The Wind Before the Dawn
by Dell H. Munger · English · Gutenberg #26992 · 845,985 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Wind Before the Dawn
Author: Dell H. Munger
Release date: October 22, 2008 [eBook #26992]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26992
Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIND BEFORE THE DAWN ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE WIND BEFORE THE DAWN
[Illustration: "THE GIRL ALSO KNELT AT HIS SIDE RENDERING SUCH
ASSISTANCE AS WAS IN HER POWER"]
THE WIND BEFORE THE DAWN
BY DELL H. MUNGER
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers--New York
Copyright, 1912, by
Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I Castles in Spain 3
II Brushing up to go to Topeka 43
III Reforms not easy to Discuss 74
IV A cultured man 92
V Reaching hungry hands toward a symbol 115
VI "Didn't take 'em long" 131
VII Erasing her blackboard 150
VIII Cyclones 174
IX "Against her instincts, against her better
judgment, against her will" 195
X Philosophy of Elizabeth's life voiced 210
XI "Wives, submit yourselves unto your
husbands, as unto the Lord" 224
XII "Pore little woman" 266
XIII "Ennobled by the reflected story of
another's goodness and love" 291
XIV Mortgages of soul 317
XV Hugh Noland 353
XVI Revivifying fires 356
XVII Adjusting domestic to social ideals 372
XVIII The child of her body 399
XIX "Her wages, food and clothing she
must accept" 419
XX The cream-jars of her life 426
XXI Bound to the stake 458
XXII "There are some things we have
to settle for ourselves" 467
XXIII "At any cost" 496
XXIV Facing consequences 506
XXV "The weight of a dollaree and out
of debt don't forget that" 534
XXVI "Was--was my papa here then?" 540
XXVII To do over, and to do better,
was the opportunity offered 548
XXVIII "Till death do you part" considered 562
THE WIND BEFORE THE DAWN
CHAPTER I
CASTLES IN SPAIN
The unclouded sun of a burning August day had driven bird and beast to
shelter wherever a bit of shade could be found. The Kansas prairie
afforded little refuge from sun or wind. The long stretches of low rolling
hills were mostly covered with short grass, now dry from a protracted
season of drought. Occasionally a group of stunted cottonwood trees
surrounded an equally stunted looking hut, or dugout, but the blazing
sunshine had browned all to a monotonous tone in keeping with the
monotonous life it represented. The only corn to be seen was of the
variety called sod-corn, which, unwashed by rain for a full month now, had
failed to mature, such stalks as had tasselled at all being as barren as
the rest because the tender silks had dried too rapidly and could furnish
no fertilizing moisture to the pollen which sifted down from the scanty
bloom above.
The sun's rays beat down upon the head of a fourteen-year-old girl who
rode slowly around a herd of cattle, the members of which lay in the
unavailing shade of the rosin weeds or browsed drowsily on the short
grass. The day had been long and hard. The child knew that it was not
later than two o'clock, having counted the hours eagerly since early
morning, and having eaten her bit of cornbread and bacon full two hours
before. She stopped her horse for the fortieth time, however, to get the
angle of her shadow on the ground and to confirm her calculations. The
sigh she gave as she again started on her round was not of relief, but of
resignation. It was necessary to keep on the move or she was likely to
fall asleep in her saddle, and then the cattle would escape to the nearby
fields, and there would be a neighbourhood altercation over the matter,
whether the fields held crops of value or not, farmers being jealous of
their territorial rights, and ready to resent intrusion upon them.
Another horseback rider was moving across the prairie toward her, and the
girl smiled when she saw him and stopped to watch his calico pony lope
unevenly across the grass-covered slope. The pony was prone to drop into a
rough trot at short intervals, and at such times was urged to renewed
efforts by a dig of its rider's heels in the under regions of its stunted
body. In order to get his heels in contact with his mount, the lanky boy
was obliged to elevate his knees slightly, and when it was over his feet
dropped languidly and his heavy plow-shoes dangled loosely, with several
inches of bare ankle in evidence before the faded overalls concealed
further stretches of the hairy legs.
"Howdie, Lizzie!" he said with a pleasant smile as he drew his pony up
beside her. "I've got something to tell you. We've sold out, an' goin'
right off. Th' other folks moved in last night. They was goin' through
with a wagon an' stopped to eat. They found out that pap wanted to sell
an' go back to Minnesoty, an' took th' land quick. I've come to say
good-bye."
It had been so exciting that he had tumbled his news all out at once,
although he was a quiet boy and slow of speech.
"Oh, Luther! Are you really going away?" The girl exclaimed in dismay.
"Yass," the boy replied, falling back unconsciously into Swedish
pronunciation. He had begun his announcement with pleased animation, but
now that it was out, and she was sorry, the going did not seem so
pleasing. "I wisht I wasn't!" he added with quick dejection.
"I should think you'd be glad. I'd be glad, if I was going too."
The boy looked surprised and asked with some curiosity, "What do you want
to go for? I thought you liked Kansas."
"Put your hand on your horse's neck," she commanded, leaning forward and
setting the example.
The boy did as she told him, but drew his hand back suddenly.
"Gosh!" he exclaimed. "Don't their hair get hot in this sun!"
"Well, I'm just as hot as that all over," she replied emphatically, "and I
want to go to a country where a body can get under a tree once in a while.
I can't go in till five o'clock, and I forgot my jug, and I'm so thirsty I
feel as if I'd crack like this ground," she said, pointing to the earth
between them.
"Jimminy! I'll ride back and fetch you a drink," he said, poking his heels
into his pony's ribs so suddenly that the little beast kicked spitefully.
The girl called after him to "never mind," but he was off on his errand.
It was a good mile to her home, but the boy knew what it meant to forget
the water-jug on a day like this.
When he returned half an hour later the sunshine had changed character and
there was a peculiar dimming of its brilliancy.
"Is it going to rain?" the girl asked as she lowered the jug to her knee.
She wiped her lips on the skirt of the faded sunbonnet she wore and looked
up again.
"Rain!" Luther Hansen swept the horizon with the air of one who knew the
signs, backing his horse about to see on all sides as he did so.
"Th' don't seem t' be any clouds," he said in surprise. "Ain't it queer!
Looks's if it might be some kind of eclipse," he said. "Do you
remember--no, of course you don't--but, th' was an eclipse of th'
sun--total, I believe they called it--when I was only about seven year
old. All th' chickens went to roost, it got so dark, an' when th' cover
come off they crowed's if 'twas mornin'. We had a blue hen an' she crowed
too. Pap killed 'er. He said it was bad luck t' have a hen crowin' about
th' place."
"You all don't believe in luck, do you?" the child asked.
"I don't, but pap does," the boy answered apologetically. "I cried about
th' blue hen; she was just like a dog; she'd let you ketch 'er, an' she'd
sing, 'co-ook, co-ook, co-ook,' to 'erself, right in your arms, an' wasn't
afraid. She wouldn't never set though. I guess that's why pap was so ready
with his axe."
Happening to look up again, the girl gave an exclamation of surprise. "Is
it snow?" she asked.
"No!"
They sat with their faces turned skyward, studying the upper air intently.
The sun was completely obscured now and the rapidly moving mass, not
unlike snow indeed, was being driven straight toward the north. Whatever
it was, it was driving fiercely ahead, as if impelled by a strong wind,
though there was not a breath of air stirring below. Soon small objects
began to detach themselves from the mass, so that the eye could
distinguish separate particles, which looked not unlike scraps of silver
driven with terrific force from the tail end of some gigantic machine. One
of these scraps struck the girl on the cheek and she put her hand up
quickly to feel the spot. While examining the place she received a similar
blow on the forehead and another on the back of her hand. Drawing her
bonnet down tight over her face for protection, she shaded her eyes and
again looked up. The whole moving cloud had lowered to a distinguishable
distance.
"Why, they're all grasshoppers!" she exclaimed; and indeed so true was the
observation and so rapidly were the grasshoppers settling that the boy and
girl were obliged to turn their backs and shield their faces from the
storm.
The cattle also, annoyed by the myriads of insects settling upon them,
began to move about restlessly and presently to mill slowly around,
threshing with their heads from side to side while they whipped their
flanks with their tails.
"I didn't know they came like this!" the girl said, as Luther's pony
sidled over toward her.
"What'd you say?" the boy demanded, leaning forward to catch her reply.
"I said I didn't know they came like this," the girl shouted, raising her
voice to make herself heard above the rasping noise of many wings. "Father
read out of the _Prairie Farmer_ last week that they was hatching out in
the south."
The two drifted apart and circled about the herd again. The cattle were
growing more restless and began to move determinedly away from the
oncoming swarm. To keep them in the centre of the section, and away from
the cornfields, the girl whipped her horse into a gallop.
Without paying the slightest attention to either her voice or her whip,
half blinded in fact by the cutting wings of the grasshoppers, the
irritated cattle began to move faster and, before either boy or girl knew
what was happening, were in full trot toward the north. Seeing that the
matter was becoming serious, Luther lent all the aid of which he was
capable and circled about the herd, shouting with all his strength, but
the cattle, contending against countless numbers of smaller things and
unable to look steadily in any direction because of the little wings which
cut like the blades of many saws, stumbled blindly against his horse if he
got in their way, and, shifting around him, went on.
The girl was beside herself with trouble and anxiety. Lashing her horse
one minute, and the nearest cow the next, she raged up and down in front
of the herd, bending all her energies toward deflecting her charges from
their course, but the struggle was useless.
Seeing that they could do nothing, Luther caught her horse by the bit as
she passed him and shouted explanations in her ear.
"Let 'em go, Lizzie! You can't stop 'em! I'll have t' come with you! We'll
just follow 'em up!"
"But they're going to get into that field right off if we don't get them
turned!" the girl cried in distress, pulling down her long scoop-like
bonnet and holding it together to keep the grasshoppers out of her face
while they talked.
The cattle now broke into a run. There was nothing to do but follow, as
Luther had advised. But the exasperated beasts were not looking for fodder
and paid no attention to the corn. They were not out on a picnicking
expedition; they were escaping from this tormenting swarm of insects which
settled on itching back and horns and tail, settled anywhere that a
sufficiently broad surface presented itself. Having started to run, they
ran on and on and on. The boy and girl followed, their horses stumbling
blindly over the ridges between which the corn was growing. The grayish
brown sod, through which the matted white roots of the grass showed
plainly, lay in fine lines down the long field, their irregular edges
causing horses and cattle to go down on their knees frequently as they
ran. But though the cattle sometimes fell, they were as quickly up and
pushed blindly ahead, neither knowing nor caring where they were going,
their only instinct being to get away.
Not a breath of air was in motion except such as was stirred by the wings
of the grasshoppers or was blown from the hot nostrils of the harassed
cattle. They passed through the cornfield, over a stubblefield beyond,
through a slough, another stubblefield, and on to the open prairie of
another section of "Railroad land." The boy and girl made no further
attempt to guide them. A cow, with the tickling feet of half a dozen of
these devils of torment on the end of a bare, wet nose, was in no state of
mind to be argued with, and the tossing horns, threshing about to free the
head from the pests, were to be taken into sober account. All they could
do was to let the maddened beasts take their own course.
For an hour, helpless to prevent the stampede, desiring nothing now but to
keep the cattle in sight, the weary, sunbaked children trudged along in
the rear of the herd, following through fields cut and uncut, over the
short grass of the hills or the long bluestem of the hollows, their horses
sweating profusely, their own faces too parched to emit moisture,
conscious only of the business of following the panting herd and of
avoiding the pitfalls under their horses' feet.
At last the cattle came to a walk. The heat of the day and the unusual
exertion had told upon them. Occasionally a tongue lolled from the mouth
of some wearied beast, but it was not permitted even that respite for
long; the grasshoppers respected no part of the bovine anatomy, and with
an angry snort and an annoyed toss of the head the tongue would be
withdrawn.
The perspiring cattle seemed so fatigued that the despairing children
thought at last that they might be turned toward home, but though whips
and voices were used to the utmost the nettled beasts could not be made to
face the stinging devils which settled thicker and ever thicker about
them. They came down to a walk, but they walked doggedly toward the north.
At last the sun's rays began to peep through. The air soon cleared, and
the scorched and burning children began to wish for even a cloud of
grasshoppers to protect them from the heat. Wherever the light fell it
disclosed moving masses of locusts which covered the entire face of the
landscape. The teeming cloud of insects was a pest equal to that of the
lice of Egypt. They overflowed the Kansas prairies like the lava from
Mount Vesuvius, burying vegetation and causing every living thing to flee
from their path.
At last the storm spent itself. The sun came out clear, and as hot as
molten brass. The cattle could hold out no longer. The swarms which flew
up in front of their moving feet were as unbearable as any that had come
from above. The exhausted beasts gave up and permitted themselves to be
headed toward home.
"I began to think they wouldn't stop till they had reached the State
line," the girl said with a relieved sigh, when they were safely started
down the first road they came upon after turning south again.
Luther made no reply. He had stopped the pony and was watching the inroads
of numberless scissor-like mouths on a stub of corn near the roadside. The
tassel was gone, the edges of the leaves were eaten away, and lines of
hungry insects hung to the centre rib of each blade, gnawing and cutting
at every inch of the stem.
"Th' won't be a cornstalk left standin' by night," Luther observed as the
girl rode up to see what it was that attracted his attention. "Crackie!
but I'm glad pap's sold out. It'd be no shoes for me this winter if we
didn't get away," he added, spitefully brushing a grasshopper from the end
of his nose and rubbing the injured member.
The girl's face fell at the mention of hard times. Times were always hard
in the Farnshaw home, but she could never get accustomed to them, and each
new phase of the trouble was a blow. The sensitive child already carried a
load of financial worry which was tugging at every pleasure her young life
craved.
"Won't we have any corn at all?" she cried in dismay.
"I don't know," Luther answered dubiously. "It'll be starvin' times about
here. You better get your folks t' sell out and go East too," he said,
without looking up.
The child's fear of financial disaster was eased by the prospect of "goin'
East." The "East" was the fairyland of her dreams, the childhood's home of
her father, who was a good story-teller when he was not irritated, the
Mecca and Medina of all the pilgrimages of all their little world. To go
East was to be a travelled person, to attain distinction, just the next
best thing in fact to being made President of the United States. To go
East was to live near the timber, where one could wander for hours, days,
ages, in the cool freshness of its shady paths. The sunburned child, with
her jug hanging by a strap from the saddle horn, had a swift, rapturous
vision of alluring, mossy banks, canopied by rustling leaves, before she
was called back to the stern hills of her native Kansas and the sterner
necessity of forcing a hundred head of maddened cattle to keep within the
confines of an illy defined road.
By the time they had ridden ahead and crowded the cattle down to the right
of way again, the child's natural good sense and business instincts had
combined to temporarily shatter the dream.
"Nobody 'd buy us out if there ain't nothing to feed the cattle," she
said, watching the boy's face eagerly in the hope that he would reassure
her.
When he did not speak, she added, with discouraged conviction, "Pa
wouldn't sell out anyhow; ma's been trying to get him to for a year."
"He'll have to. You won't be able t' stay if there's nothin' t' feed," the
lad said with emphasis, and then added with a giggle, "I bet th' Cranes is
mad for bein' in such a hurry t' get in. They paid pap th' money last
night, an' made 'im promise t' give possession 'fore t'morrow night. Three
hundred dollars! Th' old woman took it out of 'er stockin'."
"Three hundred dollars!" Lizzie Farnshaw repeated, whirling her horse
about suddenly at the mention of a sum of money which ran into hundreds.
She looked at the boy enviously. She was but fourteen, and did not realize
that more than three hundred acres of fertile land had been exchanged for
the sum. Her spirits rose as they turned to follow the cattle again.
Perhaps, as Luther had said, they would have to sell out also. The dream
of going East absorbed her once more. As she dreamed, however, a shrewd
eye was kept on the cattle. As nearly as possible she lived up to the
trust reposed in her. Quick to serve, sensitive, honest, dependable as she
was, these cattle constituted the point of contact between the developing
girl and her developing philosophy of life. Duty pointed sternly to the
undesired task, and duty was writ large on the pages of Lizzie Farnshaw's
monotonous life. Her hands and face had browned thickly at its bidding,
but though, as she had remarked a couple of hours before, she should crack
like the sunbaked earth beneath her feet, she would not fail in her
obligation to keep the cattle out of other men's fields, and her father
out of the primitive courts where damages could be assessed. Poverty she
had always known, but now they were threatened with a new and more
dreadful form of it than any hitherto encountered, a fact of which courts
took no cognizance. Hope and fear alternated in her heart as she rode
along, but for the most part the young life in her clung to the idea of
the Eastern trip. Hope springs eternal in the child heart. Perhaps after
all they would have to leave Kansas, as Luther had said. If only----. In
spite of the arguments of good sense she clung to the idea. She was glad
Luther was there. In her simple way she had told her plans, her hopes, and
her fears to Luther's willing ears ever since she had known him: she did
so now. A Maggie Tulliver in her own family, Luther was the one
compensating feature of her life. Luther not only understood but was
interested. His tallow-candle face and faded hair were those of the--in
that country--much despised Swede, but the child saw the gentle spirit
shining out of his kindly blue eyes. Luther was her oracle, and she quoted
his words so often at home that it was a family joke.
Luther Hansen was the only preacher to whom Lizzie Farnshaw ever listened.
Her Sundays had been spent on the prairies from choice. Mrs. Farnshaw
mourned over what she considered her daughter's unregenerate condition,
but Mr. Farnshaw was quite willing that the child should herd the cattle
if she preferred it to spending an hour at "meetin'." Luther, who also
until this year had herded his father's cattle and who usually spent the
long days with the girl, had quaint ways of looking at religious questions
which was a never-ending source of delight and interest to her. Their
problems at home as well as at school were subjects of common discussion.
He had been the beginning and the end of her social life. Now she took him
into her dream of going away, and discussed her ideas of the best way of
disposing of the stock by sale or gift, the sort of home she would have
with her grandparents, and pictured, with a vivid imagination, the woods
and streams she had heard her father describe. If she only could go! They
stopped at every field to watch the voracious insects, which were eating
every green thing upon which they happened to alight. A turnip patch on
the corner of the Farnshaw place which had been straggling, but green,
when the cattle had passed through it that afternoon, had not a leaf to
show as they returned. The ground was dotted all over the patch with small
holes where the hungry swarms, not satisfied with the tops, had followed
the stems down into the earth, eating out the bulbs to the very taproots.
They drove the cattle across to the usual feeding place, but the
grasshoppers flew up in continuous clouds before every moving object, and
it was impossible for them to eat.
"Why don't you take them in and shut them up?" Luther asked when he saw
that the herd was so restless that the child could not manage them alone.
"Pa wouldn't let me," she sighed, and continued to ride around her
charges.
Luther had intended going home long before this, but he knew that Lizzie
could not control the restless cattle, and so he stayed with her, rather
glad of the excuse to do so. Josiah Farnshaw's temper was a matter of
neighbourhood knowledge. A word of explanation to his father, Luther knew,
would be all that he would need to make the fact of his absence
commendable. He was glad of any excuse which would leave him with Lizzie
Farnshaw for an extra hour, but he was to find that hour disappointing,
for the cattle were restless and kept them both in constant motion.
When at last the time came to corral the stock a new calamity was
discovered. The cattle wandered into the edge of a field of flax as they
neared the barn. Luther, following them, dropped from the back of his pony
and stopped to examine the grain. The girl was excitedly getting the
straying animals crowded on toward the pens and it was not till she had
the gate shut fast on them that she could take time to join him.
"What is it?" she asked as she rode up.
The lanky boy, who was really a man, measured the field slowly with his
eye, calculating the damage before he answered slowly:
"Kicked it out o' th' pods flyin' through. Must 'a' been twenty acres.
What made you let it get s' ripe for? It ought t' been cut three days ago,
anyhow."
The girl was out of her saddle in an instant. She walked into the body of
the field somewhat, her face quivering pitifully as she examined the grain
for herself. It was only too true! The beautiful brown seeds carpeted the
earth around the roots of the flax, but no amount of harvesting would ever
gather so much as a handful. The crop was a total loss.
"Poor ma!" she cried, when convinced beyond a doubt of the empty bolls.
With the eyes of the prematurely old, she saw the extent of the ruin, and
she knew what would be its effect upon the mother who seldom knew joy.
The loss of the turnips had seemed bad enough, but while watching the
green things about her disappear it had not occurred to the child that the
grasshoppers would eat the dry and, as Luther had said, overripe stems of
the flax. Still less had it occurred to her that the insignificant wings
and feet of such small things could do damage to an entire field by merely
flying through it.
That flax was of paramount importance in the family calculations just now.
In her considerations of the prospective move to the East, the price of
this flax had figured largely. Family discussions had centred about that
field for weeks. It was the one definite starting point in the bickerings
about their weak and indefinite plans for the future. The loss of every
other family asset could not have undone the child's faith in the ultimate
good of things so overwhelmingly. She choked back a sob as she mounted her
horse again.
"Poor ma!" she repeated. "Pa told her she could have the money from the
flax to go and see grandma on. You know grandma's old, and they think she
can't live through the winter. That's one reason why I was so glad when I
thought we were going to have to go East to live. She don't hardly know
her own children any more, I hope ma don't know about the flax; She'll be
sure to have one of her spells, and she's just got over one. Ain't it
awful?"
Luther feared she was going to cry, and, man fashion, prepared to flee.
"I've got t' go, Lizzie," he said, and awkwardly held out his hand.
All thought of the flax disappeared from the girl's mind.
"Oh, Luther!" she exclaimed in new distress, "won't I ever see you
again?"
The thought was so overwhelming that her tears came now from quite a
different cause, and the frank eyes threatened to overflow as she stood
clasping his bony hand in hers insistently. "What will I do without you?"
she sobbed.
The unexpected question and the unexpected tears had an uncomfortable
effect on the boy. He grew suddenly embarrassed and drew his hand away.
Some indefinable thing about the action made her conscious that there was
a change in his feelings. It checked her rising emotions and made her
curious. What was he embarrassed about? The girl stole a look at him,
which left him still more disturbed and uneasy. It was an intangible thing
upon which she could not remark and yet could not fail to recognize.
Luther had never been awkward in her presence before. Their association
had been of the most offhand and informal character. As a boy of fifteen
he had carried her, a girl of eleven, over many a snowbank their first
winter of school in the Prairie Home school district. They had herded
cattle together, waded the shallow ponds and hunted for mussel shells, and
until this year they had seen each other daily. This year Luther had taken
a man's place in the fields and the girl had seen him at rare intervals.
She was not conscious of the change which this year of dawning adolescence
had brought to them both. Luther had developed a growing need of a razor
on his thin, yellow face, while she, four years younger, had also matured.
The outgrown calico dress she wore was now halfway to her knees, its
sleeves exposed some inches of sunburned wrists, and the scanty waist
disclosed a rapidly rounding form. Young womanhood was upon her, unknown
to her, and but now discovered by Luther Hansen. For the first time Luther
felt the hesitancy of a youth in the presence of a maid.
"I shall miss you _so!_" the girl said, looking at him, puzzled by the
indefinable something in his manner which was a new element in their
communications.
Her frank curiosity put the boy utterly to rout. The blood surged to his
pale face and pounded in the veins under his ears, half choking him; it
cut short the leave-taking and left the child bewildered and half hurt.
She watched the calico pony lope away in a cloud of scurrying grasshoppers
and wondered in a child-like way what could have happened. This abrupt and
confused departure increased the loneliness she felt. He was her one real
friend, and her tears came again as she turned toward the house.
There was little time given the child to indulge her feelings, or to
speculate upon a friend's confusion or adieus, for a sharp voice summoned
her to the house and fresh duties.
"When I call you I want you to step spry," was the greeting the child
received from the stooped figure putting the potatoes over the fire to
fry, as she entered the door.
Mrs. Farnshaw had her head tied up in a white cloth; "the spell" had
arrived. It was no time to tell of the loss of the flax, and Luther's
going was not mentioned, because Mrs. Farnshaw shared the public contempt
for his nationality and had failed to get her daughter's confidence in
that quarter.
"Here, set this table for me; I'm clear done out. Did you ever hear of
such a crazy thing as all them hoppers comin' down like bees? Your pa's
gone over to Hansen's t' see what he thinks. Looks 's if we'd be harder up
'n ever, an' I thought I'd done 'bout all th' savin' a woman could do
a'ready. I'm goin' t' get right off t' mother's soon's ever we can sell
that flax. If I don't, we'll be havin' t' use th' money for feed."
Her daughter made no reply. It was no time, when her mother was having one
of her periodical sick-headaches, to let it be known that there was no
flax to sell. That flax had been one long series of troublesome worries,
to which the total loss was a fittingly tragic end. The restless
grasshoppers outside were forgotten.
Some weeks before, Mr. Farnshaw had given a grudging consent to the use of
the proceeds from the flax crop for a trip' to his wife's old home while
her mother yet lived. Josiah Farnshaw's temper was an uncertain quantity.
Had Mrs. Farnshaw been wise she would have dropped all reference to the
flax when the promise was obtained. But Mrs. Farnshaw had to talk; it was
her fate. She had hovered about the field, she had centred her faculties
on the considerations of harvesting, and prices. She laboriously and
obviously collected eggs, skimped the family on its supply of butter, and
had counted her chickens to see how many she could sacrifice for the
purchase of "a decent bit of black."
As she sewed upon the premature emblems of her coming woe, she had
discussed the desirability of threshing out of the shock instead of
waiting for the stack to go through the sweating process; she talked,
talked, talked, with an endless clacking, till her husband fled from her
presence or cut her short with an oath. He wished he had never planted
flax, he wished he had never heard of it, he wished--he hardly knew what
he did wish, but he was sick of flax.
Crops of all sorts were shortened by continued drought; corn would be an
utter failure. He had given notes for a new harvester and other machinery
while the prospects for crops were good, and the knowledge that implement
dealers would collect those notes whether the yield of grain was equal to
their demands or not tightened the set lines about his naturally stern
mouth and irritated a temper never good at the best. Daily he became more
obstinate and unapproachable.
Josiah Farnshaw was not only obstinate, he was surly. Nothing could induce
him to show any interest in the flax field after he found that his wife
was looking out for its advantages. If she suggested that they go to
examine it, he was instantly busy. If she asked when he intended to begin
the cutting, he was elaborately indifferent and replied, "When its ripe;
there's plenty of time." When at last the field showed a decided tendency
to brown, he helped a neighbour instead of beginning on Friday, as his
wife urged. Saturday he found something wrong with the binder. By Saturday
night he began to see that the grain was ripening fast. He was warned and
was ready to actually start the machine early the next day. His grizzled
face concealed the grin it harboured at the idea of running the harvester
on Sunday; he knew Mrs. Farnshaw's scruples. The flax had ripened, almost
overnight, because of the extreme heat. Torn with anxiety and the certain
knowledge that haste was necessary, Mrs. Farnshaw quoted scripture and
hesitated. Her husband, who had delayed in all possible ways up to this
time, and had refused to listen to her advice, became suddenly anxious to
do "that cuttin'." Now that his wife hesitated from principle, he was
intensely anxious to move contrary to her scruples.
The knowledge that her husband was enjoying her indecision, and that he
was grimly thinking that her religious scruples would not stand the test,
made her even less able to decide a question than usual.
The game was getting exciting and he let her argue, urging with pretended
indifference that, "That flax's dead ripe now an' if it shatters out on
th' ground you kin blame yourself," adding with grim humour, "There's
nothin' like th' sound of money t' bring folks t' their senses. It's good
as a pinch of pepper under th' nose of a bulldog."
There was everything to point that way, but a woman and a mother must
vindicate her claims to religion, and Mrs. Farnshaw refused to give her
consent to the Sunday harvesting.
Torn between her desire to save every grain of the precious crop and the
fear of a hell that burned with fire and brimstone, her husband's scorn
did what neither had been able to do. Mrs. Farnshaw forbade the machine
being taken to the field, and then cried herself into a headache.
"Do as you please; it's your lookout, but I tell you It'll be a sick
lookin' field by to-morrow mornin'," was Mr. Farnshaw's final shot.
When her decision was finally reached, Mr. Farnshaw became alarmed. He
knew he had let the flax go too long uncut. He had half believed in the
reasons he had given for delay up to this point, but suddenly realizing
that the overripe grain would suffer great loss if left another day in the
hot sun, he reasoned with real earnestness that it must be cut if it were
to be saved. His wife, thoroughly convinced that he was still tormenting
her and that he would never let her hear the last of the matter if she
gave up, closed her lips down firmly and declined to allow it to be done.
All this the child had heard argued out that morning. It was a cruel
position in which to place one of her years. Part of it she had
comprehended, part had escaped her, but she was sensitive to the
atmosphere of suffering. The details of past elements in the tragedy she
could not be expected to understand. The stunted, barren life of her
mother was but half guessed. What child could know of the heartsick
longing for affection and a but little understood freedom, the daily
coercion, the refusal of her husband to speak kindly or to meet her eye
with a smile?
The sorely puzzled and bewildered woman thought affection was withheld
from her because of something done or undone, and strove blindly to
achieve it by acts, not knowing that acts have little, if anything, to do
with affection. She strove daily to win love, not knowing that love is a
thing outside the power to win or bestow. Had she had understanding she
would have spared the child with whom she worked; instead, she talked on
with her dreary whine, morbidly seeking a sympathy of which she did not
know how to avail herself when it was so plainly hers.
With a lump in her throat of which the mother did not even suspect, Lizzie
Farnshaw set the table, cut the bread, brought the water, "put up the
chairs," and, when her father came from the stable, slipped out to where
he was washing for supper and whispered about the flax, asking him not to
mention it while her mother was suffering with the headache.
The news was not news to Josiah Farnshaw, who had examined the field
anxiously as he had returned from Hansen's. Sobered by the loss, he was
less disagreeable than usual and only pushed his daughter out of his way
as he reached around her for the sun-cracked bar of yellow laundry soap
with which to wash his hands. Thankful to have the unpleasant but
important matter, as she thought, safely attended to, the child returned
to help lift the meal to the bare kitchen table.
The illy lighted room, with its one small window, was dim and dismal in
the dusk of evening. In spite of the added heat it would produce, the
child decided that a light was necessary.
After the kerosene lamp was lighted, she turned to see if her mother
needed her help again. The crooked blaze ran up unexpectedly and blacked
the cracked chimney on one side with a soot so thick that one half of the
room was soon in semi-darkness. Mrs. Farnshaw took it fretfully in hand.
"Why can't you trim it when you see it runnin' up that way?" she demanded
querulously, poking at the lopsided and deeply charred wick with a sliver
obtained from the side of the wood-box.
Her ministrations were not very successful, however, for when the chimney
was replaced it ran up on the other side, and in the end her daughter had
to prosecute a search for the scissors and cut the wick properly. As they
worked over the ill-smelling light, Albert, the youngest of the three
children of the household, burst into the kitchen crying excitedly:
"Ma, did you know that th' flax was all whipped out of th' pods on to the
ground?"
Mrs. Farnshaw, who had received the lamp from her daughter's hand, let it
fall on the edge of an upturned plate in her excitement, and then, seeing
what she had done, fumbled blindly in a terrified effort to right it
before it should go over. The cracked chimney fell from its moorings, and,
striking a teacup, spattered broken glass over the table like hailstones.
The entire family scrambled to save the lamp itself from a similar fate
and were plunged into darkness by the girl blowing out its flame to save
an explosion.
The excitement of the moment served, temporarily, to lessen the blow of
Albert's announcement, but by the time "a dip" had been constructed the
full weight of the disaster had fallen upon the defeated and despairing
woman, and to protect her from the taunts of the head of the house, Lizzie
induced her to go to bed, where she sobbed throughout the night.
The next day was hot and windy. The grasshoppers, unable to fly in a
strong wind, clung to the weeds, to the dry grass, the stripped branches
of the half-grown trees, to the cattle and hogs upon which they happened
to alight, and even to people themselves, unless brushed off.
Lizzie took the cattle out to the usual grazing ground, but there was no
Luther to help, and the grasshoppers made the lives of the restless
animals so unendurable that in real alarm, lest they run away again, she
took them home, preferring her father's wrath to the experience of getting
them back if they should get beyond her control. Fortune favoured her.
Unable to endure the demonstrations of grief at home, her father had taken
himself to a distant neighbour's to discuss the "plague of locusts."
The wind blew a gale throughout the day, sweeping remorselessly over the
unobstructed hillsides. Unable to fly, the helpless insects hugged the
earth while the gale tore over the Kansas prairies with a fearful
velocity. With feminine instinct, every female grasshopper burrowed into
the dry earth, making a hole which would receive almost her entire body
back of her wings and legs. The spring sod, half rotted and loosened from
the grass roots, furnished the best lodgment. In each hole, as deep down
as her body could reach, her pouch of eggs was deposited.
No attempt was made to cover the hole, and by night the sod presented a
honeycombed appearance never before seen by the oldest settlers. Having
performed nature's functions, and provided for the propagation of their
kind, the lately fecund grasshoppers were hungry when the act was over.
Not a spear of anything green was left. The travel-worn horde had devoured
everything in sight the day before. Evening closed in upon a restless and
excited swarm of starving insects, but they were unable to fly at night or
while the wind was blowing.
It was necessary to find food; hunger's pangs may not be suffered long by
creatures whose active life is numbered in weeks. The high wind had cooled
the air and made the locusts stupid and sleepy, but when the next morning
the wind had fallen, and the sun had warmed their bodies, as fast as they
were able all were on the wing, headed for the north. The air was calm,
and by ten o'clock they were away in swarms, leaving ruin and desolation
to show that they had sojourned in the land.
The situation was truly desperate. Cattle, horses, and hogs were without
food of any sort. Many families were new to the country and had depended
upon sod-corn for the winter's supply of provender for both man and beast.
Mr. Farnshaw, being one of the older residents, had grown a crop of wheat,
so that his bread was assured; but the herd of cattle which had been his
delight was now a terrorizing burden. Cattle and horses could not live on
wheat, and there was no hay because of the dry weather. What was to be
done?
That night the neighbours held a consultation at the Farnshaw house, where
grizzled and despairing men discussed the advisability of "goin' East,"
and ways and means of getting there. The verdict was strongly in favour of
going.
Mrs. Farnshaw brightened. Perhaps, after all, she would get away from
these wind-blown prairies, where no shade offered its protecting presence
against a sun which took life and spirits out of the pluckiest of them.
Even more childish than the daughter at her side, Mrs. Farnshaw clapped
her hands with joy as she leaned forward expectantly to address her new
neighbour.
"If I can only get t' my mother's, I won't care for nothin' after that. My
heart goes out t' Mrs. Crane. Think of all that good money goin' t' them
Swedes! You just better pocket your loss an' get away while you can."
"You're goin' too, then, Farnshaw?" the new neighbour asked.
All eyes turned upon Mr. Farnshaw, who had not as yet expressed himself on
either side. These neighbours had asked to assemble in his house because
his kitchen afforded more room than any other house in the vicinity, the
kitchen being a large room with no beds in it to take up floor space.
Mrs. Farnshaw realized as soon as the question was asked that her joy had
been premature.
Josiah Farnshaw sat with his chair tilted back on two legs against the
wall, snapping the blade of his pocket knife back and forth as he
considered what he was going to say in reply. He felt all eyes turned in
his direction and quite enjoyed the suspense. Mr. Farnshaw was an artist
in calculating the suspense of others. He gave them plenty of time to get
their perspective before he replied. At last he shut the blade of the
knife down ostentatiously, replaced it in his trousers' pocket, and
announced slowly:
"Well, sir, as for me and mine, I think we'll stay right here."
Mrs. Farnshaw gave a despairing, "Oh!" and covered her face with her hands
to strangle back her tears. Her one hope had been that poverty would
accomplish what the flax had failed to do.
"Why--I thought you said there'd be nothin' t' feed an' you'd have t',"
said a man whose shaggy whiskers had not seen a comb that year. "What'll
you do? You can't see things starve!"
"I thought you was strong for goin'. What'll you do with all your stock?"
another said, and all bent forward and waited for his answer as if he
could find a way out of the tangle for them.
"That's just it." Again he paused, enjoying the suspense that his silence
created. Mr. Farnshaw was not popular, but he had more stock than all his
simple neighbours put together and was conscious that money, or its
equivalent, had weight. "That's just it," he repeated to add emphasis to
his opinion. "What is a man to do? You folks that have nothin' but your
teams an' wagons can load th' family in an' get away. How'd I feel 'bout
th' time that I got t' th' Missouri River if I knowed all them hogs an'
cattle was layin' around here too weak t' get up cause they hadn't been
fed?"
He dropped his argument into the midst of them and then sat back and
enjoyed its effect. He had intended to go till ten minutes previous. The
argument sounded good to him now, however. It put him on a higher basis
with himself, in spite of the fact that it had only popped into his head
while he was clicking his knife blade. He conceived a new liking for
himself. "No, sir," he continued; "I'll stay by it."
"I don't see as your stayin' helps anything if you ain't got nothin' t'
feed," was the reiterated objection.
"Well," Mr. Farnshaw replied, careful not to look in his wife's direction,
"I was for goin' at first, but I've listened t' you folks an' I've come t'
th' conclusion that you ain't goin' t' better yourselves any. If you go
East, You'll have t' come back here in th' spring, or live on day's work
there--an'--an' I'll take my chances right here. It's a long lane that has
no turn. Grasshoppers can't stay always."
"What'll you do if all them eggs hatch out an' eat th' crops in th'
spring?" the new neighbour asked, determined to look on all sides of the
question before he decided to give up his recently purchased farm, and
glad of this opportunity to get the opinions of his fellow sufferers on
that particular phase of his unexpected calamity. "What'll you do with all
that bunch of cattle, anyhow?" he added.
"I'll share what I've got with th' stuff, an' if part of it dies I'll drag
it out on th' hill t' rot; th' rest I'll stay by," was the stubborn reply.
"As for them eggs a-hatchin', they'll be good ones if they can stand a
Kansas winter; they'll do a blamed sight better'n any eggs Mrs. Farnshaw
gethers in. They'd better go south."
This raised a laugh. The grim humour of anything, that could get away,
spending a winter in Kansas, appealed to these grizzly pioneers, who
struggled with the question of fuel in a country where there was little
natural timber, and coal must be paid for before it was burned. But all
their arguments would not turn him from his course.
"Your wife's turrible set on goin', Farnshaw," one of the men said to him
as they went to the stable for their horses when the meeting broke up.
"Women's always wantin' things," was the indifferent reply. "Say, you've
got a stack of wheat straw. What'll you take for it?"
In the house the sympathetic daughter helped her mother prepare for bed.
"I thought sure to-night we'd get to go," the child said. "If you could
get back East you might get to stay; and then you wouldn't have to cry so
much," she added as she picked up the abandoned clothing her mother had
left lying on the floor.
Mrs. Farnshaw, who was turning the same matter over disconsolately as she
sat on the side of the bed, shook her head with the bitter certainty that
her fate would pursue her, and replied hopelessly:
"It wouldn't make no difference, I guess, Lizzie. He'd be there, an' it'd
be just the same."
And the girl, who was naturally reflective, carried with her to the loft
overhead that night a new idea: that it was not the place, but the manner
in which lives were lived, which mattered.
The preparations for the coming of that winter were the strangest ever
witnessed in a farming community. Never had any man known fuel to be so
scarce. Cornstalks, which were usually staple articles for fuel in that
country, had been eaten almost to the very ground, but the stubs were
gathered, the dirt shaken from them, and they were then carted to the
house. Rosin weeds were collected and piled in heaps. The dried dung of
cattle, scattered over the grazing lands, and called "buffalo chips," was
stored in long ricks, also, and used sparingly, for even this simple fuel
was so scarce as to necessitate care in its use.
To keep out the driving winds, the houses were banked with sods and earth
halfway to the roofs. With so little material for keeping warm, and that
of the lightest variety, it was necessary to make the living quarters
impervious to the never-ceasing winds which tore at the thin walls of the
unprotected houses that sheltered such folk as were hardy enough to
remain.
It was impossible to build sheds for all the stock, so the hogs were
allowed to swarm under the feet of the horses tied in the straw stable,
and many and sad were the accidents to the smaller animals. It was soon
clear that not many of them could be carried through till the spring.
Seeing that they lost weight rapidly, as many as were full grown were
killed and their flabby carcasses salted away to be eaten.
Fortunately, the grasshoppers had not arrived in Kansas till after the
small grain had been nearly all cut, so that there was considerable oat
and wheat straw in the country. Mr. Farnshaw bargained for every straw
stack he could find, but straw was a poor substitute for the corn and hay
to which the cattle were accustomed, and as the weeks lengthened into
months, and winter closed in, the unprotected cattle grew thinner and ever
thinner. Corn was quoted in the markets at a dollar a bushel, but in fact
was not to be had at any price. Iowa had had a drought, and Illinois was
the nearest base of supplies, and as it was generally known that there was
no money west of the Missouri River, no grain was sent to Kansas.
Finding that the horses did not thrive on the straw alone, and knowing
that wheat would very quickly kill them, Mr. Farnshaw put away a
sufficient amount of oats for seed and then carefully portioned out the
rest to be fed to four of his best broodmares, hoping to be able to put in
the spring crops with them as well as to save the coming colts of two. The
rest, he decided, must take their chances on getting through the winter
alive.
The family food consisted largely of bread and the slabs of thin meat,
with a sort of coffee made from browned rye. As a "company dish" there was
a scanty supply of sweet corn, dried before the drought had cut the crop
short. There were no eggs, because the chickens had sickened from eating
grasshoppers in the fall and nearly all had died. The few hens which
remained clung to the limbs of the half-grown cottonwood trees throughout
the long winter nights, and found barely food enough during the day to
keep life in their fuzzy bodies, which could not even furnish the oil
necessary to lay their feathers smooth, much less foster the growth of
eggs.
Josiah Farnshaw secretly questioned the propriety of having remained in
that desolate territory when, as spring approached, the shrunken cows died
one after another in giving birth to the calves which had matured in their
slowly perishing bodies, but he made no sign or admission of the fact.
It was a season of gloom such as our frontier states had never known, and
to add to the general depression there was a growing conviction that the
hatching of the grasshoppers' eggs when warm weather came would complete
the famine.
To support his action in refusing to go East, Josiah Farnshaw asserted
stubbornly that the frost of their hard winter would certainly kill the
larvae of the locusts. So persistent was his attitude that at short
intervals throughout the entire winter rumours that "th' hopper eggs is
dead 's doornails" stirred the community and set its members to making
tests in a vain endeavour to establish their truth. Pieces of earth,
honeycombed with the tiny nests, would be placed near the fire and kept at
as regular a degree of warmth as possible, the condition of the eggs would
be noted carefully, and in a short time the hopes of the anxious pioneers
would be dashed to the ground by wriggling little insects climbing
cheerfully out of their winter quarters and hopping about in a vain search
for something green to live upon. Often, in sheer desperation, the
harassed settler would sweep the hatching brood into the fire, remarking
as he did so, "Burnin's too good for such pests," and always fear gripped
the heart. If the crops in spring were eaten, other homes must be sought,
and all knew that the weakened horses were unfit for travel. In fact, no
team in that entire country was fit to travel far or fast, except the two
which Mr. Farnshaw groomed and fed so carefully for the sake of the spring
work and the much desired colts.
The depression and worries of the Farnshaw home increased the spirit of
contention and distrust of its guardians. The husband daily grew surlier
and more unpleasant and the wife more lachrymose and subject to "spells."
The children learned to avoid the presence of either parent as much as
possible, and to look outside the home for the joy childhood demands. The
chores were heavy and difficult, but could at least be performed in the
open light of God's great out-of-doors, where the imagination could people
the world with pleasant features and pleasant prospects.
The cattle were driven daily to the ponds, half a mile away, for water,
and if the ice was thick and the axe-handle benumbing to the mittened
hands as they chopped the holes for the tottering animals to drink from,
there was the prospect of a slide on the uncut portions of the ice later;
and as the plucky youngsters followed the cattle home they dreamed of
skates to be obtained in the dim future, and tried to run fast enough to
keep warm. The blessing of childhood is that it cannot be cheated of its
visions, and the blood of adolescence was coursing riotously through the
veins of the daughter of the Farnshaw house. If her hands were cold when
she returned to the barnyard, after watering the cattle, she beat them
about her shoulders or held them against the shrunken flank of some dumb
animal, or blew her breath through the fingers of her knitted mittens; but
her thoughts were of other things.
It is an old saying that "God helps them who help themselves," and in the
case of Lizzie Farnshaw the axiom became a living truth. While the rest of
her family suffered and magnified their sufferings, she, by a vivid
imagination, placed herself in the path of fortune and obtained the thing
she demanded. The simple country schoolhouse that year, dreary and
cheerless enough to the pert Miss who had come out from Topeka to teach
there, and incidentally to collect twenty-five dollars a month from the
school board, was to be the scene of the initial change in Lizzie
Farnshaw's life.
Verily, God helps them who help themselves, and Lizzie Farnshaw proved the
old saw by laying hold of and absorbing every new idea and mannerism of
which the new teacher was arrogantly possessed--absorbed them, but
transmuted them, winnowing out the coarse, the sarcastic, the unkind, and
making of what was left a substance of finer fibre.
The number of children in the Prairie Home school that year was limited to
five, the rest having departed for the indefinable land known as the
"East." Three of these children came from the Farnshaw home and the other
two from the new neighbours, the Cranes, on the Hansen place.
Sadie Crane hated the new teacher with all the might that her pinched
little twelve-year-old body could bring to bear. She saw only the
snippish, opinionated, young peacock, and the self-assurance which came
from the empty-headed ability to tie a ribbon well. She was so occupied
with resenting the young teacher's feeling of vast superiority that she
failed to understand, as did the Farnshaw child, that along with all that
vainglorious assumption went a real knowledge of some things with which it
was valuable to become acquainted.
To the spiteful Crane child the schoolma'am was "stuck-up," while to the
imaginative daughter of the Farnshaw house she was a bird of paradise, and
though Lizzie was conscious that the teacher's voice was harsh, and her
air affected, the child reached out like a drowning man toward this symbol
of the life she coveted. To her the new teacher was a gift from heaven
itself.
This young girl from Topeka brought into activity every faculty the
sensitive, ambitious child possessed.
Lizzie Farnshaw laid hold, with a strong hand, upon every blessing which
came in her way. She knew that the foppish young thing at the teacher's
desk was "stuck-up," but Lizzie was willing that she should be whatever
she chose, so long as it was possible to live near her, to study her, and
to become like the best that was in her.
The teacher's matter-of-fact assumption that no self-respecting person
failed to obtain a high-school education was a good thing for the country
girl, however overdrawn it might be. Lizzie Farnshaw listened and built
air-castles. To this one child, out of that entire community, the idea
appealed alluringly. But for her castles in Spain she must have burst with
her unexpressed desires. To add fuel to the fires of her fancy, Mr.
Farnshaw also fell under the fascinations of the school teacher and
boasted in the bosom of his family that "Lizzie's just as smart as that
Topeka girl any day," and when his daughter began to talk hopefully about
teaching school it appealed to the father's pride, and he encouraged her
dreams. He had been the leading man in the community since coming to
Kansas because of the number of cattle he had been able to accumulate. A
small legacy had aided in that accumulation, and it appealed to his pride
to have his daughter's intellectual ambitions adding to the general family
importance. Pride is an important factor in the lives of all, but to the
children of the farm it is an ambrosia, which once sipped is never
forgotten and to obtain which many strange sacrifices will be made. Mr.
Farnshaw usually regarded a request from his children as a thing to be
denied promptly, and always as a matter for suspicion. Yet here he was,
considering soberly, yea pleasurably, a move involving money, at a time
when money was more than usually scarce. His assent was even of such a
nature as to deceive both himself and the child into thinking that it was
being done for her benefit!
The young girl received a new impetus toward improvement. The family began
to regard her as a member set apart, as one from whom special things were
to be expected. From being just comfortably at the head of her classes,
she became more ambitious, reached over into new territory, and induced
the teacher to create new classes for her benefit. The subjects required
for the examination of teachers were added to those usually carried. There
was a real purpose in her efforts now, and the smoky kerosene lamp burned
stubbornly till late hours.
The new teacher not only listened to recitations but appealed to the
artistic in the newly developing woman. She rolled her hair from neck to
brow in a "French twist" and set on the top of it an "Alsatian bow," which
stood like gigantic butterfly wings across her proud head. The long basque
of her school dress was made after the newest pattern and had smoke-pearl
buttons, in overlapping groups of three, set on each side of its vest
front. The skirt of this wonderful dress was "shirred" and hung in
graceful festoons between the rows of gatherings, and was of an entirely
new style. Last, but not least, the teacher's feet were shod in "side
laces," the first pair of a new kind of shoes, destined to become popular,
which laced on the inside of the ankle instead of on the top as we have
them now. Of all her stylish attractions this was the most absorbing.
"Fool shoes," Sadie Crane called them, and her little black eyes twinkled
with a consuming spite when she mentioned them, but the ambitious Farnshaw
child, reaching out for improvement and change, coveted them, and preened
her own feathers, and mimicked, and dreamed. She accepted the shoes just
as she accepted the teacher's other attributes: they were better than her
own.
To be better than her own--that was the measure of Lizzie Farnshaw's
demand. If the shoes, the clothing, the manners, the ideas, were better
than her own they were worthy of honest consideration. The teacher's
tongue was sharp and her criticisms ruthless, but they had elements of
truth in them, and even when they were directed against the child herself
they were a splendid spur. The young girl copied her manners, her gait,
and her vocabulary. She watched her own conversation to see that she did
not say "have went" and "those kind"; she became observant of the state of
her finger-nails; if she had to lace her shoes with twine string, she
blackened the string with soot from the under side of the stove lids, and
polished her shoes from the same source.
Mrs. Farnshaw, broken with the cold, the privations of the long winter,
and the growing disappointments of her domestic life, saw nothing but
overdressing and foolishness in her daughter's new attention to the
details of personal appearance. Burdened with her inability to furnish the
clothes the family needed, she complained monotonously over every evidence
of the young girl's desire to beautify herself. When the mother's
complaints became unendurable, the father usually growled out a stern,
"Let the child alone," but for the most part the growing girl lived a life
apart from her family, thought along different lines, and built about the
future a wall they could never climb, and over whose rim they would
rarely, if ever, catch a glimpse of the world within. No life, however
hard, could ever tame that spirit, or grind its owner into an alien groove
after that year of imaginative castle building.
CHAPTER II
BRUSHING UP TO GO TO TOPEKA
With the opening of spring and the coming of the young grass, the handful
of cattle that had not died of starvation began to look healthier. A
shipment of seed corn for planting, and even a stinted amount for feed,
had been sent from the East in March. But for that donation even the work
horses must have succumbed. Josiah Farnshaw had the best horses in the
country and was suspected of having had far more help than he had really
received. The two teams he had favoured all winter against the seeding
season were the envy of all. Some of the old neighbours, after a winter
spent with the wife's relatives in the East, had decided to return and
take the chances of the grasshopper-ridden Middle West, and had come with
horses able to drag the plow, but, worn from travel, most of them were
practically useless.
There was a lull after the small grain was in the ground. The menacing
eggs of the grasshoppers began to hatch as the sun warmed the earth. It
was a period of intense anxiety. So many months had been spent in
alternate intervals of hope and fear that now, since the test was actually
and immediately to be made, the tension was terrific. Men rose as soon as
the first light of day appeared and went to examine the tender grain,
without which they could not remain upon the land which had cost so dear
in the suffering of the winter just past.
A surprise was in store for them. The young insects matured rapidly. While
they appeared in swarms, it was noticed that they disappeared immediately
upon hatching.
Kansas began to get its breath.
Never was promise of crops more encouraging. There was a distinct note of
reassurance and hopefulness in the air. What became of the grasshoppers
nobody knew exactly, but they went almost as fast as they hatched. Some
shook their heads and said, "Wait till hot weather."
Josiah Farnshaw moved steadily ahead with his planting. He announced that
he had faith in Kansas--had always had--he'd stand on the burning deck!
While others hesitated, he took advantage of wind and weather to get his
crops in the ground. He had been right all along. He did not propose "to
be run off of the land he had homesteaded and set with trees by any durned
little bugs he'd ever come across." It was necessary to be up and doing if
a man was going to provide for a family.
Now this assertion proved to be true, for the agent of the harvester
company visited him and requested payment of the notes given the year
before. The agent was gracious when the inability to pay was explained. He
would renew the paper if it could be secured by the land. There was no
hurry about payment, but it was necessary for the details to be finished
up in a business-like manner. The thing looked simple enough. It was a
just debt and Mr. Farnshaw intended to pay it. He'd as soon it was secured
by the land as any other way. The details were soon arranged.
Mr. Farnshaw agreed to meet the agent in Colebyville, the nearest town,
the next day, and have the papers made out. After the agent was gone Mr.
Farnshaw went to the house to inform his wife that she was to go to town
and attach her name to the document.
The storm of protest was expected, and when Mrs. Farnshaw broke out with:
"Now, pa, you ain't never goin' t' mortgage th' farm, are you?" he
answered surlily:
"Yes, I be, an' I don't want no words about it neither," and walked
determinedly out of the house, leaving his wife to cry out her fears with
her children.
"We won't have where to lay our heads, soon," she announced bitterly.
"I've seen somethin' of th' mortgage business an' I ain't never seen any
of 'em free from payin' interest afterward." This was no mere personal
quarrel. Her children distinguished that. This was real, definite
trouble.
Accustomed as the child was to her mother's woes, Lizzie Farnshaw was
moved to unusual demonstrations by the quality of the outburst of tears
which followed the words, and said impulsively:
"Never you mind, ma, I'm going to teach school in another year, and I'll
help pay the interest; and we'll get out of debt, too, somehow."
Mrs. Farnshaw brightened.
"I hadn't thought of that!" she said. "I'm glad you're willin' t' help
out. I had thought maybe you'd get me one of them new nubies after you got
some money of your own." She went into the other room to lay out the black
dress, which death had sanctified some months before, for use on the
morrow. The opportunity to wear the emblems of mourning turned her
childish mind away from the object of her journey, and left her as
unconscious as the young girl herself that the mortgage had extended from
the land to the lives of herself and her husband, and that in that promise
it had laid its withering hand on the future of her child as well.
The promise of assistance had been lightly given; unearned money is always
easily spent; besides, a teacher's salary seemed rolling wealth to the
girl who had never had a whole dollar in her life. The question of paying
the next year's interest was for the time settled. The next morning the
healthy young mind was much more largely concerned with the appearance of
her mother in the new black dress than with either the mourning it
represented or the mortgage which occasioned its presence. She sensed
dimly that a mortgage was a calamity, but her vigorous youth refused to
concern itself for long with a disaster so far removed as the next year.
But though calamity might pursue Lizzie Farnshaw on one hand, true to her
innate nature she handled fate in so masterful a manner that even poverty
could not cheat her youth of all its prerogatives. In order to
sufficiently nourish the teams which must be used in seeding, Josiah
Farnshaw had been obliged to use a part of his seed corn for feed. In
despair at the thought of not being able to plant all the land under
cultivation, he was overjoyed to hear that a farmer by the name of Hornby,
who lived twenty miles or more to the south, had a new and desirable
variety which he was trying to exchange for cows with young calves by
their sides. A calf was selected from their diminished herd, its mother
tied behind the wagon which held it, and Lizzie taken along to assist in
driving. The journey, though begun in early morning, was a tedious one,
for the cow fretted, the day was hot, and the footsore and weary child was
worn out long before the Hornby place was reached. It was after nine
o'clock when they did arrive, the last five miles having been made with
the added burden of a horse which seemed not at all well. Mr. Farnshaw
would not even go into the house to eat supper, but asked the farmer to
see that Lizzie was put to bed at once, while he remained with the sick
horse. The best team had been chosen for this trip, in spite of the near
approach of foaling time for one of the mares, because the other horses
were too reduced by lack of food to drive so far.
After eating a bowl of bread and milk the tired child was taken to her
room by Mrs. Hornby, and in spite of the ruffled curtains which adorned
the windows and the other evidences of taste and refinement about her, she
was soon fast asleep.
The next morning at daybreak the household of Nathan Hornby was astir. The
first object upon which Lizzie's eyes fell was Susan Hornby herself, who
had come to call her to breakfast.
"Your father took one of our horses and started right off home this
morning. The one that was sick last night died and left a little colt. He
said he thought he had better get the other one home at once, so he took
ours. Come right into our room to wash and comb."
Lizzie was on her feet instantly and followed her hostess into the next
room, making love to the neat white bows of her hostess' apron-strings as
she went. What did she care about her father's departure without her when
she could wash her face in a white bowl whose pitcher stood beside the
washstand, and comb her hair before a looking-glass "where you could see
your head and your belt at the same time?" But the combing was destined to
be a lengthy process, for before the child had pulled her comb through the
first lock attacked she saw reflected beside her face in that mirror an
old-fashioned, black walnut secretary _full of books_! Lizzie Farnshaw had
never seen a dozen books in one house in her life except school books, and
here were rows of books that didn't look like any she had ever seen. She
took her comb and walked over to the bookcase where she could read the
titles and comb at the same time, the spacious mirror, two whole feet in
length, being forgotten in this much more desirable gift of fortune.
Susan Hornby's eyes twinkled with delight. In the five years she had been
in Kansas she had never been able to persuade any one to read with her.
Here was a kindred spirit. She looked at the fifteen-year-old girl and was
anxious to know how it happened that she was interested in books at her
time of life.
"Do you like to read?"
The question was repeated, and once more she asked it before the child
heard her.
"I guess you do," she laughed, answering her own question. "We'll have
some good times before your father comes back for you. Come on to
breakfast now--the men are waiting."
Lizzie Farnshaw fell naturally into her improved surroundings. The
educating processes of reforming her language that year had also tended to
improve the girl in other ways and it was with her straight brown hair
gathered into neat braids, clean finger-nails, and a feeling of general
self-respect that she approached Susan Hornby's white-clothed table and
was introduced to Mr. Hornby and the hired men who were already seated
there.
"Right glad t' see you. I been feedin' th' colt. It's about as likely a
specimine as you be," was Nathan Hornby's salutation, and his handclasp
was as hearty as his stubby fingered, hairy hands could make it.
Lizzie slipped quietly into her chair at his side, and stole a glance up
at him again. All through the meal he found her eyes turning toward him
curiously, and at last he said good-naturedly:
"I'll know you next time whether you do me or not."
The remark was a random one and meant nothing at all, except that he had
been conscious of her close attention, but something in the way her gaze
was withdrawn showed that whatever she had been thinking she wished to
conceal it, and in the end it made Nathan Hornby really uncomfortable. The
fact of the matter was that Nathan's language did not fit his
surroundings. Susan Hornby's house was in advance of the country in which
they lived, while her husband fitted the pioneer life he had chosen. Of
this fact neither husband nor wife seemed to be conscious. Nathan was ten
years older than the woman he had married. In accepting him she had
accepted him as he was; later she had grown, but to her he remained the
same; he was just Nathan, and needed no analysis. They lived and loved,
and radiated the harmony which was theirs. The incongruities of their
union were evident to this child, who was supersensitive about grammatical
constructions, but their harmony was to be one of the strong lessons of
her life. Lizzie was accustomed to ungrammatical language at home, but the
atmosphere of this house made ignorance of good form noticeable. She liked
Mr. Hornby, but she wondered a little about his association with his wife
and her home. She went with him to see the colt after breakfast and
remarked upon his neat barnyard in a manner which lifted the cloud upon
his face; he had had a feeling that he did not somehow come up to her
expectations.
The little colt nosed about his hand looking for food, and Nathan
laughed.
"It's just like th' human critter o' that age--wants t' try everything in
its mouth," he said, trying to find a topic of conversation.
Again Nathan Hornby caught a flicker of surprise in Lizzie Farnshaw's eye,
and again he was disconcerted.
"Wonder what I done t' set that child t' lookin' at me so funny?" he asked
himself as he went to the field later, and being big-hearted and ignorant
was unaware that a man could hamstring himself by an ungrammatical
phrase.
All day Susan Hornby read with the young girl and questioned her to get
into touch with her life and thought, and when night came was wildly
enthusiastic about her.
"Nate, she's worth a lift," she said to her husband after Lizzie had again
been tucked into bed. "Let's take her with us to Topeka this fall and put
her into the high school. She's--she's just the age our Katie would have
been. She says some teacher told her she was ready for the high school."
"Better wait till I'm elected, Sue," Nathan replied, and then, seeing
Susan's face cloud over with disappointment, added more cheerfully:
"Of course I don't care if you have the child, but you mustn't get to
countin' on this thing. That's th' trouble with these here fool politics:
they get folks t' countin' on things that can't come around."
Long after his wife was asleep, however, he mused upon the prospects of
going to Topeka, and for her sake he wanted to go. Nathan Hornby always
spoke of his chances of being elected to the legislature of his state
deprecatingly. He swaggered and pretended to be indifferent, but the worm
of desire burrowed deeper every time Topeka was mentioned. The very fact
that he was uneducated, and, as the Democrats had said, unfit, made him
desire it the more. Criticism had aroused the spirit of contest in him.
Also he wanted Susan, now that she had begun to plan for it, to have it.
Nathan Hornby knew that the woman he had married was his superior, and
loved her for it. Masculine jealousy he did not know. He would have been
sincerely glad to have had her elected to the legislature of Kansas
instead of himself.
"It's like Sue t' want t' take th' girl," he meditated, the next day in
the cornfield. "She'll see Katie in every girl she sees for th' rest of
'er days, I reckon. I wouldn't 'a' had no show at Topeka, nohow, if she
hadn't 'a' made Wallace feel good 'bout that crazy thing he calls 'is
wife. Curious how big things hinge on little ones. Now Sue had no more
idea o' gettin' a nomination t' th' legislature for me than that hen she
was foolin' with this mornin'." Later, he remembered the thing that had
worried him before the subject of Topeka came up. "Wonder what I done that
set that youngster t' lookin' at me so funny?"
Mrs. Hornby had not set her heart on going to Topeka foolishly, but she
wanted to go and it entered into all her plans. She did not tell the young
girl of her plans at once, but waited for her to make her place in
Nathan's heart, as she was sure she would do. On that point the girl
succeeded surprisingly. Her knowledge of horses, of harness, of farm
subjects in general made good soil for conversation with her host, and her
love for the motherless colt called her to the barn and made special
openings for communications. Nathan called the colt, which was of the
feminine gender, Pat, because its upper lip was so long, and that too the
girl enjoyed, and entered into the joke by softening the name to Patsie.
They were good friends. Having decided to befriend her, the man's interest
in her increased. She was to be theirs. The sense of possession grew with
both husband and wife. Already they had cast their lot with the child, and
when at last they put the question of the high school to her, the
friendship was firmly welded by the extravagance of its reception.
"Think of it! Think of it! Only think of it! I didn't know how it was
going to come about, but I was sure I was going to get it somehow!" the
young girl cried, dancing about the room excitedly. "Whenever I was afraid
something was going to keep me from it, I used to say, 'I will! I will! I
will go to high school!' Oh, isn't it too lovely! Do you think my saying
it made any difference?" she asked eagerly; and the quaint couple, who
were born two generations in advance of the birth cry of New Thought,
laughed innocently and made no reply.
When the floodgates of surprise and emotion were opened, and she began to
talk of her hopes and fears, it was but natural that she should speak of
her struggles for personal improvement, though this was instinctively done
when Mr. Hornby was absent.
Curiously enough, some of her points of information were as helpful to
Susan Hornby as they had been to her. Mrs. Hornby knew the rules of good
grammar, but many little observances of table manners had changed since
her youth. She read and was well informed on general topics of the day,
but her life for more than fifteen years had been spent with Nathan and
with the hired men who ate at her table, and she had become careless of
small things, so that she listened with an amused smile, but with real
profit as well, to Lizzie's confidences that "You shouldn't cross your
knife and fork on your plate when you are through eating, like the hired
men, but lay them side by side, neat and straight"; that "You shouldn't
eat with your knife, neither," and that "To sip your coffee out of your
saucer with a noise like grasshoppers' wings was just awful!" She, too,
was brushing up to go to Topeka, and while much in advance of her husband
or any of her associates in society matters, she had lived the life of the
farm, and to the end of her existence would be conscious of the
inequalities of her education. Of this she said nothing to the child, but
listened and remembered. Occasionally she reminded the girl that they
might not go to Topeka, but even as she warned she was quickening the
subconscious mind to aid in recording any fact which might be advantageous
when she herself got there, and her love for the child grew. The girl was
part of the scheme. In a week she had become one of the family.
At the end of the week Mr. Farnshaw did not appear; farm matters had
detained him, so that the opportunity for a closer acquaintance with his
daughter was permitted. Under Mrs. Hornby the child blossomed naturally.
The old-fashioned secretary was the young girl's delight. Seeing her
shaking in silent glee over "David Copperfield" one night, and remembering
her eager pursuit of intellectual things, Mrs. Hornby remarked to her
husband, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." The world of to-day
would add to Susan Hornby's little speech, "Not only as a man thinketh in
his heart, so is he," but "So shall he live, and do, and be surrounded."
This simple daughter of the farm, the herds, and the homesteaded hills of
bleak and barren Kansas, where the educated and intellectual of earth were
as much foreigners as the inhabitants of far off Russia or Hindustan, had
by her thought not only prepared herself for the life she coveted, but had
compelled the opportunity to enter upon her travels therein. When Mr.
Farnshaw arrived, Mrs. Hornby was fortunate in the form of her request to
take his daughter with her, and it was arranged that if they went to
Topeka the child should be a member of their household.
"We'll be just as good to her as if she were our own," she promised, and
then added reflectively, "We're going to call her her full name too.
Elizabeth was my mother's name. It's so much prettier than Lizzie."
Under any other circumstances Mr. Farnshaw would have seen symptoms of
being "stuck-up" in the change of name, but Elizabeth had been his
mother's name, and although he had little recollection of his mother, and
had never heard her called by her given name, he had seen it writ large on
her tombstone, and, his eye having become accustomed to the word, his ear
fell naturally into line with its pronunciation; besides, his daughter was
to be a school-teacher, and was to sign contracts like a man, and must
have a proper sort of name. She was to live in the house of a member of
the legislature, too, and already called him and his wife "Uncle" and
"Aunt." Mr. Farnshaw tasted pride and found it a sweet morsel.
Election day came the first week in November and Nathan was successful.
With the high school year in view, they moved to Topeka the next week. It
was as if they were literally to educate their Katie. A slight
disappointment awaited them. Though they were ready the young girl did not
come immediately.
According to the dilatory methods of the Farnshaw household,
Elizabeth--she had been supported by her father when the boys had shown an
inclination to laugh her out of the change of name--was three weeks later
yet in going. The eager girl urged at home that she would be behind her
classes if she went into school so late in the term, but her parents, who
knew nothing of school requirements, refused to let her go till the corn
was all husked and everything snug for the winter, arguing that so much
stock had been lost the winter before that every care must be taken of
what was left. Tears at the prospect of such a handicap made no
impression, and it was not till December that the child and her father set
off in the farm wagon for Topeka, two days distant. Railroad fare was not
to be considered, and two new dresses and a new pair of shoes--not
side-laces--were all the additions to her wardrobe.
Susan Hornby was much annoyed at the delay, but met the young girl with
open arms when she arrived.
She was less happy in accosting Mr. Farnshaw.
"Why in this world did you keep her so late? Half the year is gone!" was
her luckless remark to him.
"She's doin' mighty well t' get t' come at all," Mr. Farnshaw replied,
taking instant offence. "I'm th' only man in our part of th' country
that's givin' 'is childern any show at th' high school at all, I can tell
you. I knew I wouldn't get no thanks for it from th' beginnin'. That's th'
way with things nowadays," was his reply.
"Oh, well, we all know you have needed her, and that it's hard to spare a
child on the farm, but we were so anxious to have her have all that could
be got out of this year," Mrs. Hornby said, divided between a desire to
scold the man and a real disinclination to hurt any one. So much valuable
time had been lost. She saw that she must be politic for Elizabeth's sake,
however, for the child's appearance told the experienced woman that she
must keep him in a good humour and inveigle him into giving her a little
money for clothes.
"We'll just make the best of the time that is left, little girl," Mrs.
Hornby said cheerfully, and in that only added to the impression already
made, for Mr. Farnshaw remembered his daughter's tears, and the feeling
grew that instead of being lauded for what he considered a great sacrifice
on his part, he was coming in for a blame wholly unexpected, and that this
woman was siding with the girl and going to spoil her. People of the farm,
more than any other class, resent being blamed, and Josiah Farnshaw was an
extreme representative of his class. He had come to Topeka delighted with
himself because of the fine opportunities he was giving his daughter, and
here was this woman at the first word finding fault because he had not
done better; it was no wonder that children were not satisfied with
anything a man could give them!
There was now no possibility of Elizabeth entering school till after
Christmas, and Aunt Susan turned her attention to efforts to get the most
out of the time they would have to reorganize the poorly constructed
dresses. She was considerate of Mr. Farnshaw's evident sensitiveness,
seeing also that he had no real comprehension of the damage done by the
delay, and made him comfortable by urging him to stay on after he was
really ready to go home. So successful was she that he forgot for the time
he was in her presence that all was not in his favour, and she was able to
induce him to give all that he was able to give toward the improvements
she suggested in his daughter's wearing apparel. Elizabeth was surprised
at the ready response to demands made upon his purse, but here again Mrs.
Hornby left a sting, wholly unintended and at the time not recognized by
Mr. Farnshaw himself, but remembered by him later and never forgotten
after it was once fixed firmly in his mind. Aunt Susan, concerned for the
entrance of the child into the company of those of her own age, pointed
out to her father the gayly dressed girls of Elizabeth's age, and
suggested that a new coat would be an absolute necessity. Mr. Farnshaw had
given Mrs. Hornby all the money he had with him except four dollars, and
his wife had given him a list of groceries to be purchased in the city. It
rather pleased him to use the money toward his daughter's adornment and it
tickled his pride as well to give his last cent toward her education. Mrs.
Hornby looked at the money he placed in her hand, and hesitated visibly.
Josiah Farnshaw stiffened at her manner. Aunt Susan hated to ask for more,
but this would not buy the girl a coat that she could wear in Topeka!
"You are just as good as you can be about this, Mr. Farnshaw, but--but a
coat like the other girls have will cost at least eight or ten dollars."
She felt his attitude.
The amount named took the man's breath. He had given all he had and yet
this woman, whom he had begun to like again, was not satisfied!
"A man can't do no more'n he can, an' that's th' last red cent I've got,"
he replied, humiliated at the necessity of the confession.
"Oh! I'm so sorry," Aunt Susan exclaimed, really so at having forced the
statement. She sat with her brows knit in serious thought a moment, and a
light began to break in upon her. Elizabeth had to have that wrap somehow
and here was a way right before her. She remembered a long cape she had
noticed going down the street that very morning.
"I guess we can make it do," she said hesitantly. She was thinking out her
plan and spoke slowly. "We'll just make a cloak ourselves. We can do it."
Josiah Farnshaw left the next day for home, in a good humour with himself
and his munificence, but on the way home remembered Susan Hornby's
hesitancy and later decision to make the cloak herself, and the worm of
suspicion began to gnaw again.
"If that woman could make something that'd do, what'd she ask for one of
them expensive coats for?" he asked himself. "I guess it's only th' girl
that figures in that deal! I ain't nothin' but th' oats she feeds on
nohow," he reflected, and having once given the thought lodgment it grew
and became the chief stone of the corner.
Our own comes to us, and Josiah Farnshaw had formed the habit of that kind
of thinking. He felt that he was being robbed, and forgot that his
daughter was being befriended, and out of his trip to Topeka got only a
sour distaste for the woman he could clearly see was going to encourage
the child in extravagance. He had never spent so much money on the entire
family in a winter as he had done on that girl, and yet it wasn't enough.
"He'd bet he'd never give 'er another year's schoolin'. She'd come home
an' get a summer school--that's what she'd do. All folks thought about
nowadays was clothes!"
To Elizabeth Farnshaw every day of that busy month was full of unconscious
growth. As soon as Mr. Farnshaw was out of sight, Mrs. Hornby said to
Elizabeth:
"Now, my child, I am going to take up the seams in that basque."
Elizabeth looked down at her "long basque" in dismay; she had striven hard
over that waist and had thought that it would do very well, though
conscious that it had faults. Her face flushed as she answered
reluctantly:
"The seam in the back isn't quite straight, but--I never made one like it
before--and I thought it would do."
"So it would, dear, but it can do better and we've got plenty of time to
fix it. You'll feel ever so much better about it when you see how the
other girls are dressed."
As Aunt Susan snipped and ripped and rebasted the refractory seam,
Elizabeth brought out her little stores of finery to discuss their
artistic features.
"Look," she said, opening a pasteboard box which held her few ribbons. "I
coaxed a long time for that, but I got it." She held up for Aunt Susan's
approval a new Alsatian bow of pink ribbon. "I wanted the wide, but they
didn't have it, so I got a lot of the narrow and hid the joinings in the
pleats. I think it's pretty, don't you?"
Susan Hornby looked at the bow critically, and then seeing Elizabeth's
face cloud over with a suspicion that she did not regard the treasure with
favour, said slowly:
"It's pretty--that is, it's a pretty colour; but I was looking to see
about how many yards there was in it, for the girls aren't wearing
Alsatian bows, as you call them, this year. They seem to be wearing their
hair mostly in two plain braids. I'm glad of it, for you look ever so much
better with your hair done that way. We can rip it up and press the
ribbon. I'm awfully glad you've got such a lot; It'll make lovely bows for
the braids."
While Elizabeth ripped her bow to pieces Aunt Susan's tongue ran on with
the subject nearest her heart.
"To-morrow morning I'm going to have you sit by that window and watch the
girls that go past about school time. You'll learn more this month doing
that than you would in school, I expect. It's just as well you can't start
till next term, since you didn't get here at first."
"Next term!" her new dresses with their long basques--long basques were
more talked of than any other feature of dress that year, not by Elizabeth
alone but all womankind--had seemed so magnificent that she could not
think of it being necessary to take a whole month to make them over.
"Yes, not till after Christmas. You can't start in at the middle of a term
in high school like you can in the country. We'll get you a wrap made
before that time. I told your father I couldn't think of your going
without a coat of some sort. He didn't feel that he could afford a coat,
so I'm going to get the cloth and you and I will make you a circular this
week."
"A circular? What's that?"
Aunt Susan explained the new kind of cape which came down to the bottom of
the dress and had a hood lined with bright coloured silk and was puckered
with rubber to make it fit the face.
It took all day to finish the basque, and the next morning Elizabeth
watched the well-dressed city girls loiter past, and was glad that she
could have a month to get ready to meet them in the schoolroom. She had
never known anybody dressed so well for anything but a funeral, or a
party, or to go to church. They actually wore gloves to school! Elizabeth
looked at her brown hands and decided that she would wear her mittens to
bed till her hands sweated themselves to a proper degree of whiteness, and
Susan Hornby let her look on, and weigh, and exclaim. Thus was Elizabeth
Farnshaw's education begun.
The afternoon was spent selecting the goods for the new cape, and
wandering about the great stores and the streets; a new pair of pretty
gray gloves were obtained, and for the first time Elizabeth heard the term
"lisle thread" used as against the common term of cotton for all things
not silk or woollen. The new cape was to have a wonderful metal fastener
called a clasp, and life ran like a silver stream the next two days as
they sewed on the new-fangled garment.
Oh, father! could you have but seen truly, how great would have been your
joy!
Each day Elizabeth watched the boys and girls come and go past Nathan
Hornby's house, and when the cape was finished she and Aunt Susan went
daily on shopping expeditions. It was the most wonderful week of her
fifteen years, and was well rounded out by going to church on Sunday and
for the first time listening to a choir, and seeing a window of softly
coloured glass. She almost wondered if she had been transported from the
body to the heaven of crowns and harps which her mother loved to
describe.
To heaven Elizabeth Farnshaw had gone in very truth, but it was the heaven
of adolescence and developing womanhood. In the short time she had been
observing the comings and goings of the boys and girls of their
neighbourhood one young man had begun to stand out from the rest.
Elizabeth was nearly sixteen, and when she saw _him_ now in a pew a few
seats ahead of her she made a little movement of astonishment.
Aunt Susan caught the sound of the indrawn breath and looked around
inquiringly, but Elizabeth, with eyes modestly down, studied her
gray-gloved hands and seemed unaware of her scrutiny. Happiness had been
Elizabeth Farnshaw's daily portion for weeks, but this was different. Here
was happiness of another sort, with other qualities, composed of more
compelling elements. The gamut of bliss had not all been run. Elizabeth
had progressed from Arcadia to Paradise and was invoicing her emotions.
She never shied around a subject, but looked all things in the face; and
she found this delightfully surprising world of emotions as entrancing as
the external one of mellow light, music, good clothes, and educational
prospects. The rest of the hour was a blissful dream, in which the only
thought was a wish for Luther and his stunted pony and the freedom of
grassy slopes where she could pour out her newfound joy. With each new
event of this life the loss of Luther was accentuated.
Nathan Hornby and his wife had no acquaintances in Topeka. They left the
church as soon as the service was over. The young girl went with them,
conscious that _he_ was behind her, glad that her new cape was finished,
wondering if _he_ noticed it, eager to be seen yet wanting to hide, and
foolishly aglow and wishing devoutly that she had eyes in the back of her
head. Henceforth Elizabeth lived in the thought of seeing _him_. She
dubbed him "The Unknown," and if she looked out of the window at home, it
was in the hope of seeing him pass; on the way to school she was alert and
watchful for a glimpse of him in the distance; if she went to church it
was to look for him as soon as seated, though he was rarely there. If she
saw him in the morning her day was made glad; if she failed to see him she
looked forward with anticipation to the next day.
The winter spent itself. January passed, and February. The glad days ran
on in kaleidoscopic readjustment of joy, work, wonder, and unfoldment, as
far as Elizabeth's own life was concerned. After the manner of youth, her
own affairs absorbed her. In fact the young girl was so filled with the
delights of her own little world that it was only gradually that she began
to understand that the life in Topeka was not as fortunate with the dear
couple who had shared with her their home. The first signs of trouble were
made manifest to her by the increasing tenderness with which Susan Hornby
hovered around her mate, and her evident and growing solicitude.
Elizabeth was startled when she did at last comprehend the gloom and
anxiety about her. The manner of the pair prevented questions, but, as she
watched covertly, Aunt Susan's distress was transferred to her. Elizabeth
was not curious, but she was intensely sympathetic, and from disinterested
motives she became keenly observant of all that took place about her. No
opportunity to help offered. With a sharp realization that her best
friends were in trouble, she was obliged to conceal any trace of that
knowledge. Nathan and his wife talked apart and in low tones, avoiding the
young girl's presence, and were evidently puzzled and uneasy. It was
Elizabeth's way to make the troubles of those about her her own. Longing
to help, it was impossible to be indifferent. Gradually she got bits of
indirect light upon the subject. From little things dropped accidentally,
and often from explanations which circumstances forced upon them,
Elizabeth learned that money was scarce. This came as a shock, and with
all the hurt and heartsick worry which the mention of finances always
brought to the girl. Why must people have money? she asked herself daily.
And mixed with dreams of "The Unknown" came speculations as to the part
which money played in the game of life, and the bondage of men to it, and
a longing to be free from its withering grasp. In her childish mind the
matter of freedom became slightly mixed and she dreamed dreams of being
free by owning unlimited amounts of it, and she coveted marvellous bank
accounts, acquired in some mystical way, with which the woes of humanity
could be relieved by giving. Along with this new idea of dispensing
charity grew a desire to know why the crop of cash was short in Nathan
Hornby's home. In her innocent way she led up to the subject of expenses
in general, but Aunt Susan kept family affairs strictly in the family and
vouchsafed no explanations, unaware that the example she set in that way
was to bear strange and unexpected fruit. But though Elizabeth carried the
reflex of the anxiety of those about her, she was scarcely sixteen, and
youth and joy and life claimed her attention and the affairs of her stage
in life's span crowded out the affairs of others.
These were days of transition. The child was becoming a woman. The love
which was flowing out of her heart like a spring freshet toward one who,
because she saw him less often was the more often in her thoughts, was
making Elizabeth Farnshaw more observant of those who professed love.
Desiring mutual relations, she became sensitive to the communications of
those about her who had to do with mutual relations.
Elizabeth saw that the more trouble clouded the brow of Nathan Hornby the
cheerier and closer Aunt Susan drew to him. There was none of the quarrels
here to which Elizabeth had become accustomed when things went wrong at
home. The contrast between her father's and mother's daily life and that
of Nathan and Susan Hornby in times of trouble was the subject of constant
thought. Nathan and Susan Hornby were to be guide-posts along the highway
of Elizabeth Farnshaw's domestic affairs. Love pointed her thoughts toward
marriage, and here was a worthy model after which to build. Her natural
affection and gratitude were enhanced by the fact that this couple with
whom she lived, and who were otherwise very dear to her, were the
immediate example of all that was noble in the world of her present
dreams.
The fact that the harmony between Aunt Susan and her mate was of stern
stuff and not matured solely upon success and pleasure added to the
strength of that example. Elizabeth had not been taken into the confidence
of either; their private affairs were kept screened from the gaze of any
but themselves. By a word dropped here and there, however, she learned
that Nathan had speculated and lost much money; also that he had favoured
measures advanced by butter-tongued lobbyists, and that he had lost the
good-will of many of his constituents.
While Elizabeth watched the tender association of Nathan Hornby and his
wife and found such glowing tribute in her heart toward the life they
lived together, a tragedy, in spite of the support and affection lavished
by a faithful wife, was to leave the sunny, cordial man a broken,
half-suspicious one.
Nathan Hornby was to learn that legislative assemblies were death-traps to
those whom providence had failed to coach in diplomacy and judgment, that
legislation was a game at which none but gamesters might successfully
play, a devouring flame singeing the wings of all who failed to
distinguish between the light of a common candle and that of a real sun,
that it was a nightmare to most, and ticklish business for all. Unable to
distinguish between the good and the bad intentions of those who advocated
the passage of bills, convinced long before the end of the legislative
session that a bill looking innocent and direct in its wording might be
evil and indirect in its outworking, Nathan became more and more confused
and less and less able to withstand the attacks made upon him.
Nathan Hornby was a leaden figure in the legislative assembly. He was
honest, but slow of wit, and apt to become passive if pushed beyond his
power to understand. This man who could throw the earth up to a hill of
corn with skill and precision, who could build a haystack which would turn
the rains and snows of winter, and break a colt to the harness without
breaking its spirit, who had handled successfully the problems to which he
had been trained, was not able to throw arguments up to the legislative
hill or protect his reputation against the floods of criticism and
accusation to which his actions were subjected either here in the Capitol
or at home among his constituents. His spirit was broken: he recognized
that he was totally unfit for the position into which fortune had thrust
him. Nathan sat back in his chair, in the House, with few books and papers
on the desk before him, and these unopened, his manner, like his wrinkled
boots, indicative of the farm, his whole attitude that of the
unsophisticated. He listened to the speeches made around him, but had no
ideas to express. He was a pathetic figure. Only the accidents of
Grasshopper Year, when legislative timber was scarce, could have placed
him in such a position. His tough, shaven cheeks grew thinner day by day
as he pulled at the brush of grizzled chin-whiskers and tried to
understand what went on before him.
During those days Susan was both his refuge and the cross of his
crucifixion. The deeper his difficulties became the more he turned to her
for help, certain not only that she understood better than he the measures
about which his colleagues argued, but that she understood him and his
failures, as well as his needs. It was because Susan understood that the
cross was so heavy. If his wife had been a dull woman, if she had been a
woman without ambitions of her own, if she could have been hoaxed into
thinking him the equal of his associates, it would have been easier; but
Nathan was aware that Susan Hornby knew to the finest detail the nature of
his failure as well as she understood and loved the best in him. During
those gloomy days the man marvelled at the gentleness of her solicitations
for his cheering and encouragement, not realizing that woman is by nature
faithful where man is appreciative of her devotion. Appreciation! that had
been the keynote of Nathan Hornby's attitude toward his wife. Susan had
always known what she ought to do, what she wanted to do, and what it was
best for her to do, and in all matters where her individual affairs were
concerned Nathan had never interposed coercion nor advice. If Susan made
mistakes, her husband knew that they were the mistakes of the head and not
of the heart, and left her to correct them in her own way.
Susan Hornby had always been free, and now the walls of love and trust
which Nathan Hornby had builded about their home for nearly twenty years
were to be a flawless rampart behind which he could take refuge from foes
without and receive help from within. At Nathan's request his wife came
day after day and listened to the discussions toward the end of the
session. Nathan sat before her dumb, but she was the anchor to his
drifting soul as the political landslide took the ground out from under
his feet.
"I only wisht I'd 'a' taken you in on this thing sooner," he said on one
occasion, and remembered those first weeks when he had felt
self-sufficient, and had made false moves at the State House, and had also
let himself be inveigled into buying "a few margins." That was the
bitterest drop in his cup. Wheat had dropped steadily from the very day he
had begun buying. A steady decline in prices was unthinkable, and it was
not till their land was endangered that the trusting man began to take
alarm, and even then he let the speculators who profited by the sales
induce him to make one more wild investment to save that which he had
already lost.
His certainty that his neighbors would take revenge upon _him_ for
political differences by sly prods regarding speculation was of slight
importance, but Susan was to be humiliated before them!--Susan, who had
tried to help him to see the dangers--Susan, who did not complain when she
was called upon to sign the deeds to the land she had helped to win from
the Indians and the wilderness of uncultivated things. Nathan remembered
on that bitter day that but for her adventurous spirit he would have been
working at day's wages in old Indiana, instead of having a home and being
an active member of his community and a member of the legislature of his
state, with opportunities to prove himself a man in the world of men. He
had failed, and his failure reacted upon her. It was not the loss of money
and political prestige alone which bit. Another phase of their life in
Topeka added its humiliation. Nathan had wanted his wife to share his
political honours and had found himself ignorant of every means by which
these things could be brought to her. He had heard of gay winters at the
Capital, but they lived apart from it all. The house in which he had
placed her was attractive and on a good street, but the men whom he met at
the State House soon saw that nothing was to be gained through knowing
Nathan Hornby, and failed to ask their wives to call upon his wife.
Disaster is in exact ratio to our valuation of things. Although Nathan
Hornby had lost three fourths of his land, his reputation as a business
man and politician, and his faith in men, he still had left the one
essential gift which should have helped him to win again all that which he
had lost. Susan Hornby, like Ruth of old, abandoned all else and abode
with her husband in love, cheering him at each problematical step, and
saying as they returned from the notary's office after signing away their
land to a stranger:
"Never mind, Nate, there are only two of us," and for the first time since
their little daughter had been taken from them, he had replied:
"Yes, only two, thank God!" and had kissed awkwardly the hand laid over
his mouth, and Susan had seen the glitter of a tear on his faded lashes,
the first in many years.
Susan knew that Nathan would never forget the failures of that year, but
she also knew that the comfort of accustomed activities would help to fill
his mind and keep his thoughts from sore introspection. Here in Topeka
there was nothing to do but cogitate and reflect. It was therefore a
relief to her when Elizabeth received a letter from her mother summoning
her home to teach a spring term of school. While at any other time she
would have been filled with indignation at the recall of Elizabeth just as
she was beginning to get settled to her new work, Susan Hornby felt that
Elizabeth needed education less at this point than Nathan needed the busy
seeding season to occupy his troubled thoughts.
CHAPTER III
REFORMS NOT EASY TO DISCUSS
Elizabeth kept her tears and regrets to herself. She cried them out on her
pillow that night, all the disappointments and handicaps of that wonderful
year of experience and aspiration, but as she cried she planned the
arrangements of her going.
The letter was received on Thursday night; Elizabeth decided that she
would go for her books the next day, and say her farewells to desk,
recitation room, and the halls that had been dear to her. When Elizabeth
was called to the blackboard that afternoon to explain a problem in
algebra, the board, the pointer, the very chalk in her fingers cried aloud
their unity with her life and thought, and she sat down when it was over
with a great throbbing in her throat and ears, and a sense of overwhelming
disaster.
As Elizabeth carried her books home under her arm, bulging out one side of
her circular like an unevenly inflated pudding-bag, the throbbing
continued, and she turned into the less frequented streets with the
certainty that she was going to disgrace herself with tears shed publicly.
It had been a trying day, and in spite of all efforts her emotions broke
loose before she could gain the shelter of home. Hurrying blindly to get
the last block covered, she nearly dropped her books as she turned the
corner.
"The Unknown" was coming toward her!
Her startled glance of recognition was so unexpectedly open that he
thought that he had probably met her. He looked puzzled, but lifted his
hat as she hurried past him, wiping the tears from her face with her free
hand.
A boy called from across the street an instant later.
"Oh, Hugh, I'm coming over for some help on that chem. ex. to-night."
"All right," came the answer from "The Unknown," and mixed with
Elizabeth's mortifying confusion was a quick thrill at knowing his name.
"Hugh!"
No opportunity had ever come to meet him or to find out what his name
might be. Elizabeth was conscious that her life on the farm had made of
her an impossible mate for this young man who, even among the young men of
the city, was set apart by a peculiar grace and culture. She remembered
the hat which had not merely been lifted from the head, but had been
carried below the chin as he bowed distantly, and also the well-bred
curiosity of his look. The rest of the leave-taking was made easier by
having met him, and received his bow, and acquired the glorious, mystical
knowledge of his name.
To round out the experiences of the winter, fate decreed that Mr. Farnshaw
could not come for her, and the glitter of the inside of a railway coach,
with its brass lamps, plush seats, and polished woods, was added to her
experimental knowledge. Luther was somehow connected in her mind with the
day's experiences and she wished devoutly that she could talk to him about
the disappointment of leaving her school before the end of the term, and
of this journey home on the train, and of Hugh. Yes, Elizabeth would have
told Luther even of Hugh. Luther Hansen was to Elizabeth Farnshaw
unchanged and unchangeable. The transformations of her own life did not
call for any such transformations in him. He was Luther. It had been his
mental processes which had won and now sustained her attachment for him.
Their two minds had worked together as one mind while they had struggled
with the innocent problems of their childhood days, and Elizabeth still
felt incomplete without him. She had been less conscious of Luther's
absence the first year than at any time since his going away, but in
Topeka, and now that she was approaching the scene of their association
together, Elizabeth wanted him with a depth of homesickness she had never
felt before. It was hard to go back to the old battleground and not find
him there. The prospects in store for her at home made her shrink.
Elizabeth fell to wondering if any improvement in that home were possible.
She had had them quite cheerfully in mind all winter, but now that the
distance between her home and herself lessened rapidly a feeling of
inadequacy came upon her, and the glitter of the wonderful coach in which
she was riding was forgotten. Could she help? The only thing that was very
clear to her was that much patience would be necessary. At Uncle Nathan's
they had been gentle and loving and tolerant.
"Can I make them see it--and see how?" she asked herself so many times
that the wheels beneath her took up the refrain.
"Gentle and loving and tolerant--gentle and loving and tolerant--gentle
and loving and tolerant," they sang for miles as she sat with her young
brow puckered into a deep frown.
The realities of life were thrust into the foreground the moment Elizabeth
arrived, and for new reasons she missed Luther. Mr. Farnshaw resented the
new circular.
"Is that th' damned fool kind of coat she was talkin' about?" he inquired
as his daughter alighted from the farm wagon at the kitchen door that
afternoon. "It ain't got no warmth," he added scornfully. "Th' ain'
nothin' to it but looks, an' not much of that. What 'd y' you do with th'
coat you had?"
The old heartsickening contention had begun.
"I've got it."
"Well, you see that you wear it and don't go makin' a fool out of yourself
around here. I'd 'a' kept my money if I'd 'a' knowed it was goin' t' be
put into a thing that'd swell up in th' wind like a balloon."
Mrs. Farnshaw saw the look that swept over Elizabeth's face and
instinctively ranged herself on the side of the young girl. She saw with a
woman's eyes the style in the garment and its importance in her daughter's
appearance. When Elizabeth took it off her mother took it to the bedroom
to put it away, remarking in a whisper that it made her look quite like a
school-teacher ought to look. She was secretly glad that her daughter had
it, since it was already paid for and she did not have to make it. It
would be the most observed wrap in the schoolhouse the next Sunday if she
could only persuade Elizabeth to go to meeting. The metal clasp had
virtues all its own.
"I think it's ever so much more stuck-up than if it had buttons," she
whispered.
The undertone rasped on Elizabeth's nerves. Aunt Susan never differed with
Uncle Nate in undertones.
"Let's get supper, ma," she said, to shake herself from threatened
despondency.
But though Elizabeth bustled energetically about the getting of that meal,
the eating of it was not a very great success. Mr. Farnshaw discoursed
upon the senselessness of prevailing styles, with the new cape plainly in
mind, and Mrs. Farnshaw nudged her daughter's knee under the table
whenever Elizabeth seemed inclined to defensive retorts.
When Mr. Farnshaw had taken the milk pails on his arm and repaired to the
corral, however, Mrs. Farnshaw turned from a belated churning and
administered the caution in words:
"Don't ever say anything back to your pa, Lizzie; he gets worse and worse
all th' time."
Elizabeth considered the subject for some minutes. The wear and tear of
the discords of her mother's life she knew were far more responsible for
her mother's broken health than anything she did in the way of hard work.
It seemed a good time to begin the reforms upon which her heart was set.
"Ma, I've been thinking about you a good deal this winter," she began
slowly. "Something is wrong with us all." The girl thought again for a
moment. Her mother watched her with sharp attention and waited. Reforms
were not easy to discuss with her mother; they were very different,
Elizabeth and her mother. Elizabeth hardly dared express her longing to
reorganize their home. If only she could effect a reformation! Her heart
had been set on it all winter. She knew now how people _could_ live if
only they understood how to do it. Her help here was needed. When she
began to speak again it was very slowly, and with a careful consideration
of the words she was using.
"We ought all of us to be different. We go along day after day hating our
work, scolding and fretting at each other, and never really happy, any of
us, and I've been wondering why?"
Her mother eyed her closely. Something of the girl's mood stirred a
responsive chord.
"I've thought of it too," she said, "but I can't never tell why it is
though, unless"--she spoke slowly and Elizabeth was encouraged--"unless
it's because we don't never belong to ourselves. Now your pa wants t' run
th' house, an' th' farm, an' you children, an' me, an' everything, an' I'm
so tired, an' never have any help, that anybody'd be cross. Nobody ever
pities me, though. Here, take this dasher an' finish this here churnin'
for me."
Elizabeth took the dasher into her own hand and stood looking down
meditatively at the cream gathered about the hole in the churn lid. The
first sentence of her mother's remark struck her attention.
"Why can't folks belong to themselves?" she asked, letting the dasher rest
while she churned mental problems of greater moment.
Mrs. Farnshaw looked up quickly. "Well, if you think you can marry an'
belong t' yourself, just you try it," she replied.
"But, ma, if a man loved a woman couldn't she get him to leave her free?
Now--"
Mrs. Farnshaw cut her short. "Love! Men don't know how to spell th' word.
They get a woman, an' after she's got children they know she can't help
herself. She's got t' stick to it 'cause she can't raise 'em alone
an'--an' it don't make no difference whether he takes care of 'em or
not--" Words failed the exasperated woman.
Elizabeth studied her mother with a new interest. She began to apply her
mother's words to her own case. She knew that her mother had wanted her
services this spring as much as her father, and remembered the letter
calling her home.
"But that don't cover your case, ma. You love pa more than you do us
children; you know you do, and we know that you do too."
Mrs. Farnshaw usually denied the most obvious thing if her protective
instincts prompted her to do so, but her daughter had hit the bull's-eye
so exactly that for the moment she had no defence ready. Elizabeth was
encouraged by her mother's silence. Mrs. Farnshaw talked so much that it
was not easy to get her attention. The young girl, glowing with the
discoveries made in Aunt Susan's home, desired to get at the bottom of the
causes of inharmony in her own and to reorganize it on a better basis. It
looked as if she was to be granted a hearing upon her schemes.
"I don't care about him running over _us_ so much," she said
diplomatically, "but you let him run over you in the same way. Now isn't
there some way to come at him and get him to see it. When we're alone you
talk about him domineering over you, but when he's here you let him say
anything he wants to and you never try to help yourself. Why don't you
strike out on a new tack and say you won't do it when he makes
unreasonable demands? Why don't you reason with him good-naturedly, if you
think that's better, without crying, I mean, and then if he won't listen
at all----"
"I don't know, Lizzie," the mother interposed slowly. "I sometimes think I
will an' then when he's here something won't let me. It ain't what he says
to you; it's--it's--something he does to you when he looks at you. I'm as
weak as water when he looks at me. I don't know why. I guess it's because
I've always give up--an'--an'--I can't tell why. A woman does just like a
horse--there's more'n one kind of whippin' a man can give--an' she gets
scared--an' minds. A man begins right from th' first t' tell her what to
do an' she loves 'im and wants t' please 'im, an' before long she don't
have her way no more'n a nigger."
Some of the truth of the statement came within the grasp of the daughter,
who was looking across the idle churn with her mind fixed in singleness of
purpose upon remedies, and yet she felt that there was some other element
in the matter not yet accounted for. The hopeless tone of the older woman,
however, goaded her young spirit into forgetting the caution necessary to
dealing with the subject. Her blood fired with resentment that one life
should be so crushed by another. It was her mother whose shoulders drooped
with a burden too heavy for her to throw off.
"If you're sure of that, why don't you leave him? We children are old
enough to support ourselves and----"
"Lizzie!"
Elizabeth had overshot the mark. Her mother was of another generation.
"But, ma," the girl protested quickly, "I don't say leave him if you can
find any way of settling matters. Can't you have a talk with him--and get
him to let you alone if you are willing to do the very best you can?
That's the best way. Have you tried it?"
"No I hain't," the mother replied shortly; "it wouldn't do no good. But if
my talkin' t' you is goin' t' make you say such things, I ain't goin't'
talk t' you no more. When folks is married they're married, an' I don't
believe in partin', nor talk of partin'."
"Well, I think maybe you are right, but if you and pa are going to live
together you ought to try and have it out, and be a help to each other
instead----" She broke off and thought a moment, "Now Aunt Susan and Uncle
Nate----"
"Stop right there!" Mrs. Farnshaw cried, afire with jealousy. "That
woman's brought more trouble into this house a'ready than She'll ever take
out. Your pa's been rantin' about her all winter an'--an' he said you'd be
pokin' her ways into our faces th' very day you got home. I 'spect she's
th' one that got it into your head to talk of partin', most likely."
"Oh, now, ma, don't go on like that. You don't know about Aunt Susan.
She's the last person in the world to ever suggest such a thing. That's
just what I started out to say--they never have a word about anything.
It's the loveliest home to live in, and I was just thinking that they must
have found----"
"I said I didn't want t' hear nothin' more about them folks, an' I don't,"
Mrs. Farnshaw cried, caught on the other horn of the argument and even
more deeply offended than before. "She'll most likely get all your love
just like she got all your father's money last winter. You needn't mention
her here no more. Th' school directors 'll be over to see you about
fillin' out that term, to-night," Mrs. Farnshaw ended shortly, and turned
the subject of conversation to other channels.
"Me? To fill out the term?" Elizabeth exclaimed in surprise. "What's gone
wrong with the school here? I don't want a piece of a term, and I don't
want, ever, to teach in this district where I've gone to school."
"Well, you're goin' to," was the brief reply. "Your pa an' me told 'em
you'd take it."
"But how does it happen that the school is without a teacher?" Elizabeth
asked with curiosity, ignoring the curt disposal of her services. She was
accustomed to the peremptory measures of her parents.
"Jake Ransom run him out. He just piked off after he got his money order
cashed last Saturday mornin'."
"And you expect me to take a school that's all upside down from that kind
of handling--and me without any experience?"
"You'll take it an' You'll do your best, an' we won't hear no more about
it. Here, ma, tie up this finger," Mr. Farnshaw said. He had just come in
from the barn in time to hear his daughter's objections.
Later in the evening the directors came. Family pressure was strong, and
with reluctance Elizabeth accepted the month yet to be taught. It would
help with the interest, and that interest clouded the family sky to the
horizon on every side now. Elizabeth was divided between a fear of
inability to manage a demoralized school and the desire to add twenty-five
dollars to the family revenue. In anticipation she saw the unruly boys
supported and encouraged in insubordination by such as Sadie Crane, who
was jealously ready to resent her--a former playmate--in the role of
authority. And to put herself right with the governing board Elizabeth
told the new director--Sadie's own father--her fears on that score.
"They have played with me and we have had the sort of quarrels all
children have, Mr. Crane, and I may not be able to manage them."
Lon Crane was ignorant and uncouth, but big of heart, and the openness of
the discussion pleased him.
"You jest take that school, young lady, an' I'll see that my end of th'
thing's kep' up. I'll come over there an thrash every mother's son of 'em
if I have t'. I'd kind o' like t' lick a few of 'em anyhow, an' if my
young ones give any trouble, you jes' stop in on your way home an' I'll
see that it don't never happen ag'in."
Half the battle was won; she let him hold her hand a moment at
leave-taking while he reinforced his remarks by many repetitions.
"Don't you worry, Sis," he repeated as he backed out of the door; "you
needn't be afraid; this here school board's at your back. We know it's a
bad school, but, by ginger! we'll see that you're stood by. You jes' let
me know if that there Jake Ransom tries any more monkeyshines and I'll tan
his hide till It'll be good for shoe leather."
It occurred to Elizabeth that every word they were saying would be carried
to the boy long before Monday morning and that a bad matter might from the
very goodness of the teller's intentions be made worse.
"How old did you say the Ransom boy was?" she asked with concern.
"Fifteen--and a stinker if there ever was one."
"Then I think maybe I'll have a show. I thought he was older than that,"
she said diplomatically. "Now may I ask that what we have said be kept
quiet? I would rather like to have a fair show with him--and I'll admit
I'd like to be on good terms. Promise me that what we have said may be a
secret even from your own family till after Monday."
Elizabeth went forward and spoke confidentially. The man liked her even
better than before.
"I'll do it, by jing!" he exclaimed. "They'll be wantin' t' know soon's
ever I get home what we done about it, an' fur once they'll suck their
thumbs. Look out fur that boy, though; he's a black sheep that lives
around in any flock; ain't got no home. I'll help if I'm needed."
Elizabeth listened closely to all that she heard her brothers say about
Jake Ransom, trying to form some estimate of his character, and soon came
to the conclusion that whatever else the boy might be, he was at least not
to be classed as a sneak. In fact, Jake seemed to have rather a surprising
faculty for announcing his policies before he began action.
When school opened Monday morning the bully was easily recognizable.
Elizabeth had gone through all the stages of fright, of distaste for the
job, and lastly of set determination to show this district that she could
take that boy and not only conquer him but become friends with him.
Instead of being nervous about the coming encounter, however, Elizabeth
grew more steady and self-reliant as she felt his eyes upon her, and
actually became interested in the small affairs preceding the ringing of
the bell, and forgot him altogether till it was time to call the roll.
Jacob Ransom's name came last on the list. A titter ran around the room
when it was called. The tone of reply was louder than the rest and defiant
of manner. Elizabeth looked around the room with frank inquiry and the
titter died down. She let her gaze wander quietly and naturally down the
aisle to the seat of the bully and was surprised to find that she liked
the boy.
Closing the roll book and following an instinct rather than a formulated
plan, Elizabeth walked slowly down the room to his desk. A faint giggle
behind her spoke of the hushed expectations of trouble.
"If I hear any more laughing in this room, I shall inquire into the
matter," she said sternly, facing about beside Jake's desk.
The instant response to that remark gave her confidence in her own powers.
It was the first time she had ever used the tone of authority and she
instinctively recognized that the quality of her personality in that
position was good. Both she and Jake Ransom were on trial in that room.
"So you are the 'Jake' I have heard about?" she said, looking him frankly
in the face and letting him see that she was measuring him openly. "Is
your name Jake or Jacob?" she asked, as if it were an important matter to
get settled.
"Don't call me Jacob," the boy snapped.
"I think I like the nickname better myself," Elizabeth replied easily. Her
good fairy beckoned her on. "These children are all laughing because they
think we are going to pull each other's hair presently. We will show them
at least that we are a lady and a gentleman, I trust. Let me see your
books." She looked at him with such straightforward sincerity that the boy
returned the look in the same spirit.
The books were produced in surprise; this was walking into the middle of
the ring and bidding for an _open_ fight, if fight they must. The boy
loved a square deal. Jake Ransom's sting had been drawn.
"You are in advance of the rest of the school. Are you preparing for the
high school?" Elizabeth asked, emphasizing her surprise.
"Lord, no!" the boy blurted out.
Elizabeth looked through the book in her hand slowly before she asked:
"Why don't you? I was only about as far along as this in arithmetic last
year. Some one said you were ready for it."
"Oh, I kin do 'rithmetic all right, but I ain't no good in nothin'
else--an'--an'--wouldn't I look fine teachin' school?" Jake Ransom
exclaimed, but the bully melted out of him by way of the fact that she had
heard good reports of him. He would not smoke this level-eyed girl out of
the schoolhouse, nor sprinkle the floor with cayenne, as was the usual
proceeding of the country bumpkin who failed to admire his teacher. Jake
Ransom was not really a bully; he was a shy boy who had been domineered
over by a young popinjay of a teacher who had never taught school before
and who had himself many lessons to learn in life's school. The boy
brought out his slate, spit on its grimy surface and wiped it with his
sleeve. One of the buttons on his cuff squeaked as he wiped it across, and
the children had something tangible to laugh at. Elizabeth was wise enough
to take no notice of that laugh.
Some one has said that experience is not as to duration but as to
intensity, and it was Elizabeth's fate to live at great pressure in every
important stage of her life. But for the fact that she had made a friend
of Jake Ransom that month's events would have had a different story. Sadie
Crane took exceptions to every move made and every mandate issued from the
teacher's desk. The spirit of insubordination to which the entire school
had been subjected that winter made good soil for Sadie's tares. For the
most part the dissatisfaction was a subtle thing, an undercurrent of which
Elizabeth was aware, but upon which she could lay no finger of rebuke, but
at times it was more traceable, and then, to the young teacher's surprise,
Jake Ransom had ways of dealing with the offenders outside of school
hours. Sadie's tongue was sharp and she was accustomed to a wholesome
attitude of fear among the scholars, but her first thrusts at Jake had
aroused a demon of which she had little dreamed. Jake had no foolish pride
and would admit his faults so guilelessly that her satire fell to the
ground. He was an entirely new sort to the spiteful child. The terrible
advantage the person who will admit his faults cheerfully has over the one
who has pride and evades was never more manifest. Jake Ransom pointed out
to a credulous following the causes of Sadie's disaffection, and left the
envious child in such a state of futile rage that she was ready to burst
with her ill-directed fury. In the end the month's work had to be granted
the tribute of success, and the term closed with a distinct triumph for
Elizabeth and the experience of a whole year's trial crowded into four
short weeks.
At home things were not so fortunate. The young girl had come back from
Topeka with higher ideals of home life, of personal conduct, and of good
manners than she had ever had before. It was so good to have something
better, and Elizabeth hungered to pass along the transforming things she
had found; but when she tried to give the boys gentle hints about correct
ways of eating she was greeted with guffaws and sarcastic chuckles about
handling soup with a fork. Mrs. Farnshaw saw nothing but Susan Hornby's
interference, Mr. Farnshaw told her to attend to her own affairs until her
help was desired, and when the child was rebuffed and unable to hide her
disappointment and retired within herself, both parents resented the
evident and growing difference between her and themselves.
It was to escape from a home which was unendurable that Elizabeth
flat-footedly, and for the first time, refused to accede to her parents'
authority. When the matter of a spring term of school came up for
discussion she refused to teach the home school again, though Mr. Crane
had been so pleased with her work that he had offered it to her. When
asked if Jake Ransom was the objection she indignantly asserted to the
contrary.
"He was the best pupil I had," she said, "but I don't want to teach at
home, and I won't do it," and that was all she would say. She secured a
school ten miles north of her home; ten miles had been the nearest point
which she would consider.
The interest was at last paid, but when the summer groceries were paid for
there was no money left with which to go back to Topeka, and it was
necessary to teach a winter school. Elizabeth went to work anew to collect
funds for another year's schooling. Mr. Farnshaw sold himself short of
corn in the fall, however, and the young girl was expected to make up the
deficit. In the spring the interest was to be paid again, and so at the
end of a year and a half the situation was unchanged. The next year a
threshing machine was added to the family assets, and again the cry of
"help" went up, again Elizabeth's plans were sacrificed. The next year the
interest was doubled, and for four years Elizabeth Farnshaw worked against
insurmountable odds.
CHAPTER IV
A CULTURED MAN
When no remonstrance of hers availed to prevent the constant increase of
expenses, Elizabeth saw that her assistance, instead of helping the family
to get out of debt, was simply the means of providing toys for
experimentation, and that she was being quietly but persistenly euchred
out of all that her heart cherished. Mr. Farnshaw valued the machinery he
was collecting about him, Mrs. Farnshaw valued the money, partly because
in one way and another it added to the family possessions, and also
because her husband having found out that he could obtain it through her
easier than by direct appeal, she could avoid unpleasantness with him by
insisting upon her daughter giving it to him; but Elizabeth's education
was valued by no one but Elizabeth, and unless she were to learn her
lesson quickly the time for an education to be obtained would have
passed.
"It's of no use for you to talk to me, ma," Elizabeth said the spring
after she was twenty years old, "I shall keep every cent I make this
summer. Pa gets into debt and won't let anybody help him out, and I am
going to go to Topeka this fall. I'm years older right now than the rest
of the scholars will be--not a single pupil that was there when I went
before will be there--and I'm going to go. I don't ever intend to pay the
interest on that old mortgage again--it's just pouring money into a
rat-hole!"
[Illustration: "'NOW LOOK HERE, LIZZIE, ... YOUR PA EXPECTS IT'"]
It was early morning and they were planting potatoes. Her mother stood
with her back turned toward the raw April wind as they talked, her old
nubia tied loosely about her head and neck, and her hands red with the
cold.
"Now look here, Lizzie"--Mrs. Farnshaw always refused to use the full
name--"your pa expects it."
"Of course he expects it; that's why he keeps adding to the mortgage; but
that don't make any difference. I'm going to Topeka this fall just the
same. I am not going to pay one dollar on the interest in May, and you can
tell pa if you like."
Mrs. Farnshaw was alarmed. Elizabeth had protested and tried to beg off
from the yearly stipend before, but never in that manner. The tone her
daughter had used frightened her and she quivered with an unacknowledged
fear. Her husband's wrath was the Sheol she fought daily to avoid. What
would become of them if the interest were not paid?
Added to Mrs. Farnshaw's personal desire to command her daughter's funds
there was the solid fear of her husband's estimate of her failure. She
could not look in his eye and tell him that she was unable to obtain their
daughter's consent. To live in the house with him after Lizzie had told
him herself was equally unthinkable, for his wrath would be visited upon
her own head.
"My child! My child!" she cried, "you don't have to be told what he will
do t' me."
There was a long pause while she sobbed. The pause became a compelling
one; some one had to speak.
"I can't help it, ma," Elizabeth said doggedly after a time.
"Oh, but you don't know what it means. Come on to th' house. I can't work
no more, an' I've got t' talk this thing out with you."
They picked up the pails and the hoe with which they had been covering the
hills and went to the house, carrying a burden that made a potato-planting
day a thing of no consequence.
The mother busied herself with the cob fire as she argued, and Elizabeth
put away the old mittens with which she had protected her hands from the
earth which never failed to leave them chapped, before she picked up the
broom and began an onslaught on the red and fluffy dust covering the
kitchen floor.
"You see, You'll go off t' teach an' won't know nothin' about it,
an'--an'--I'll have it t' bear an'----" The pause was significant.
Mrs. Farnshaw watched her daughter furtively and strained her ears for
signs of giving up. At last Elizabeth said slowly:
"I'm as sorry as I can be, ma, but--I'm twenty years old, and I've _got_
to go."
There was no doubting that her mind was made up, and yet her mother threw
herself against that stone wall of determination in frantic despair.
"Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie! I can't live an' have you do it. You don't know,
child, what I have to bear."
"Now look here, ma; you won't let me have things out openly with pa and
come to an understanding with him, and when I told you four years ago that
you ought to leave him if you couldn't live with him peaceably you talked
as if I had committed some sort of sin. You and pa are determined to fuss
it out and I can't help it, and I've sacrificed four good years to you and
the interest is bigger than it ever was. I haven't helped you one bit. If
you want to go on living with him You'll do it in your own way, but if
your life is unbearable, and you want to leave him, I'll see that you are
provided for. The law would give you a share of this----"
The noise of the broom and of their voices had prevented them from hearing
any other sounds, but a shadow fell across the middle door and Josiah
Farnshaw entered the kitchen a blazing picture of wrath. Before he could
speak, however, the dog on the doorstep barked sharply at a stranger who
was close upon him, and the irate father was obliged to smooth his
manner.
Elizabeth escaped to the bedroom as her father crossed to the kitchen to
see what the man wanted, and Mr. Farnshaw went on out to the pens a moment
later with the "hog buyer," as the man proved to be.
"My God! My God! What have you done?" Mrs. Farnshaw cried, following
Elizabeth into the bedroom.
"I don't know, ma," the girl cried, as white as her mother. "I'm going to
get off to hunt up a school while that man is here. The sun has come out
and it's only ten o'clock. If you're afraid, come along," she advised, as
she hurried into a clean calico dress and took down her old black riding
skirt from its nail.
"Lizzie!" the mother exclaimed, as much afraid of the advice as she was of
her husband.
There was little time left her for argument, for Elizabeth hurriedly tied
a thick green veil over her plain straw hat and left the house. The hog
pens were on the opposite side of the stable from the house and Elizabeth
soon had Patsie, now a mare of five years, saddled and bridled.
The air was softening, and it occurred to her that it was going to rain,
as she hurried out of the yard, but she did not wait to get extra wraps
nor her umbrella. The best thing to do, she knew, was to get away while
that hog buyer was there and trust to luck for the edge of her father's
anger to wear away before she returned.
Fortunately she had worn her old coat, which was heavy and waterproof, and
when it did begin to rain half an hour later, instead of turning back she
pressed forward, more afraid of the thunderstorm at home than any to be
encountered on the way.
Elizabeth rode steadily southward, thinking out her share in this new
quarrel in which she had embroiled her parents, unaware that as it
drizzled it became warmer and that the day had become spring-like and
endurable. She began to question the propriety of having suggested drastic
measures to her mother. "Till death do you part" rang in her ears in spite
of the certainty that the union of her mother and her father was an unholy
thing which was damning them more surely than a separation could possibly
do. Of only one thing could Elizabeth be sure: she saw without mistake at
last that she must decide upon her own duties hereafter without listening
to a mother who could not decide anything for herself.
The director of the district to which Elizabeth first turned her steps was
away from home when she arrived and it was necessary to consider where she
would go next. After some thought she decided to try the Chamberlain
district, which lay between there and her home. It was eight miles from
the Farnshaw homestead and far enough away so that she would not have to
board with her parents and she determined to try to meet the school board,
which met usually on the first Tuesday night in April.
The fact of facing around toward the north again set her to considering
what course of action she would pursue when she went back home.
"I'll go back, I guess, and be patient with whatever he feels like doing
with me," she resolved, reflecting that from her father's standpoint he
had a very real grievance against her. "It was a dreadful thing for him to
hear me advising ma to leave him. I guess I owe it to them to try to
straighten it up. But I don't believe it can ever be straightened up," she
ended doubtfully.
Elizabeth was passing a grove of young cottonwood trees and was so
absorbed in her thoughts that, becoming only half conscious that Patsie
was lagging and that time was passing rapidly, she gave her a slap with
the strap in her hand, urging the horse to a faster pace as she rounded
the corner of the section without looking up. Patsie broke into a long,
easy lope. Suddenly Elizabeth became conscious of the noise of other hoofs
splashing toward them. Glancing up, she saw a farm team almost upon them,
whose driver was stooped to avoid the rain.
Elizabeth pulled her horse up sharply, and to one side. The trail was an
old one, and the sloping, washed-out rut was deep. Patsie lost her footing
and, after a slipping plunge or two, fell floundering on her side before
her mistress could support her with the rein. Active as a boy, Elizabeth
loosened her foot from the stirrup and flung herself to the other side of
the road, out of the way of the dangerous hoofs. Elizabeth slipped as her
feet struck the ground and she landed on "all-fours" in the grass.
The young man, suddenly awake to what had happened, was out of his high
seat and had the mare by the bridle before its rider had fairly scrambled
up.
"I beg your pardon! Are you hurt?" he called across the wagon, when
Patsie, still nervous from her fall, hung back as far as her rein would
permit and not only refused to be led but threatened to break away
altogether.
"Not at all! Not a bit! Whoa! Patsie! Whoa! Lady!" Elizabeth cried, coming
around to them, and extending a smeary, dripping hand for the taut rein.
The young man let her step in front of him and put her hand on the strap,
but kept his own there as well, while they both followed the backing horse
with braced steps, the girl talking soothingly to the frightened animal
the while. The naturally docile filly responded to the voice she had heard
from earliest colthood and soon let Elizabeth approach close enough to put
her hand on the bit. The seriousness of the affair gave way to the comic
when the horse began to snatch bits of grass from the roadside.
The young couple laughed and looked at each other rather sheepishly as
they saw that further cooperation was not needed. They untangled their
hands where they had slipped tight together in the loop of the bridle rein
as they had followed the rearing beast.
"She has broken the girth," the young man said, lifting his hat
ceremoniously and with a manner not born of life on the farm.
He threw the stirrup over the top of the saddle and fished under the now
quiet horse for her dangling surcingle. Having secured it, he untied the
strap and examined it to see if it were sufficiently long to permit of
tying another knot. Deciding that it was, he tied one end in the ring in
the saddle and, passing the other through the ring of the girth, drew it
up with a strong, steady pull. His side face against the saddle, as he
pulled, permitted him to examine curiously the young girl in front of
him.
"Are you sure you are not hurt at all?" he asked solicitously.
"Not a bit--only muddy," she replied, stooping to brush her earth-stained
hands through the rain-laden grass at the roadside. He was still working
with the straps when her hands were cleaned and watched her openly as she
shielded her face behind Patsie's head while waiting. The water dripped
from the ends of her braided brown hair and the long dark lashes of her
brown eyes were mist-laden also. He examined all the accoutrements of her
mount minutely. When at last it occurred to her that he was giving them
extra attention for the sake of extending the time Elizabeth's eyes
lighted up with a humorous twinkle. The young man caught and rightly
interpreted the expression and was embarrassed.
"I think it's all right," he said quickly. "I'm awfully sorry to have been
so stupid. I never thought of meeting any one in all this rain."
Elizabeth took that as a reflection upon her presence out of doors on such
a day, and leading her horse down into the deep road sprang into the
saddle from the bank before he could offer his assistance.
"Thank you for helping me," she said, and was off toward the west before
he could speak.
She was gone, and he could do nothing but look after her helplessly.
"Your horse has lamed itself," he called when he was at last able to
concern himself with such matters, but either the spattering hoofbeats
prevented her hearing his voice or she was determined not to reply; he
could not tell which. There was nothing to do but return to his wagon.
"Confound it!" he exclaimed. "Now you've made an ass of yourself and let
her get away without finding out who she was or where she lived." He liked
her--and he was an ass! He anathematized himself openly.
When well away from the man, Elizabeth saw that his observation regarding
the prospects of meeting people on such a day was a perfectly natural one
and not aimed at her at all. She laughed at the spectacle she was sure she
must have presented, and wished now that she had not been in such a hurry
in leaving him. Here was a man worth looking at. The gesture as he had
lifted his hat indicated refinement.
"Curious that I haven't seen him--he lives here some where," she pondered,
and now that she could not find out she rated herself severely for the
embarrassment which was apt to assail her at critical moments.
Patsie limped miserably, and Elizabeth brought her down to a walk and let
her droop along the old country road, and speculated on this new specimen
of masculinity which had dropped from the skies to puzzle and delight her
soul.
The rain beat heavily now, and Elizabeth began to take her situation into
account after thinking over the stranger a few minutes. There was a
perfect deluge of water from the burdened sky, and though no sign of a
house could be seen, she knew she could not be far from the Chamberlain
homestead; but the ground was becoming more and more soggy, and her
garments were not of the heaviest. Patsie's feet went ploop, ploop, ploop,
in the soft, muddy road. Elizabeth urged her to the fastest possible
walking speed in spite of her lameness. To trot or gallop was impossible,
and the young horse slipped now and then in a manner which would have
unseated a less skilful rider.
The sodden Kansas road was aflood with this spring rain. Patsie laboured
heavily and Elizabeth gave herself up to her cogitations again. Her mind
had reacted to more pleasant subjects than home affairs.
It had been a dreary, disheartening ride, and yet it had had its
compensations, for was not the rider young and the earth filled with the
freshness of spring? The short and tender grass bordered the road to the
very wheel-ruts; the meadow larks sang regardless of the rain, or mayhap
in sheer meadow-lark delight because of it. To the south a prairie chicken
drummed, and a cow called to her calf, whose reply came from a point still
farther in the distance. At the sound of the cow's lowing Elizabeth
Farnshaw peered delightedly through mists.
"I knew it couldn't be much farther, Patsie," she said, leaning forward
and patting the neck of the dripping horse. Little spurts of water flew
spatteringly from under the affectionate palm, and Elizabeth shook her
bare hand to free it from the wet hairs which adhered to it, laughing at
her rainsoaked condition.
It was indeed a time for seeking shelter.
Presently the rattle of a chain was heard nearby, then the outlines of a
straw stable were seen, and from the foreground of mist a man appeared
unhitching a team of horses from a large farm wagon. Patsie gave a little
nicker of anticipation as she scented the sacks of oats, carefully
covered, in the back of the wagon. The old man rose from his stooping
position in unfastening the tugs and faced the newcomer.
"Why, it's Miss Farnshaw! Gee whiz! Be you a duck t' be out on such a day
as this?" he inquired, stepping forward when he saw that she was coming
in. Then chuckling at his own humour, he added:
"I guess you be a goslin'--a goslin' bein' a young goose, you know."
Elizabeth Farnshaw laughed. "But my feathers aren't turning the rain, Mr.
Chamberlain." It was the second time within the hour that she had been
reminded that women were not expected to go out of doors in a rainstorm.
"That's because you're such a young goose, you know; you ain't got no
feathers yet, it's only down."
"Fairly caught!" she replied, backing her horse around so that the rain
would come from behind, "Tell me, does the school board meet to-night?"
"Oh, ho!" the farmer replied, "that's th' way th' wind blows, is it? Now
look here, young lady, if you be as prompt in lickin' them youngsters in
season an' out o' season as you be in lookin' up schools I guess You'll
do. Yes, sir-ee, th' school board meets to-night an' you jes' come t' th'
house an' have a bite t' eat an' we'll see what we can do for you. Why,
stars an' garters!" he exclaimed as he lifted her down from her horse,
"Liza Ann 'll have t' put you in th' oven along with th' rest of th'
goslins." Then he added: "Now you run along to th' house, an' I'll take
this horse in hand. I judge by its nicker you didn't stop for no dinner
to-day."
Mrs. Chamberlain appeared at the door and her husband called to her,
"Liza Ann! here's Miss Farnshaw, as wet as that last brood of chickens you
found under th' corn-planter. Give 'er a dry pair of shoes an' take 'er
wet coat off o' 'er."
As Elizabeth turned to her hostess, the old man exclaimed, "Why, Gosh all
Friday, what's happened to your horse?"
"I'm awfully worried about Patsie's foot. She slipped in the muddy road
this afternoon. Do you suppose It'll lay her up? It's a busy time and pa
needs her."
"I don't know; it's in a ticklish place. I'll rub it good with Mustang
liniment; that's th' best thing I know of. Now you run on to th' house;
you're wet enough t' wake up lame yourself in th' mornin'," he admonished,
straightening up, with his hands on the small of his back.
Having dismissed Elizabeth, Silas Chamberlain took Patsie's saddle from
her back and laid it across Old Queen's harness, taking his own team into
the barn first. Old Queen was an unsocial animal and it was necessary to
tie her in the far stall when a strange horse was brought into the barn,
as she had a way of treating intruders badly. She sniffed at the saddle
distrustfully as Mr. Chamberlain tied her up.
"Whoa! there!" he said emphatically, giving her a slap on the flank which
sent her into the opposite corner of the stall. "You needn't be s' all
fired touchy you can't let a strange saddle come into th' stall. That
saddle's carried th' pluckiest girl in this end of th' county t'day.
Gosh-a-livin's! Think of her a comin' out on a day like this, an' smilin'
at them wet feathers, as she called 'em, 's if it didn't make no
difference bein' wet at all. Now if John Hunter gets his eyes on 'er
there'll be an end of ma's board money; an' then how'll I finish payin'
fur that sewin' machine?"
In the house, after some time spent in trying to be stiffly polite to her
guest, the unwilling hostess began the supper. The potatoes were put on to
fry, the kettle sang, and Mrs. Chamberlain sat down to grind the coffee in
a mill which she grasped firmly between her knees.
"Maybe you 'uns don't drink coffee?" she remarked anxiously, stopping to
look over at the girl, who sat near the fire drying her shoes in the
oven.
"Oh, yes," Elizabeth answered slowly, coming back reluctantly from a
consideration of the handsome stranger she had met; "that is," she added
confusedly, "I never drink anything but water, anyhow."
Mrs. Chamberlain gave a relieved sigh. "I was afraid you'd rather have
tea, an' I ain't got no tea in th' house. Bein' farmin' season now it
seems as if I can't never get t' town."
Just then one adventurous chick which, with the rest of the brood, had
been discovered under the corn-planter earlier in the day, jumped out of
the box in which it had been kept near the fire. Mrs. Chamberlain set the
mill on the table and gave chase to the runaway.
"That's th' peertest chicken of th' lot," she remarked as she again
enveloped him in the old woollen skirt, from the folds of which came much
distressed cheeping. "They're hungry, I think," she added, reaching for a
bowl of yellow cornmeal which she mixed with water. Lifting the skirt off
the little brood carefully, and giving it a cautious shake to assure
herself that no unwary chick was caught in its folds, she dropped some of
the mixture in the middle of the box, tapping lightly with the spoon to
call the attention of the chicks to its presence. The chickens pecked
hungrily, and there was a satisfied note in the twitterings of the downy
little group as Mrs. Chamberlain turned to the preparation of her supper
again.
"Yes, he's th' peertest chicken of th' lot; an' I'd most as soon he'd been
more like th' rest--he's always gettin' out of th' box."
"Now, Liza Ann, you ain't thinkin' nothin' of th' kind," said her husband,
who had hurried with his evening chores so as to get a chance to visit
with the company and had just come in from the stable. "You know you said
yourself, 'Thank goodness, there's one on 'em alive,' when you fished 'em
out from under that planter. Th' same thing's keeping 'im on th' go now
that kept 'im from givin' up as quick as th' rest did then. Chicken's is
like boys, Miss Farnshaw," Silas continued, addressing Elizabeth; "th'
ones that makes th' most trouble when thy're little, you can count on as
bein' th' most likely when they're growed up. Now, Liza Ann there counted
on that chicken soon's ever she set eyes on 'im."
Having washed his face and hands in the tin basin on the bench just
outside the kitchen door, Silas Chamberlain combed his curly locks of iron
gray before the little looking glass which was so wrinkled that he looked
like some fantastic caricature when mirrored on its surface. After a short
grace at the opening of the meal, he passed a dish of potatoes,
remarking:
"We ain't much hands t' wait on th' table, Miss Farnshaw; You'll have t'
reach an' help yourself."
"Who's this plate for?" Elizabeth asked at last, designating the vacant
place at her side.
"That's John's," said Mrs. Chamberlain.
"John Hunter's, Miss Farnshaw," said Silas. "He's our boarder, an' th'
likeliest young man in these parts." Then he added with conviction, "You
two be goin' t' like each other."
A girlish blush covered the well-tanned cheeks, and to hide her
embarrassment Elizabeth said with a laugh:
"Describe this beau ideal of yours."
"Now, Si, do let th' child alone," Mrs. Chamberlain protested. "He's
always got t' tease," she added deprecatingly.
"Sometimes I be an' sometimes not. Miss Farnshaw made me think of you some
way when I see her this afternoon." Noting his wife's look of surprise, he
explained: "I mean when I see you down to th' Cherryvale meetin' house.
An' it didn't take me long t' make up my mind after that, neither."
Mrs. Chamberlain smiled at the mention of girlhood days, but said nothing,
and Silas turned to Elizabeth again with his honest face alight with
memories of youth.
"You see, Miss Farnshaw, I'd gone out on th' hunt of a stray calf, an' an
unexpected shower came on--th' kind that rains with th' sun still a
shinin'--an' I dug my heels into old Charlie's flanks an' hurried along
down th' road to th' meeting house, a few rods farther on, when what
should I see but a pretty girl on th' steps of that same place of refuge!
Well, I begged 'er pardon, but I stayed on them there steps till that
shower cleared off. Most of th' time I was a prayin' that another cloud
would appear, an' I didn't want it no bigger than a man's hand neither.
No, sir-ee, I wouldn't 'a' cared if it'd 'a' been as big as th' whole Bay
of Biscay. An' what I was thinkin' jest now was that there was about th'
same fundamental differences 'tween you an' John Hunter that th' was
'tween Liza Ann an' me. He's light haired an' blue eyed, an tall an' slim,
an' he's openin' up a new farm, an' 'll need a wife. He talks of his
mother comin' out t' keep house for him, but, law's sakes! she wasn't
raised on a farm an' wouldn't know nothin' about farm work. Oh, yes, I
forgot t' tell you th' best part of my story: I got t' carry Miss Liza Ann
Parkins home on old Charlie, 'cause th' crick rose over th' banks outen
th' clouds of rain I prayed for!"
"Now, Si Chamberlain, there ain't a word of truth in that, an' you know
it," said his wife, passing Elizabeth a hot biscuit. "I walked home by th'
turnpike road, Miss Farnshaw, though we did wait a bit, till it dried up a
little."
Her husband's laugh rang out; he had trapped Liza Ann into the discussion,
in spite of herself, and he had trapped her into an admission as well.
"Well," he said, "I may be mistaken about th' details, but I've always had
a soft spot in my heart for th' rainy days since that particular time."
"But you haven't told me why Mr. Hunter isn't here to eat his supper,"
said Elizabeth, "nor have you told me what he is like."
"Oh, he's gone over to Colebyville for his mail, an' won't be home till
late--in all this mud. As to what he's like--it ain't easy t' tell what
John's like; he's--he's a university feller; most folks say he's a dude,
but we like him?"
"What university?" Elizabeth asked with a quick indrawn breath; she knew
now whom she had met on the road that afternoon.
"He comes from Illinois. I guess it's th' State University--I never asked
him. His father died an' left him this land an' he's come out here to farm
it. Couldn't plow a straight furrow t' save his life when he come a little
over a year ago, but he's picked up right smart," Silas added, thereby
giving the information the young girl wanted.
This young man was to be in this neighbourhood all summer. Still another
reason for applying for the Chamberlain school.
As Elizabeth helped Liza Ann with her dishwashing after supper, John
Hunter came in. The ground had been too soft for them to hear the wagon
when he drove up. Silas introduced them promptly and added with a grin:
"You've heard of folks that didn't know enough t' come in out of th' rain?
Well, that's her!"
John Hunter's eyes twinkled an amused recognition, but he did not mention
the accident in which Patsie had come to grief.
"I am very glad to meet you, Miss Farnshaw; we are both wet weather
birds."
Seeing Liza Ann reach for a frying pan, he addressed himself to her:
"Never mind any supper for me, Mrs. Chamberlain. I knew I'd be late, as I
had to go around by Warren's after I got back, and I got an early supper
at the new hotel before I left town!"
"The extravagance of that!" exclaimed Mrs. Chamberlain, to whom hotel
bills were unknown.
John Hunter went to the door to clean some extra mud off his boot tops,
and to hide a wide and fatuous smile at the thought of tricking Silas out
of his accustomed joke. He felt nearer the girl, because she too had been
silent regarding the afternoon encounter. He liked the mutuality of it and
resolved that it should not be the last touch of that sort between them.
While not really intellectual, John Hunter had the polish and tastes of
the college man, and here he reflected was a girl who seemed near being on
his own level. She looked, he thought, as if she could see such small
matters as bespattered clothes.
Silas followed him out. "You didn't bed them horses down did you?" he
asked.
"No. I expect we'd better do it now and have it out of the way."
As they entered the dark stable and felt their way along the back of the
little alley, behind the stalls, for the pitchforks, the younger man asked
indifferently:
"Who did you say the young lady was?"
"Oh, ho!" shouted Silas; "it didn't take you long. I knew you'd be
courtin' of me along with your questions. Now look here, John Hunter, you
can't go an' carry this schoolma'am off till this here term's finished. I
look fur Carter an' that new director over to-night, for a school meetin',
an' I'm blamed if I'm goin' t' have you cuttin' into our plans--no,
sirr-ee--she's t' be left free t' finish up this school, anyhow, if I help
'er get it."
"No danger! You get her the school; but how does she come to have that air
away out here? Does she come from some town near here?"
"Town nothin'! She was jest raised on these prairies, same as th' rest of
us. Ain't she a dandy! No, sir--'er father's a farmer--'bout as common as
any of us, an' she ain't had no different raisin'. She's different in
'erself somehow. Curious thing how one body'll have a thing an' another
won't, an' can't seem t' get it, even when he wants it an' tries. Now you
couldn't make nothin' but jest plain farmer out of me, no matter what you
done t' me."
"Do you think they'll give her the school?" John asked.
Silas's laugh made the young man uncomfortable. He had intended to avoid
the necessity for it, but had forgotten himself.
"There's Carter now," was all the reply the old man gave as he moved
toward the door, which he could dimly see now that he had been in the
darkness long enough for his eyes to become accustomed to it. The
splashing footsteps of a horse and the voice of a man cautioning it came
from toward the road.
"That you, Carter?" Silas called.
"Yes. This ground's fairly greasy to-night," answered the voice.
"Bring your horse in here; there's room under cover for it," was the
rejoinder.
They tied it in the darkness, feeling their way from strap to manger. "The
Farnshaw girl's here waitin' fur th' school."
"Glad of that," replied the newcomer. "I don't know her very well, but
they say she can handle youngsters. She's had some extry schoolin' too.
Don't know as that makes any difference in a summer term, but it's never
in th' way."
The young man slipped out of the stable, intending to get a word with the
new teacher before the others came to the house. The school was assured to
her with two members of the board in her favour, he reflected. Liza Ann
had gone to the other room, and finding the way clear he asked in a half
whisper:
"Did you lame your horse badly?" And when Elizabeth only nodded and looked
as if she hoped her hostess had not heard, John Hunter was filled with
joy. The mutuality of the reticence put them on the footing of good
fellowship. There was no further opportunity for conversation, as they
heard Silas and Carter on the step and a third party hail them from a
distance.
There was a moment's delay and when the door did at last open Elizabeth
Farnshaw gave a glad cry:
"Uncle Nate! Where in the world did you come from?"
She caught Nathan Hornby by the lapels of his wet overcoat and stood him
off from her, looking at him in such a transport of joy that they were the
centre of an admiring and curious group instantly.
While Nathan explained that they had only last month traded their wooded
eighty for a hundred and sixty acres of prairie land in this district, and
that it had been their plan to surprise her the next Sunday by driving
over to see her before she had heard that they were in that part of the
state, Elizabeth sat on the edge of the wood-box and still held to his
coat as if afraid the vision might vanish from her sight, and asked
questions twice as fast as the pleased old man could answer them, and
learned that Nathan had been appointed to fill out the unexpired term of
the moderator of the Chamberlain school district, with whom he had traded
for the land. The business of the evening was curtailed to give the pair a
chance to talk, and when the contract was signed, Elizabeth said that she
would go home with Nathan, and John Hunter thrust himself into the
felicitous arrangement by taking the young girl over in his farm wagon, it
being decided that Patsie's lameness made it best for her to remain housed
in Silas's barn for the night.
It was a mile and a half along soggy roads to Nathan Hornby's, and John
Hunter made as much of the time fortune had thrown at him as possible.
They sat under one umbrella, and found the distance short, and John told
her openly that he was glad she was to be in his neighbourhood.
CHAPTER V
REACHING HUNGRY HANDS TOWARD A SYMBOL
Susan Hornby's delight over Elizabeth's coming was the most satisfying
thing Nathan had seen since his return from Topeka. He had traded the land
to please his wife, by getting nearer Elizabeth, but the presence of the
girl in the house was so overwhelmingly surprising that Susan was swept by
its very suddenness into shedding tears of actual joy. Elizabeth was put
to the disconcerting necessity of explaining that her mother somewhat
resented Aunt Susan's influence upon her daughter's life when she found
her friends enthusiastically planning visits in the near future. She
softened the details as much as possible and passed it over as only a bit
of maternal jealousy, but was obliged to let this dear friend see that it
was rather a serious matter in her calculations. Susan Hornby now
understood why Elizabeth had never visited her in these four years.
With the eyes of love Aunt Susan saw that four years in a position of
authority had ripened her darling, and made of her a woman of wit and
judgment, who could tell a necessary thing in a right manner or with a
reserve which was commendable. Eagerly she studied her to see what the
changes of those formative years had brought her. She listened to
Elizabeth's plans for going to Topeka, and rejoiced that the intellectual
stimulus was still strong in her. Elizabeth was obliged to explain away
her parent's attitude regarding further education, and left much for the
older woman to fill in by her intuitions and experience of the world, but
there again Susan Hornby saw evidences of strength which made her feel
that the loss was offset by power gained. Elizabeth Farnshaw had matured
and had qualities which would command recognition. John Hunter had shown
that he recognized them--a thing which Elizabeth without egotism also
knew.
It was a new experience to go to sleep thinking of any man but Hugh. In
the darkness of the little bedroom in which Elizabeth slept that night
Hugh's priority was met face to face by John Hunter's proximity.
Possession is said to be nine points in the law, and John Hunter was on
the ground. The girl had been shut away from those of her kind until her
hungry hands in that hour of thought, reached out to the living presence
of the cultured man, and her hungry heart prayed to heaven that she might
not be altogether unpleasing to him.
In the hour spent with John Hunter she had learned that he had come to
Kansas to open a farm on the only unmortgaged piece of property which his
father had left him when he died; that his mother intended to come to him
as soon as he had a house built; and by an accidental remark she had also
learned that there were lots in some eastern town upon which enough money
could be raised to stock the farm with calves and that it was the young
man's intention to farm this land himself. It seemed so incredible that
John Hunter should become a farmer that by her astonished exclamation over
it she had left him self-satisfied at her estimate of his foreignness to
the life he was driven to pursue.
Elizabeth saw that if John Hunter must needs run a farm that he would do
his best at it, but that he did not wish to _appear_ one with a role, and
being young and with her own philosophy of life in a very much muddled
condition, she liked him the better for it. Crucified daily by the
incongruities of her own home, she craved deliverance from it and all it
represented.
Just now Elizabeth Farnshaw was going home with something akin to fear in
her heart. She rated herself soundly for the useless advice she had thrust
upon her mother and for the entangling difficulties which her thoughtless
words had produced. That the union of her parents was unclean, that it was
altogether foul and by far worse than a divorce, she still felt confident,
but she saw that her mother was totally unable to comprehend the
difference between a clean separate life and the nagging poison dealt out
as daily bread to the husband with whom she lived; but she saw that
because of that very inability to understand the difference, the mother
must be left to find the light in her own way. In her desire to help,
Elizabeth had but increased her mother's burdens, and she tried to assume
an attitude of added tenderness toward her in her own mind, and puckered
her young face into a frown as she let Patsie limp slowly from one low
hill to another.
"I'll do everything I can to square the deal for ma," she resolved, but in
her heart there was a sick suspicion that all she could do was not much,
and that it had small chance really to avail.
Elizabeth had started early for home, but the sun rode high in the heavens
before she arrived. Albert, who was herding the cattle on the short grass
a half mile from home, warned her as she passed that she would do well to
hurry to the house.
"Pa waited for you to do the milking, Bess, an' you didn't come. He's mad
as a hornet, an' You'll have t' bring th' cows out after he gets
through."
It was a friendly warning. To be milking at that hour, when all the men in
the neighbourhood were already following plow and harrow, was an important
matter on the farm. Plainly it had been arranged to make Elizabeth feel a
hindrance to the business of getting in the crops, and it was with
increased apprehension that she approached home.
The storm broke as soon as she was within hailing distance.
"It's time you brought that horse home, young lady. You see to it that
it's harnessed for th' drag as quick as ever you can. Next time you get a
horse You'll know it."
When Elizabeth started on and Mr. Farnshaw saw that Patsie was lame his
anger knew no bounds, and the sound of his exasperated voice could have
been heard half a mile away as he poured out a stream of vituperation.
Elizabeth dodged into the barn as soon as its friendly door could be
reached, thankful that the cows were as far as they were from it. Joe was
harnessing a team in the far corner.
"You better shy around pa, Sis; and get t' th' house," he cautioned.
"All right. He told me to harness Patsie, but she's so lame I know she
can't work--what will I do?"
"If she can't work, she can't. How did it happen?"
"She strained herself just before I got to Mr. Chamberlain's. I was
passing a young man by the name of Hunter and she fell flat. Say, do you
know anything about Mr. Hunter?"
"Yes, yes. Jimmie Crane says he's a stuck-up, who's goin' t' show us
country jakes how t' farm; but th' best thing you can do is t' get in an'
not let pa get any excuse for a row."
Mr. Farnshaw had taken the milkpails to the house while they were talking
and it was Elizabeth's fate to encounter him on the doorstep as she ran up
to the kitchen door.
"Where were you last night?"
"I'm awfully sorry about the horse, pa. I hurried this morning, but Patsie
was so lame and I had to come all the way from the Chamberlain district.
The Haddon school board didn't meet this week and the director of number
Twelve was away, and it was so late last night that I couldn't get home."
"Oh, you've always got a good excuse. I bet you didn't get a school after
all."
Elizabeth had been edging toward the door as her father was speaking and
now made her escape to the inside of the house as she replied over her
shoulder in a perfectly respectful tone:
"Oh, yes, I did, and it begins Monday."
"Well, it's better than I expected. Now see to it that you get that riding
skirt off an' come an' drive my team while I finish them oats."
The daughter stopped where she stood and was going to reply that she must
get ready if she were to go to Aunt Susan's the next day, but on second
thought closed her mouth down firmly. She knew she would do well if she
escaped with no harder tax laid upon her temper than that of putting off
her arrival at the Hornby home, and she turned to do as she was bidden.
When Elizabeth found her homecoming unpleasant and her father sullen and
evidently nursing his wrath, she faced the storm without protest, took all
that was said quietly, helped in the fields and endeavoured to make up for
her unfortunate words in every helpful way possible. In all, she was so
subtly generous with her assistance that it was impossible to bring on a
quarrel with her, and the sour demeanour of her father was so carefully
handled that Friday arrived without an open break having occurred. A new
dress had been one of the longed-for accomplishments of the week's work,
but certain of Aunt Susan's help when she was safely entrenched in her
home, Elizabeth retired to the attic whenever she saw her father approach
the house. His attitude was threatening, but the anxious girl was able to
delay the encounter. It could only be _delayed_, for Mr. Farnshaw made a
virtue of not forgetting unpleasant things.
The only unfortunate occurrence of the week was the presence of Sadie
Crane and her mother when Mr. Hunter drove up to the back door for
Elizabeth's trunk, but even this had had its beneficial side, for Josiah
Farnshaw had been mending harness, because a shower had made the ground
too wet to plow, and the presence of neighbours made it possible to get
the trunk packed without unpleasantness. When John Hunter drove up to the
back door, Mr. Farnshaw rose from his chair beside the window and went to
help put his daughter's possessions in the wagon. Sadie crossed over to
the window to get a look at Lizzie's new beau.
Sadie Crane was now sixteen years old, and being undersized and childish
of appearance had never had the pleasure of the company of a young man.
The yearning in her pettish face as she stood unevenly on the discarded
harness, looking out of the window toward John Hunter, caught Elizabeth's
attention and illuminated the whole affair to the older girl.
"Dude!" Sadie exclaimed spitefully, facing about and evidently offering
insult.
But Elizabeth Farnshaw had seen the unsatisfied look which preceded the
remark and it was excused. Sadie was just Sadie, and not to be taken
seriously.
"He'd better soak his head; he can't farm."
No one replied, and Elizabeth said hurried good-byes and escaped.
But though Sadie Crane was undersized and spoke scornfully, she was old
enough to feel a woman's desires and dream a woman's dreams. She watched
the pair drive away together in pleasant converse on the quilt-lined
spring seat of the farm wagon, and swallowed a sob.
"Lizzie always had th' best of everything," she reflected.
The roads were slippery and gave an excuse for driving slowly, and the
young man exerted himself to be agreeable. The distaste for the presence
of the Cranes at her home when he came for her, his possible opinion of
her family and friends, the prolonged struggle with her father, even the
headache from which she had not been free for days, melted out of
Elizabeth's mind in the joy of that ride, and left it a perfect
experience. It began to rain before they were halfway to their
destination, and they sat shoulder to shoulder under the umbrella, with
one of the quilts drawn around both. There was a sack of butterscotch, and
they talked of Scott, and Dickens, and the other books Elizabeth Farnshaw
had absorbed from Aunt Susan's old-fashioned library; and Elizabeth was
surprised to find that she had read almost as much as this college man,
and still more surprised to find that she remembered a great deal more of
what she had read than he seemed to do. She asked many questions about his
college experiences and learned that he had lacked but a year and a half
of graduation.
"Why didn't you finish?" she asked curiously.
"Well, you know, father died, and I didn't have hardly enough to finish
on, so I thought I'd come out here and get to making something. I didn't
care to finish. I'd had my fun out of it. I wish I hadn't gone at all. If
I'd gone into the office with my father and been admitted to the Bar it
would have been better for me. I wouldn't have been on the farm then," he
said regretfully.
"Then why didn't you go into the law? You could have made it by yourself,"
Elizabeth said, understanding that it hurt John Hunter's pride to farm.
The young man shrugged his dripping shoulders and pulled the quilt tighter
around them as he answered indifferently:
"Not very well. Father left very little unmortgaged except mother's own
property, and I thought I'd get out of Canton. It ain't easy to live
around folks you know unless you have money."
"But you could have worked your way through college; lots of boys do it,"
the girl objected.
"Not on your life!" John Hunter exclaimed emphatically. "I don't go to
college that way." After a few moments' musing he added slowly, "I'll make
money enough to get out of here after a while."
"I only wish I'd had your chance," Elizabeth said with a sigh.
"Let's talk about something cheerful," young Hunter replied, when he
realized that the ride was nearly over. "When may I come to see you
again?" he asked. "You are to see a good deal of me this summer if you
will permit it."
Elizabeth Farnshaw caught a happy breath before she replied. He wanted to
come; she was to see much of him this summer if she would permit it! Could
nature and fate ask for more?
When Elizabeth arrived, the old couple bustled about the bright carpeted
room, making it comfortable, and cooing over the return of their prodigal,
till a heaven of homeness was made of her advent.
Half an hour later Elizabeth, dry and warm and with a cup of tea beside
her which she had found it easier to accept than to refuse, looked about
her and invoiced the changes of four years which in her preoccupied state
of mind during her former visit she had neglected to think upon. There
were many little changes in the household arrangement, due to the
observations of the winter spent in Topeka. In personal appearance Aunt
Susan herself showed improvement.
When Elizabeth's attention was turned to Nathan, however, the glad little
enumeration became a more sober one. In the days when they had fed the
motherless Patsie together Nathan Hornby had been portly, even inclined to
stoutness, and his face, though tough from wind and sun, inclined to be
ruddy. The genial gray eyes had sparkled with confidence in himself and
good-will toward all about him. At Silas Chamberlain's house a week ago
the girl had noticed that Nathan let others arrange the business details
of contracts and credentials, but his joy at meeting her had obscured the
habitual sadness of his present manner. She had noticed that he was
thinner, but to-night she saw the waste and aging which had consumed him.
The belt line which had bulged comfortably under the vest of five years
ago was flat and flabby, the thick brown hair which had shown scarcely a
thread of white was now grizzled and thin, the ruddy cheeks had fallen in,
and two missing lower teeth made him whistle his s'es through the gap with
a sound unlike his bluff speech of their first acquaintance, so that
without the face which accompanied the words she could hardly have
recognized the connection between the man who had and the man who did
embody the same personality. The cogitations of the first half hour in the
white counterpaned bed that night left Elizabeth in a maze of wonder over
his physical as well as mental collapse.
Aunt Susan was evidently aware of changes also, for she hovered over him
solicitously. Nathan Hornby was a broken man.
School opened auspiciously on Monday; John Hunter came and stayed to walk
home with Elizabeth on Tuesday afternoon, and the glad weeks which
followed were but the happy record of so many rides, walks, and talks, and
the dreams of Elizabeth Farnshaw and John Hunter. He was with the girl
daily. Elizabeth never expressed the smallest desire for anything human
hand could obtain for her that John Hunter did not instantly assure her
that she should receive it. If she stayed to sweep out the schoolhouse,
John would almost certainly appear at the door before she had
finished--his fields commanded a view of her comings and goings--if she
went to Carter's to have a money order cashed he accompanied her; if she
wished to go anywhere she had but to mention it and John Hunter and his
team were at her service.
Elizabeth could not have been otherwise than happy. The spring, with its
freshness and promise, was symbolical of the gladsome currents of her life
that joyous April and May. Her lightest wish was the instant consideration
of the man she admired above all others, and that man, in refinement of
appearance and knowledge of the world, was as far above those of the
country community in which they lived as the sun was above the smoky
kerosene lamps by which the members of that community lighted themselves
to bed.
John Hunter, during the season of his courtship, served the girl of his
choice almost upon his knees. He made her feel that she could command his
services, his time, and himself. By his request he ceased to ask when he
could come again, but encouraged, even commanded, her to tell him when and
where she wished to be taken and to let him come to see her unannounced.
He paid tribute to her as if she had been a goddess and he her devotee.
Silas looked on and chuckled.
"Didn't take 'em long," he remarked to Liza Ann, and when as usual his
wife did not reply, he added: "Glad we're to have 'em for neighbours.
She's about th' liveliest meadow lark on these prairies, an' if she don't
sing on a fence post it's 'cause she ain't built that way, an' can't;
she's full enough to."
Susan Hornby looked on and had her misgivings. She saw the devotion the
young man poured out at her darling's feet, and she knew that it was the
fervour of the courting time in a man's life that made him abandon his own
interests and plans while he plumed himself and pursued his desired mate.
She saw the rapturous, dreamy look of love and mating time in Elizabeth's
eyes, and she knew that the inevitable had happened, but she was not
content. Premonitions which she sought to strangle shook her whenever the
pair wandered away on real or fictitious errands. She saw that no word of
love had yet been spoken, but every look cried it aloud and the day could
not be far distant.
Between corn planting and corn plowing the foundations of the new house
had been laid and work on it had progressed fitfully and whenever the
young man could find time to help the occasional mason who laid brick and
stone for simple foundations, and who had crops of his own to tend between
times. The work had progressed slowly, but at last the wall had been
finished and the carpenters had come to do their share. It gave excuse for
many trips in the evening twilight. They usually went on horseback, and
Silas's pony with Liza Ann's sidesaddle on its back had more business on
hand that month than in all the other years of its lazy existence.
Susan Hornby watched the pair ride away one evening the first week in
June. Nathan stood at her side on the doorstep.
"Of course he loves her; how could he help it? and yet----"
"And yet, what?" Nathan asked impatiently. "She wants him, an' he wants
her, an' you stand there lookin' as if that wasn't enough."
Susan Hornby turned to her husband with some uncertainty regarding his
comprehension of the subject, and with a gentle patience with his mood.
Nathan was often impatient of late.
"Yes, I know--only it seems as if----"
"Well, now what's lacking?" her husband asked when she again broke off the
sentence doubtfully. "He's got a good farm, an' he needs a wife to help
him run it. From what he says, his mother's too old t' be of any help. He
can't run it alone, an' seems t' me it's a good thing for both of 'em."
"That's just it!" Susan Hornby broke out, turning back, her eyes following
the progress of the pair toward the crimson west, her thoughts running
ahead to the unknown future where the progress of the soul would be helped
or hindered; "that's just it! He has a farm; now he's going to need a wife
to help run it--just as he needs a horse. If he'd only be fair about it,
but he's misleading her. She thinks he'll always do things the way he's
doing them now, and he won't; there'll be an end to that kind of thing
some day--and--and when they're married and he's got her fast, that kind
of man won't be nice about it--and--they'll live on the farm--and life's
so hard sometimes! Oh! I can't bear to see her broken to it!" she cried
with such intensity that the man at her side caught his breath with a sort
of sob.
"Anybody'd think to hear you talk, Susan, that marryin' was a thing to be
feared, an' that I'd been mean t' you."
What had she done? There was a half-frightened pause as Susan Hornby
struggled to bring herself back to the husband standing beside her who was
broken by failure.
"Bless your old soul, Nate," she answered quickly, and with the flush of
confusion on her face strangely like the flush of guilt, "if he's only
half as good to her as you've been to me, She'll never have anything to
complain of nor need anybody's sympathy."
Susan understood that her assurance did not wholly reassure that bleeding
heart, and to turn Nathan's thoughts to other things she slipped one hand
through his arm, and picking up the milk pails from the bench at her side
with the other, said with a little laugh:
"There now! I'll do your milking for that. You throw down the hay while I
do it. There's nothing the matter with you and me, except that I've done a
washing to-day and you don't sleep well of late. I haven't one thing in
all this world to complain of, and this would be the happiest year of my
life if you weren't a bit gloomy and under the weather. Come on--I'm
nervous. You know I never am well in hot weather."
Nathan knew that Susan was really worried over Elizabeth's prospects, but
her luckless remark upon the marriage of farmers cut into his raw,
quivering consciousness of personal failure like a saw-bladed knife,
torturing the flesh as it went. His failure to place her where her own
natural characteristics and attainments deserved had eaten into his mind
like acid. In proportion as he loved her and acknowledged her worth he was
humiliated by the fact that she was not getting all out of life of which
she was capable, as his wife, and it left him sensitive regarding her
possible estimate of it.
"She always seems satisfied," he said to himself as he turned his
pitchfork to get a hold on the pile into which he had thrust it, "but here
she is pityin' this here girl that's goin' t' be married as if she goin'
t' be damned."
The Adam's apple in his wrinkled throat tightened threateningly, and to
keep down any unmanly weakness it indicated he fell upon the hay savagely,
but the suspicion stayed with him and left its bitter sting.
CHAPTER VI
"DIDN'T TAKE 'EM LONG"
John Hunter and Elizabeth Farnshaw rode away in the cool summer evening,
wholly unconscious of the thoughts of others. The sun had dropped behind
the low hills in front of them, and as they rode along, the light-floating
clouds were dyed blazing tints of red and gold, as glowing and rosy as
life itself appeared to the young pair. Elizabeth took off her hat and let
the cool evening breeze blow through the waves of hair on her temples and
about the smooth braids which, because of the heat of the prematurely hot
summer day, had been wound about her head. Her eyes were dreamy and her
manner detached as she let the pony wander a half length ahead of its
companion, and she was unaware that John was not talking. She was just
drinking in the freshness of the evening breeze and sky, scarcely
conscious of any of her surroundings, glad as a kitten to be alive, and as
unaware of self as a young animal should be.
John Hunter rode at her side, watching the soft curls on her round girlish
neck, athrob and athrill with her presence, and trying to formulate the
thing he had brought her out to say. It was not till they were turning
into the lane beside the new house that his companion realized that he had
been more than usually quiet.
"You are a Quaker to-night, evidently, and do not speak till the spirit
moves, Mr. Hunter," she said, facing about near the gateway and waiting
for him to ride alongside.
The young man caught the cue. "I wish you would call me John. I've been
intending to ask you for some time. I have a given name," he added.
"Will you do the same?" she asked.
"Call myself John?" he replied.
They both laughed as if a great witticism had been perpetrated.
"No, call me by my given name."
"Lizzie, Bess, Elizabeth, or Sis?" he asked, remembering the various
nicknames of her family.
"You may call me whatever you choose," she answered, drawing the pony up
where they were to dismount.
John Hunter stepped to the ground and with his bridle rein over his arm
came around to the left side of her pony. Laying one hand on its neck and
the other on the hand that grasped its bridle, he looked up into her face
earnestly and said:
"I would like to call you 'Wife,' if I may, Elizabeth," and held up his
arms quickly to help her from the saddle.
When she was on the ground before him he barred her way and stood, pulsing
and insistent, waiting for her answer.
It was a full minute before either moved, she looking down at their feet,
he looking at her and trying to be sure he could push his claims.
When Elizabeth did look up it was with her eyes brimming shyly over with
happy tears, and without waiting for her answer in words, John Hunter
gathered her into his arms and smothered her face in kisses.
Ten minutes later they tied the horses to the new hitching post and passed
into the yard.
"It is to be your house and mine, dearie," the young man said, and then
looked down at her to see why she did not answer.
Elizabeth was walking toward the house which was to be hers, oblivious of
time and place, almost unconscious of the man at her side, stunned by the
unexpectedness of this precious gift of love which had just been offered
her. As they stepped upon the little back porch, he said:
"I brought you over to ask your advice about the stairway; the carpenters
want to leave one step in the sitting room. It'll be back far enough from
the chimney to be out of the way and it makes their calculations easier
about the stairs somehow. What do you think?"
Elizabeth was altogether too new in the sense of possession to grasp the
full significance of the question. John Hunter laughed at the look she
turned upon him and said, with a large and benevolent wave of the hand,
indicating the entire premises:
"The house is yours, little girl, and you are to have it as you want it.
The only desire I have on earth is to do things for you."
Elizabeth shot a quick look of joy up to him. "No one but Aunt Susan has
ever wanted to do anything for me," she said, and opening her arms held
them out to him, crying, "Am I to be happy? John! John! do you love me,
really?"
And that was the burden of their conversation during the entire stay.
"It can't be possible, John," the happy girl said at one point. "I have
never known love--and--and I want it till I could die for it."
"Just so you don't die _of_ it, You'll be all right," John Hunter replied,
and went home from Nathan's, later, whistling a merry tune. He had not
known that love poured itself out with such abandonment. It was a new
feature of the little god's manoeuvring, but John doubted not that it was
the usual thing where a girl really cared for a man.
"I'll farm the whole place next year, and It'll be different from boarding
at the Chamberlains', where they don't have any napkins and the old man
sucks his coffee out of his saucer as if it hurt him. Mother 'll like her
too, after we get her away from that sort of thing and brush her up, and
get her into the Hunter ways," he told himself as he tied the pony in the
dark stall.
The next day was a dream to the young girl, who patiently watched the
clock and waited for the hour of visiting the new house again. "I have no
higher desire on earth than to do things for you," was the undercurrent of
her thoughts. She was to escape from the things which threatened at home.
Instead of always rendering services, which were seldom satisfactory after
she had sacrificed herself to them, she was to be served as well. Oh, the
glad thought! Not of service as such, but of the mutuality of it. She
loved John Hunter and he loved her. There was to be understanding between
them. That was the joy of it. To put her hand on the arm of one that
appreciated not only her but all that she aimed at, to open her heart to
him, to be one with him in aspiration, that was the point of value which
Elizabeth Farnshaw never doubted was to be the leading characteristic of
their life together.
Now that she was engaged, Elizabeth felt herself emancipated from home
authority. She would belong to herself hereafter. She would stay with Aunt
Susan till she had her sewing done for the winter at Topeka. She would go
to school only one year, just enough to polish up on social ideas and
matters of dress. Elizabeth Farnshaw knew that both John Hunter and his
mother were critical upon those accomplishments and her pride told her to
prepare for the mother's inspection. She knew that she was considered a
country girl by those of superior advantages, and she was resolved to show
what could be done in a year in the way of improvement; then she would
come home and teach for money with which to buy her wedding outfit, and
then they would be married. Two years and the certainty of graduation
would have suited her better, but two years was a long time. The picture
of John without her, and the home he was building for her, planted
themselves in the foreground of her thoughts, and Elizabeth was unselfish.
She would not make John Hunter wait. She would make that one year at
Topeka equal to two in the intensity of its living. She would remain away
the shortest possible length of time which was required for her
preparation. Elizabeth was glad that John had his mother to keep house for
him, because she did not want him to be lonesome while she was gone,
though she did not doubt that he would come to Topeka many times while she
was there. Her mind flew off in another direction at that, and she planned
to send him word when there were good lectures to attend.
"John likes those things," she thought, and was filled with a new joy at
the prospect of their books, and lectures, and intellectual pursuits. Her
plan of teaching in the high school was abandoned. It was better to be
loved and have a home with John Hunter than to live in Topeka. The more
Elizabeth thought of it the more she was convinced that her plan was
complete. She was glad there was a month to spare before Mrs. Hunter came.
John's mother was the only warning finger on Elizabeth's horizon. She had
always been conscious of a note of anxiety in John Hunter's voice and
manner whenever he spoke of his mother coming to Kansas to live, and she
found the anxiety had been transferred to her own mind when she began to
consider her advent into the home John was building. She had gathered,
more from his manner than anything definitely said, that his mother would
not approve of much that she would be obliged to meet in the society about
them, that she was a social arbiter in a class of women superior to these
simple farmers' wives, and that her whole life and thought were of a
different and more desirable sort. When Elizabeth thought of Mrs. Hunter
she unconsciously glanced down at herself, her simple print dress, her
brown hands, and the heavy shoes which much walking made necessary, and
wondered how she did really appear; and there was a distinct misgiving in
everything where the older woman had to be considered.
John came early that evening. The carpenters had raised new questions
about shelves and doors and Elizabeth must go over and decide those
matters. They walked over, and it was late before all the simple
arrangements could be decided upon. As they returned they walked close
together in the centre of the deep road so as to avoid the dew-laden grass
on either side. The open door of Nathan's house gave out a hospitable
light, but they were content to saunter slowly, listening to the harvest
crickets which were already chirruping in the weeds about them, and
looking at the lazy red disk of the moon just peeping above the eastern
horizon.
"I sh
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