like it. It's the truth, though, and after so much misunderstanding I am
glad you know it. I want you to know that it was you who inspired Sunday
Weeks, if any one did. I have never mentioned this before, have not
admitted it, even to myself, until now. But I realize that it is true.
We have been a long time apart, but the memory of you has never faded
for a day, for an hour. So, when I tried to describe the most charming
girl of whom I could think, I was describing you. As I wrote, there was
constantly before me the vision of your dear gray eyes, and--”
“Decatur! Look at me. Look me straight in the eyes and tell me if they
are gray.”
He looked. As a matter of fact, he had been looking into her eyes for
several moments. Now there was something so compelling about her tone
that he bent all his faculties to the task. This time he looked not with
that blindness peculiar to those who love, but, for the moment,
discerningly, seeingly. And they were not gray eyes at all. They were a
clear, brilliant hazel.
“Why--why!” he gasped out, chokingly. “I--I have always thought of them
as gray eyes.”
“If that isn't just like a man!” she exclaimed, shrugging away from him.
Her quarter profile revealed those thinly curved lips pursed into a most
delicious pout. “You acknowledge, don't you, that they're _not_ gray?”
she flung at him over her shoulder--an adorable shoulder, Decatur
thought.
“Oh, I admit it,” he groaned.
“Then--then why don't you go away?” It was just that trembling little
quaver on the low notes which spurred him on to cast the die.
“Jane,” he whispered, “I don't want to go away, and I don't want you to
send me. It isn't gray eyes that I care for, or ever have cared for.
It's been just you, your own dear, charming self.”
“No, it hasn't been. I haven't even a piquant chin.”
“That doesn't matter. What is a piquant chin, anyway?”
“You ought to know; you wrote it.”
“So I did, but I didn't know what it meant. I just knew that it ought to
mean something charming, which you are.”
“I'm not. And I am not accomplished. I don't sing, I don't play, I don't
draw.”
“Thanks be for that! I don't, either. But I think you are the dearest
girl in the world.”
At that she turned to him and smiled a little as only Jane could smile.
“You told me that once before, a long time ago, you know.”
“And you have not forgotten?”
“No. I--you see--I didn't want to forget.”
Had it been August, or even July, doubtless a great number of
vacationists would have been somewhat shocked at what Decatur did then.
But it was early June, you remember, and on the far end of the Ocean
Park fishing-pier were only these two, with just the dancing blue ocean
in front.
“But,” she said at length, after many other and more important things
had been said between them, “what will Aunt Judith say?”
“I suppose she'll think me a lucky dog--and slightly color-blind,”
chuckled Decatur, joyously. “But come,” he went on, helping her to rise
and retaining both her hands, swaying them back and forth clasped in
his, as children do in the game of London Bridge,--“come,” he repeated,
impulsively, “while my courage is high let us go and break the news to
your aunt Judith.”
There was, however, no need. Looming ponderously in the middle distance
of the pier's vista, a lorgnette held to her eyes, and a frozen look of
horror on her ample features, was Aunt Judith herself.
A STIFF CONDITION
BY HERMAN WHITAKER
An Ontario sun shed a pleasant warmth into the clearing where Elder
Hector McCakeron sat smoking. His gratified consciousness was pleasantly
titillated by sights and sounds of worldly comfort. From the sty behind
the house came fat gruntings; in the barn-yard hens were shrilly
announcing that eggs would be served with the bacon; moreover, Janet was
vigorously agitating a hoe among the potatoes to his left, while his
wife performed similarly in the cabbage-garden. And what better could a
man wish than to see his women profitably employed?
It was a pause in Janet's labors that gave the elder first warning of an
intruder on his peace. A man was coming across the clearing--a short
fellow, thick-set and bow-legged in figure, slow and heavy of face. The
elder observed him with stony eyes.
“It's the Englisher,” he muttered. “What'll he be wanting wi' me?”
His accent was hostile as his glance. Since, thirty years before, a wave
of red-haired Scots inundated western Ontario, no man of Saxon birth had
settled in Zorra, the elder's township. That in peculiar had been held
sealed as a heritage to the Scot, and when Joshua Timmins bought out
Sandy Cruikshanks the township boiled and burned throughout its length
and breadth.
Not that it had expected to suffer the contamination. It was simply
astounded at the man's impudence. “We'll soon drum him oot!” Elder
McCakeron snorted, when he heard of the invasion; to which, on learning
that Timmins was also guilty of Methodism, he added, “Wait till the
meenister lays claws on the beast.”
It was confidently expected that he would be made into a notable
example, a warning to all intruders from beyond the pale; and the first
Sunday after his arrival a full congregation turned out to see the
minister do the trick. Interest was heightened by the presence of the
victim, who, lacking a chapel of his own faith, attended kirk. His
entrance caused a sensation. Forgetting its Sabbath manners, the
congregation turned bodily and stared till recalled to its duty by the
minister's cough. Then it shifted its gaze to him. What thunders were
brewing behind that confident front? What lightnings lurked in the
depths of those steel-gray eyes? Breathlessly Zorra had waited for the
anathema which should wither the hardy intruder and drive him as chaff
from a burning wind.
But it waited in vain. By the most liberal interpretation no phrase of
his could be construed as a reflection on the stranger. Worse! After
kirk-letting the minister hailed Timmins in the door, shook hands in the
scandalized face of the congregation, and hoped that he might see him
regularly at service.
Scandalous? It was irreligious! But if disappointed in its minister,
Zorra had no intention of neglecting its own duty in the premises: the
Englisher was not to be let off while memories of Bruce and Bannockburn
lived in Scottish hearts. Which way he turned that day and in the months
that followed he met dour faces. Excepting Cap'en Donald McKay, a
retired mariner, whose native granite had been somewhat disintegrated by
exposure to other climates, no man gave him a word;--this, of course,
without counting Neil McNab, who called on Timmins three times a week to
offer half-price for the farm.
With one exception, too, the women looked askance upon him, wondering,
doubtless, how he dared to oppose their men-folks' wishes. Calling the
cows of evenings, Janet McCakeron sometimes came on Timmins, whose farm
cornered on her father's, and thus a nodding acquaintance arose between
them. That she should have so demeaned herself is a matter of reproach
with many, but the fair-minded who have sufficiently weighed the merits
of her case are slower with their blames. For though Zorra can boast
maidens who have hung in the wind till fifty and still, as the
vernacular has it, “married on a man,” a girl was counted well on the
way to the shelf at forty-five. Janet, be it remembered, lacked but two
years of the fatal age. Already chits of thirty-five or seven were
generously alluding to her as the prop of her father's age; so small
wonder if she simpered instead of passing with a nifty air when Timmins
spoke one evening.
His remark was simple in tenor--in effect that her bell-cow was “a wee
cat-ham'ed”; but Janet scented its underlying tenderness as a hungry
traveller noses a dinner on a wind, and after that drove her cows round
by the corner which was conveniently veiled by heavy maple-bush. Indeed,
it was to the friendly shadows which shrouded it, day or dark, that
Cap'en McKay--a man wise in affairs of the heart by reason of much
sailing in and out of foreign ports--afterward attributed the record
which Timmins set Zorra in courting.
“He couldna see her bones, nor her his bow-legs,” the mariner phrased
it. But be this as it may, whether or no each made love to a voice,
Cupid ran a swift course with them, steeplechasing over obstacles that
would have taken years for a Zorra lad to plod around. In less than six
months they passed from a bare goodnight to the exchange of soul
thoughts on butter-making, the raising of calves, fattening of swine,
and methods of feeding swedes that they might not taint cow's milk, and
so had progressed by such tender paths through gentle dusks to the point
where Timmins was ready to declare himself in the light of this present
morning.
Assured by one glance that Timmins's courage still hung at the point to
which she had screwed it the preceding evening, Janet drooped again to
her work.
To his remark that the potatoes were looking fine, however, the elder
made no response--unless a gout of tobacco smoke could be so counted.
With eyes screwed up and mouth drawn down, he gazed off into space--a
Highland sphinx, a Gaelic Rhadamanthus.
His manner, however, made no impression on Timmins's stolidity. The
latter's eye followed the elder's in its peregrinations till it came to
rest, when, without further preliminaries, he began to unfold his suit,
which in matter and essence was such as are usually put forward by those
whom love has blinded.
It was really an able plea, lacking perhaps those subtilities of detail
with which a Zorra man would have trimmed it, but good enough for a man
who labored under the disadvantages which accrue to birth south of the
Tweed and Tyne. But it did not stir the elder's sphinxlike calm. “Ha' ye
done?” he inquired, without removing his gaze from the clouds; and when
Timmins assented, he delivered judgment in a cloud of tobacco smoke.
“Weel--ye canna ha' her.” After which he resumed his pipe and smoked
placidly, wearing the air of one who has settled a difficult question
forever.
But if stolid, Timmins had his fair share of a certain slow pugnacity.
“Why?” he demanded.
The elder smoked on.
“Why?”
“Weel,”--the elder spoke slowly to the clouds,--“I'm no obliged to quote
chapter an' verse, but for the sake of argyment--forbye should Janet
marry on an Englisher when there's good Scotchmen running loose?”
This was a “poser.” Born to a full realization of the vast gulf which
providence has fixed between the Highlands and the rest of the world,
Janet recognized it as such. Pausing, she leaned on her hoe, anxiously
waiting, while Timmins chewed a straw and the cud of reflection.
“Yes,” he slowly answered, “they've been runnin' from 'er this twenty
year.” Nodding confirmation to the brilliant rejoinder, Janet fell again
to work.
But the elder was in no wise discomposed. Withdrawing one eye from the
clouds, he turned it approvingly upon her hoe practice. “She's young
yet,” he said, “an' a lass o' her pairts wull no go til the shelf.”
“Call three-an'-forty young?”
“Christy McDonald,” the elder sententiously replied, “marrit on Neil
McNab at fifty. Janet's labor's no going to waste. An' if you were the
on'y man i' Zorra, it wad behoove me to conseeder the lassie's prospects
i' the next world. Ye're a Methodist.”
“Meanin',” said Timmins, when his mind had grappled with the charge, “as
there's no Methodists there?”
Questions of delicacy and certain theological difficulties involved
called for reflection, and the elder smoked a full minute on the
question before he replied: “No, I wadna go so far as that. It stan's to
reason as there's some of 'em there; on'y--I'm no so sure o' their
whereaboots.”
Timmins thoughtfully scratched his head ere he came back to the charge.
“Meanin' as there's none in 'eaven?”
Again the elder blew a reflective cloud over the merits of the question.
“Weel,” he said, delivering himself with slow caution, “if so--it's no
on record.”
Again Janet looked up, with defeat perching amid her freckles. “He's got
ye this time,” her face said, and the elder's expression of placid
satisfaction affirmed the same opinion. But Timmins rose to a sudden
inspiration.
“In 'eaven,” he answered, “there's neither marriage nor givin' in
marriage.”
“Pish, mon!” the elder snorted. “It's no a question o' marrying; it's a
question o' getting theer, an' Janet's no going to do it wi' a Methodist
hanging til her skirts.”
Silence fell in the clearing--silence that was broken only by the crash
and tinkle of Janet's hoe as she buried Timmins under the clod. A Scotch
daughter, she would bide by her father's word. Unaware of his funeral,
Timmins himself stood scratching his poll.
“So you'll not give her to me?” he futilely repeated.
For the first time the elder looked toward him. “Mon, canna ye see the
impossibility o' it? No, ye canna ha' her till--till”--he cast about for
the limit of inconceivability--“till ye're an elder i' the Presbyterian
Kirk.” He almost cracked a laugh at Timmins's sudden brightening. He had
evolved the condition to drive home and clinch the ridiculous
impossibility of the other's suit, and here he was, the doddered fule,
taking hope! It was difficult to comprehend the workings of such a mind,
and though the elder smoked upon it for half an hour after Timmins left
the clearing, he failed of realization.
“Yon's a gay fule,” he said to Janet, when she answered his call to
hitch the log farther into the cabin. “He was wanting to marry on you.”
“Ay?” she indifferently returned,--adding, without change of feature,
“There's no lack o' fules round here.”
Meanwhile Timmins was making his way through the woods to his own place.
As he walked along, the brightness gradually faded from his face, and by
the time he reached the trysting-corner his mood was more in harmony
with his case. His face would have graced a funeral.
Now Cap'en McKay's farm lay cheek by jowl with the elder's, and as the
mariner happened to be fixing his fence at the corner, he noted
Timmins's signals of distress. “Man!” he greeted, “ye're looking
hipped.” Then, alluding to a heifer of Timmins's which had _bloated_ on
marsh-grass the day before, he added, “The beastie didna die?” Assured
that it was only a wife that Timmins lacked, he sighed relief. “Ah,
weel, that's no so bad; they come cheaper. But tell us o't.”
“Hecks, lad!” he commented, on Timmins's dole, “I'd advise ye to drive
your pigs til anither market.”
“Were?” Timmins asked--“w'ere'll I find one?”
“That's so.” The mariner thoughtfully shaved his jaw with a red
forefinger, while his comprehensive glance took in the other's bow-legs.
“There isna anither lass i' Zorra that wad touch ye with a ten-foot
pole.”
Reddening, Timmins breathed hard, but the mariner met his stare with the
serene gaze of one who deals in undiluted truth; so Timmins gulped and
went on: “Say! I 'ear that you're mighty clever in these 'ere affairs.
Can't you 'elp a feller out?”
The cap'en modestly bowed to reputation, admitting that he had assisted
“a sight of couples over the broomstick,” adding, however, that the
knack had its drawbacks. There were many door-stones in Zorra that he
dared not cross. And he wagged his head over Timmins's case, wisely, as
a lawyer ponders over the acceptance of a hopeless brief. Finally he
suggested that if Timmins was “no stuck on his Methodisticals,” he might
join the kirk.
“You think that would 'elp?”
The cap'en thought that, but he was not prepared to endorse Timmins's
following generalization that it didn't much matter what name a man
worshipped under. It penetrated down through the aforesaid rubble of
disintegration and touched native granite. Stiffly enough he returned
that Presbyterianism was good enough for him, but it rested on Timmins
to follow the dictates of his own conscience.
Now when bathed in love's elixir conscience becomes very pliable indeed,
and as the promptings of Timmins's inner self were all toward Janet, his
outer man was not long in making up his mind. But though, following the
cap'en's advice, he joined himself to the elect of Zorra, his change of
faith brought him only a change of name.
Elder McCakeron officiated at the “christening” which took place in the
crowded market the day after Timmins's name had been spread on the kirk
register. “An' how is the apoos-tate the morning?” the elder inquired,
meeting Timmins. And the name stuck, and he was no more known as the
“Englisher.”
“Any letters for the Apoos-tate?” The postmaster would mouth the
question, repeating it after Timmins when he called for his mail. Small
boys yelled the obnoxious title as he passed the log school on the
corner; wee girls gazed after him, fascinated, as upon one destined for
a headlong plunge into the lake of fire and brimstone. Summing the
situation at the close of his second month's fellowship in the kirk,
Timmins confessed to himself that it had brought him only a full
realization of the “stiffness” of Elder McCakeron's “condition.” He was
no nearer to Janet, and never would have been but for the sudden decease
of Elder Tammas Duncan.
In view of what followed, many hold that Elder Tammas made a vital
mistake in dying, while a few, less charitable, maintain that his
decease was positively sinful.
But if Elder Tammas be not held altogether blameless in the premises,
what must be said of Saunders McClellan, who loaded himself with
corn-juice and thereby sold himself to the fates? Saunders was a
bachelor of fifty and a misogynist by repute. Twenty years back he had
paid a compliment to Jean Ross, who afterward married on Rab Murray. It
was not a flowery effort; simply to the effect that he, Saunders, would
rather sit by her, Jean, than sup oatmeal brose. But though he did not
soar into the realms of metaphor, the compliment seems to have been a
strain on Saunders's intellect, to have sapped his being of tenderness;
for after paying it he reached for his hat and fled, and never again
placed himself in such jeopardy.
“Man!” he would exclaim, when, at threshing or logging bees, hairbreadth
escapes from matrimony cropped up in the conversation,--“man! but I was
near done for yon time!” And yet, all told, Saunders's dry bachelorhood
seems to have been caused by an interruption in the flow rather than a
drying up of his wells of feeling, as was proven by his conduct coming
home from market the evening he overloaded with “corn-juice.”
For as he drove by Elder McCakeron's milk-yard, which lay within easy
hailing distance of the gravel road, Saunders bellowed to Janet: “Hoots,
there! Come awa, my bonnie bride! Come awa to the meenister!” In front
of her mother and Sib Sanderson, the cattle-buyer--who was pricing a fat
cow,--Saunders thus committed himself, then drove on, chuckling over his
own daring.
“Ye're a deevil! man, ye're a deevil!” he told himself, giving his hat a
rakish cock. “Ye're a deevil wi' the weemen, a sair deceever.”
He did feel that way--just then. But when, next morning, memory
disentangled itself from a splitting headache, Saunders's red hair
bristled at the thought of his indiscretion. It was terrible! He,
Saunders, the despair of the girls for thirty years, had fallen into a
pit of his own digging! He could but hope it a nightmare; but as doubt
was more horrible than certainty, he dressed and walked down the line to
McCakeron's.
Once again he found Janet at the milking; or rather, she had just turned
the cows into the pasture, and as she waited for him by the bars,
Saunders thought he had never seen her at worse advantage. The sharp
morning air had blued her nose, and he was dimly conscious that the
color did not suit her freckles.
“Why, no!” she said, answering his question as to whether or no he had
not acted a bit foolish the night before. “You just speired me to marry
on you. Said I'd been in your eye this thirty years.”
In a sense this was true. He had cleared from her path like a bolting
rabbit, but gallantry forbade that manifest explanation. “'Twas the
whuskey talking,” he pleaded. “Ye'll no hold me til a drunken promise?”
But he saw, even before she spoke, that she would.
“'Deed but I will!” she exclaimed, tossing her head. “An' them says ye
were drunken will ha' to deal wi' me. Ye were sober as a sermon.”
Though disheartened, Saunders tried another tack. “Janet,” he said,
solemnly, “I dinna think as a well-brought lass like you wad care to
marry on a man like me. I'm terrible i' the drink. I might beat ye.”
Janet complacently surveyed an arm that was thick as a club from heavy
choring. “I'll tak chances o' that.”
Saunders's heart sank into his boots; but, wiping the sweat from his
brow, he made one last desperate effort: “But ye're promised to
the--the--Apoos-tate.”
“I am no. Father broke that off.”
Saunders shot his last bolt. “I believe I'm fickle, Janet. There'll be a
sair heart for the lass that marries me. I wouldna wonder if I jilted
ye.”
“Then,” she calmly replied, “I'll haul ye into the justice coort for
breach o' promise.”
With this terrible ultimatum dinging in his ears Saunders fled. Zorra
juries were notoriously tender with the woman in the case, and he saw
himself stripped of his worldly goods or tied to the apron of the
homeliest girl in Zorra. One single ray illumined the dark prospect.
That evening he called on Timmins, whom he much astonished by the extent
and quality of his advice and encouragement. He even went so far as to
invite the Englisher to his own cabin, thereby greatly scandalizing his
housekeeper--a maiden sister of fifty-two, who had forestalled fate by
declaring for the shelf at forty-nine.
“What'll he be doing here?” the maiden demanded, indicating Timmins with
accusatory finger on the occasion of his first visit. But his meekness
and the propitiatory manner in which he sat on the very edge of his
chair, hat gripped between his knees, mollified her so much that she
presently produced a bowl of red-cheeked apples for his refreshment.
But her thawing did not save Saunders after the guest was gone. “There's
always a fule in every family,” she cried, when he had explained his
predicament, “an' you drained the pitcher.”
“But you'll talk Janet to him,” Saunders urged, “an' him to her? She's
that hard put to it for a man that wi' a bit steering she'll consent to
an eelopement.”
But, bridling, Jeannie tossed a high head. “'Deed, then, an' I'll no do
ither folk's love-making.”
“Then,” Saunders groaned, “I'll ha' the pair of ye in this hoose.”
This uncomfortable truth gave Jeannie pause. The position of maiden
sister carried with it more chores than easements, and Jeannie was not
minded to relinquish her present powers. For a while she seriously
studied the stove, then her face cleared; she started as one who
suddenly sees her clear path, and giving Saunders a queer look, she
said: “Ah, weel, you're my brother, after all. I'll do my best wi' both.
Tell the Englisher as I'll be pleased to see him any time in the
evening.”
Matters were at this stage when Elder McCakeron's cows committed their
dire trespass on Neil McNab's turnips.
Who would imagine that such unlike events as Saunders McClellan's lapse
from sobriety, the death of Elder Duncan, and the trespass of
McCakeron's cows could have any bearing upon one another? Yet from their
concurrence was born the most astounding hap in the Zorra chronicles.
Even if Elder McCakeron had paid Neil's bill of damage instead of
remarking that he “didna see as the turnips had hurt his cows,” the
thing would have addled in the egg; and his recalcitrancy, so necessary
to the hatching, has caused many a wise pow to shake over the
inscrutability of Providence. But the elder did not pay, and in revenge
Neil placed Peter Dunlop, the elder's ancient enemy, in nomination for
Tammas Duncan's eldership.
It was Saunders McClellan who carried the news to the McCakeron
homestead. According to her promise, Jeannie had visited early and late
with Janet; and dropping in one evening to check up her report of
progress, Saunders found the elder perched on a stump.
Saunders discharged him of his news, which dissipated the elder's calm
as thunder shatters silence.