A STRANGER AT THE GATE
Rain overtook Isom as he was driving home from town that evening, and
rain was becoming one of the few things in this world from which he
would flee. It aggravated the rheumatism in his knotted toes and stabbed
his knee-joints with awl-piercing pains.
For upward of forty-five years Isom had been taking the rains as they
came wherever they might find him. It made him growl to turn tail to
them now, and trot to shelter from every shower like a hen.
So he was in no sweet humor as he drew near his own barn-yard gate with
the early autumn downpour already finding its way through his coat. It
came to him as he approached that portal of his domain that if he had a
son the boy would be there, with the gate flung wide, to help him. It
was only one of the thousand useful offices which a proper boy could
fill around that place, thought he; but his wives had conspired in
barrenness against him; no son ever would come to cheer his declining
days.
Even if he had the kind of a wife that a man should have, reflected he,
she would be watching; she would come through rain and hail, thunder and
wild blast, to open the gate and ease him through without that
troublesome stop.
Matrimony had been a profitless investment for him, said he in
bitterness. His first wife had lived long and eaten ravenously, and had
worn out shoes and calico slips, and his second, a poor unwilling hand,
was not worth her keep.
So, with all this sour summing up of his wasted ventures in his mind,
and the cold rain spitting through his years-worn coat, Isom was in no
humor to debate the way with another man when it came to entering into
his own property through his own wide gate.
But there was another man in the road, blocking it with his top-buggy,
one foot out on the step, his head thrust around the side of the hood
with inquiring look, as if he also felt that there should be somebody at
hand to open the gate and let him pass without muddying his feet.
"Ho!" called Isom uncivilly, hailing the stranger as he pulled up his
team, the end of his wagon-tongue threatening the hood of the buggy;
"what do you want here?"
The stranger put his head out a bit farther and twisted his neck to look
behind. He did not appear to know Isom, any more than Isom knew him, but
there was the surliness of authority, the inhospitality of ownership, in
Isom's mien, and it was the business of the man in the buggy to know men
at a glance. He saw that Isom was the landlord, and he gave him a nod
and smile.
"I'd like to get shelter for my horse and buggy for the night, and
lodging for myself," said he.
"Well, if you pay for it I reckon you can git it," returned Isom. "Pile
out there and open that gate."
That was the way that Curtis Morgan, advance agent of the divine light
of literature, scout of knowledge, torch-bearer of enlightenment into
the dark places of ignorance, made his way into the house of Isom Chase,
and found himself in due time at supper in the low-ceiled kitchen, with
pretty Ollie, like a bright bead in a rusty purse, bringing hot biscuits
from the oven and looking him over with a smile.
Curtis Morgan was a slim and limber man, with a small head and a big
mouth, a most flexible and plastic organ. Morgan wore a mustache which
was cut back to stubs, giving his face a grubby look about the nose. His
light hair was short and thick, curling in little love-locks about his
ears.
Morgan sold books. He would put you in a set of twenty-seven volumes of
the _History of the World_ for fifty-three dollars, or he would open his
valise and sell you a ready-reckoner for six bits. He carried _Household
Compendiums of Useful Knowledge_ and _Medical Advisers_; he had poultry
guides and horse books, and books on bees, and if he couldn't sell you
one thing he would sell you another, unless you were a worm, or a
greased pig, and able, by some extraordinary natural or artificial
attribute, to slip out of his hands.
As has been the case with many a greater man before him, Morgan's most
profitable business was done in his smallest article of trade. In the
country where men's lives were counted too short for all the work they
had to do, they didn't have any time for histories of the world and no
interest in them, anyhow. The world was to them no more than they could
see of it, and the needs of their lives and their longings--save in some
adventurer who developed among them now and then--went no farther than
the limit of their vision.
The ready-reckoner was, therefore, the money-maker for Morgan, who
seemed to carry an inexhaustible supply. It told a farm-hand what his
pay amounted to by days and hours down to the fraction of a cent; it
told the farmer what the interest on his note would be; it showed how to
find out how many bushels of corn there were in a crib without measuring
the contents, and how many tons of hay a stack contained; it told how to
draw up a will and write a deed, and make liniment for the mumps.
Isom drew all this information out of his guest at supper, and it did
not require much effort to set the sap flowing.
Morgan talked to Isom and looked at Ollie; he asked Joe a question, and
cocked his eye on Ollie's face as if he expected to find the answer
there; he pronounced shallow platitudes of philosophy aiming them at
Isom, but looking at Ollie for approval or dissent.
Isom appeared to take rather kindly to him, if his unusual volubility
indicated the state of his feelings. He asked Morgan a great deal about
his business, and how he liked it, and whether he made any money at it.
Morgan leaned back on the hinder legs of his chair, having finished his
supper, and fumbled in his waistcoat pocket for his goose-quill pick. He
winked at Isom on the footing of one shrewd man to another as he applied
the quill to his big white teeth.
"Well, I pay my way," said he.
There was a great deal back of the simple words; there was an oily
self-satisfaction, and there was a vast amount of portentous reserve.
Isom liked it; he nodded, a smile moving his beard. It did him good to
meet a man who could get behind the sham skin of the world, and take it
by the heels, and turn it a stunning fall.
Next morning, the sun being out again and the roads promising to dry
speedily, Morgan hitched up and prepared to set out on his flaming path
of enlightenment. Before going he made a proposal to Isom to use that
place as headquarters for a week or two, while he covered the country
lying about.
Anything that meant profit to Isom looked good and fitting in his eyes.
The feeding of another mouth would entail little expense, and so the
bargain was struck. Morgan was to have his breakfast and supper each
day, and provender for his horse, at the rate of four dollars a week,
payable in advance.
Morgan ran over his compendiums and horse books, but Isom was firm for
cash; he suggested at least one ready-reckoner on account, but Isom had
no need of that. Isom could guess to a hundredweight the contents of a
stack of hay, and there never was a banker in this world that could
outfigure him on interest. He had no more need for a ready-reckoner than
a centipede has of legs. Morgan, seeing that nothing but money would
talk there, produced the week's charge on the spot, and drove off to his
day's canvassing well satisfied.
Morgan had not been a paying guest in that house two days before the
somber domestic tragedy that it roofed was as plain to him as if he had
it printed and bound, and in his valise along with the compendiums of
his valuable assortment.
He found it pleasant to return to the farm early of an afternoon and sit
in the kitchen door with his pipe, and watch Ollie's face clear of
clouds as he talked. Consolation and cheer were strangers to her heart;
it required no words from her to tell Morgan that.
Her blushing gratitude for small offices of assistance, such as fetching
a pail of water or a basket of garden greens, repaid Morgan all that he
missed in sales by cutting short his business day just for the pleasure
of returning and talking with her.
Isom was too self-centered, and unconscious of his wife's uncommon
prettiness, to be jealous or suspicious of Morgan's late goings or early
returns. If a man wanted to pay him four dollars a week for the pleasure
of carrying up water, cutting stove-wood or feeding the calves, the fool
was welcome to do it as long as his money held.
So it was that old Isom, blind and deaf and money-mad, set with his own
hand and kindled with his own breath, the insidious spark which trustful
fools before his day have seen leap into flame and strip them of honor
before the eyes of men.
Morgan made a long stay of it in that section, owing to the density of
the population, he claimed, and the proximity of several villages which
he could reach in a few miles' drive. He was in his third week when Isom
was summoned on jury service to the county seat.
Twelve dollars had passed from the book agent's hands into Isom's, and
Isom grinned over it as the easiest money that it ever had been his
pleasure to collect. He put it away with his savings, which never had
earned interest for a banker, and turned the care of the farm over to
Joe.
Jury service at the county seat was an uncertain thing. It might last a
day, and then it might tie a man up for two or three weeks, but Isom was
able to leave home with a more comfortable feeling than ever before. He
had a trustworthy servant to leave behind him, one in whose hands
everything would be safe, under whose energy and conscientious effort
nothing would drag or fall behind.
Isom felt that he could very well afford to spread on a little
soft-soap, as flattery was provincially called, and invest Joe with a
greater sense of his responsibility, if possible. When occasion
required, Isom could rise to flattery as deftly as the best of them. It
was an art at which his tongue was wonderfully facile, considering the
fact that he mingled so seldom with men in the outside doings of life.
His wits had no foil to whet against and grow sharp, save the hard
substance of his own inflexible nature, for he was born with that shrewd
faculty for taking men "on the blind side," as they used to call that
trick in Missouri.
"I'm turnin' the whole farm over to you to look after like it was your
own while I'm away," said he, "and I'm doing it with the feeling that
it's in worthy hands. I know you're not the boy to shirk on me when my
back's turned, for you never tried to do it to my face. You stand by me,
Joe, and I'll stand by you; you'll never lose anything by it in the
end.
"I may be a crabbed old feller once in a while, and snarl around some,
but my bark's worse than my bite, you know that by this time. So I'll
put everything in your hands, with a feeling that it'll be looked after
just the same as if I was here."
"I'll do the best I can by you," promised Joe, his generous heart
warming to Isom a little in spite of past indignities, and the fact that
Joe knew very well the old man's talk was artful pretense.
"I know you will," said Isom, patting his shoulder in fatherly
approbation. "In case I'm held over there a week, you keep your eye on
that agent, and don't let him stay here a day overtime without another
week's board in advance."
"I'll attend to him," promised Joe.
Isom's hand had lingered a minute on Joe's shoulder while he talked, and
the old man's satisfaction over the depth of muscle that he felt beneath
it was great. He stood looking Joe over with quick-shifting, calculating
eyes, measuring him in every part, from flank to hock, like a farrier.
He was gratified to see how Joe had filled out in the past six months.
If he had paid for a colt and been delivered a draft-horse, his surprise
would not have been more pleasant.
As it was, he had bargained for the services of a big-jointed,
long-boned lad, and found himself possessed of a man. The fine part of
it was that he had nearly two years more of service at ten dollars a
month coming from Joe, who was worth twenty of any man's money, and
could command it, just as he stood. That was business, that was
bargaining.
Isom's starved soul distended over it; the feeling was warm in his
veins, like a gill of home-made brandy. He had him, bound body and limb,
tied in a corner from which he could not escape, to send and call, to
fetch and carry, for the better part of two good, profitable years.
As Isom rode away he rubbed his dry, hard hands above his saddle-horn,
feeling more comfortable than he had felt for many a day. He gloated
over the excellent bargain that he had made with the Widow Newbolt; he
grinned at the roots of his old rusty beard. If ever a man poked himself
in the ribs in the excess of self-felicitation, Isom Chase did it as he
rode along on his old buckskin horse that autumn morning, with the sun
just lifting over the hill.
It was an excellent thing, indeed, for a patriot to serve his country
once in a while on a jury, thought Isom, especially when that patriot
had been shrewd in his dealings with the widow and orphan, and had thus
secured himself against loss at home while his country called him
abroad. Jury duty was nothing but a pleasant season of relaxation in
such case.
There would be mileage and _per diem_, and the state would bear the
expense of lodging and meals in the event of his being drawn out of the
panel to serve in some long criminal case. Mileage and _per diem_ would
come in very nicely, in addition to the four dollars a week that
loose-handed book agent was paying. For the first time in his life when
called upon for jury service, Isom went to meet it with no sourness in
his face. Mileage and _per diem_, but best of all, a great strong man
left at home in his place; one to be trusted in and depended upon; one
who would do both his master's work and his own.
Joe had no such pleasant cogitations to occupy his mind as he bent his
long back to assume the double burden when Isom went away. For many days
he had been unquiet with a strange, indefinable unrest, like the yearn
of a wild-fowl when the season comes for it to wing away to southern
seas. Curtis Morgan was behind that strong, wild feeling; he was the
urge of it, and the fuel of its fire.
Why it was so, Joe did not know, although he struggled in his reason to
make it clear. For many days, almost from the first, Joe had felt that
Morgan should not be in that house; that his pretext of lingering there
on business was a blind too thin to deceive anybody but Isom. Anybody
could deceive Isom if he would work his scheme behind a dollar. It was a
shield beyond which Isom could not see, and had no wish to inquire.
Joe did not like those late starts which Morgan made of a morning, long
after he and Isom were in the field, nor the early homings, long before
they came in to do the chores. Joe left the house each morning with
reluctance, after Isom's departure, lingering over little things,
finding hitherto undiscovered tasks to keep him about in the presence of
Ollie, and to throw him between her and the talkative boarder, who
seemed always hanging at her heels. Since their talk at dinner on the
day that Morgan came, Joe had felt a new and deep interest in Ollie, and
held for her an unaccountable feeling of friendliness.
This feeling had been fed, for a few days, by Ollie, who found odd
minutes to talk with him as she had not talked before, and by small
attentions and kindnesses. She had greeted him in the morning with
smiles, where her face once wore the sad mask of misery; and she had
touched his hand sometimes, with encouraging or commending caress.
Joe had yielded to her immediately the unreserved loyalty of his
unsophisticated soul. The lot of his bondage was lightened by this new
tie, the prospect of the unserved term under Isom was not so forbidding
now. And now this fellow Morgan had stepped between them, in some manner
beyond his power to define. It was as one who beholds a shadow fall
across his threshold, which he can neither pick up nor cast away.
Ollie had no more little attentions for Joe, but endless solicitude for
Morgan's comfort; no more full smiles for him, but only the reflections
of those which beamed for the chattering lounger who made a pretense of
selling books while he made love to another man's wife.
It was this dim groping after the truth, and his half-conception of it,
that rendered Joe miserable. He did not fully understand what Morgan was
about, but it was plain to him that the man had no honest purpose there.
He could not repeat his fears to Isom, for Isom's wrath and correction
would fall on Ollie. Now he was left in charge of his master's house,
his lands, his livestock, and _his honor_.
The vicarious responsibility rested on him with serious weight. Knowing
what he knew, and seeing what he saw, should he allow things to proceed
as they had been going? Would he be true to the trust that Isom had
placed in him with his parting word in standing aside and knowingly
permitting this man to slip in and poison the heart of Isom's wife?
She was lonely and oppressed, and hungry for kind words, but it was not
this stranger's office to make green the barrenness of her life. He was
there, the bondboy, responsible to his master for his acts. She might
come to him for sympathy, and go away with honor. But with this other,
this man whose pale eyes shifted and darted like a botfly around a
horse's ear, could she drink his counsel and remain undefiled?
Joe thought it up and down as he worked in the field near the house that
morning, and his face grew hot and his eyes grew fevered, and his
resentment against Morgan rose in his throat.
He watched to see the man drive away on his canvassing round, but the
sun passed nine o'clock and he did not go. He had no right there, alone
in the house with that woman, putting, who could say, what evil into her
heart.
Ten o'clock and the agent's buggy had not left the barn. Joe could
contain himself no longer. He was at work in a little stony piece of
late clover, so rough he did not like to risk the mower in it. For three
hours he had been laying the tumbled swaths in winding tracks across the
field, and he had a very good excuse for going to the well, indeed.
Coupled with that was the need of a whet-rock, and behind it all the
justification of his position. He was there in his master's place; he
must watch and guard the honor of his house.
Joe could not set out on that little trip without a good deal of moral
cudgeling when it came to the point, although he threw down his scythe
with a muttered curse on his lips for the man who was playing such an
underhanded game.
It was on Ollie's account he hesitated. Ollie would think that he
suspected her, when there was nothing farther from his mind. It was
Morgan who would set the snare for her to trip into, and it was Morgan
that he was going to send about his business. But Ollie might take
offense and turn against him, and make it as unpleasant as she had shown
that she could make it agreeable.
But duty was stronger than friendship. It was stern and implacable, and
there was no pleasant road to take around it and come out with honor at
the other end.
Joe made as much noise as he could with his big feet--and that was no
inconsiderable amount--as he approached the house. But near the building
the grass was long, and soft underfoot, and it bore Joe around to the
kitchen window silently. His lips were too dry to whistle; his heart was
going too fast to carry a tune.
He paused a little way beyond the window, which stood open with the sun
falling through it, listening for the sound of their voices. It was
strangely silent for a time when the book-agent was around.
Joe went on, his shadow breaking the sunbeam which whitened the kitchen
floor. There was a little quick start as he came suddenly to the kitchen
door; a hurried stir of feet. As he stepped upon the porch he saw Morgan
in the door, Ollie not a yard behind him, their hands just breaking
their clasp. Joe knew in his heart that Morgan had been holding her in
his arms.
Ollie's face was flushed, her hair was disturbed. Her bosom rose and
fell like troubled water, her eyes were brighter than Joe ever had seen
them. Even Morgan was different, sophisticated and brazen that he was. A
flash of red showed on his cheekbones and under his eyes; his thin
nostrils were panting like gills.
Joe stood there, one foot on the porch, the other on the ground, as
blunt as honesty, as severe as honor. There was nothing in his face that
either of them could read to indicate what was surging in his breast. He
had caught them, and they wondered if he had sense enough to know.
Joe pushed his hat back from his sweating forehead and looked
inquiringly at Morgan.
"Your horse sick, or something?" he asked.
"No," said Morgan, turning his back on Joe with a little jerk of
contempt in his shoulders.
"Well, I think he must be down, or something," said Joe, "for I heard a
racket in the barn."
"Why didn't you go and see what was the matter?" demanded Morgan
crossly, snatching his hat from the table.
Ollie was drowned in a confusion of blushes. She stood hanging her head,
but Joe saw the quick turn of her eyes to follow Morgan as he went away
in long strides toward the barn.
Joe went to the tool-chest which stood in a corner of the kitchen and
busied himself clattering over its contents. Presently he looked at
Ollie, his hand on the open lid of the box.
"Did you see that long whetstone lying around anywhere, Ollie?" he
asked.
She lifted her head with a little start. Joe never had called her
familiarly by her name before. It always had been "Missis Chase,"
distant and respectful.
"No, I haven't seen it, Joe," she answered, the color leaving her
cheeks.
"All right, Ollie," said he, holding her eyes with steady gaze, until
she shifted hers under the pain of it, and the questioning reproach.
Joe slammed down the lid of the tool-chest, as if with the intention of
making as much noise as possible.
There was something in the way he had spoken her name that was stranger
than the circumstance itself. Perhaps she felt the authority and the
protection which Joe meant that his voice should assume; perhaps she
understood that it was the word of a man. She was afraid of him at that
moment, as she never had been afraid of Isom in all their married life.
"I suppose Isom put it away somewhere around the barn," said Joe.
"Maybe he did, Joe."
"I'll go down there and see if I can find it," he said.
Ollie knew, as well as Joe himself, that he was making the whetstone the
vehicle to carry his excuse for watching Morgan away from the farm, but
she was not certain whether this sudden shrewdness was the deep
understanding of a man, or the domineering spirit of a crude lad,
jealous of his passing authority.
The uncertainty troubled her. She watched him from the door and saw him
approach Morgan, where he was backing his horse into the shafts.
"All right, is he?" asked Joe, stopping a moment.
Morgan was distant.
"I guess he'll live another day, don't worry about him," said he, in
surly voice.
"What time do you aim to be back today?" pursued Joe, entirely unmoved
by Morgan's show of temper.
"Say, I'll set up a bulletin board with my time-table on it if you've
got to have it, Mr. Overseer!" said Morgan, looking up from the buckling
of a shaft-strap, his face coloring in anger.
"Well, you don't need to get huffy over it."
"Mind your business then," Morgan growled.
He didn't wait to discuss the matter farther, but got into the buggy
without favoring Joe with as much as another glance, gave his horse a
vindictive lash with the whip and drove off, leaving the gate open
behind him.
Joe shut it, and turned back to his mowing.
Many a time he paused that morning in his labor, leaning on the snath of
his scythe, in a manner of abstraction and seeming indolence altogether
strange to him. There was a scene, framed by the brown casing of the
kitchen door, with two figures in it, two clinging hands, which
persisted in its disturbing recurrence in his troubled mind.
Ollie was on dangerous ground. How far she had advanced, he did not
know, but not yet, he believed, to the place where the foulness of
Morgan had defiled her beyond cleansing. It was his duty as the guardian
of his master's house to watch her, even to warn her, and to stop her
before she went too far.
Once he put down his scythe and started to go to the house, his mind
full of what he felt it his duty to say.
Then there rose up that feeling of disparity between matron and youth
which had held him at a distance from Ollie before. He turned back to
his work with a blush upon his sun-scorched face, and felt ashamed. But
it was not a thing to be deferred until after the damage had been done.
He must speak to her that day, perhaps when he should go in for dinner.
So he said.
Ollie seemed self-contained and uncommunicative at dinner. Joe thought
she was a little out of humor, or that she was falling back into her old
gloomy way, from which she had emerged, all smiles and dimples, like a
new and youthful creature, on the coming of Morgan. He thought, too,
that this might be her way of showing her resentment of the familiarity
that he had taken in calling her by her name.
The feeling of deputy-mastership was no longer important upon his
shoulders. He shrank down in his chair with a sense of drawing in, like
a snail, while he burned with humiliation and shame. The pinnacle of
manhood was too slippery for his clumsy feet; he had plumped down from
its altitudes as swiftly as he had mounted that morning under the spur
of duty. He was a boy, and felt that he was a boy, and far, far from
being anything nobler, or stronger, or better qualified to give saving
counsel to a woman older, if not wiser, than himself.
Perhaps it was Ollie's purpose to inspire such feeling, and to hold Joe
in his place. She was neither so dull, nor so unpractised in the arts of
coquetry, to make such a supposition improbable.
It was only when Joe sighted Morgan driving back to the farm late in the
afternoon that his feeling of authority asserted itself again, and
lifted him up to the task before him. He must let her understand that he
knew of what was going on between them. A few words would suffice, and
they must be spoken before Morgan entered the house again to pour his
poison into her ears.
Ollie was churning that afternoon, standing at her task close by the
open door. Joe came past the window, as he had crossed it that morning,
his purpose hot upon him, his long legs measuring the ground in immense,
swift steps. He carried his hat in his hand, for the day was one of
those with the pepper of autumn in it which puts the red in the apple's
cheeks.
Ollie heard him approaching; her bare arm stayed the stroke of the
churn-dasher as she looked up. Her face was bright, a smile was in her
eyes, revealing the clear depths of them, and the life and the desires
that issued out of them, like the waters of a spring in the sun. She was
moist and radiant in the sweat of her labor, and clean and fresh and
sweet to see.
Her dress was parted back from her bosom to bare it to the refreshment
of the breeze, and her skin was as white as the cream on the dasher, and
the crimson of her cheeks blended down upon her neck, as if the moisture
of her brow had diffused its richness, and spread its beauty there.
She looked at Joe, halted suddenly like a post set upright in the
ground, stunned by the revelation of the plastic beauty of neck and bare
bosom, and, as their eyes met, she smiled, lifted one white arm and
pushed back a straying lock of hair.
Joe's tongue lay cold, and numb as wood against his palate; no word
would come to it; it would not move. The wonder of a new beauty in God's
created things was deep upon him; a warm fountain rose in him and played
and tossed, with a new and pleasurable thrill. He saw and admired, but
he was not ashamed.
All that he had come to say to her was forgotten, all that he had framed
to speak as he bore hastily on toward the house had evaporated from his
heated brain. A new world turned its bright colors before his eyes, a
new breadth of life had been revealed, it seemed to him. In the pleasure
of his discovery he stood with no power in him but to tremble and
stare.
The flush deepened in Ollie's cheeks. She understood what was moving in
his breast, for it is given to her kind to know man before he knows
himself. She feigned surprise to behold him thus stricken, staring and
silent, his face scarlet with the surge of his hot blood.
With one slow-lifted hand she gathered the edges of her dress together,
withdrawing the revealed secret of her breast.
"Why, Joe! What are you looking at?" she asked.
"You," he answered, his voice dry and hoarse, like that of one who asks
for water at the end of a race. He turned away from her then, saying no
more, and passed quickly out of her sight beyond the shrubbery which
shouldered the kitchen wall.
Slowly Ollie lifted the dasher which had settled to the bottom of the
churn, and a smile broke upon her lips. As she went on with the
completion of her task, she smiled still, with lips, with eyes, with
warm exultation of her strong young body, as over a triumphant ending of
some issue long at balance and undefined.
Joe went away from the kitchen door in a strange daze of faculties. For
that new feeling which leaped in him and warmed him to the core, and
gave him confidence in his strength never before enjoyed, and an
understanding of things hitherto unrevealed, he was glad. But at heart
he felt that he was a traitor to the trust imposed in him, and that he
had violated the sanctity of his master's home.
Now he knew what it was that had made his cheeks flame in anger and his
blood leap in resentment when he saw Ollie in the door that morning, all
flushed and trembling from Morgan's arms; now he understood why he had
lingered to interpose between them in past days. It was the wild, deep
fear of jealousy. He was in love with his master's wife! What had been
given him to guard, he had looked upon with unholy hunger; that which
had been left with him to treasure, he had defiled with lustful eyes.
Joe struck across the fields, his work forgotten, now hot with the
mounting fires of his newly discovered passion, now cold with the
swelling accusation of a trust betrayed. Jealousy, and not a regard for
his master's honor, had prompted him to put her on her guard against
Morgan. He had himself coveted his neighbor's wife. He had looked upon a
woman to lust after her, he had committed adultery in his heart. Between
him and Morgan there was no redeeming difference. One was as bad as the
other, said Joe. Only this difference; he would stop there, in time,
ashamed now of the offending of his eyes and the trespass of his heart.
Ollie did not know. He had not wormed his way into her heart by pitying
her unhappiness, like the false guest who had emptied his lies into her
ears.
Joe was able to see now how little deserving Isom was of any such
blessing as Ollie, how ill-assorted they were by nature, inclination and
age. But God had joined them, for what pains and penances He alone knew,
and it was not the work of any man to put them apart.
At the edge of a hazel coppice, far away from the farmhouse that
sheltered the object of his tender thoughts and furtive desires, Joe sat
among the first fallen leaves of autumn, fighting to clear himself from
the perplexities of that disquieting situation. In the agony of his
aching conscience, he bowed his head and groaned.
A man's burden of honor had fallen upon him with the disclosure of a
man's desires. His boyhood seemed suddenly to have gone from him like
the light of a lamp blown out by a puff of wind. He felt old, and
responsible to answer now for himself, since the enormity of his offense
was plain to his smarting conscience.
And he was man enough to look after Morgan, too. He would proceed to
deal with Morgan on a new basis, himself out of the calculation
entirely. Ollie must be protected against his deceitful wiles, and
against herself as well.
Joe trembled in his newer and clearer understanding of the danger that
threatened her as he hastened back to the barn-yard to take up his
neglected chores. The thought that Morgan and Ollie were alone in the
house almost threw him into a fever of panic and haste.
He must not be guilty of such an oversight again; he must stand like a
stern wall between them, and be able to account for his trust to Isom
with unclouded heart.