THE COMING OF THE MOTHER.
Hot July had passed, and the sun of August had shaded to the blandness
of near-September, when Daisy Ware climbed into her own buggy, behind
her own smart bronco, and driving out through the gate of her own farm,
took bowlingly the ruts of the Toddburn trail on her way to meet Lady
Frances Ware's train.
For half a mile, the road led past Sir William's fields, in which the
wheat was now its full ripe harvest yellow. Around one of these fields,
a binder hummed, and the shirt-sleeved man on the seat of it flung a
kiss to Daisy from afar. That shirt-sleeved man was Sir William Ware,
Baronet. The man who was stooking behind the binder also lifted his hand
to his lips, though in _his_ case the salute was not a kiss but a
friendly hail; for the stooker was he who had been yodling, artificial,
"city-bug"-imitating Dexie Coleman. He had callouses on his palms now
that it would be hard to get through with a chisel, and on each arm a
biceps that would burst an iron ring.
Daisy herself was changed in some indefinable way. Her mouth was
softened, her eyes had become forward-looking and dreamy, her color
more delicate. Her attitude was not now tensed, aggressive, a-jump with
schoolgirlish spirit; but gentle, relaxed, restful. One could not on
this day imagine her with the horsewhip of punishment in her hand.
There were no pools on the Toddburn highway to impede this August drive.
The breath of autumn was soft in the air, and the summer's work of the
sun was over. The ruts of the trail were cushioned with soft dust, the
uplands ripe green, the trees full-sapped and thriving, every twig
deciduously ready for the going of the leaves. The prairie plants had
long ago sent the last of their pollen abroad by wind and voyaging bee.
There were red berries on the rose-bushes, and white on the wolf-willow.
The house of the world was swept and garnished for the fall.
The thoughts of the young woman who sat, with that quiescent and settled
look in her eyes, on the seat of the tranquilly-travelling buggy, moved
to her beginning of life and ratchetted slowly up the years to the now;
and it came to Daisy Ware, as it has come to many another who thinks
more abstrusely, that consummated marriage is, and properly, the climax
of womanhood. Every growing thing about her whispered it to-day. The
message received definiteness and point as there blew across her lap a
fragment of fertile fluff that had in its heyday and its summer
nodding-time been part of a maiden dandelion-blossom.
In the light of this flash of truth from exemplary Nature, the young
wife saw in its true light the "board and lodging" marriage in which she
might have continued unawakened--continued, perhaps, until she was old
and blase and "set" and sterile--if it had not been for the potent
something, salutarily born, both to her and to her husband, by the airs
that move among the hills and groves of God. She saw why a "little chum"
is not a wife.
Lady Frances had been held, partly by her years and partly by the
prejudices which fixedly inhabit the old, from exploring far this
northwest of her son's adoption. Among people not socially en rapport
with her, she had long ago decided she was too advanced in years to
commence to mingle. She had found few enough intimates in the cities of
this colonial dominion; she anticipated there would be in the country no
"nice people" at all.
She had at last consented to come out to the farm, less because she had
been assured that now suitable and comfortable accommodation awaited
her, than because her heart contained a vague hunger. When she had
started on her journey, she had thought it was her son she wanted to
see. But now, as she sat reflectively in the coach that--after
travelling what had seemed to her an interminable stretch of
country--was at last approaching the place Toddburn, Lady Frances Ware
discovered that the one she most looked forward to meeting was, not her
son, but her young daughter-in-law.
This was not wholly because of regard for Daisy herself--although the
young wife, with her frank and clean girlishness, had won the warmest
possible place in the old lady's affections--but because Daisy was
linked with a hope and a dream that now abode daily with the mother of
the last male of the ancient lineage of Ware.
Daisy had, by letting the bronco take its own gait, occupied a little
too much time on the trip to the village--a thing her alert and
practical former self would never have done--and, as she rose to the
crest of the last hill outside Toddburn, she saw the passenger train
just leaving the station, from which she was still separated by about
half a mile. This meant that Lady Frances, if she had come--which was
certain, for she was always punctual--was waiting alone at the little
depot. Daisy sat up straight, rousing the little bronco to its best
speed with voice and driving-reins.
"My dear, it's quite immaterial," was the response of the old
gentlewoman to her apology, as the two embraced--not in the little depot
waiting-room, but out on the end of the platform, where Daisy had found
Lady Frances, standing by her luggage and looking about her. The old
lady had on a simple black travelling dress and a light wrap, rather
Victorian in pattern. Neither glasses nor any substitute were in view.
Lady Frances could see "her way about" quite easily without them, and
never carried anything as a concession to mode, or for pose or show.
"I have been enjoying myself immensely during the interval," she said,
as the two proceeded to the sloping end of the platform, at the foot of
which stood the buggy; "this is an enormous country--simply enormous, my
dear. No, you needn't help me in."
Putting one gloved hand on the brace of the buggy-top, Lady Frances,
from the slight eminence of the platform-end, reached handily the iron
step of the buggy and raised herself halely to the cushioned seat.
"No, no, child--I should much prefer to wait till we are home--that is
to say, unless you are hungry," she said, as Daisy started the pony in
the direction of the Toddburn House.
"I'm not hungry, Mother. Billy said----"
"Billy?" Lady Frances made the interruption in a tone of pleasant
interrogation.
"Will," Daisy substituted, with a little blush (Lady Frances, of course,
could not know that she was a real wife now), "said that he thought you
would rather lunch at home, so I had a little something just before I
left."
"Billy--Billy," Lady Frances, in mental enquiry, repeated the nickname,
which had at first grated her a bit. Then her heart gave a great leap.
She turned and looked closely at Daisy. One glance at the softened eyes,
the delicate-hued and somewhat pale cheeks, the dreamy lips, the relaxed
and restful lines of neck and bosom--and the old gentlewoman and mother,
warmth of joy flooding all her arteries, reached out her hand, covered
Daisy's with it, and held the young girl's fingers in a close and long
caress.
"My darling, my darling!" she murmured, with a thrilling tenderness,
"oh, we _will_ have to take such care of you. Does William know?"
Daisy answered with her frank and matter-of-fact affirmative nod.
The drive home was a very quiet one. Daisy's new habit of
forward-looking occupied her. Lady Frances Ware was wrapped in an
ecstasy of that kind and depth which one does not want to break or to
have broken by the paltry sound of the spoken word.