WHY?
Jim Burns thought he had never seen anything more girlishly attractive
than his former playmate Daisy, as she romped over the honeycombed March
drifts with Rover, the patriarchal but galvanized Nixon collie. An old
wool cap of her mother's was perched on the side of her head; her hair
was gathered in a careless braid behind; her skirt was of the shortest;
her face had a schoolgirl color and a schoolgirl dance.
"Say, why d'n you wait for about ten years more anyway before you got
married up, Daise?"
Daisy, as her chase of Rover brought her close, stopped and regarded her
questioner teasingly. Rover waited, wagging from neck to tail like a
young pup.
"I suppose you mean that you'd have been about ready to say something
then, eh?" she remarked, putting her head on one side.
"No," said Jim Burns, a little shortly; "what I mean is, that you ought
to be goin' to school instead of bein' married."
"Would you object to me being married, if I was married to you?" was
Daisy's response, as she tweaked Rover's tail.
"Say, Daise," Jim Burns blurted out headlong a query he had carried
around in his brain for some days, "why did you marry that old fellow?
Wasn't there no young ones handy? I know you didn't marry him for his
money: you ain't that kind. I can't figure the thing out nohow, Daise."
Daisy Ware's eyes, as she looked at her questioner silently for a
moment, did not see him. Neither did they see the farm barn, the
straw-bucks in the distance, the thawing ice at the cattle-trough, the
drifts reduced to liquefying ice by the spring sun. For the girl was
back in a massive ugly upstairs hall, with broom and dustpan, facing the
son of a pile-driving millionaire who was trying to, after the pattern
of his parent, "put her where she belonged;" in her memory again, as
there had been on that occasion, a certain man equal in fortune but very
different otherwise, who had in spite of his apparent fifty or so years,
made her a boyish and eager proposal of marriage.
"Because," Daisy, this picture out of the past in her mind, answered Jim
Burns unconsciously, by what was really a sentence thought aloud, "I
wanted to show some people where they got off at."
Jim Burns' legs went numb at the vigor with which she said this. His
hands opened loosely, and his pitchfork slid out of them.
"Well," he gulped, presently, "you needn't have went and did a trick
like that. Why couldn't you have given me a hint, Daise?"
At this, Daisy came out of her reverie and stared.
"Given you a hint?" she repeated, "wha--o-oh I see. Well, that's what
you get by being slow, Mr. Man. See!"
She caught Rover's tail, and raced away with him over the big drift that
ran up to the top of the snow-flattened haystack. Jim Burns took off his
hat and rubbed the back of his head till it tingled.
"Can't make head or tail of that'n," he said finally, replacing the
weathered "dogskin" cap; "But I might ast _him_. Say--I _will_ ast him!
I b'en a kind of a brother to the girl, and I got a right to know, ain't
I?"
The chance to ask Ware, who had gone for a stroll about the farm with
Nixon, did not present itself till toward evening. Then Burns, returning
with the horse from the trough, met Sir William, thoughtfully inspecting
the architecture of an old log wing of the stable.
"Clever work, that dovetailing, Burns," Ware said casually; then, as he
noted that Jim Burns had halted and fixed him with a glance conveying
what seemed to be determination, the baronet, said, briskly,
"Well, old chap? What is it?"
"I got something to say to you, sir," Jim Burns responded, setting his
feet a little apart and squaring his shoulders.
"Say on," Ware invited, dropping his hands in his pockets, and regarding
his catechist pleasantly.
"It's about Daise," Jim Burns went on, "I've knew her since she was a
kid. We went to school together, and we was pretty good chums them days,
and in fact right up to the time she skinned out with yon Beatty. I was
figurin' I'd marry her some time (she claims I never said nothin', but I
wouldn't have got no satisfaction anyway, if I _had_ ast her, which I
guess after all I didn't, but she might have knew, for I didn't try to
cover it up none). Well, now she comes back married up to you. O'
course, the girl's her own boss, I know that. But--if you don't like me
talkin' to you this way, sir, you'll have for to lump it; I never was
one to hold back anything I got to say, not for no man--there seems to
me to be somethin' queer, mighty queer, about the way you an' her yips
along. You go out with Jack for a walk, or for a load o' hay, or off to
town; and she hurrays around with the dog or me. Yous never seem to be
together, nor neither one of you to care one rip what the other's doin'.
And--now here's the place where maybe there's an apology comin' to you
for what I'm going to say, so I'm going to apologise first, and then go
ahead--"
"Go on," said Sir William, gravely.
"I been brought up out here in the country," Jim Burns continued, a
little more slowly, "and I don't know what they do in town, or over
there where you come from; but out in this country, when two people are
married, they're married. It don't matter whether he's old and she's
young, or whether she's old and he's young. They're married, and they
act married, and they stay married, or they don't get the respect of the
settlement--and if they don't get that, they might as well be dead."
"Do go on," said Ware, his eyes alight. "I'm vastly interested, Burns. I
am, really. What is your point?"
"The point," Daisy's schoolmate pursued, stoutly, "is just this. You
sleep upstairs there, in the spare bed; and Daise, she still climbs into
her old bunk downstairs, where she slept when she was a kid. Now," Jim's
voice broke a little, "that suits me fine, for I'm sure I don't want to
think of her as a married woman, married to somebody else. But it ain't
right, and you know it ain't right. Yous two are married, and you ought
to act married. First thing you know, some neighbor woman will notice
it--one of the talky ones--and she'll put it around the whole district."
The speaker paused; cleared his throat; and went on:
"I know it ain't Daise's fault; for she was born in this country and she
knows what's right; and whatever bargain she made, she'd stick to it. So
I blame it onto you. Now, what's the matter? Ain't she good enough for
you? If you didn't intend to treat her like a wife, why did you marry
her? That's my point! I can't very well speak to Daise about it; so, as
man to man, I put it up to you."
There were a few moments of silence after Jim Burns finished speaking.
Something sincere and high in the quiet gray eyes across from him
quelled his bristling earnestness.
"Dear old chap," said Sir William, dropping his hand on the other's
shoulder, "first, don't think I wish any apology for what you have said.
Secondly, be patient. That is all I may say in words, by way of reply to
what I believe you have said in thorough sincerity: be patient, as I
myself am patient. You will see that all will be well. Now--shall we
speak of something else?"