DAISY'S HOME COMING.
"Well, Jim," Daisy, neatly hatted and furred, came down the steps of the
passenger coach to Toddburn's icy station platform, set down what Ware
called her "kit-bag", reached over a matter-of-fact way and, arresting
the hesitating hand of Jim Burns, first shook it, and then, with a
recrudescence of her old "free-actin'" self, punched him lightly in the
ribs with a gloved knuckle; "how's everything? Come in by yourself?"
"Me an' the team," responded Jim Burns, with an effort at levity, "three
of us altogether. How's _your_self?"
"Oh, not too bad," Daisy, answering in the old phrase, caught up her
"kit-bag" and stepped briskly along beside her escort; "what did you
bring, Jim--the jumper?"
"What did you think I was a-goin' to bring," retorted her former
playfellow, "the high-box wagon?"
They reached the end of the station platform. Down on the snow
alongside, that homely but comfortable vehicle called a "jumper", full
of warm-looking blankets, topped with the gray goatskin robe, slid to
and fro as Prince the colt, secured to the hitching-ring by his
halter-rope, rocked spiritedly from foot to foot and pawed the snow up
in clouds.
"Whoa, you!" directed Jim Burns, as he untied the haltershank. Daisy
pushed her grip under the seat, looked at the blankets, and then looked
at Burns.
"What have you got all these things for?" she said.
"Oh, I thought you'd be a soft city-bug by now," said Jim Burns, as he
came around with the reins in his hand, "and would want every rug I
could find. Jump in, an' we'll drive around to the Toddburn House.
Dinner's on."
The sleigh, at a trot, crossed toward the main street, half-way down
which was the Toddburn hotel, with its stable just beyond.
"Where's that Beatty?" said Jim Burns, as the two heads rocked together
to the plunging of the "jumper".
"Beatty?" Daisy had been looking half-dreamily around her at the
familiar little frame houses and black-lettered store-fronts, "oh--him!
You better ask somebody that knows, Jimmy."
"I'm going to break his neck," said Jim Burns.
"You'd be wasting your time, Jim," Daisy returned, half-absently, as the
sleigh pulled up in front of the Toddburn House. "Don't be long putting
the horses away. I'll go on into the dining-room and order your dinner
too. I know what you like. Turnips, isn't it?"
"Turnips!" whooped Jim Burns; "say, if we was out where nobody was
lookin', I'd wash your face in the snow for that, Miss!"
"You'd try to, you mean," Daisy flung back, as she ran virilely up the
steps to the hotel veranda; "hurry in, Jim."
Daisy had left her hat and furs in the "ladies' parlor" upstairs and was
just coming out of the door of that apartment, when a diffident but
somewhat sweet voice said, "Hello, Daisy."
Spinning about in her vigorous way, Daisy Ware looked into the mild blue
eyes of a girl who had just come out of a room across the hall. In the
girl's arms was a tiny baby.
"Why, Pearlie Brodie!"
"Not Pearlie Brodie now," said the fair-haired girl who had been a
waitress in the Toddburn House when Mr. Frederick Beatty used to come
there for his meals; "Pearlie Halliday now. Ed's buying here for the
Northern Elevator Company, and we stay at the hotel."
She looked shyly down at the baby, and then added, giving the confidence
of one girl to another, "Ed says the baby here will get used just the
same as one of his own, and that if he ever hears of anybody saying a
word to me about it, he'll knock their heads off. We were married just
a little while after you went away."
"What did Ed think about me going off with Freddy?" said Daisy, coloring
up a little.
"Oh, he just said, 'Yon fellow would have to be an early riser to get
ahead of Daise Nixon. She'll watch herself, an' don't you forget it.' I
wish Ed thought as much of me as he does of you, Daisy."
"Well, you've got him, haven't you," said Daisy, "what more do you want,
Pearlie? You know right well Ed Halliday could have had any other girl
in town, if he'd wanted them. If he married you, that's a sign he likes
you best."
"I thought maybe he'd just took pity on me, like," said the other girl,
a little sadly, "Ed, he's so good-hearted, you see."
"Aw, go on with you," exclaimed Daisy; "no fellow's going to be
'good-hearted' enough to marry one girl, if there's another he likes
better. He'd have given you a lot of talking that would have done you no
good, and a lot of advice you didn't need; but he'd never have married
you. Come on down to dinner. Let me carry the baby: what are you going
to call him, Pearlie--or is it a him?"
"I--I'd like to call him 'Frederick'," said Pearlie Halliday, her eyes
dreamily on the infant, "but of course I'll call him 'Ed'. There can't
be any Freddies in our family now, can there."
"I should hope not," Daisy said, kissing the baby; "I guess Ed likes you
better than you do him, after all, Pearlie. But never mind. You've got a
_man_. That's more than you'd've had if you'd married Fred."
Jim Burns did not like it much when, returning from putting the horses
away, he found a third party at the table he had expected to have with
Daisy. But, upon reflecting that there could be no third party on the
long ten-mile drive out to the Nixon farm, he swallowed his chagrin and
approached the chair next Daisy with a sociable grin.
In the country, where faith is deep, the spirit of brotherhood strong,
and respectability a thing that must be through-and-through, the
dishonest man or the loose woman soon "gets to be known" and to be
treated, quite regardless of fortune or social position, for what he or
she is. But the person so "down" only stays down because of his (or her)
own fault; for the country--unlike the city--is quick to see and ready
to believe in the desire of an erring neighbor to return to clean and
honest ways. When Pearlie Brodie married Ed Halliday, she shut up her
critics. When popular, though somewhat shiftless, Ed Halliday married
Pearlie Brodie, a prominent Toddburn grain-grower, who had never taken
any notice of Ed before, got him the job in the elevator.
"You'll be in a position o' trust, Ed," this wealthy patron had
remarked; but--he slapped Ed on the shoulder--"a man that's helped that
poor girl out the way you've done, deserves a show, an' he's a-goin' to
get it. Honesty and straight livin's goin' to be the best policy, here
in Canaday, as long as I have a vote. Go to it, now, boy--an' watch them
grain checks."
Jim Burns was western-bred. Dangling his watch-guard in front of the
infant--who regarded the utensil without interest and its owner somewhat
surlily--he said, ignoring Daisy for the moment:
"We-ell, Pearlie. How's Ed a-comin' up? He's a middlin' good judge of
steers, but I never heard of him knowin' much about grain."
"You didn't, eh," returned Pearlie Halliday, who had gone to school with
Jim; "I s'pose you think you've heard of everything, Jimmy Burns. You
seem to know a whole lot, for a boy that quit school before he was
through the Third Reader."
"I done wrong, for to set in with such sassy company," was Jim's rather
feeble retort, as the meat and potatoes arrived and put an end to
conversation.
The jumper, on its bouncing but exhilarating way out to the Nixon farm,
had travelled three miles of the distance before Daisy's rapid-fire of
tricks and talk gave Jim Burns a chance to put the question that lay
nearest his heart:
"What did you go an' skedaddle off like that for, and now come back
married, Daise? You know what I said to you, that day you was fixin' up
my finger after I cut it on the hay-knife. Don't you mind of that? Eh,
Daise?"
"Of course I remember it," Daisy looked straight at her questioner, the
corners of her eyes twinkling, "I was always throwing out hints, but you
were too slow to take them, Jim. A person can't wait forever. I'd have
been grayheaded if I'd had to wait till you married me."
"W-what!" Jim Burns pushed his "dogskin" cap back, so he could stare at
her better, "what's that you're sayin' to me?"
"I don't chew my cabbage twice," Daisy retorted, dimpling with her
effort to keep a straight face.
The situation was beyond Jim Burns' power of tongue. He stared at her
dumbly, until his eyes commenced to water; then he threw out an arm and
made the whip sing savagely but harmlessly over the backs of the team.
"Get-epp, yous sons-of-mooses, get _epp_!" he half-yodled, "or I'll skin
you alive!"
The horses obligingly, but without any manifestation of alarm,
quickened their stride for perhaps ten paces. Then they looked at each
other--seemed mutually to smile--and dropped easily back to their normal
trotting-gait. In the interval, Daisy had slipped a piece of ice off the
dash-board of the "jumper" down the back of Jim Burns' neck.
It was a different day from that upon which John Nixon, his wife, and
Ware had driven out of Toddburn. Overhead, there was neither wind nor
cloud. The wonderful sky stretched blue and bright from the black and
stark groves on the east to the long expanse of snow-waves that planed
away treeless to westward, meeting in a rippling line the point where
earth and firmament parted on their clean, splendid and vast ways.
Daisy presently ceased from play and, under the sway of a wave of
recollection, leaned back and looked about her. The sundance of her
spirits, that in the old days had made summer of every season, had not
been able to thaw the frost of surliness about the Nixon home. Not then;
but now, it seemed, things were different. Ever since that understanding
which had been arrived at in the Ware library, between Sir William and
John Nixon, the farmer seemed to have opened out, changed--ratchetted
back, as it were, to play over again his tune of life with a merrier
lilt. The young wife had often sensed vaguely the power which proceeded
from this friendly philosophy which was at the root of, and gave point
and purpose to, all her husband's thoughts, words and actions; but the
change in her fosterfather gave her the first striking and definite
illustration of its effect.
"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of
these is charity."