"For thy life shall fall as a leaf, and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain."
It was late autumn. The grapes were all out, although their aroma
still filled the air, for stray bunches, super-ripened by the frost,
hung visible now upon the leafless stems where they had been concealed
by the foliage from the cutters. The late apples were all picked, and
in the orchards were great piles of new barrels ready to be filled.
Bright green fields checkered the face of the sombre countryside with
vivid squares, showing the advance of the fall-sown wheat. The
chestnut-burs had opened in the woods, and the hickory-nuts were strewn
thick beneath the trees. All the boys in Jamestown had brown-stained
fingers, from the shelling of walnuts and butternuts. The Indian corn
was being cut and bound into tent-shaped shocks, so that the fields had
the appearance of a plain, set thick with tiny wigwams. Now and then,
along the roads, a great wagon passed, piled high with apples,
windfalls and culls going to the cider mills. Their drivers went out
to Ezra Harmon's and loitered about in his big barn where the cider
press stood, and watched their apples poured into the wide hopper,
heard them grinding and groaning between the wheels, and saw their
juices drain out through the clean rye straw into the pails beneath.
People began to talk about the threshing of the grain, to bank up their
cellars, and to speak of the portents of a severe winter. The leaves
were all down. They lay a foot deep along the roads, where the maples
grew in regular avenues, and rustled, wind-blown, between the tree
trunks in the woodland. The squirrels skimmed about in their efforts
to secure their winter hoard. In the woods, great heaps of hickory-nut
hulls and emptied chestnut-burs, showed where, with their sharp teeth
and persistent paws, they had removed the superfluous covering before
storing away the nuts.
The horses were growing shaggy and the dogs' fur lengthening. In
short, winter was drawing near.
In Homer Wilson's orchard all was noise, confusion, and work. Homer
himself was packing the apples--putting in a layer of newspapers, then
carefully "laying" by hand several rows of apples, before emptying in
the pailfuls of picked fruit that were brought to him, for the bottom
of a barrel in the orchard is the top of the barrel when it is opened
by the dealers. Next in order to Homer was Sam Warner, who was heading
the barrels, the tap-tapping of his hammer ringing clear in the frosty
air, Homer shouting out directions every now and then in a sepulchral
voice from the depths of the barrel. There was a great gathering in
the orchard of the neighbors, for a fruit dealer had bought up all the
apples in Jamestown to send to England, and they were to be shipped by
the car-load upon a certain date. So, following the suggestion of the
buyer (to whom time meant money), they had agreed to help each other
with the fruit. This was not a usual custom in Jamestown; there was
too much jealousy to admit of such interchange of labor.
It was Homer Wilson's benefit this day, and both outside in the orchard
and within doors all was happy, hurrying confusion. There was nothing
remarkable about the day or the scene; but exactly a year after this,
Homer Wilson was to act in a somewhat different scene, and after he
played his part in that his neighbors recalled this day "just a year
ago." They said, "Who would have thought it?"
Bing White was in the Wilson orchard, and Si Warner, and other of their
cronies. No one ever expected Bing to work; his idleness was looked
upon with tolerant indifference, a perilous indication in this
neighborhood, where to be a hard worker and a good church-goer meant
perfection, and to fail in either grace was to be utterly lost. People
began to look at Bing White attentively now and then, and shake their
heads with ominous import, for the son and heir of the Whites was daily
becoming more elfish-looking, more evil-eyed, more mocking of speech,
more stubborn of purpose. After racing here and there over the
orchard, he climbed (not without scratched hands and torn clothes) into
the heart of a juniper tree that grew in the corner, and, hidden there,
began to make what was known among school children in Jamestown as a
"wolf-bite" upon his arm. This he did simply by baring the arm,
putting his lips to the flesh, and sucking at it until the blood showed
in red pin-points at every pore; this was a wolf-bite. There was a
thread of savagery running through these Jamestown children--hardly one
of them but had a mark of this kind upon his arm. But Bing White's
meagre arms looked hideously repulsive--like raw flesh almost--so
completely was the skin disfigured by his vampire-like amusement. The
fading marks were of an ugly unhealthy color, like a livid bruise, the
fresh ones fierily encarnadined and inflamed; for Bing pursued this
pastime to a perilous pitch.
Another custom indulged in every now and then by the boys and girls in
Jamestown was the making of "fox-bites," which meant simply the rubbing
with a moistened finger of a spot upon the back of the hand until the
skin was worn away and a spot of red flesh left; this was a
fox-bite--no cut, burn, or bruise took so long to heal, and in the
little schoolhouse there were always some of those hungry-looking
sores, attesting the perseverance and fortitude of the sufferers.
Rather grewsome pastimes these seem--sprung perhaps from some Indian
custom, witnessed by some early settler, described by him to his
breathless circle of little ones, by them to be practised in their play
and perpetuated in the mysterious manner that makes a meaningless
mummery survive as a sacred rite.
Myron Holder's grandmother had been failing during the entire summer.
She sank rapidly as the autumn advanced, her strength ebbing as the
days shortened. Myron went no more to Mrs. Deans', but stayed at home
to wait upon her grandmother. The old woman was a querulous invalid,
with no specific disease, only a gradual decline of her vitality.
Myron waited upon her untiringly, giving her every possible comfort she
could devise out of their scanty means and her scantier knowledge.
Bitter as her grandmother's tongue had been, harsh as had been her
rule, Myron yet shrunk with a sick feeling of defenselessness from the
hour when that tongue would be forever silenced, from the moment when,
that rule ceasing, she would be left rudderless.
In these days of autumn quietude, little My grew dearer and dearer to
his mother; she caught him to her in the pauses of her work, to kiss
him for a moment.
"O soft knees clinging,
O tender treadings of soft feet,
Cheeks warm with little kissings--
O child, child, what have we made each other?"
This was the translation of her heart's mute cry above her boy. Myron
Holder, denied the religion of those about her, given no other in its
place, founded for herself a new sect, and created for herself a god,
and the god was this yellow-haired child, and the worship she accorded
him was expressed in every tender tendance of her loving hand. He
chattered away to her ceaselessly when he was awake, and the echo of
his uncertain tones mingling with her grandmother's bitter words robbed
them of their sting.
Mrs. Holder sank daily. Her tongue was silent now, save for murmurs of
discontent or chiding, for her strength did not permit of much speech;
but her eyes shone balefully as they followed Myron's figure about the
room; and sometimes, when Myron bent over her, their depths were
lighted by malignant mirth, for her thoughts were turned to that little
plot in the graveyard where two tiny pine stakes stood now, marking a
new boundary.
The day the first snow fell, Mrs. Holder's mind, hitherto fixed solely
upon her sorrows and Myron's shame, began to wander. She too, like her
dead son, began to speak of England, but not so sweetly as he. Old
bits of village scandal, flashes of old spites against this one or
that, the expression of old dislikes, broke from her lips with painful
force, together with reflections upon household affairs and daily
needs, which told that she was in spirit back amid the old manners and
the old people.
One day Myron watched her fall asleep, and then crept out to the
kitchen to steal a look at the boy, who was also sleeping. She
returned in an instant, but in that time a change had come to her
grandmother's bewildered brain. She was awake again, and her eyes met
Myron's with cruel scorn, as she paused involuntarily upon the
threshold of the bedroom; it was an expression that spoke not only of
dislike, but loathing, fury, hatred. Myron would have approached to
replace the coverlets that were falling from the couch, but her
grandmother grew furious if she advanced a step.
"Out of my sight, Myron Kind!" she cried. "Out wi' ye! What? Ye'll
follow my son within his own doors, to win him? Out, you!
Go--ou--out----"
Myron retreated, seeing her grandmother was confusing her with the
memory of her mother. Thrice she tried to enter, and thrice withdrew
before the rage that seemed to shake the sick woman's frail form so
cruelly. Then, feeling she must have aid, Myron hurried to the street,
and going to the nearest house, which happened to be Mrs. Warner's,
knocked at the door.
"Will you come over?" she said, when Mrs. Warner answered her knock.
"Grandmother's out of her head; she thinks I'm my mother, and won't let
me go near her."
"Poor old woman!" said Mrs. Warner, catching at a clean white apron.
"Poor old woman! You've made her life a burding to her between you,
I'll be bound."
In a few moments they were in the cottage again, and Mrs. Warner
installed herself in the sickroom, somewhat disconcerted because Mrs.
Holder persisted in calling her "Bet," but delighted that circumstances
had brought her to the front at such a time, for Mrs. Warner was one of
the matrons of the village who, not yet attained to the elect, like
Mrs. Deans, Mrs. White and Mrs. Wilson, was yet far in advance of the
young wives in experience, and thought herself quite capable of
sustaining any responsibility.
To be present and assisting at the coming of a life or the passing of a
soul was the highest excitement and most precious pleasure these women
knew; but this was a height to be attained only after many years of
wifehood. And what novitiate of suffering experience--years,
knowledge--might fitly prepare for these mysteries! The taking up and
laying down of the burden, the beginning and the ending of the
spinning--for, from our first moments, our hands are bound to the loom;
we must weave our own webs, but Fate doles out the thread and
Circumstance dyes the fabric, not as we will, but as Destiny designs,
and Death spares no pattern, however lovely, but stops the shuttle when
our reel of thread is spun.
By what holy purification, by what fastings, by what soul-searchings
may we prepare to enter Nature's holy of holies? Surely, ere entering
the meanest hut of clay and wattles wherein life springs or withers, we
should put the shoes from off our feet.
But of all this Mrs. Warner recked nothing. It was not the spirit she
was interested in, but the body it was casting off; the gasping lips,
and not the vital breath that already almost eluded them.
Mrs. Holder sank rapidly. The women began to gather in; Mrs. Warner
maintained her place as chiefest in the synagogue, and put aside, with
judicial firmness, all hands but her own. Most of the women
congregated in the kitchen, where they eyed the scanty furniture and
whispered of Myron's hard-heartedness, for she did not weep. She was
feeling bitterly her impending loneliness and isolation, for deep down
in her heart there yet lived that marvellous tenderness for kith and
kin that takes so much to kill. Of a verity, "blood is thicker than
water." The woman dying so fast in that inner room was her
grandmother, the woman who had borne for her father what she had borne
for My. She clasped My in her arms and hid her face in his curls.
Mrs. Holder's voice came fitfully through the half-closed door to the
women outside. Mrs. Warner came to the door just as Mrs. Deans entered
the kitchen, hurrying in from the outer air, and bringing a new
excitement with her to intensify the suspense. Mrs. Warner beckoned
and whispered:
"She's speaking of hearing music and singing, now; they mostly don't
last long after that."
"They," not "we"! Oh, strange race of dying people, that are set apart
from all men by death's approach, that we never identify with
ourselves! Oh, weird world to which they go, which doubtless we shall
never enter! Oh, dreary passage they must tread, upon whose threshold
we shall never stand! Oh, awful pang of severance they must endure,
which we will never have to bear--and yet
"Fear not then, Spirit, Death's disrobing hand;
'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour;
The transient gulf--dream of a startling sleep!"
Mrs. Deans and Mrs. Warner entered the room. Mrs. Deans' experienced
eye told her how nearly time was ended for the dying woman. She turned
to the kitchen.
"You better come in, Myron," she said.
Myron, with her child in her arms, entered, fearful yet of her
grandmother denying her; but the old woman's eyes held no knowledge of
her presence now. They wandered from one to the other of the throng of
women impartially, and then as they fastened upon the child and
lightened, as eyes might do which behold long-lost ones once dear, she
held out wavering arms to the child.
"Jed, my own little lad," she said.
Myron went swiftly forward and laid My by her grandmother's side. He
nestled to her lovingly, and she muttered tender words to him, calling
him "Jed" and caressing him with fluttering fingers. He clasped his
warm arms about hers, in which the blood was already chilling, and
smilingly fell asleep, and a little later sleep came to her also.
It was the night after her grandmother's death, and Myron Holder, with
a sinking heart, had watched the form of the last visitor pass out of
the gate. The early dusk of winter enveloped the house and promised a
long, dreary night--a night of terror she was to endure alone, for the
Jamestown women had gone each to her own house and left her with her
dead and her child. Her imagination, stored with transmitted
superstitions, peopled each familiar corner with horrors. She saw in
every flickering light a death fire, in every shadow a shroud; each
breath of wind spoke of ghostly visitants, each sound seemed to herald
a light. She lit the lamp in the kitchen, and proceeded to undress My
and put him in his cradle for the night, pausing to listen between each
movement.
She had been anticipating and fearing this ordeal for days; now that it
had come upon her, she sickened at heart.
The definite darkness of night set in, and the child slept. She began
to hear soft stirrings succeeded by shuddering silences. Beset by a
thousand fears, she pursued the worst possible plan: she constrained
herself to absolute inaction, and sat--her hands clasped in her lap--an
image of fear. The silence about her gradually gave way to a babel of
weird voices, through which there suddenly sounded the muffled
pat-patting of light footsteps. As she became conscious of this
definite sound, all the imaginary murmurs died, and she found herself
in deep silence, broken only by the muffled repetition of the soft
sound that chilled her heart. This noise, which she recognized as
actually existent, stood out against the background of those imaginary
fears with frightful distinctness. All the time of fear which had
passed seemed now to have been but an interval of listening for what
had come.
At this moment, the flame of the little lamp which had been for some
time burning palely suddenly flared up--once--twice; grew for an
instant bluish, then went out, leaving her, in the acme of her terror,
in darkness. She closed her eyes and listened to the soft
sounds--coming now at intervals only, but linked each to each by fear
of the last and anticipation of the next, forming a chain that bound
her in the Place of Fear. But at last silence fell again, a silence
most horrible. She felt impelled to open her eyes, and did so, gazing
with wide lids straight into the gloom; there was nothing there. For a
moment her heart was reassured: then came the thought of that open door
behind her; slowly she turned her head. Does any one live who has not,
at one time or other, recognized that it may require, under certain
circumstances, the supremest effort of will to look behind one?
That effort Myron Holder made, but sustained the gaze but a moment;
for, gleaming from the death chamber, nay, from the very couch of
death, shone two balls of livid light. With a moan of extreme terror,
Myron slid from her chair and, catching at the boy's cradle, fell
helpless to the floor.
Homer Wilson did not stand long knocking at the cottage door: his heart
misgave him when he saw there was no light. Homer had returned from
town late that night; his mother had told him of Mrs. Holder's death.
She said no word of Myron, and Homer forebore to question. As he
passed his father's and mother's room that night, he heard his mother
close the shutters and say:
"It's a mighty spooky night. I wouldn't like to be in Myron Holder's
shoes, a-settin' death-watch all alone over a woman I had worried into
her grave."
Homer's heart stood still. Could it be possible those women had left
Myron alone? Surely not! When it was customary for five or six to go
and stay over night in the house where death was? Surely not! And
yet--"The hags!" said Homer to himself, and went down stairs.
He was soon on the road, with a lantern. He recalled the death of his
sister, and remembered how the neighbor women had sat whispering
together in the brilliantly lighted kitchen, brewing tea for
themselves, and now and then stealing on tip-toe to look in upon the
silent one.
Arriving at the gate, the darkness of the cottage gave color to all his
vague fears of ill to Myron. As he crossed the little garden, slinking
cats, drawn by their ghoulish instincts to the house of death, fled
before the light, but pausing as he passed, followed to the threshold,
their breath white in the frosty air, their phosphorescent eyes
gleaming in the dark.
When he saw Myron, lying prostrate and silent, his first sensation was
one of relief. He had feared that she had fled into the desolate
night; he realized that she had been frightened and had fainted.
Raising her in his arms, he called her name softly. Her senses were
already reasserting themselves. She soon stirred, looking up at him
with eyes of blank terror, which faded slowly into wonderment as she
recognized him. She held her hands up to him, and pressed closer to
the shelter of his breast. He caught both her hands in one of his, and
groped for a chair with the other. In turning, his eyes caught a
vision of the open door of the death chamber. He saw dimly the couch,
with its rigid burden, and saw those dreadful glaring eyes. For a
moment, he caught his breath. Myron, seeing the direction of his gaze,
clung shudderingly to him, and hid her face on his arm. An instant
more, and Homer perceived the outline behind those gleaming spots.
"It's a brute of a cat," he said; and Myron, understanding all at once
the origin of the sound, broke down in sobs of relief. She caught up
the lantern, whilst he went in and seized the bristling creature,
crouching upon the corpse, and flung it out among its lurking
companions.
"How is it you are in the dark?" asked Homer.
"The lamp went out," she answered. "There's some oil in the cupboard."
He held the lantern, whilst she filled and re-lit the lamp. Then he
explained his presence.
"How good you are!" said Myron.
"Good?" he said, his eyes fastening upon her forlorn figure bending
over the cradle, for My was stirring.
"Good?" Then he burst forth, "What beasts these women are to leave you
alone!"
"It was dreadful," she said, trembling. "The darkness, the noises, the
loneliness--those eyes, and _her_!" looking towards the inner room.
Then suddenly she caught his sleeve: "Don't leave me till daylight,
will you? Oh, don't! I can't stay alone; I am frightened! I--oh,
don't leave me, will you?"
"Leave you? Of course not. I wish----," he checked himself abruptly.
It was on his tongue to say, "I wish I might never leave you," but a
sense of her absolute isolation smote him so keenly that the words
stuck in his throat. Had he spoken then, how many things might have
been different, for Myron, in her utter loneliness, was ready to cling
to any outstretched hand.
"I'm going to make you some tea," he said.
Going to the bedroom door, he closed it, took his lantern out to the
little "lean-to" woodshed, and split up some bits of lightwood; with
these he roused the dying fire to life. With much precision, he put on
the kettle, and when it boiled asked in a matter-of-fact way for the
tea.
Myron rose, with My half awake in her arms, and went to the
pantry-shelf to get it. It was chill there; she wrapped her apron
about My's bare toes. He soon went to sleep again, and Myron Holder
and Homer Wilson sat down together to drink the tea. Her eyes rested
upon him, as if well content, and he noted this with delight. The
truth was they dared not yet stray elsewhere, lest the spectres he had
banished might jibber at her from the dusky corners of the room.
Love is served on strange altars, and the sacrifice of a heart was
again proffered in that lonely cottage, whose atmosphere was chill with
the dreadful influence of death, whose silence was broken by the soft
breathing of a child of shame. Homer looked upon the woman of his
heart and loved her. When the first breaking of the skies ushered in
the dawn, he left.
The women returned early, for it was considered an honorable thing to
have the ordering of a funeral--to be able to speak _ex cathedra_ of
the mode of procedure.
Mr. Muir came. The last ghastly toilet for the grave was made.
Nothing remained but to wait for the morrow, when the funeral was to be.
The women looked at her curiously when they came that morning, and Mrs.
Warner expressed the sentiment of the rest when she said: "That Myron
Holder is bad clean through. Any other woman would have been drove
crazy last night; but look at her! She's a hardened one!" Mrs. Warner
did not consider that this speech cast any reflection upon herself and
her friends who had subjected a woman to an ordeal calculated to drive
her crazy.
Night sank slowly down; and once more the women, departing, cast
wondering glances at Myron's pale face, steadfast in the knowledge that
she would have some one near her to chase those horrid visions away.
When Homer arrived, she was sitting beside her sleeping child, sewing
upon an old black skirt of her grandmother's that some of the women,
with an eye to funeral effects, had pinned up to suit her shorter
stature, and bade her sew, that she might be properly clothed on the
morrow. The work was nearly done, and the needle hung loosely between
her listless fingers. Her eyes ached for lack of sleep; every joint
trembled from fatigue; every nerve tingled from overstrain.
She greeted Homer more by a gesture than by speech, and perceiving her
exhaustion, he insisted upon her resting. She made some demur, but he
overruled it with a word. She rose a little unsteadily, and bent over
My.
"Where do you want him taken?" asked Homer, and lifted him in his arms.
She led the way to the little bedroom off the kitchen, opposite to the
one in which in which her grandmother lay.
Homer laid My down upon the blue and white checked counterpane--spun in
England by Myron's mother.
"Good-night!" he said. "Good-night, Myron!"
"Good-night!" she answered in almost a whisper, for she was
inexpressibly weary. Almost before he had reached the next room, she
had sunk down upon her bed.
It was broad daylight when Myron awoke and rose, chilled and stiff.
Utter weariness had overcome the discomfort of her cramped position;
she had slept as she had first thrown herself down; she shivered, as
one does who has slept in his clothes. The morning air was cold, and
the window-panes glistened with frost.
Hurrying out to the kitchen, she found Homer had done what he could for
her comfort before leaving. The stove held a glowing mass of hardwood
embers; evidently the fire had been well banked up before he stole away
at dawn. The kettle stood singing on the stove; the table was drawn up
by the fire, and awkwardly set out with dishes for her solitary
breakfast.
* * * * * *
The hour of the funeral was at hand.
Mr. Muir, determined to have nothing to blame himself for in regard to
his bargain, had come dressed in his official broadcloth. His horses
stood outside the gate in all the panoply of sable plumes and black
fly-netting, the latter surely superfluous, but ornamental. These
horses looked as if they had never appeared before a less stately
equipage than a hearse, yet every one had seen them pass that very
morning dragging an unpainted lumber-wagon. They looked as if they had
never known a baser burden than "stained cherry with mahogany finish,
plated handles and bevelled glass," yet an unplaned pine box had
constituted their load that morning; and as they passed, each on-looker
had said, to the other, "There goes old Mrs. Holder's shell."
"Who's Myron Holder goin' with?" said Gamaliel Deans to his mother, as
they drove along to the village the day of Mrs. Holder's funeral.
"I don't know," answered his mother. "Mrs. Warner's took a mighty lot
to do with everything, so like's not she'll take her."
"Seems to me Mrs. Warner's been putting herself forward some,"
suggested Gamaliel, diplomatically.
"Indeed she has," agreed Mrs. Deans; "enough sight more'n she's got any
call for--considerin' all things."
They passed the little graveyard, silent beneath the light snow.
"Is there any track?" asked Mrs. Deans, looking across the white
expanse, with her hands shielding her rheumy eyes.
"Yes," said Gamaliel, "the shell was took out this morning; you can see
it from here." He gazed interestedly across to where the corner of an
unpainted pine box showed as the terminus of an ugly black track which
the wheels of Mr. Muir's wagon had scarred upon the snow.
They drove on without further speech. The first snow had fallen in the
night. It lay now white and untrodden, over field and lane, over bush
and tree, over house and barn. The air seemed spaced in vistas of
cloudy whiteness, a purity which suffused itself in the atmosphere, and
seemed to fill it with particles of impalpable white dust that the
motionless air held in suspension. The trees glistened in the sun,
whose rays were silver instead of gold. All the world was rimed with
hoar frost--nature presented, in beautiful parable, the story of the
iron hand in the velvet glove; for, despite the whiteness, the
softness, and the silvery sun, it was intensely cold.
Presently through this white world there wended the gloomy little
funeral, the more gloomy for the lack of any real grief. They reached
the graveyard, where gaped an ugly brown gash, beside which the earth
lay in frozen clods.
Mr. Frew's brief prayer was ended, and he departed, stamping his feet.
There was the bustle as the coffin was lowered; then, one by one, the
onlookers straggled away; one by one the vehicles departed, until Myron
Holder was left alone by the grave--yet not wholly so, for My shivered
in her arms, and old Clem Humphries was hastily pushing the earth atop
the coffin. And presently Myron became aware that there was another
patient one also, for Homer Wilson came to her side, carrying a buffalo
robe in his arms. He laid it down on the frozen ground, and, taking
her arm, drew her gently towards it. She looked mute thanks to him
from eyes round which the slow tears lingered, rimming them with grief.
He came nearer and held out his arms to My, but the child cowered
closer to his mother, and looked at Homer from the vantage of her
shoulder.
The little group embodied all the stages in life's progression. There
was the child, cowering in a world already cold to him. There was the
woman, bearing in her countenance the ineffaceable traces of woman's
agony. There was the young man, strong in the choice of will and
heart; the old man, drawing the last coverlet over the last sleep; and,
severed from these by only a short depth of kindred substance, she who
had passed, her bed rapidly rounding to a grave.
At last, Clem began patting the mound with the back of his spade; his
work was nearly done. Each echoless blow struck upon Myron's heart;
and, thinking of the shame she had wrought the dead woman, she dealt
herself those blows that she had been accustomed to endure from her
grandmother's bitterness.
Homer broke the silence, which seemed deepened instead of lightened by
the thud-thud of the spade.
"Come, Myron," he said; "you better go home."
"Yes," she answered, heavily, "I may as well;" and she turned to the
footpath that led across the graveyard to the road.
"Not that way," said Homer; "the horses are here."
"The horses!" she said; "the horses! Is your mother waitin' for me?"
"No," he answered, a little grimly. "No, she isn't; but I am, and the
horses are."
He recalled the stormy little scene his mother had made but a little
while ago: her contemptuous words when he asked her to wait; the
scornful and bitter accusation she had flung at him; it had leaped
forth from her lips like an arrow held long at the bowstring. It was
barbed with all the poison of accumulated suspicion, and winged by the
impulse of unreasoning anger, such as springs within mean breasts
against hands that succor them; but it had reacted swiftly upon
herself, for at the words something came into her son's eyes not good
to see--a blending of surprise, indignation, denial, that paled his
face, and made it implacable. Before it Mrs. Wilson faltered in her
tirade, wavered in her steps, and finally turned and, crossing quickly
to where Gamaliel was waiting for his mother, was soon seated with Mrs.
Deans in the back seat. Gamaliel backed his horses slowly out of the
throng, and they drove away.
The incident had not been unnoticed, but no comment had been made,
although meaning looks, of which Homer now knew the interpretation,
were exchanged. He had seen some such looks pass between his neighbors
of late. A hot, impotent rage filled his heart against the false
position in which he was placed, but it did not alter his determination.
"Are you waiting for anything, Homer?" Mr. Warner could not refrain
from calling out before starting.
"Yes. What of it?" said Homer, turning round sharply. His brows were
knit, his lips firm; an interrogation, not defiant, but direct, was
expressed in every line of face and figure. "Yes," he said again, and
unmistakable interrogation this time made the answer a question.
Mr. Warner shook the reins hastily over his horses.
"Oh, nothing--nothing," he said, "I was only wondering."
Homer turned away abruptly. "Better keep his wonderment to himself,"
he muttered, with a frown. "They better all keep their amazement to
themselves or----" his hand clinched in a very suggestive fashion.
Then he had gone for the buffalo robe for Myron to stand on, and as he
gazed at her forlorn figure his anger changed to deep and abiding pity,
to stern and righteous wrath. So Homer drove Myron home to the empty
cottage, with Clem Humphries sitting in the bottom of the wagon, with
his feet dangling over the tailboard, a quid of tobacco in his mouth,
peace within his bosom. Clem was, as he expressed it, "a dollar to the
good," and he was meditating unctuously upon the quantity of good
Canadian Rye he could buy with the money, and speculating where he
could beg, borrow, or (be it admitted) steal a jug. He had no mind to
pay for one out of the dollar.
Mr. Prew, the minister, passed. He regarded Homer and Myron with
incredulous horror, and returned Homer's somewhat brusque greeting in a
very scandalized way. Clem took off his hat with a labored flourish;
Mr. Prew returned his salute with condescending affability, and drove
on to Mrs. Deans', where, presently, over hot soda-biscuits, doughnuts,
and other good things, he praised Clem as "an humble, but very worthy
old man."
"Humbugging old hypocrite!" ejaculated the "worthy old man," as soon as
his pastor was out of hearing. "Miserable, designing old cuss he is.
I'd like to use him for bait!" Then this humble follower relapsed into
his reverie upon the _modus operandi_ of getting a jug.
No other words were uttered during the ride. Homer and Myron were both
silent; both knew that Homer had flung down the gauntlet to the
gossips; both realized the import of the step; both pondered upon its
significance from the village point of view.
Clem jumped off nimbly when they were opposite Mr. Muir's verdant
veranda.
"You are not angry with me, Myron?" asked Homer.
"Oh, no," she cried; "you are so good to me."
"I'm good to you for my own sake," he answered. "Don't you see that?
Don't you suppose I am looking out for my own happiness?" He paused.
"Don't you think I am?" he resumed, an insistent note in his voice.
They were near the cottage, but she felt obliged to answer.
"But, Homer," she said, "I have no happiness to give anyone! What
return can I make for this sacrifice?"
They were opposite the cottage. Clustered heads in the window of the
Warner house showed how their return had been waited for; Homer
discerned the white muslin rose in his mother's black bonnet, and if
the sight made his face hard, it softened the touch of his hands as he
lifted Myron down from the high seat, and then put the boy in her arms.
The little gate stood leaning against the fence. It had been lifted
off its hinges, to leave free room for the coffin and its bearers to
pass. Myron paused between the gate-posts; Homer bent above her.
"I will tell you some day," he said, "what you can give me."
[Illustration: "I WILL TELL YOU SOME DAY WHAT YOU CAN GIVE ME."]
"Good-by," she said; and, turning, passed down the desolate garden,
feeling remorseful that she had left him unthanked.
Homer, now that the tenderness evoked by her presence was left
unsustained, felt a spiteful defiance waken in his heart. He walked
slowly to his horses' heads, pretending to adjust the harness; then,
after inspecting them with critical deliberateness, drove slowly past
the curious eyes at the window.
"Might as well give them the full benefit of the sight," he said to
himself; "it seems to strike them as interesting."
All day long, as he swung his axe in the woodland, he mused upon Myron
as he had seen her last, with pure, uplifted brow and chin, as she said
good-by.
He returned at night, calm, and braced, as he thought, to receive a
storm of reproaches. He found a table "coldly furnished forth" for his
supper; the kitchen was deserted, and from his mother's room came the
hum of voices.
Mrs. Wilson expected to crush her son utterly by this isolation, but it
was a treatment he could endure much longer than she could suffer to
inflict it, for to women of her type the expression of anger in words
is essential; any repression of speech is a physical pang. It was
well, though, for this one night that it should be so, for Homer's calm
was but as the brittle crust that forms on seething lava, that neither
controls nor cools it; that melts at a touch, and offers no restraint
to the force beneath. Too hot an anger yet filled his heart to admit
of peaceful argument; his hand was too ready to clinch yet when he
thought of Warner's tentative question. He ate his supper, smoked a
peaceful pipe, and soon slept, dreaming, even as he had done all day,
of the calm sweetness of those patient eyes.
Myron was having her first of solitude, passing it in brief watches of
wakefulness and shorter spaces of sleep.
And in the lonely little graveyard a new-made mound was slowly
whitening under the falling snow.