master would wait until all the pupils had gone, and then overtake
Barbara. He solaced his conscience by carrying a book in his pocket, so
as to study on the way back; but he found a strange wandering of the
mind in his endeavors to read a dead language after a walk with Barbara.
He still held to his resolution, or to what was left of his resolution,
not to entangle himself with an early engagement. What visions he
indulged in, of projects to be carried out in a very short time after
his graduation, belong to the secrets of his own imagination; all his
follies shall not be laid bare here. But to keep from committing himself
too far, he drew the line at the boundary of Mrs. Grayson's farm,--the
meadow fence. He gave himself a little grace, and drew the line on the
inside of the fence. He was firmly resolved never to go quite home with
his pupil, and never to call at her house. So long as he stopped at the
fence, or within ten, or say twenty, or perhaps thirty, feet of it he
felt reasonably safe. But he could not, in common civility, turn back
until he had helped her to surmount this eight-rail fence; and indeed it
was the great treat to which he always looked forward. There was a sort
of permissible intimacy in such an attention. He guarded himself,
however, against going beyond the limits of civility--of kindly
politeness--of polite friendship; that was the precise phrase he hit on
at last. But good resolutions often come to naught because of its being
so very difficult to reckon beforehand with the involuntary and the
uncontrollable. The goodman of the house never knows at what moment the
thief will surprise him. One evening Mason had taken especial pains to
talk on only the most innocent and indifferent subjects, such as
algebra. On this theme he was the schoolmaster, and he felt particularly
secure against any expression of feeling, for _x_, _y_, and _z_ are
unknown quantities that have no emotion in them. Though Barbara was yet
in the rudiments of the study, he was trying to make her understand the
general principles involved in the discussion of the famous problem of
the lights. To make this clear he sat down once or twice on logs lying
by the roadside, and wrote some characters on her slate showing the
relation of _a_ to _b_ in any given case, while Barbara sat by and
looked over his demonstrations. But in spite of these delays, they got
to the fence before he had finished, and the rest was postponed for
another time. It didn't matter so much about the lights after all,
whether they were near together or far apart; it does not matter to
lights, but there _are_ flames much affected by proximity. As Mason
helped Barbara down from the fence, his passion, by some sudden assault,
got the better of his prudence, and looking intently into the eyes
shaded by the sun-bonnet, he came out with:
"It's all the world to a fellow like me to have such a scholar as you
are, Barbara."
The words were mild enough; but his eager manner and his air of
confidence, as he stood in front of her sun-bonnet and spoke, with his
face flushed, and in a low and unsteady voice, made his speech a half
confession. Startled at this sudden downfall of his resolution, he got
back over the fence and went straight away, without giving her a chance
to say anything; without so much as uttering a civil good-bye. The
precipitation of his retreat only served to lend the greater
significance to his unpremeditated speech.
Mrs. Grayson complained that there was "no sense in a girl's studyin'
algebra, an' tryin' to know more 'n many a good schoolmaster ever knowed
when I was a girl. Ever since Barbary's been at that new-fangled study,
it's seemed like as if she'd somehow'r nuther gone deranged. She'll say
supper's ready when they ain't knife nur fork on the table; an' she's
everlastin'ly losin' her knittin'-needles an' puttin' her thimble where
she can't find it, or mislayin' her sun-bonnet. Ef her head was loose,
she'd be shore to leave that around somewheres, liker'n not."
If Hiram Mason's half-involuntary love-making had not brought Barbara
unmeasured pleasure she would not have been the normal young woman that
she was. He filled all her ideals, and went beyond the highest standard
she had set up before she knew him. She was not the kind of a girl that
one meets nowadays; at least, that one meets nowadays in novels. She did
not have a lot of perfectly needless and inconceivably fine-spun
conscientious scruples to prevent the course of her fortune from running
smoothly. She did find in herself a drawing back from the future which
Mason's partiality had brought within the range of her vision. But her
scruple was only one of pride; she exaggerated the superiority of an
educated family, such as she conceived his to be, and she reflected that
the Graysons were simple country people. She felt in herself that she
could never endure the mortification she would feel, as Hiram's wife, if
the Masons should look down on her good but unlettered mother, and say
or feel that Hiram had "married below him." If, now, Tom should come to
something, the equation would be made good.
But the very day after Mason had spoken so warmly of the comfort he
found in such a pupil was that disagreeable Saturday on which Tom had
come home plucked in gambling, to ask for money enough to pay the debt
he had incurred in redeeming his clothes. Was it any wonder that Barbara
spoke to him with severity when she found her cherished vision becoming
an intangible illusion? Tom would make no career at all at this rate;
and to yield to Hiram Mason's wooing would now be to bring to him, not
only the drawback of a family of humble breeding and slender education,
but the disgrace of a rash, unsteady, and unsuccessful brother, whose
adventures with gamblers would seem particularly disreputable to a
minister's family. There was no good in thinking about it any more. Her
pride could never bear to be "looked down on" by the family of her
husband. It would be better to give it up at once--unless--she clung to
this possibility--unless Tom should turn out right after all. The
necessity for surrendering so much imminent happiness did not surprise
her. She had always had to forego, and no prospect of happiness could
seem quite possible of realization to an imagination accustomed to
contemplate a future of self-denial. None the less, the disappointment
was most acute, for she must even give up the school, and try, by
spinning yarn, by knitting stockings, and by weaving jeans and linsey,
to make up the money taken out of their little fund by Tom's
recklessness.
On the next Monday, and the days following, she staid at home without
sending any word to the schoolmaster. She held to a lurking hope that
Tom's affairs might mend, and she be able, by some good luck, to resume
her attendance on the school for a part of the remainder of the quarter.
But when on Wednesday Tom's haggard face appeared at the door, and she
read in it that all her schemes for him had miscarried, she knew that
she must give up dreaming dreams which seemed too good to be innocent.
There was nothing for her but to give herself to doing what could be
done for Tom. It was lucky that the poor fellow did not suspect what it
cost her to put a smooth face on his disasters.
IX
BY THE LOOM
On Monday, Mason saw with regret that Barbara was not at school. On
Tuesday he felt solicitous, and would have made inquiry if it had not
been for an impulse of secretiveness. By Wednesday he began to fear that
his words spoken to her at the meadow fence had something to do with her
absence. He questioned the past. He could not remember that she had ever
repelled his attentions, or that she had seemed displeased when he had
spoken his fervent and unpremeditated words. Aware that his bearing
toward Barbara had attracted the observation of the school, he did not
summon courage to ask about her until Thursday. Then when the voluble
Mely McCord came to him before the beginning of the afternoon session,
to ask how she should proceed to divide 130 by 9, he inquired if Barbara
was ill.
"No, I don't 'low she's sick," responded Mely. "I sh'd 'a' thought she'd
tole you, 'f anybody, what't wuz kep' 'er"; and Mely laughed a malicious
little snicker, which revealed her belief that the master was in
confidential relations with his algebra scholar. "She thinks the
worl'n'all of the school an' the master." Mely gasped a little as she
ventured this thrust, and quickly added, "An' of algebray--she's _that_
fond of algebray; but I sh'd thought she'd 'a' tole _you_ what kep' 'er,
ur'a' sen' choo word. But I 'low it's got sumpin' to do weth the trouble
in the family."
Mely made what the old schoolmasters called a "full stop" at this point,
as though she considered it certain that Mason would know all about
Barbara's affairs.
"Trouble? What trouble?" asked the master.
"W'y, I 'low'd you'd 'a' knowed," said the teasing creature, shaking her
rusty ringlets, with a fluttering, half-suppressed amusement at the
anxiety she had awakened in Mason's mind. "Hain' choo h-yeard about her
brother?"
"No; which brother? The one that's in Moscow?"
"W'y, lawsy, don'choo know't she hain't got nary nuther one? The res' 's
all dead an' buried long ago. Her brother Tom lost 'is sitooation along
of gamblin' an' the like. They say he lost the boots offviz feet an' the
coat offviz back." Here Mely had to give vent to her feelings in a
hearty giggle; Tom's losses seemed to her a joke of the best, and all
the better that the master took it so seriously. "I 'low it's cut
Barb'ry up more'n a little. She sot sech store by Tom. An' he _is_
smart, the _smartest_ feller you'd find fer books an' the like. But
what's the use a-bein' so smart an' then bein' sech a simple into the
bargain? _I_ say."
Mason did not like to ask further questions about Barbara's family
affairs. He could hardly bear to hear Mely canvass them in this
unsympathetic way. But there was one more inquiry that he made about
Tom.
"Does he drink?"
"Mighty leetle. I 'xpect he takes a drop ur two now an' then, jest fer
company's sake when he's a-cavortin' 'roun' weth the boys. But I 'low he
hain't got no rale hankerin' fer the critter, an' he's that fond of
Barb'ry 'n' 'is mother, an' they're so sot on 'im, that he would n'
noways like to git reg'lar drunk like. But he's always a-gittin' into a
bad crowd, an' tryin' some deviltry'r nuther; out uv one scrape an' into
t'other, kind-uh keerless like; head up an' never ketchin' sight 'v a
stump tell he's fell over it, kerthump, head over heels. His uncle's
been a-schoolin' 'im, an' lately he's gone 'n' put 'im weth Squire
Blackman to learn to be a lawyer; but now he's up 'n' sent him home fer
a bad bargain. Ut's no go't the law, an' he won't never stan' a farm,
yeh know. Too high-sperrited."
Possessed of a share of Mely McCord's stock of information about
Barbara's troubles, Hiram Mason saw that his resolution against calling
on his pupil at her own house would have to go the way of most of his
other resolutions on this subject. He set himself to find arguments
against keeping this one, but he was perfectly aware, all the time, that
his going to the Graysons' would not depend on reasons at all. He
reflected, however, that Barbara's trouble was a new and unforeseen
condition. Besides, his regulative resolutions had been so far strained
already that they were not worth the keeping. It is often thus in our
dealings with ourselves; we argue from defection to indulgence.
Mely McCord felt sure of having the master's company after school as far
as she had to go on the road leading to the Graysons'. But he went
another way to Pearson's, where he was boarding out the proportion due
for three pupils. Mrs. Pearson had intermitted the usual diet of
corn-dodgers, and had baked a skilletful of hot biscuits, in honor of
the master; she was a little piqued that he should absorb them, as he
did, in a perfectly heartless way, and she even apologized for them,
asserting that they were not so good as usual, in the vain hope that the
master would wake up and contradict her. As soon as the early supper was
over Hiram left the house, without saying anything of his destination.
He took a "short cut" across a small prairie, then through the woods,
and across Butt's corn-field, until he came out on the road near the
place at which he had several times helped Barbara over the fence. By
her path through the meadow he reached the house just as the summer
twilight was making the vault of the sky seem deeper and mellowing all
the tones in the landscape. In that walk Mason's mind had completely
changed front. Why should he try to maintain a fast-and-loose relation
with Barbara? She was in need of his present sympathy and help. Impulses
in his nature, the strength of which he had never suspected, were
beating against the feeble barriers he had raised. Of what use was this
battle, which might keep him miserable awhile longer, but which could
end in but one way? As he walked through the narrow meadow path, in the
middle of which the heavy overhanging heads of timothy grass, now ready
for the scythe, touched one another, so that his legs brushed them aside
at every step, he cast away the last tatters of his old resolves. The
dams were down; the current might flow whither it listed. He would have
it out with Barbara this very evening, and end the conflict.
It is by some such only half-rational process that the most important
questions of conduct are usually decided--sometimes luckily; in other
cases, to the blighting of the whole life. Is it not rather a poor fist
of a world after all, this in which we live, where the most critical and
irrevocable decisions must be made while the inexperienced youth is
tossed with gusts of passion and blinded by traditional prejudices or
captivated by specious theories? The selection of wives and vocations,
the two capital elements in human happiness and success, is generally
guided by nothing higher than the caprice of those whose judgments are
in the gristle. Often the whole course of life of the strong,
clear-seeing man yet to come is changed forever by a boy's whim. The old
allegorists painted the young man as playing chess with the devil; but
chess is a game of skill. What the young man plays is often a child's
game of pitch and toss, cross or pile, heads or tails, for stakes of
fearful magnitude. Luckily for Hiram, as you and I know from our present
acquaintance with Barbara, nothing more disastrous than disappointment
was likely to happen to him from his inability to keep his mortifying
resolves. The abandonment of them had simplified his feelings and
brought him present relief. When he knocked on the jamb of the open
front door of the Grayson farm-house, and was invited to come in by the
mother, there was a wholeness in his feelings and purposes to which he
had been a stranger for weeks.
"Barb'ry," said Mrs. Grayson as she entered the kitchen, after giving
Hiram a chair, "here's the master come to see you. I 'low he thought you
mought be sick ur sumpin'."
Barbara sat perched on the loom-bench, with her back to the web she had
been weaving. Just now she was peeling, quartering, and coring summer
apples to dry for winter stores. She untied her apron and went from the
kitchen into the sitting-room, where Mason was looking about, as was his
habit, in a quizzical, half-amused way. He had noted the wide stone
fire-place, the blackness of whose interior was hidden by the bushy
asparagus tops which filled it, and the wooden clock on the unpainted
mantel-piece, which had a print of the death-bed of George Washington
impaneled in its door. A stairway winding up in one corner gave
picturesqueness to the room; diagonally across from this was a high post
bed; there were some shuck-bottom chairs, a splint-bottom rocking-chair,
and a bureau with a looking-glass on top. The floor was covered with a
new rag-carpet, and the comfortable, home-like sentiment excited in
Hiram's mind by the general aspect of the room was enhanced by a hearth
cricket, which, in one of the crevices of the uneven flag-stones, was
already emitting little vibrant snatches like the black fiddler that he
was, tuning up for an evening performance.
The sight of Mason dissipated for the moment the clouds that darkened
Barbara's thoughts; she saw blue sky for the first time since Tom's
first return. It was a pleased and untroubled face that met his gaze
when she extended her hand to him.
"Howdy, Mr. Mason!"
Mason fixed his eyes on her in his odd fashion, half turning his head
aside, and regarding her diagonally.
"Well, Barbara, you're the lost sheep," was his greeting. "I was afraid
you wouldn't come back to the flock if I didn't come into the wilderness
and look you up."
"There's been such a lot of things to do this week," she answered
hurriedly, "I didn't know how to get time to go to school."
This was truthful, but it was far from being frank, and it was not on
these terms that Mason wished to meet her. His first thought was to put
her more at ease.
"Can't we sit out on the porch?" he said; "I'm warm with walking." And
he lifted two of the chairs and carried them to the covered porch. There
would soon be no light outside but what came from the night sky, and
what a dim candle in the sitting-room, when it should be lighted, might
manage to spare through the open door. Hiram had a notion that in this
obscurity he could coax Barbara out of the diplomatic mood into the
plain indicative. But before they had sat down he had changed his plan.
"Hold on," he said, more to himself than to her; and added, "What were
you doing when I came?"
"Only peeling some apples to dry."
"Let me help you; we'll have an apple-peeling all to ourselves."
"No," said Barbara, hesitatingly; but Mason went through the
sitting-room and, opening the kitchen door, thrust his head through and
said:
"Mayn't I sit out there and help Barbara peel apples, Mrs. Grayson?"
"You may do what you like, Mr. Mason," said the old lady, pleased with
his familiarity; "but peelin' apples ain't jest the kind of work to set
a schoolmaster at."
"Schoolmasters a'n't all of them so good for nothing as you think. Come
on, Barbara, a little apple-peeling will make it seem like home to me;
and this living 'round in other people's houses has made me homesick."
Barbara came out and took her old place on the loom-bench, beside the
great three-peck basket of yellow apples. Her seat raised her
considerably higher than Mason, who occupied a low chair. In front of
Barbara was another chair, on which sat a pan to hold the quarters of
apples when prepared for drying; on one of the rungs of this Barbara
supported her feet. The candle which Mrs. Grayson lighted shed a dim
yellow light from one end of the high smoke-blackened mantel-shelf,
which extended across the chimney above the cavernous kitchen
fire-place. The joists of the loft were of heavy logs, and these, and
the boards which overlaid them, and all the woodwork about this
kitchen, were softened and sombered by the smoke that had escaped from
the great, rude chimney; for the kitchen was the original log-cabin
built when Tom's father, fresh from Maryland, had first settled on the
new farm; the rest of the house had grown from this kernel.
The mother, who had not dreamed of any relation between Barbara and
Hiram Mason more friendly than that of master and pupil, was a little
surprised at the apparently advanced stage of their acquaintance; but
she liked it, because it showed that the schoolmaster was not "stuck
up," and that he understood that "our Barb'ry" was no common girl. Tom
looked in at the open outside door of the kitchen after a while, and was
pleased. "Barb deserved a nice beau if ever anybody did," he reflected,
and it might keep her from feeling so bad over his own failures. Not
wishing to intrude, and wearied to exhaustion with his first day of
farm-work since his return, he went around to the front door and through
the sitting-room upstairs to bed. When the mother had finished "putting
things to rights" she went into the sitting-room, and the apple-peelers
were left with only the loom, the reel, and the winding-blades for
witnesses.
They talked of school, of their studies, and of many other things until
the great basket of apples began to grow empty while the basket of
parings and corings was full. The pan of apple-quarters having
overflowed had been replaced by a pail, which was also nearly full,
when, after a playful scuffle of hands in the basket, Hiram secured the
last apple and peeled it. Then laying down his knife, he asked:
"You'll be back at school next week?"
Barbara had been dreading this inquiry. She wished Mason had not asked
it. She had heartily enjoyed his society while they talked of things
indifferent, but the question brought her suddenly and painfully back
into the region of her disappointment and perplexities.
"I'm afraid I can't come any more. Things haven't gone right with us."
The wide spaces between her words indicated to her companion the effort
it cost to allude to her affairs.
Mason was more than ever puzzled. By what means could he establish such
a ground of confidence between them as would enable him to enter into
her difficulties and give her, at the least, the help of his sympathy
and counsel? There seemed no way so good as that by direct approach.
"Barbara," he said, drawing his chair nearer to the loom-bench and
leaning forward toward her, "won't you please tell me about your
affairs, if--if you can do it? I don't want to intrude, but why can't
you let me be your best friend and--help you if I can?"
This speech had a different effect from what Mason had intended.
Barbara's pride resented an offer of help from him. Of all things, she
did not wish to be pitied by the man she was beginning to love. He would
always think of her as lower than himself, and she had too much pride
to relish anything like the role of Cophetua's beggar maid.
"I can't do it, Mr. Mason; there's nothing anybody can do." She spoke
with her eyes downcast. Having ventured so much and gained nothing,
Mason leaned back in his chair and turned his head about to what a
photographer would call a "three-quarters position," and looked at
Barbara from under his brows without saying anything more. He was like a
pilot waiting for the fog to lift. This silent regard made Barbara
uneasy. She could not help feeling a certain appreciation of his desire
to help her, however disagreeable it might be to her feelings. Perhaps
she was wrong to repel his confidence so abruptly.
"I suppose you know about poor Tom?" she said, making so much concession
to his kindness, but half swallowing the rapidly spoken words.
"Yes," said Hiram; "I heard he had got into a scrape such as many a
bright boy gets into. A village like Moscow is a hard place for a boy
raised in the country. But he'll pull out of that."
It lifted a weight from Barbara's mind that Mason did not take a too
serious view of Tom. She wished, however, that he would not look at her
so long in that askance fashion.
"Did the trouble cost you much money?" he ventured to inquire after a
while.
[Illustration: BARBARA AND HIRAM BY THE LOOM.]
"Well, no, not much for some folks, but a good deal for us; we're rather
poor, you know." There is a pride that conceals poverty; there is a
greater pride that makes haste to declare it, feeling that only hidden
poverty is shameful. "You know father was a smart man in some ways,"
Barbara continued, "but he hadn't any knack. He lost most of his money
before he came to Illinois; and then when he got here he made the
mistake, that so many made, of settling in the timber, though very
little of the prairie had been taken up yet. If he hadn't been afraid of
the winters on the prairie, we might have been pretty well off; but it's
been a hard struggle opening a farm in the woods. Then we have had
nothing but misfortune. My father died of a congestive chill, and then
my three brothers and my sister died, and Tom and I are all that's left
to mother. And there are doctor's bills to pay yet, and a little debt on
the farm."
"Yes, yes," said Hiram, wounded in thinking of the pain he was giving
Barbara in forcing her to speak thus frankly of the family troubles. "I
know what it is. Poverty and I are old acquaintances; regular old
cronies. She's going to stand by my side till I graduate, anyhow; but as
I have known her ever since I was born, I can afford to laugh in her
face. There's nothing like being used to a thing."
Barbara made no reply to this. Mason sat and looked at her awhile in
silence. There was no good in trying to help her on his present footing.
He leaned forward, resting his elbow on the loom-bench by her side.
"Look here, Barbara," he said, with abrupt decision, "let's, you and me,
go in partnership with our poverty some day, and see what'll come of
it. I suppose, so far as money is concerned, the equations would be
about equal without the trouble of figuring it out."
Barbara looked at her hands in her lap with her eyes out of focus, and
made no reply. After a while Hiram spoke again.
"Did I--make you mad, Barbara?" He used the word "mad" in the sense
attached to it in that interior country, meaning angry.
"No, not mad," said Barbara. "Not that--but--I don't know what to say. I
don't believe what you propose can ever be."