out," traditionally sacred, was quite
unreasonable and superfluous, commemorating nothing but the days of
hunted Covenanters and few psalm-books and fewer still who were able to
read them, perhaps the remembrance of these things was as conducive to
thankfulness of heart as David's recital of the travails and triumphs of
ancient Israel. Certain it is that profound gratitude to God and
devotion to duty characterized the lives of most of these men and women
who sang the praises of their Maker in this halting and unmusical
fashion.