The sloppy snow went away at last, and the reluctant frost was forced
to follow, yet not before it had wreaked its spite by softening all
the country roads into dismal swamps of mud, and heaving into painful
confusion of holes and hummocks the pavements on Thessaly’s main
streets. But in compensation the birds came back, and the crocus and
hyacinth showed themselves, and buds warmed to life again along the
tender silk-brown boughs and melted into the pale bright green of a
springs new foliage. Overcoats disappeared, and bare-legged boys with
poles and strings of fish dawned upon the vision. The air was laden with
the perfume of lilacs and talk about baseball.
From this to midsummer seemed but a step. The factory workmen walked
more wearily up the hill in the heat to their noonday dinners;
lager-beer kegs advanced all at once to be the chief staple of freight
traffic at the railway dépôt. People who could afford to take travelling
vacations began to make their plans or to fulfil them, and those who
could not began musing pleasantly upon the charms of hop-picking in
September. And then, lo! it was autumn, and young men added with pride
another unit to the sum of their age, and their mothers and sisters
secretly subtracted such groups or fractions of units as were needful,
and felt no more compunction at thus hoodwinking Time than if he had
been a customs-officer.
The village of Thessaly, which like a horizon encompassed most of the
individuals whom we know, could tell little more than this of the months
that had passed since Thanksgiving Day, now once again the holiday
closest at hand. The seasons of rest and open-air amusement lay behind
it, and in front was a vista made of toil. There had been many deaths,
and still more numerous births, and none in either class mattered much
save under the roof-tree actually blessed or afflicted. The year had
been fairly prosperous, and the legislature had passed the bill which at
New Year’s would enable the village to call itself a city.
Of the people with whom this story is concerned, there is scarcely more
to record during this lapse of time.
Jessica Lawton was perhaps the one most conscious of change. At the
very beginning of spring, indeed on the very day when Horace had his
momentary fright in passing the shop, Miss Minster had visited her, had
brought a reasonably comprehensive plan for the Girls’ Resting House, as
she wanted it called, and had given her a considerable sum of money to
carry out this plan. For a long time it puzzled Jessica a good deal that
Miss Minster never came again. The scheme took on tangible form; some
score of work-girls availed themselves of its privileges, and the
result thus far involved less friction and more substantial success
than Jessica had dared to expect. It seemed passing strange that Miss
Minster, who had been so deeply enthusiastic at first, should never have
cared to come and see the enterprise, now that it was in working order.
Once or twice Miss Tabitha had dropped in, and professed to be greatly
pleased with everything, but even in her manner there was an indefinable
alteration which forbade questions about the younger lady.
There were rumors about in the town which might have helped Jessica to
an explanation had they reached her. The village gossips did not fail
to note that the Minster family made a much longer sojourn this year at
Newport, and then at Brick Church, New Jersey, than they had ever done
before; and gradually the intelligence sifted about that young Horace
Boyce had spent a considerable portion of his summer vacation with them.
Thessaly could put two and two together as well as any other community.
The understanding little by little spread its way that Horace was going
to marry into the Minster millions.
If there were repinings over this foreseen event, they were carefully
dissembled. People who knew the young man liked him well enough. His
professional record was good, and he had made a speech on the Fourth
of July which pleased everybody except ’Squire Gedney; but then, the
spiteful old “Cal” never liked anybody’s speeches save his own. Even
more satisfaction was felt, however, on the score of the General. His
son was a showy young fellow, smart and well-dressed, no doubt, but
perhaps a trifle too much given to patronizing folks who had not been to
Europe, and did not scrub themselves all over with cold water, and put
on a clean shirt with both collar and cuffs attached, every morning. But
for the General there was a genuine affection. It pleased Thessaly to
note that, since he had begun to visit at the home of the Minsters,
other signs of social rehabilitation had followed, and that he himself
drank less and led a more orderly life than of yore. When his intimates
jokingly congratulated him on the rumors of his son’s good fortune, the
General tacitly gave them confirmation by his smile.
If Jessica had heard these reports, she might have traced at once to
its source Miss Minster’s sudden and inexplicable coolness. Not hearing
them, she felt grieved and perplexed for a time, and then schooled
herself into resignation as she recalled Reuben Tracy’s warning about
the way rich people took up whims and dropped them again, just as fancy
dictated.
It was on the first day of November that the popular rumor as to
Horace’s prospects reached her, and this was a day memorable for vastly
more important occurrences in the history of industrial Thessaly.
The return of cold weather had been marked, among other signs of the
season, by a renewed disposition on the part of Ben Lawton to drop in
to the millinery shop, and sit around by the fire in the inner room. Ben
came this day somewhat earlier than usual--the midday meal was in its
preliminary stages of preparation under Lucinda’s red hands--and it was
immediately evident that he was more excited over something that had
happened outside than by his expectation of getting a dinner.
“There’s the very old Nick to pay down in the village!” he said, as he
put his feet on the stove-hearth. “Heard about it, any of you?”
Ben had scarcely ascended in the social scale during the scant year that
had passed, though the general average of whiteness in his paper collars
had somewhat risen, and his hair and straggling dry-mud-colored beard
were kept more duly under the subjection of shears. His clothes,
too, were whole and unworn, but they hung upon his slouching and
round-shouldered figure with “poor white” written in every misfitting
fold and on every bagging projection. Jessica had resigned all hope that
he would ever be anything but a canal boatman in mien or ambition, but
her affection for him had grown rather than diminished; and she was glad
that Lucinda, in whom there had been more marked personal improvements,
seemed also to like him better.
No, Jessica said, she had heard nothing.
“Well, the Minster furnaces was all shut down this morning, and so was
the work out at the ore-beds at Juno, and the men, boys, and girls in
the Thessaly Company’s mills all got word that wages was going to be
cut down. You can bet there’s a buzz around town, with them three things
coming all together, smack!”
“I suppose so,” answered Jessica, still bending over her work of
cleaning and picking out some plumes. “That looks bad for business this
winter, doesn’t it?”
Ben’s relations with business, or with industry generally, were of the
most remote and casual sort, but he had a lively objective interest in
the topic.
“Why, it’s the worst thing that ever happened,” he said, with
conviction. “There’s seven hundred men thrown out already” (the figure
was really two hundred and twelve), “and more than a thousand more got
to git unless they’ll work for starvation wages.”
“It seems very hard,” the girl made reply. The idea came to her that
very possibly this would put an extra strain upon the facilities and
financial strength of the Resting House.
“Hard!” her father exclaimed, stretching his hands over the stove-top;
“them rich people are harder than Pharaoh’s heart. What do them Minsters
care about poor folks, whether they starve or freeze to death, or
anything?”
“Oh, it is the Minsters, you say!” Jessica looked up now, with a new
interest. “Sure enough, they own the furnaces. How could they have done
such a thing, with winter right ahead of us?”
“It’s all to make more money,” put in Lucinda. “Them that don’t need
it’ll do anything to get it. What do they care? That Kate Minster of
yours, for instance, she’ll wear her sealskin and eat pie just the same.
What does it matter to her?”
“No; she has a good heart. I know she has,” said Jessica. “She wouldn’t
willingly do harm to any one. But perhaps she has nothing to do with
managing such things. Yes, that must be it.”
“I guess Schuyler Tenney and Hod Boyce about run the thing, from what I
hear,” commented the father. “Tenney’s been bossing around since summer
begun, and Boyce is the lawyer, so they say.”
Ben suddenly stopped, and looked first at Jessica, then at Lucinda.
Catching the latter’s eye, he made furtive motions to her to leave the
room; but she either did not or would not understand them, and continued
stolidly at her work.
“That Kate you spoke about,” he went on stum-blingly, nodding hints at
Lucinda to go away as he spoke, “she’s the tall girl, with the black
eyes and her chin up in the air, ain’t she?”
“Yes,” the two sisters answered, speaking together.
“Well, as I was saying about Hod Boyce,” Ben said, and then stopped in
evident embarrassment. Finally he added, confusedly avoiding Jessica’s
glance, “‘Cindy, won’t you jest step outside for a minute? I want to
tell your sister something--something you don’t know about.”
“She knows about Horace Boyce, father,” said Jessica, flushing, but
speaking calmly. “There is no need of her going.”
Lucinda, however, wiped her hands on her apron, and went out into the
store, shutting the door behind her. Then Ben, ostentatiously regarding
the hands he held out over the stove, and turning them as if they
had been fowls on a spit, sought hesitatingly for words with which to
unbosom himself.
“You see,” he began, “as I was a-saying, Hod Boyce is the lawyer, and
he’s pretty thick with Schuyler Tenney, his father’s partner, which,
of course, is only natural; and Tenney he kind of runs the whole
thing--and--and that’s it, don’t you see!”
“You didn’t send Lucinda out in order to tell me _that_, surely?”
“Well, no. But Hod being the lawyer, as I said, why, don’t you see, he
has a good deal to say for himself with the women-folks, and he’s been
off with them down to the sea-side, and so it’s come about that they
say--”
“They say what?” The girl had laid down her work altogether.
“They say he’s going to marry the girl you call Kate--the big one with
the black eyes.”
The story was out. Jessica sat still under the revelation for a moment,
and held up a restraining hand when her father offered to speak further.
Then she rose and walked to and fro across the little room, in front
of the stove where Ben sat, her hands hanging at her side and her brows
bent with thought. At last she stopped before him and said:
“Tell me all over again about the stopping of the works--all you know
about it.”
Ben Lawton complied, and re-stated, with as much detail as he could
command, the facts already exposed.
The girl listened carefully, but with growing disappointment.
Somehow the notion had arisen in her mind that there would be something
important in this story--something which it would be of use to
understand. But her brain could make nothing significant out of this
commonplace narrative of a lockout and a threatened dispute about wages.
Gradually, as she thought, two things rose as certainties upon the
surface of her reflections.
“That scoundrel is to blame for both things. He advised her to avoid me,
and he advised her to do this other mischief.”
“I thought you’d like to know,” Ben put in, deferentially. He felt a
very humble individual indeed when his eldest daughter paced up and down
and spoke in that tone.
“Yes, I’m glad I know,” she said, swiftly. She eyed her father in an
abstracted way for an instant, and then added, as if thinking aloud:
“Well, then, my fine gentleman, you--simply--shall--_not_--marry Miss
Minster!”
Ben moved uneasily in his seat, as if this warning had been personally
addressed to him. “It _would_ be pretty rough, for a fact, wouldn’t it?”
he said.
“Well, it won’t _be_ at all!” she made emphatic answer.
“I don’t know as you can do much to pervent it, Jess,” he ventured to
say.
“Can’t I? _Cant_ I!” she exclaimed, with grim earnestness. “Wait and
see.”
Ben had waited all his life, and he proceeded now to take her at her
word, sitting very still, and fixing a ruminative gaze on the side
of the little stove. “All right,” he said, wrapped in silence and the
placidity of contented suspense.
But Jessica was now all eagerness and energy. She opened the store door,
and called out to Lucinda with business-like decision of tone: “Come in
now, and hurry dinner up as fast as you can. I want to catch the 1.20
train for Tecumseh.”
The other two made no comment on this hasty resolve, but during the
brief and not over-inviting meal which followed, watched their kinswoman
with side-glances of uneasy surprise. The girl herself hastened through
her dinner without a word of conversation, and then disappeared within
the little chamber where she and Lucinda slept together.
It was only when she came out again, with her hat and cloak on and a
little travelling-bag in her hand, that she felt impelled to throw some
light on her intention. She took from her purse a bank-note and gave it
to her sister.
“Shut up the store at half-past four or five today,” she said; “and
there are two things I want you to do for me outside. Go around the
furniture stores, and get some kind of small sofa that will turn into a
bed at night, and whatever extra bed-clothes we need for it--as cheap as
you can. We’ve got a pillow to spare, haven’t we? You can put those two
chairs out in the Resting House; that will make a place for the bed in
this room. You must have it all ready when I get back to-morrow night.
You needn’t say anything to the girls, except that I am away for a day.
And then--or no: _you_ can do it better, father.”
The girl had spoken swiftly, but with ready precision. As she turned now
to the wondering Ben, she lost something of her collected demeanor, and
hesitated for a moment.
“I want you--I want you to see Reuben Tracy, and ask him to come here at
six to-morrow,” she said. She deliberated upon this for an instant, and
held out her hand as if she had changed her mind. Then she nodded, and
said: “Or no: tell him I will come to his office, and at six sharp. It
will be better that way.”
When she had perfunctorily kissed them both, and gone, silence fell
upon the room. Ben took his pipe out of his pocket and looked at it with
tentative longing, and then at the stove.
“You can go out in the yard and smoke, if you want to, but not in here,”
said Lucinda, promptly. “You wouldn’t dare think of such a thing if she
were here,” she added, with reproach.
Ben put back his pipe and seated himself again by the fire. “Mighty
queer girl, that, eh?” he said. “When she gets stirred up, she’s a
hustler, eh?”
“It must be she takes it from you,” said Lucinda, with a modified grin
of irony.
The sarcasm fell short of its mark. “No,” said Ben, with quiet candor,
“she gets it from my father. He used to count on licking a lock-tender
somewhere along the canal every time he made a trip. I remember there
was one particular fellow on the Montezuma Ma’ash that he used to
whale for choice, but any of ’em would do on a pinch. He was jest
blue-mouldy for a fight all the while, your grandfather was. He was
Benjamin Franklin Lawton, the same as me, but somehow I never took
much to rassling round or fighting. It’s more in my line to take things
easy.”
Lucinda bore an armful of dishes out into the kitchen, without making
any reply, and Ben, presently wearying of solitude, followed to where
she bent over the sink, enveloped in soap-suds and steam.
“I suppose you’ve got an idea what she’s gone for?” he propounded, with
caution.
“It’s a ‘_who_’ she’s gone for,” said Lucinda.
Pronouns were not Ben’s strong point, and he said, “Yes, I suppose it
is,” rather helplessly. He waited in patience for more information, and
by and by it came.
“If I was her, I wouldn’t do it,” said Lucinda, slapping a plate
impatiently with the wet cloth.
“No, I don’t suppose you would. In some ways you always had more sense
than people give you credit for, ‘Cindy,” remarked the father, with
guarded flattery. “Jess, now, she’s one of your hoity-toity kind--flare
up and whirl around like a wheel on a tree in the Fourth of July
fireworks.”
“She’s head and shoulders above all the other Lawtons there ever was or
ever will be, and don’t you forget it!” declared the loyal Lucinda, with
fervor.
“That’s what I say always,” assented Ben. “Only--I thought you said you
didn’t think she was quite right in doing what she’s going to do.”
“It’s right enough; only she was happy here, and this’ll make her
miserable again--though, of course, she was always letting her mind run
on it, and perhaps she’ll enjoy having it with her--only the girls may
talk--and--”
Lucinda let her sentence die off unfinished in a rattle of knives and
spoons in the dish-pan. Her mind was sorely perplexed.
“Well, Cindy,” said Ben, in the frankness of despair, “I’m dot-rotted if
I know what you are talking about.” He grew pathetic as he went on: “I’m
your father and I’m her father, and there ain’t neither of you got a
better friend on earth than I be; but you never tell me anything, any
more’n as if I was a last year’s bird’s-nest.”
Lucinda’s reserve yielded to this appeal. “Well, dad,” she said, with
unwonted graciousness of tone, “Jess has gone to Tecumseh to bring
back--to bring her little boy. She hasn’t told me so, but I know it.”
The father nodded his head in comprehension, and said nothing. He had
vaguely known of the existence of the child, and he saw more or less
clearly the reason for this present step. The shame and sorrow which
were fastened upon his family through this grandson whom he had never
seen, and never spoken of above a whisper, seemed to rankle in his heart
with a new pain of mingled bitterness and compassion.
He mechanically took out his pipe, filled it from loose tobacco in his
pocket, and struck a match to light it. Then he recalled that the absent
daughter! objected to his smoking in the house, on account of the wares
in her shop, and let the flame burn itself out in the coal-scuttle. A
whimsical query as to whether this calamitous boy had also been named
Benjamin Franklin crossed his confused mind, and then it perversely
raised the question whether the child, if so named, would be a “hustler”
or not. Ben leaned heavily against the door-sill, and surrendered
himself to humiliation.
“What I don’t understand,” he heard Lucinda saying after a time, “is why
she took this spurt all of a sudden.”
“It’s all on account of that Gawd-damned Hod Boyce!” groaned Ben.
“Yes; you told her something about him. What was it?”
“Only that they all say that he’s going to marry that big Minster
girl--the black-eyed one.”
Lucinda turned away from the sink, threw down her dish-cloth with a
thud, and put her arms akimbo and her shoulders well back. Watching her,
Ben felt that somehow this girl, too, took after her grandfather rather
than him.
“Oh, _is_ he!” she said, her voice high-pitched and vehement. “I guess
_we’ll_ have something to say about _that_!”