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Title: The Wall Between
Author: Sara Ware Bassett
Release Date: December 9, 2008 [eBook #27471]
Language: English
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THE WALL BETWEEN
* * * * *
By Sara Ware Bassett
The Taming Of Zenas Henry
The Wayfarers at The Angel's
The Harbor Road
The Wall Between
* * * * *
[Illustration: And now, by some miracle, here were the blossoms of
Martin's raising. Frontispiece. _See page 159._]
THE WALL BETWEEN
by
SARA WARE BASSETT
With Frontispiece by Norman Price
Boston
Little, Brown, and Company
1920
Copyright, 1920,
by Sara Ware Bassett.
All rights reserved
Published August, 1920
"Such are the miracles men call lives."
--Edward Rowland Sill.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A Modern Richelieu 1
II The Howes 20
III Lucy 38
IV The Episode of the Eggs 50
V A Clash of Wills 70
VI Ellen Encounters an Enigma 82
VII The Unraveling of the Mystery 95
VIII When the Cat's Away 109
IX Jane Makes a Discovery 135
X A Temptation 147
XI The Crossing of the Rubicon 163
XII The Test 189
XIII Melviny Arrives 205
XIV A Piece of Diplomacy 234
XV Ellen's Vengeance 246
XVI Lucy Comes to a Decision 258
XVII The Great Alternative 270
XVIII Love Triumphant 290
THE WALL BETWEEN
CHAPTER I
A MODERN RICHELIEU
The Howe and Webster farms adjoined, lying on a sun-flooded, gently
sloping New Hampshire hillside. Between them loomed The Wall. It was not a
high wall. On the contrary, its formidableness was the result of tradition
rather than of fact. For more than a century it had been an estranging
barrier to neighborliness, to courtesy, to broad-mindedness; a barrier to
friendship, to Christian charity, to peace.
The builder of the rambling line of gray stone had long since passed away,
and had he not acquired a warped importance with the years, his memory
would doubtless have perished with him. All unwittingly, alas, he had
become a celebrity. His was the fame of omission, however, rather than of
commission. Had he, like artist or sculptor, but affixed his signature to
his handiwork, then might he have sunk serenely into oblivion, "unwept,
unhonored, and unsung." But unfortunately he was a modest creature.
Instead, he had stepped nameless into the silence of the Hereafter,
leaving to those who came after him not only the sinister boundary his
hands had reared, but also a feud that had seethed hotly for generations.
If within the narrow confines of his last resting place he had ever been
conscious of the dissension for which he was responsible and had been
haunted by a desire to utter the magic word he had neglected to speak in
life, he at least gave no sign. His lips remained sealed in death, and his
spirit was never seen to walk abroad. Possibly he retired into his shroud
with this finality because he never found it imperative, as did Hamlet's
ghost, to admonish posterity to remember him.
Only too well was he remembered!
The Howes and Websters who followed him hurled against the sounding board
of heaven the repeated questions of who built the wall, and whose duty was
it to repair it. Great-grandfather Jabez Howe quibbled with
Great-grandfather Abiatha Webster for a lifetime, and both went down into
the tomb still quibbling over the enigma. Afterward Grandfather Nathan
Howe and Grandfather Ebenezer Webster took up the dispute, and they, too,
were gathered into the Beyond without ever reaching a conclusion. Their
children then wrangled and argued and slandered one another, and, like
their forbears, retired from the field in impotent rage, leaving the
combat a draw.
In the meantime the outlines of the ancient landmark became less
clear-cut. Rocks toppled from its summit; yawning gaps marred its sharp
edges; and at its base vines and growing things began to creep defiantly
in and out the widening fissures that rent its foundation. Almost
imperceptibly year by year dissolution went on, the crude structure
melting into picturesqueness and taking on the gentle charm of a ruin
until Martin Howe and Ellen Webster, its present-day guardians, beheld it
an ignominious heap of stone that lay crumbling amid woodbine and
clematis.
Far more beautiful was it in this half-concealed dilapidation than ever it
had been in the pride of its perfection. Then it had stood boldly out
against the landscape, naked and aggressive; to-day, clothed in Nature's
soft greenery, it had become so dim a heritage that it might easily have
receded into the past and been forgotten had not the discord of which it
had become the symbol been wilfully fanned into flame.
As in a bygone age one runner passed a lighted torch on to another, so did
one generation of Howes and Websters bequeath to the next the embers of a
wrath that never died. Each faction disclaimed all responsibility for the
wall, and each refused to lay hand to it.
Adamantine as was the lichen-covered heap of granite, it was of far more
mutable a quality than were the dispositions of those who had so
stubbornly let it fall into decay. Time's hand had softened the harsh
stone into mellow beauty; but the flintlike characters of the Howes and
Websters remained uncompromising as of yore.
And now that Martin Howe and Ellen Webster reigned in their respective
homesteads, neither one of them was any more graciously inclined toward
raising the fallen boundary to its pristine glory than had been their
progenitors. But for their obstinacy they might have agreed to dispense
with the wall altogether, since long ago it had become merely an empty
emblem of restriction, and without recourse to it each knew beyond
question where the dividing line between the estates ran; moreover, as
both families shunned the other's land as if it were plague-ridden
territory there was scant temptation for them to invade each other's
domains. But the man and the woman had inherited too much of the blood of
the original stock to consider entering into an armistice.
They had, it is true, bettered their predecessors to the extent of
exchanging a stilted greeting when they met; but this perfunctory
salutation was usually hurtled across the historic borderline and was
seldom concluded without some reference to it. For Ellen Webster was an
aggravating old woman dowered with just enough of the harpy never to be
able to leave her antagonist in peace if she saw him at work in his
garden.
"Mornin', Martin," she would call.
"Good mornin', Miss Webster."
"So you're plowin' up a new strip of land."
"Yes, marm."
"I s'pose you know it would save you a deal of cartin' if you was to use
the stones you're gettin' out to fix up your wall."
Then the hector would watch the brick-red color steal slowly from the
man's cheek up to his forehead.
To pile the stones on the heap so near at hand would, he recognized, have
saved both time and trouble; nevertheless, he would have worked until he
dropped in his tracks rather than have yielded to the temptation.
_His_ wall, indeed! The impudence of the vixen!
Angry in every fiber of his body, he would therefore wheel upon his
tormentor and flash out:
"When you see me tinkerin' your tumbledown wall, Miss Ellen Webster, I'll
be some older than I am now. I've work enough of my own to do without
takin' in repairs for my neighbors."
At that he would hear a malicious chuckle.
For some such response Ellen always waited. She liked to see the fire of
rage burn itself through Martin's tan and feel that she had the power to
kindle it. He never disappointed her. Sometimes, to be sure, she had to
prod him more than once, but eventually his retort, sharp as the sting of
an insect, was certain to come. From it she derived a half-humorous,
half-vindictive satisfaction, for she was a keen student of human nature,
and no one knew better than she that after the cutting words had left his
lips proud-spirited young Martin scorned himself for having been goaded
into uttering them.
A tantalizing creature, Ellen Webster!
Silent, penurious, shrewd to the margin of dishonesty; unrelenting as the
rock-fronted fastnesses of her native hills; good-humored at times and
even possessed of swift moods of tenderness that disarmed and
appealed--such she was. She stood straight as a spruce despite the burden
of her years, and a suggestion of girlhood's bloom still colored her
cheek; but the features of her crafty countenance were tightly drawn; the
blue eyes glinted with metallic light; and the mouth was saved from
cruelty only by its upward curve of humor.
She had been an only daughter who since her teens had nursed invalid
parents until death had claimed them and left her mistress of the
homestead where she now lived. There had, it is true, been a boy; but in
his early youth he had shaken the New Hampshire dust from off his feet
and gone West, from which Utopia he had for a time sent home to his sister
occasional and peculiarly inappropriate gifts of Mexican saddles,
sombreros, leggings, and Indian blankets. He had received but scant
gratitude, however, for these well-intentioned offerings. It had always
been against the traditions of the Websters to spend money freely and
Ellen, a Webster to the core, resented his lack of prudence; furthermore
the articles were useless and cluttered up the house. Possibly the more
open-handed Thomas understood the implied rebuke in the meager thanks
awarded him and was hurt by it; at any rate, he ceased sending home
presents, and by and by Ellen lost trace of him altogether. Years of
silence, unbroken by tidings of any sort, followed. Ellen had almost
forgotten she had a brother when one day a letter arrived announcing his
death.
The event brought to the sister no grief, for years ago Thomas had passed
out of her life. Nevertheless the message left behind it an aftermath of
grim realizations that stirred her to contemplate the future from quite a
new angle. She had never before considered herself old. Now she suddenly
paused and reflected upon her seventy-five years and the uncertainty of
the stretch of days before her.
Through the window she could see her prosperous lands, her garden upon the
southern slope of the hill where warm sun kissed into life its lushly
growing things; her pasture pierced by jagged rocks, and cattle-trampled
stretches of rough turf; her wood lot where straight young pines and oak
saplings lifted their reaching crests toward the sky; her orchard, the
index of her progenitor's foresight. All these had belonged to the
Websters for six generations, and she could not picture them the property
of any one bearing another name; nor could she endure the thought of the
wall being sometime rebuilt by an outsider.
What was to be the fate of her possessions after she was gone? Suppose a
stranger purchased the estate. Or, worse than all, suppose that after she
was dead Martin Howe was to buy it in. The Howes had always wanted more
land.
Imagine Martin Howe plowing up the rich loam of her fields, invading with
his axe the dim silences of her wood lot, enjoying the fruit of her
orchard, driving his herds into her pasture! Fancy his feet grating upon
the threshold of her home, his tread vibrating on her stairways! The
irony of it!
Martin was young. At least, he was not old. He could not be more than
forty. He might marry sometime. Many a man more unapproachable even than
Martin Howe did marry.
And if he should marry, what would be more likely than that he would give
to his maiden sisters--Mary, Eliza, and Jane--the Howe farm and take for
his own abode the more spacious homestead of the Websters?
Ellen's brows contracted fiercely; then her mouth twisted into a crooked
smile.
What a retribution if, after all, it should be Martin whose fate it was to
rebuild the wall! Why, such a revenge would almost compensate for the
property falling into his hands! Suppose it should become his lot to cut
away the vines and underbrush; haul hither the great stones and hoist them
into place! And if while he toiled at the hateful task and beads of sweat
rolled from his forehead, a sympathetic and indulgent Providence would but
permit her to come back to earth and, standing at his elbow, jeer at him
while he did it! Ah, that would be revenge indeed!
Then the mocking light suddenly died from the old woman's eyes. Maybe
Martin would not buy the farm, after all.
Or if he did, he might perhaps leave the wall to crumble into extinction,
so that the rancor and bitterness of the Howes and Websters would come to
an end, and the enmity of a hundred years be wasted!
Would not such an inglorious termination of the feud go down to history as
a capitulation of the Websters? Why, the broil had become famous
throughout the State. For decades it had been a topic of gossip and
speculation until the Howe and Webster obstinacy had become a byword,
almost an adage. To have the whole matter peter out now would be
ignominious.
No. Though worms destroyed her mortal body, the hostility bred between the
families should not cease. Nor should her ancestral home ever become the
prey of her enemies, either.
Rising decisively, Ellen took from the mahogany secretary the letter she
had received a few days before from Thomas's daughter and reread it
meditatively.
Twice she scanned its pages. Then she let it drop into her lap. Again her
eyes wandered to the stretch of land outside across which slanted the
afternoon shadows.
The day was very still. Up from the tangle of brakes in the pasture came
the lowing of cattle. A faint sweetness from budding apple trees filled
the room. Radiating, narrowing away toward the sky line, row after row of
low green shoots barred the brown earth of the hillside with the promise
of coming harvest. It was a goodly sight,--that plowed land with its lines
of upspringing seeds. A goodly sight, too, were the broad mowings stirring
gently with the sweep of the western breeze.
Ellen regarded the panorama before her musingly. Then she seated herself
at the old desk and with deliberation began to write a reply to her
brother's child.
She was old, she wrote, and her health was failing; at any time she might
find herself helpless and ill. There was no one to care for her or bear
her company. If Lucy would come to Sefton Falls and live, her aunt would
be glad to give her a home.
"As yet," concluded the diplomat, with a Machiavelian stroke of the pen,
"I have made no will; but I suppose I shall not be able to take the
Webster lands and money with me into the next world. You are my only
relative. Think well before making your decision."
After she had signed and blotted the terse missive, Ellen perused its
lines, and her sharp eyes twinkled. It was a good letter, a capital
letter! Without actually promising anything, it was heavy with insidious
bribery.
Be the girl of whatsoever type she might, some facet of the note could not
fail to lure her hither. If a loyal Webster, family obligation would be
the bait; if conscientious, plain duty stared her in the face; if
mercenary, dreams of an inherited fortune would tempt her. The trap was
inescapable.
In the meantime to grant a home to her orphan flesh and blood would appeal
to the outside world as an act of Christian charity, and at the same time
would save hiring the help she had for some time feared she would be
driven to secure,--a fact that did not escape the woman's cunning mind.
She was not so strong as formerly, and of late the toil of the farm taxed
her endurance. There was milking, sewing, the housework, and the care of
the chickens; enough to keep ten pairs of hands busy, let alone one. Oh,
Lucy should earn her board, never fear!
As nearly as the aunt could calculate, her niece must now be about twenty
years old,--a fine, vigorous age! Doubtless, too, the girl was of buxom
Western build, for although Thomas had not married until late in life, his
wife had been a youthful woman of the mining country. This Lucy was
probably a strapping lass, who in exchange for her three meals would turn
off a generous day's work. Viewed from every standpoint the scheme was an
inspiration.
Ellen hoped it would not fail. Now that she had made up her mind to carry
through the plan, she could not brook the possibility of being thwarted.
Once more she took the letter from its envelope and read it. Yes, it was
excellent. Were she to write it all over again she could not improve it.
Therefore she affixed the stamp and address and, summoning Tony, the
Portuguese lad who slaved for her, she sent him to the village to mail
it.
For two weeks she awaited an answer, visiting the post office each day
with a greater degree of interest than she had exhibited toward any
outside event for a long stretch of years.
Her contact with the world was slight and infrequent. Now and then she was
obliged to harness up and drive to the village for provisions; to have the
horse shod; or to sell her garden truck; but she never went unless forced
to do so. A hermit by nature, she had no friends and wanted none.
Her only neighbors were the Howes, and beyond the impish pleasure she
derived from taunting Martin, they had no interest for her. The sisters
were timid, inoffensive beings enough; but had they been three times as
inoffensive they were nevertheless Howes; moreover, Ellen did not care for
docile people. She was a fighter herself and loved a fighter. That was the
reason she had always cherished a covert admiration for Martin. His temper
appealed to her; so did his fearlessness and his mulish attitude toward
the wall. Such qualities she understood. But with these cringing sisters
of his who allowed him to tyrannize over them she had nothing in common.
Had she not seen them times without number watch him out of sight and then
leap to air his blankets, beat his coat, or perform some service they
dared not enact in his presence? Bah! Thank Heaven she was afraid of
nobody and was independent of her fellow men.
Save for the assistance of the hard-worked Tony whom she paid--paid
sparingly she confessed, but nevertheless _paid_--she attended to her own
plowing, planting, and harvesting, and was beholden to nobody. The world
was her natural enemy. To outwit it; to beat it at a bargain; to conquer
where it sought to oppress her; to keep its whining dogs of pain, poverty,
and loneliness ever at bay; to live without obligation to it; and die
undaunted at leaving it,--this was her ambition.
The note she had mailed to her niece was the first advance she had made
toward any human being within her memory; and this was not the cry of a
dependent but rather the first link in a plot to outgeneral circumstances
and place the future within her own control. She prided herself that for
half a century she had invariably got the better of whosoever and
whatsoever she had come in contact with. What was death, then, but an
incident, if after it she might still reign and project her will into the
universe even from the estranging fastnesses of the grave?
Therefore the answer from Lucy was of greater import than was any ordinary
letter. It would tell her whether the initial step in her conspiracy to
triumph over Destiny was successful. What wonder that her aged fingers
trembled as she tore open the envelope of the message and spread the snowy
paper feverishly on the table?
Summit, Arizona,
May 5, 1917.
Dear Aunt Ellen:
I can't tell you what a surprise it was to hear from you, and how
much greater a surprise it was to have you ask me to come and live
with you.
I had decided to go abroad and do Red Cross work, and was about to
accept a position that had been offered me when your letter arrived.
("Humph!" murmured Ellen.)
But you write that you are alone in the world and not very well, and
this being the case, I feel my place is with you.
You are my only relative, and I should be a very poor-spirited
Webster indeed did I not acknowledge that your claim comes before any
other. Therefore I shall be glad to come to New Hampshire and avail
myself of your hospitality. I presume you have found, as I have, that
living entirely for one's self is not very satisfactory after all.
Since my father's death I have had no one to look after and have
felt lonely, useless, and selfish in consequence.
I am certain that in attempting to make you happy, I shall find
happiness myself, and I assure you that I will do all I can to be
helpful.
If all goes well I should arrive at Sefton Falls in about ten days.
In the meantime, I send my warmest thanks for your kindness and the
affectionate greetings of
Your niece,
Lucy Harmon Webster.
After she had finished reading the letter, Ellen sat tapping her foot
impatiently upon the floor. She was nettled, angry.
She did not at all relish having this child turn the tables on her charity
and make of it a favor. As for the girl's sentimental nonsense about its
not being satisfactory to live alone, what was she talking about? Living
alone was the most satisfactory thing in the world. Did it not banish all
the friction of opposing wills and make of one a monarch? No, she did not
like the letter, did not like it.
If this Lucy were sincere, she showed herself to be of that affectionate,
conscientious, emotional type Ellen so cordially detested; besides, she
held her head too high. If on the other hand, she were shamming, and were
in reality endowed with a measure of the Howe shrewdness, that was
another matter.
Her aunt laughed indulgently at the girl's youthful attempt at subterfuge.
She hoped she was humbugging. Worldly wisdom was an admirable trait. Had
not the Websters always been famed for their business sagacity? She would
far rather find Thomas's daughter blessed with a head than with a heart.
But the letter proved that the child was still a novice at the wiles of
the world, dissemble as she would.
Had she been older and more discerning, she would have realized she had
not actually been promised anything, and she would not have been decoyed
into journeying hundreds of miles from home to pursue the wraith of an
ephemeral fortune.
CHAPTER II
THE HOWES
Within the confines of his own home Martin Howe, as Ellen Webster
asserted, was a czar. Born with the genius to rule, he would probably have
fought his way to supremacy had struggle been necessary. As it was,
however, no effort was demanded of him, for by the common consent of an
adoring family, he had been voluntarily elevated to throne and scepter. He
was the only boy, the coveted gift long denied parents blessed with three
daughters and in despair of ever possessing a son.
What rejoicings heralded his advent! Had half the treasures an eager
father and mother prayed Heaven to grant been bestowed upon the child, he
would unquestionably have become an abnormality of health, wealth, and
wisdom. But Destiny was too farseeing a goddess to allow her neophyte to
be spoiled by prosperity. Both his parents died while Martin was still a
pupil at the district school, and the lad, instead of going to the city
and pursuing a profession, as had been his ambition, found himself
hurried, all unequipped, uneducated and unprepared, into the
responsibilities of managing the family household.
Farming was not the calling he would have chosen. He neither liked it, nor
was he endowed with that intuitive sixth sense on which so many farmers
rely for guidance amid the mazes of plowing and planting. By nature, he
was a student. The help he had sporadically given his father had always
been given rebelliously and been accompanied by the mental resolve that
the first moment escape was possible, he would leave the country and its
nagging round of drudgery and take up a broader and more satisfying
career.
To quote Martin's own vernacular, farming was hard work,--_damned hard
work._ It was not, however, the amount of toil it involved that daunted
him, but its quality. He had always felt a hearty and only thinly veiled
contempt for manual labor; moreover, he considered life in a small village
an extremely provincial one.
It was just when he was balancing in his mind the relative advantages of
becoming a doctor or a lawyer, and speculating as to which of these
professions appealed the more keenly to his fancy, that Fate intervened
and relieved him of the onerousness of choosing between them.
Martin could have viewed almost any other vocation than that of farmer
through a mist of romance, for he was young, and for him, behind the
tantalizingly veiled future, there still moved the shadowy forms of
knights, dragons, and fair ladies; but with the grim eye of a realist, he
saw farming as it was, stripped of every shred of poetry. Blossoming
orchards and thriving crops he knew to be the ephemeral phantasms of the
dreamer. Farming as he had experienced it was an eternal combat against
adverse conditions; a battle against pests, frosts, soil, weather, and
weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from
its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision.
One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see
in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing
_finis_ beneath any chapter of the ponderous tome of muscle-racking
labor.
The farmer stopped work at twilight only because his strength was spent
and daylight was gone. The aching back, the tired muscles, could do no
more, and merciful darkness drew a curtain over the day, thereby cutting
off further opportunity for toil until the rising of another sun.
But although night carried with it temporary relief from exertion, it
brought with it little peace. As one sat at the fireside in the gathering
dusk, it was only to see in imagination a sinister procession of specters
file past. They were the things that had been left undone. On they swept,
one unperformed task treading upon the heel of its predecessor. There
still remained potatoes to spade, weeds to pull, corn to hoe. A menacing
company of ghosts to harass a weary man as his eyes closed at night and
confront him when he opened them in the morning!
And even when, with the zest the new day brought, he contrived to mow down
the vanguard of the parade, other recruits were constantly reënforcing its
rear ranks and swelling the foes arraigned against the baffled farmer.
Struggle as he would, the line was sometimes longer at evening than it had
been at dawn. What wonder that a conscientious fellow like Martin Howe
felt farming less a business to be accomplished than a choice of
alternatives? What rest was there in sleep, if all the time one's eyes
were closed a man was subconsciously aware that cutworms were devouring
his lettuce and that weeds were every instant gaining headway? Even the
rhythm of the rain was a reminder that the pea vines were being battered
down and that the barn roof was leaking.
Yet to flee from this uncongenial future and seek one more to his liking
did not occur to Martin Howe. He had been born with an uncompromising
sense of duty, and once convinced of an obligation, he would have scorned
to shirk it. The death of his parents left him no choice but to take up
his cross with New England Spartanism and bear it like a true disciple.
All the Howe capital was invested in land, in stock, and in agricultural
implements. To sell out, even were he so fortunate as to find a purchaser,
would mean shrinkage. And the farm once disposed of, what then? Had he
been alone in the world, he would not have paused to ask the question. But
there were Mary, Eliza, and Jane,--three sisters older than himself with
no resources for earning a living. Even he himself was unskilled, and
should he migrate to the city, he would be forced to subsist more or less
by his wits; and to add to his uncertain fortunes the burden of three
dependent women would be madness. No, the management of the family
homestead was his inevitable lot. That he recognized.
What the abandonment of his "Castles in Spain" cost Martin only those who
knew him best appreciated; and they but dimly surmised. Resolutely he kept
his face set before him, allowing himself no backward glances into the
_dolce-far-niente_ land left behind. As it was characteristic of him to
approach any problem from the scholar's standpoint, he attacked his
agricultural puzzles from a far more scientific angle than his father had
done, bringing to them an intelligence that often compensated for
experience and opened before him vistas of surprising interest. He
subscribed to garden magazines; studied into crop rotation and the
grafting of trees and vines; spent a few months at college experimenting
with soils and chemicals. He investigated in up-to-date farming machinery
and bought some of the devices he felt would economize labor.
Gradually the problem of wresting a living from the soil broadened and
deepened until it assumed alluring proportions. Farming became a conundrum
worthy of the best brain, and one at which the supercilious could ill
afford to scoff. Martin found himself giving to it the full strength both
of his body and mind.
By the end of the first year he had become resigned to his new career; by
the end of the second interested in it; by the end of the third
enthusiastic.
In the meantime, as season succeeded season, the soil he had so patiently
tended began to give him thanks, returning ever increasing harvests. The
trees in the old orchard bent under their weight of apples; the grapevines
were lush with fruit. The Howe farm acquired fame in the neighborhood.
The boy was proud of his success and justly so. Not alone did it represent
man's triumph over Nature, but it also meant the mastery of Martin's own
will over his inclinations. And all the while that he was achieving this
dual victory he was developing from a thin, over-grown lad into a muscular
young giant,--keen-eyed, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-armed. He
was lithe as an Indian and almost as unwearying. If through the cross
rifts of his daily routine there filtered occasional shadows of
loneliness, he only vaguely acknowledged their existence, attributing his
groping longing for sympathy to the lack of male companionship and the
uncongeniality that existed between himself and his sisters.
He had, to be sure, a few masculine acquaintances in the village, but most
of them were older and less progressive than he, and they offered him
little aid in his difficulties. Having farmed all their lives and been
content with the meager results they had obtained, they shrugged their
shoulders at Martin's experiments with irrigation and fertilizer,
regarding his attempts as the impractical theories of a fanatic. Of youth,
Sefton Falls contained only a scattering, the more enterprising young men
having gone either to the city or to the War.
Thus bereft of friends of his own sex, and turned back from a professional
or a soldier's career by Duty's flaming sword, Martin reverted to his own
home for comradeship. But here, alas, he was again disappointed.
Mary, Eliza, and Jane were not of a type to fill the void in his life that
he sought to have filled. It would be unfair to say he had not a warm
regard for his sisters, for he was a person of inherent loyalty, and ties
of blood meant much to him. Had he not sacrificed his own dreams that his
family might retain their old home? Nevertheless one may have a
deep-rooted affection for one's kin and yet not find them congenial; and
Martin was compelled to acknowledge that Mary, Eliza and Jane--estimable
women as they were--had many fundamental characteristics that were quite
out of harmony with his ideals of life. It was possible their faults were
peculiar to the entire feminine race. He was not prepared to say, since
his knowledge of the sex had never extended beyond the sill of his own
doorway. But whether general or particular, the truth remained that the
mental horizon of his sisters, bounded as it was by the four walls of the
kitchen and such portion of the outside world as could be seen from its
windows, was pitiably narrow.
Beyond the round of their daily duties none of the three women had an
interest in life. Over and over again they performed their humdrum tasks
in the same humdrum fashion, arguing over each petty detail of the
time-worn theme until he marveled they could retain a particle of zest
for routine they never varied from year to year.
Reading and experimenting brought a freshness to his work that stimulated
detours into untraveled paths. But Mary, Eliza, and Jane never sought out
the uncharted way. Evidently monotony suited their stolid temperaments; or
if it did not, they never rebelled against it or tried to shake off its
fetters. Matter-of-fact, timid, faithful, capable, middle-aged,--they were
born to be plodders rather than explorers.
Martin admitted that to their undeviating system he owed a great measure
of the comfort and tranquillity of his well-ordered house, and hence he
struggled earnestly not to complain at the bondage that resulted from
their cast-iron methods. Long since he had despaired of expecting
adaptability from them. They must cling to their rut or all was _lost._
Once out of their customary channel, and they were like tossing ships,
rudderless and without an anchor.
Their solicitude for him was another source of exasperation. There were
days when the brute in him rose and clamored to strike Mary for tagging at
his heels with coats and medicines, and Eliza for her lynxlike
observation of every mouthful he ate. But he curbed the impulse,
shamefacedly confessing himself to be ungrateful.
Had his tolerance been reënforced by insight, he would have understood
that the very qualities which so exasperated him sprang from his sister's
laudable desire to voice a gratitude they could not put into words by
neglecting no act which would promote his welfare; but Martin, alas, was
not a psychologist, and therefore was unable to translate his annoyances
in these interpretative terms.
In truth, what Mary, Eliza, and Jane were as individuals concerned him
very little. He always thought of them as a composite personality, a sort
of female trinity.
Nevertheless Mary, Eliza, and Jane Howe were not a trinity. They were
three very distinct beings.
Mary had had spinsterhood thrust upon her. At heart she was a mother, a
woman created to nurse and comfort. Her greatest happiness was derived
from fluttering about those she loved and waiting upon them. Had she
dared, she would have babied Martin to an even greater extent than she
did. As it was, when she was not at his elbow with warmer socks, heavier
shoes, or a cup of hot coffee, she was worrying about Mary and Eliza,
brewing tonics for them, or putting burning soapstones in their beds. It
was a pity Life had cheated her of having a dozen babies to pilot through
the mazes of measles and whooping cough, for then Mary would have been in
her element. Yet nature is a thing of inconsistencies, and through some
strange, unaccountable caprice, Mary's marital instincts stopped with this
fostering instinct. In every other respect she was an old maid. Men she
abhorred. Like Jennie Wren, she knew their tricks and their manners--or
thought she did--which for all practical purposes amounted to the same
thing. Had it been necessary for her to prove some of the theorems she
advanced concerning the male sex, she would have been at a loss to do so,
since the scope of her experience was very limited. Nevertheless, with
genuine Howe tenacity, she clung to her tenets even though she was without
data to back them up.
Eliza, on the other hand, had in her girlhood been the recipient of
certain vague attentions from an up-State farmer, and these had bared to
her virgin imagination a new world. True, the inconstant swain had
betaken himself to the next county and there wed another. But although the
affair had come to this ignominious end and its radiance had been dimmed
by the realities of a quarter of a century of prosaic life, Eliza had
never allowed time to obscure entirely the beauty of that early dream, nor
the door thus opened into the fairy realms of romance to be wholly closed.
Though she knew herself to be old, silver-haired, and worn, yet within the
fastnesses of her soul she was still young and waited the coming of her
lover. The illusion was only an illusion--a foolish, empty fantasy.
However, it helped her to be content with the present and harmed no one.
That Eliza had never quite "quit struggling" was borne out by the ripples
into which she coaxed her hair and by the knot of bright ribbon she never
failed to fasten beneath her ample chin.
Of the trio, Jane was the best balanced. Although the youngest of the
sisters, it was to her judgment they were wont to appeal in times of
stress. She was more fearless, more outspoken; and any mission she
undertook was more certain of success. Therefore, when it became necessary
to present some cause to Martin, it always fell to Jane's lot to act as
spokesman. Once when a controversy concerning Ellen Webster had arisen,
Jane had actually had the temerity to denounce her brother's attitude to
his face, declaring that should the old woman fall ill she would certainly
go and take care of her. Martin had met her defiance with rage. The
Websters and all their kindred might die before he would cross their
threshold or allow any of his family to do so. Before the violence of his
wrath, Mary and Eliza, who within their souls agreed with Jane, quailed in
terror; but Jane was undaunted.
This lack of what Martin termed _proper pride_ in his sisters was a source
of great disgust to him. He was quite conscious that although they did not
openly combat his opinions, they did not agree with him, and not only
regretted being at odds with their neighbors but also condemned his
perpetuation of the old feud as unchristian. Hence it was a cause for much
rejoicing to his mind to reflect that one male Howe at least survived to
bolster up a spineless, spiritless, and decadent generation. To love one's
enemies was a weak creed. Martin neither loved them nor pretended to.
Never, never, would he forgive the insults the Websters had heaped upon
his family. He wished no positive harm to Ellen Webster; but he certainly
wished her no good.
Mary, Eliza, and Jane had too much timidity and too great a craving for
peace not to conform outwardly at least to their brother's wishes.
Accordingly they bent their necks to his will; for did not Martin rule the
house?
Had you inquired of any of the sisters the Howes' breakfast hour, you
would have been told that breakfast was served when Martin pleased. It was
the sound of his step upon the stair that set preparations for the morning
meal in motion. So it was with every other detail of the home. When he
appeared in the doorway his handmaidens sprang to serve him, and so long
as he lingered beneath the roof they stayed their impatient hands from any
task that would create noise or confusion, and disturb his tranquillity.
It was not until the ban of his presence was removed that they ventured to
resume the mopping, dusting, or cooking in which they had been engaged
before his entrance.
It would have been interesting to know how Martin explained to himself
the lack of machinery in his household, and how he reconciled the
spotlessness of his home with the apparent idleness of his sisters. His
hearth was always swept; the dishes noiselessly washed; the beds made as
if by magic; and the cleaning done without shadow of inconvenience to him.
So long as these processes were not forced upon his consciousness and were
faultlessly performed, he accepted the results without comment. But let
one cog of the wheel slip, setting the mechanism of his comfort awry, and
he was sure to mention it.
Possibly it was because he himself performed his out-of-door duties well
that he demanded, and felt he had the right to demand a similar perfection
within doors. In fact, he drew the lines of demarkation between the
masculine and feminine spheres of service so sharply that his sisters
would have died before they would have asked his aid in any domestic
difficulty. Faithfully he met every obligation he considered to be within
a man's province,--bringing wood, coal, and kindlings with the courtesy of
a courtier; but the fowl browning in the oven might have burned to ebony
before Martin would have lifted a finger to rescue it. To oversee the
cooking was not his duty. No autocrat ever reigned with more absolute
power than did Martin Howe; and no monarch ever maintained a more sincere
faith in his divine right to rule. He simply set the crown of sovereignty
upon his own brows because he believed it to belong there. And had his
faith in his destiny wavered, there were always his slaves Mary, Eliza,
and Jane to bow their foreheads in the dust at his feet and murmur with
true Oriental submissiveness:
Oh, King, Live Forever!
His lordship being thus acknowledged, was it any wonder that Martin cast
about himself a mantle of aloofness and dignity and rated as trivial the
household routine and petty gossip of his sisters? When he listened to
their chatter at all it was with the tolerance of a superior being toward
a less intelligent rabble.
Hence when he returned from the field one night and was greeted by the
breathless announcement that a strange young woman with her trunk had just
arrived at the Websters', it was characteristic of him to quiet the
excited outburst of his sisters with the chilling and stately reply:
"What does it matter to us who she is, or what she's come for? Ellen
Webster's visitors are no concern of ours."
CHAPTER III
LUCY
In the meantime the being whom Martin had dismissed with this majestic
wave of his hand stood in the middle of the Webster kitchen, confronting
the critical eyes of its mistress.
"Yes, Aunt Ellen," the girl was saying, catching the elder woman's stiff
fingers in hers, "I'm Lucy. Do you think I look like Dad? And am I at all
what you expected?"
Ellen drew her hands uncomfortably from the impulsive grasp but did not
reply immediately. She was far too bewildered to do so.
Lucy was not in the least what she had expected,--that was certain. In the
delicate oval face there was no trace of Thomas's heavily modeled
features; nor was Lucy indebted to the Websters for her aureole of golden
hair, the purity of her blond skin, or her grave brown eyes. Thomas had
been a massively formed, kindly, plain-featured man; but his daughter was
beautiful. Even Ellen, who habitually scoffed at all that was fair and
banished the æsthetic world as far from her horizon as possible, was
forced to acknowledge this.
In the proudly poised head, the small, swiftly moving hands, and the tiny
feet there was a birdlike alertness which was the epitome of action. The
supple body, however, lacked the bird's fluttering uncertainty; rather the
figure bespoke a control that had its birth in an absence of all
self-consciousness and the obedience of perfectly trained muscles to a
compelling will.
Without a shadow of embarrassment Lucy endured her aunt's inspection.
"Anybody'd think," commented Ellen to herself in a mixture of indignation
and amusement, "that she was a princess comin' a-visitin' instead of bein'
a charity orphan."
Yet although she fumed inwardly at the girl's attitude, she did not really
dislike it. Spirit flashed in the youthful face, and Ellen admired spirit.
She would have scorned a cringing, apologetic Webster. Unquestionably in
her niece's calm assurance there was no hint of the dependent.
As she stood serenely in the center of the room, Lucy's gaze wandered over
her aunt's shoulder and composedly scanned every detail of the kitchen,
traveling from ceiling to floor, examining the spotless shelves, the
primly arranged pots and pans, the gleaming tin dipper above the sink.
Then the roving eyes came back to the older woman and settled with
unconcealed curiosity upon her lined and sharply cut features.
Beneath the intentness of the scrutiny Ellen colored uneasily.
"Well?" she demanded tartly.
Lucy started.
"You seem to have made up your mind about me," went on the rasping voice.
"Am I what _you_ expected?"
"No."
The monosyllable came quietly.
"What sort of an aunt were you lookin' for?"
Lucy waited a moment and then replied with childlike directness:
"I thought you'd be more like Dad. And you don't look in the least like an
invalid."
"You're disappointed I ain't sicker, eh?" commented Ellen grimly.
"No, indeed," answered Lucy. "I'm glad to find you so strong. But it makes
me feel you do not need me as much as I thought you did. You are
perfectly able to take care of yourself without my help."
"Oh, I can take care of myself all right, young woman," Ellen returned
with an acid smile. "I don't require a nurse--at least not yet."
Lucy maintained a thoughtful silence.
"I don't quite understand why you sent for me," she presently remarked.
"Didn't I write you I was lonesome?"
"Yes. But you're not."
Ellen laughed in spite of herself.
"What makes you so sure of that?"
"You don't look lonesome."
Again the elder woman chuckled.
"Mebbe I do, an' mebbe I don't," she responded. "Anyhow, you can't always
judge of how folks feel by the way they look."
"I suppose not."
The reply was spoken politely but without conviction.
"An' besides, I had other reasons for gettin' you here," her aunt went on.
"I mentioned 'em in my letter."
"I don't remember the other reasons."
Ellen stared, aghast.
"Why--why--the property," she managed to stammer.
"Oh, that."
The words were uttered with an indifference too genuine to be questioned.
"Yes, the property," repeated Ellen with cutting sarcasm. "Ain't you
interested in money; or have you got so much already that you couldn't
find a use for any more?"
The thrust told. Into the girl's cheek surged a flame of crimson.
"I haven't any money," she returned with dignity. "Dad left me almost
penniless. His illness used up all we had. Nevertheless, I was glad to
spend it for his comfort, and I can earn more when I need it."
"Humph."
"Yes," went on Lucy, raising her chin a trifle higher, "I am perfectly
capable of supporting myself any time I wish to do so."
"Mebbe you'd rather do that than stay here with me," her aunt suggested
derisively.
"Maybe," was the simple retort. "I shall see."
Ellen bit her lip and then for the second time her sense of humor overcame
her.
"I guess there's no doubtin' you're a genuine Webster," she replied
good-humoredly. "I begin to think we shall get on together nicely."
"I hope so."
There was a reservation in the words that nettled Ellen.
"Why shouldn't we?" she persisted.
"I don't know."
"Don't you like your aunt?"
"Not altogether."
The audacity of the reply appealed to the older woman, and her eyes
twinkled. "Not altogether, eh?" she echoed. "Now I'm sorry to hear that
because I like you very much."
Lucy smiled. It was a radiant smile, disclosing prettily formed white
teeth and a lurking dimple.
"That's nice."
"But you ain't a-goin' to return the compliment?"
"Not yet."
It was long since Ellen had been so highly entertained.
"Well," she observed with undiminished amusement, "I've evidently got to
be on my good behavior if I want to keep such an independent young lady as
you in the house."
"Why shouldn't I be independent?"
A few moments before Ellen would have met the challenge with derision; but
now something caused her to restrain the retort that trembled on her
tongue and say instead:
"Of course you've got a right to be independent. The folks that ain't
ought to be made way with."
Her affirmation surprised her. She would not have confessed it, but a
strange sense of respect for the girl before her had driven her to utter
them.
Lucy greeted the remark graciously.
"That's what I think," she replied.
"Then at least we agree on somethin'," returned Ellen dryly, "an' mebbe
before I put my foot in it an' lose this bit of your good opinion, I'd
better take you up to your room."
She caught up the heavy satchel from the floor.
"Oh, don't," Lucy protested. "Please let me take it. I'm used to carrying
heavy things. I am very strong."
"Strong, are you?" questioned Ellen, without, however, turning her head or
offering to surrender the large leather holdall. "An' how, pray, did you
get so strong?" She passed into the hall and up the stairs as she spoke,
Lucy following.
"Oh, driving horses, doing housework, cooking, cleaning, and shooting,"
the girl replied. Then as if a forgotten activity had come to her mind as
an afterthought, she added gaily: "And sawing wood, I guess."
"You can do things like that?"
"Yes, indeed. I had to after Mother died and we moved to Bald Mountain
where Dad's mine was. I did all the work for my father and ten Mexicans."
"You? Why didn't your father get a woman in?"
Lucy broke into a merry laugh.
"A woman! Why, Aunt Ellen, there wasn't a woman within twenty miles. It
was only a mining camp, you see; just Dad and his men."
"An' you mean to tell me you were the sole woman in a place like that?"
Lucy's silvery laughter floated upward.
"The ten Mexicans who boarded with us were engineers and bosses," she
explained. "There were over fifty miners in the camp besides."
Stopping midway up the staircase Ellen wheeled and said indignantly:
"An' Thomas kep' you in a settlement like that?"
"Who?"
"Your father."
"Why not?"
"'Twarn't no place for a girl."
"It was the place for me."
"Why?"
"Because Dad was there."
Something in the reply left Ellen wordless and made her continue her way
upstairs without answering. When she did speak, it was to say in a gentler
tone:
"Mebbe you'll like the room I'm going to give you. It used to belong to
your Dad when he was a little boy."
She lifted the latch of a paneled door and stood looking into a large
bedroom. The sun slanted across a bare, painted floor, which was covered
by a few braided rugs, old and worn; there was a great four-poster about
which were draped chintz curtains, yellowed by age, and between the
windows stood a mahogany bureau whose brasses were tarnished by years of
service; two stiff ladder-back chairs, a three-cornered washstand, and a
few faded photographs in pale gilt frames completed the furnishings.
With swift step Lucy crossed the room and gazed up at one of the
pictures.
"That's Dad!"
Ellen nodded.
"I'd no idea he was ever such a chubby little fellow. Look at his baby
hands and his drum!"
She paused, looking intently at the picture. Then in a far-away tone she
added:
"And his eyes were just the same."
For several minutes she lingered, earnest and reminiscent.
"And is this you, Aunt Ellen?" she asked, motioning toward another
time-dimmed likeness hanging over the bed.
"Yes."
A silence fell upon the room. Ellen fidgeted.
"I've changed a good deal since then," she observed, after waiting
nervously for some comment.
"You've changed much more than Dad."
"How?"
Curiosity impelled her to cross to Lucy's side and examine the
photograph.
"Your eyes--your mouth."
"What about 'em?"
"I--I--don't believe I could explain it," responded Lucy slowly.
"Mebbe you'd have liked me better as a little girl," grinned her aunt
whimsically.
"I--yes. I'm sure I should have liked you as a little girl."
The reply piqued Ellen. She bent forward and scrutinized the likeness more
critically. The picture was of a child in a low-cut print dress and
pantalettes,--a resolute figure, all self-assurance and self-will.
It was easy to trace in the face the features of the woman who confronted
it: the brows of each were high, broad, and still bordered by smoothly
parted hair; the well-formed noses, too, were identical; but the eyes of
the little maiden in the old-fashioned gown sparkled with an unmalicious
merriment and frankness the woman's had lost, and the curving mouth of the
child was unmarred by bitter lines. Ellen stirred uncomfortably.
As she looked she suddenly became conscious of a desire to turn her glance
away from the calm gaze of her youthful self. Yes, the years had indeed
left their mark upon her, she inwardly confessed. She did not look like
that now. Lucy was right. Her eyes had changed, and her mouth, too.
"Folks grow old," she murmured peevishly. "Nobody can expect to keep on
looking as they did when they were ten years old."
Abruptly she moved toward the door.
"There's water in the pitcher, an' there's soap and towels here, I guess,"
she remarked. "When you get fixed up, come downstairs; supper'll be on the
table."
The door banged and she was gone. But as she moved alone about the kitchen
she was still haunted by the clear, questioning eyes of the child in the
photograph upstairs. They seemed to follow her accusingly, reproachfully.
"Drat old pictures!" she at last burst out angrily. "They'd ought to be
burnt up--the whole lot of them! They always set you thinkin'."
CHAPTER IV
THE EPISODE OF THE EGGS
The next morning while Ellen stood at the kitchen table slicing bread for
breakfast, Lucy, her figure girlish in a blue and white pinafore, appeared
in the doorway.
"Good morning, Aunt Ellen," she said. "You will have to forgive me this
once for being late. Everything was so still I didn't wake up. Your nice
feather bed was too comfortable, I'm afraid. But it shan't happen again.
After this I mean to be prompt as the sun, for I'm going to be the one to
get the breakfast. You must promise to let me do it. I'd love to. I am
quite accustomed to getting up early, and after serving breakfast for
twelve, breakfast for two looks like nothing at all." As she spoke she
moved with buoyant step across the room to the table.
"Shan't I toast the bread?" she inquired.
"I ain't a-goin' to toast it," returned Ellen in a curt tone. "Hot bread
an' melted butter's bad for folks, 'specially in the mornin'."
Lucy smiled. "It never hurts me," she replied.
"Nor me," put in her aunt quickly. "I don't give it a chance to. But
whether or no, I don't have it. When you melt butter all up, you use twice
as much, an' there ain't no use wastin' food."
"I never thought about the butter."
"Them as has the least in the world is the ones that generally toss the
most money away," the elder woman observed.
The transient kindliness of the night before had vanished, giving place to
her customary sharpness of tone. Lucy paid no heed to the innuendo.
"I might make an omelet while I'm waiting," she suggested pleasantly. "Dad
used to think I made quite a nice one."
"I don't have eggs in the mornin', either," replied Ellen.
"Don't you like eggs?"
"I don't eat 'em."
"How funny! I always have an egg for breakfast."
"You won't here," came crisply from her aunt.
Lucy failed to catch the gist of the remark.
"Why, I thought you kept hens," she said innocently.
"I do."
"Oh, I see. They're not laying."
"Yes, they are. I get about four dozen eggs every day," retorted Ellen.
"But I sell 'em instead of eatin' 'em."
As comprehension dawned upon Lucy, she was silent.
"Folks don't need eggs in the mornin' anyway," continued Ellen, still on
the defensive. "This stuffin' yourself with food is all habit. Anybody can
get into the way of eatin' more 'n' more, an' not know where to stop.
Bread an' coffee an' oatmeal is all anybody needs for breakfast."
If she expected a reply from her niece, she was disappointed, for Lucy did
not speak.
"When you can get sixty-six cents a dozen for eggs, it's no time to be
eatin' 'em," Ellen continued irritably. "You ain't come to live with a
Rockefeller, Miss."
Receiving no answer to the quip, she drew a chair to the table and sat
down.
"You'd better come an' get your coffee while it's hot," she called to
Lucy.
Slowly the girl approached the table and seated herself opposite her
aunt.
The window confronting her framed a scene of rare beauty. The Webster farm
stood high on a plateau, and beneath it lay a broad sweep of valley, now
half-shrouded in the silver mists of early morning. The near-at-hand field
and pasture that sloped toward it were gemmed with dew. Every blade of
tall grass of the mowing sparkled. Even the long rows of green shoots
striping the chocolate earth of the garden flashed emerald in the morning
sunlight; beyond the plowed land, through an orchard whose apple boughs
were studded with ruby buds, Lucy caught a glimpse of a square brick
chimney.
"Who lives in the next house?" she inquired, in an attempt to turn the
unpleasant tide of the conversation. If she had felt resentment at her
aunt's remarks, she at least did not show it.
"What?"
"I was wondering who lived in the next house."
"The Howes."
"I did not realize last night that you had neighbors so near at hand,"
continued the girl brightly. "Tell me about them."
"There's nothin' to tell."
"I mean who is in the family?"
"There's Martin Howe an' his three sisters, if that's what you want to
know," snapped Ellen.
Lucy, however, was not to be rebuffed. She attributed her aunt's
ungraciousness to her irritation about the breakfast and, determining to
remain unruffled, she went on patiently:
"It's nice for you to have them so near, isn't it?"
"It don't make no difference to me, their bein' there. I don't know 'em."
For some reason that Lucy could not fathom, the woman's temper seemed to
be rising, and being a person of tact she promptly shifted the subject.
"No matter about the Howes any more, Aunt Ellen," she said, smiling into
the other's frowning face. "Tell me instead what you want me to do to help
you to-day? Now that I'm here you must divide the work with me so I may
have my share."
Although Ellen did not return the smile, the scowl on her forehead
relaxed.
"You'll find plenty to keep you busy, I guess," she returned. "There's all
the housework to be done--dishes, beds, an' sweepin'; an' then there's
milk to set an' skim; eggs to collect an' pack for market; hens to feed;
an'----"
"Goodness me!"
"You ain't so keen on dividin' up, eh?"
"Oh, it isn't that," returned Lucy quickly. "I was only thinking what a
lot you had to do. No wonder you sent for me."
It was a random remark, but it struck Ellen's conscience with such aplomb
that she flushed, dismayed.
"What do you mean?" she faltered.
As Lucy looked at her aunt, she observed the shifting glance, the crafty
smile, the nervous interlacing of the fingers.
"Mean?" she returned innocently. "Why, nothing, Aunt Ellen. We must all
work for a living one way or another, I suppose. If I prefer to stay here
with you and earn my board there is no disgrace in it, is there?"
"No."
Nevertheless Ellen was obviously disconcerted. There was an uncanny
quality in Lucy that left her with a sense that every hiding place in her
heart was laid bare. Were the girl's ingenuous observations as ingenuous
as they seemed? Or were they the result of an abnormal intuition, a
superhuman power for fathoming the souls of others?
Eager to escape the youthful seer, the woman pushed back her chair and
rose.
"I must go out an' see what that boy Tony's up to," she said. "While I'm
gone you might tidy up round here a bit. There's the dishes an' the beds;
an' in the pantry you'll find the eggs with the cases to pack 'em in. An'
if you get round to it you might sweep up the sittin' room."
"All right."
Drawing on a worn coat Ellen moved toward the door; when, however, her
hand was on the knob, she turned and called over her shoulder:
"The washin's soakin' in the tubs in the shed. You can hang it out if you
like."
Lucy waited until she saw the angular figure wend its way to the barn.
Then she broke into a laugh.
"The old fox! She did get me here to work for her," she murmured aloud.
"Anyway, I don't have to stay unless I like; and I shan't, either. So,
Aunt Ellen Webster, you'd better be careful how you treat me."
With a defiant shake of her miniature fist in the direction her aunt had
taken, Lucy turned to attack the duties before her. She washed the dishes
and put them away; tripped upstairs and kneaded the billowy feather beds
into smoothness; and humming happily, she swept and polished the house
until it shone. She did such things well and delighted in the miracles her
small hands wrought.
"Now for the eggs!" she exclaimed, opening the pantry door.
Yes, there were the empty cases, and there on the shelf were the eggs that
waited to be packed,--dozens of them. It seemed at first glance as if
there must be thousands.
"And she wouldn't let me have one!" ejaculated the girl. "Well, I don't
want them. But I'm going to have an egg for breakfast whether she likes it
or not. I'll buy some. Then I can eat them without thanks to her. I have a
little money, and I may as well spend part of it that way as not. I
suppose it will annoy her; but I can't help it. I'm not going to starve to
death."
During this half-humorous, half-angry soliloquy, Lucy was packing the
eggs for market, packing them with extreme care.
"I'd love to smash them all," she declared, dimpling. "Wouldn't it be fun!
But I won't. I'll not break one if I can help it."
The deft fingers successfully carried out this resolution. When Ellen
returned from the garden at noontime, not only was the housework done, but
the eggs were in the cases; the clothes swaying on the line; and the
dinner steaming on the table. She was in high good humor.
"I forgot to ask you what you had planned for us to have this noon,"
explained Lucy. "So I had to rummage through the refrigerator and use my
own judgment."
"Your judgment seems to have been pretty good."
"I'm glad you think so."
"The Websters always had good judgment," the woman observed, as she
dropped wearily into a chair. "Yes, you've got together a very good meal.
It's most too good, though. Next time you needn't get so much."
Lucy regarded her aunt mischievously.
"Probably if I'd been all Webster I shouldn't have," she remarked
demurely. "But half of me, you see, is Duquesne, and the Duquesnes were
generous providers."
If Ellen sensed this jocose rebuke, she at least neither resented it nor
paid the slightest heed to its innuendo.
"The Duquesnes?" she questioned.
"My mother was a Duquesne."
"Oh, she was?"
"Didn't you know that?"
"Yes, I reckon I did at the time your father married, but I'd forgot about
it. Thomas an' I didn't write much to one another, an' latterly I didn't
hear from him at all."
"It was a pity."
"I dunno as it made much difference," Ellen said. "Likely he didn't
remember much about his home an' his relations."
"Yes, indeed he did," cried Lucy eagerly. "He used to speak often of my
grandparents and the old house, and he hoped I'd come East sometime and
see the place where he had lived as a boy. As he grew older and was sick,
I think his early home came to mean more to him than any other spot on
earth."
"Queer how it often takes folks to their dyin' day to get any sense,"
declared Ellen caustically. "Where'd your father pick up your mother,
anyway?"
Lucy did not answer.
"I mean where did he get acquainted with her?" amended Ellen hastily.
"You never heard the story?"
"No."
"Oh, it was the sweetest thing," began Lucy enthusiastically. "You see,
Grandfather Duquesne owned a coal mine up in the mountains, and Dad worked
for him. One day one of the cages used in going down into the mine got out
of order, and Grandfather gave orders that it was to be fixed right away
lest some accident occur and the men be injured. But through a
misunderstanding the work was not done, and the next day the cage dropped
and killed nine of the miners. Of course the men blamed poor Grandfather
for the tragedy, and they marched to his house, intending to drag him out
and lynch him. Dad knew the truth, however, and he rushed to the place and
held the mob back with his pistol until he could tell them the real facts.
At first they were so angry they refused to listen, but by and by they
did, and instead of killing Grandfather they went and found the engineers
who were to blame."
Ellen waited.
"What did they do to them?" she demanded at last.
"Oh, they hung them instead of Grandfather," answered Lucy simply.
"How many of them?"
"I don't know. Three or four, I guess."
It was evident that Lucy was quite indifferent to the fate of the unlucky
engineers.
"Mercy on us!" Ellen gasped.
"But their carelessness caused the death of the other men. It was only
fair."
"So that's the way you settle things in the West?"
"Yes. At least, they did then."
The mountain-bred girl obviously saw nothing amiss in this swift-footed
justice.
"And where did your mother come in?" asked her aunt.
"Why, you see, Grandfather Duquesne afterward made Dad the boss of the
mine, and when Mother, a girl of sixteen, came home from the California
convent, where she had been at school, she saw him and fell in love with
him. Grandfather Duquesne made an awful fuss, but he let her marry him."
Lucy threw back her head with one of her rippling laughs.
"He had to," she added merrily. "Mother'd have married Dad anyway."
Ellen studied the tea grounds in the bottom of her cup thoughtfully.
How strange it was to picture Thomas the hero of a romance like this! She
had heard that once in his life every man became a poet; probably this was
Thomas's era of transformation.
Her reverie was broken by the gentle voice of Lucy, who observed:
"And that's what I'd do, too."
"What?" inquired Ellen vaguely. In her reverie about Thomas she had lost
the connection.
"Marry the man I loved no matter what anybody said. Wouldn't you?"
"I--I--don't know," stammered Ellen, getting to her feet with
embarrassment at having a love affair thrust so intimately upon her.
"Mebbe. I must go back now to Tony an' the weedin'. When you get cleared
up round here, there's plenty of mendin' to be done. You'll find that
hamper full of stockin's to be darned."
After Ellen had gone out, Lucy did not rise immediately from the table,
but sat watching the clouds that foamed up behind the maples on the crest
of the nearby hill. A glory of sunshine bathed the earth, and she could
see the coral of the apple buds sway against the sky. It was no day to sit
within doors and darn socks. All Nature beckoned, and to Lucy, used from
birth to being in the open, the alluring gesture was irresistible.
With sudden resolve she sprang up, cleared away the confused remnants of
the meal before her, dashed to her room for a scarlet sweater, and fled
into the radiant world outside.
She followed the driveway until it joined the road, and then, after
hesitating an instant, turned in the direction of the Howe farm. A
mischievous light danced in her brown eyes, and a smile curved her lips.
The road along which she passed was bordered on either side by walls of
gray stone covered with shiny-leaved ivy and flanked by a checkerboard of
pastures roughly dotted with clumps of hardback and boles of protruding
rock. Great brakes grew in the shady hollows, and from the woods beyond
came the cool, moist perfume of moss and ferns.
The girl looked about her with delight. Then she began to sing softly to
herself and jingle rhythmically the coins in her pocket.
It was nearly a quarter of a mile to the Howes' gate, and by the time she
reached it, her swinging step had given to her cheek a color that even the
apple orchard could not rival.
A quick tap on the knocker brought Mary Howe to the door. She was tall,
angular, and short-sighted, and she stood regarding her visitor
inquisitively, her forehead lined by a network of wrinkles.
"Could you let me have a dozen eggs?" asked Lucy.
Mary looked at the girl in waiting silence.
"I am Miss Webster's niece," explained Lucy, with an appealing smile. "We
live next door, you know. Aunt Ellen didn't seem to have any eggs to
spare, so----" she stopped, arrested by Mary's expression.
"Maybe you don't sell eggs," she ventured.
"Yes, we do," Mary contrived to articulate, "but I don't know--I'm
afraid----" She broke off helplessly in the midst of the disjointed
sentence and, raising her voice, called: "Eliza, is Jane there?"
"She's upstairs. I'll fetch her down," responded Eliza, coming to the
door. "What is it?"
"It's Miss Webster's niece askin' for eggs."
"Miss Webster's niece! Ellen Webster's?"
The explanation had in it an intonation of terror.
"Yes."
"My land, Mary! What shall we do? Martin will never----" the awed whisper
ceased. "I'll call Jane," broke off Eliza hurriedly.
Lucy heard the messenger speed across the floor and run up the stairs.
"I'm afraid I'm making you a great deal of trouble," she remarked
apologetically.
"No."
"Perhaps you haven't any eggs to spare."
Mary did not reply to the words; instead she continued to look with
bewilderment at the girl on the doorstep.
"Did Miss Webster send you?" she at last inquired.
Lucy laughed.
"No, indeed," she answered. "She didn't even know I was coming. You see, I
only arrived from Arizona last night. I've come to live with my aunt. We
didn't seem to agree very well about breakfast this morning so I----"
"Oh!"
The explanation was pregnant with understanding.
"I just thought I'd feel more independent if I----"
A swish of skirts cut short the sentence, and in another moment all three
of the Howe sisters were framed in the doorway.
Although a certain family resemblance was characteristic of them, they
looked little alike. Eliza, it was true, was less angular than Mary and
lacked her firmness of mouth and chin; but nevertheless the Howe stamp was
upon her black hair, heavy, bushy brows, and noble cast of forehead. It
was Jane's face, touched by a humor the others could not boast, that
instantly arrested Lucy's attention. It was a fine, almost classic
countenance which bespoke high thinking and a respect for its own soul.
The eyes were gray and kindly, and in contrast to the undisguised dismay
of her sisters, Jane's attitude was one of unruffled composure.
"You want some eggs?" she began with directness.
"If you can spare a dozen."
"I reckon we can."
"Now, Jane----" interrupted Mary nervously.
"Do be careful, Jane," chimed in Eliza.
"I have a right to----" but the resolute Jane was not permitted to finish
her declaration.
"Martin won't----" interpolated Mary.
"You know Martin will be dretful put out," protested Eliza at the same
instant.
"I can't help it if he is," asserted Jane impatiently. "I ain't obliged to
think as he does, am I?"
"He'll be--oh, Jane!" Eliza implored.
"I'll take all the blame."
"I don't know what he'll say," pleaded Mary.
"Well, I'm going to get the eggs, anyhow," announced Jane, cutting short
further argument by moving away.
During this enigmatic dialogue, Lucy's mystified gaze traveled from the
face of one woman to that of another. What was it all about? And who was
this Martin that he should inspire such terror?
"I'm afraid," she called to the retreating Jane, "you'd rather not----"
"It's all right, my dear," replied Jane cordially. "We're glad to let you
have the eggs. I'll get them right away. It won't take me a second."
She disappeared behind the paneled door at the end of the hall, and
presently Mary and Eliza, who had loitered irresolutely, uncertain whether
to go or stay, followed her.
Left to herself, Lucy looked idly across the sunny landscape. Against the
sky line at the top of the hill she could see a tall, masculine figure
delving in the garden.
"That must be Martin-the-Terrible," she observed. "He doesn't look like
such an ogre."
The banging of the door heralded Jane's approach. She held in her hand a
neatly tied package, and over her shoulders peered Mary and Eliza.
"The eggs will be sixty-seven cents," Jane said in a businesslike tone.
"That is the regular market price. I'd carry the box this side up if I
were you."
Lucy counted the change into the woman's palm.
"You have such a pretty home," she murmured as she did so.
"We like it," replied Jane pleasantly.
"I don't wonder. The view from this porch is beautiful. Sometime I hope
you'll let me come over and see you."
Lucy heard two faint simultaneous gasps.
"I'd be glad to have you," came steadily from Jane.
"And I'd like you to come over and see me some day, too--all of you," went
on the girl.
"We don't have much time for goin' out," returned Jane. "There's such a
lot to do that----" she stopped, appearing for the first time to be
confused.
"I know there is," Lucy assented serenely. "I am afraid I have kept you
too long from your work as it is. You must forgive me. Thank you very much
for the eggs."
She extended a slender hand, which Jane grasped warmly. A smile passed
between the two.
But as Lucy turned down the driveway and the door of the Howe homestead
closed, a tragic babel of voices reached her ear, piping in shrill
staccato the single word:
"Jane!"
CHAPTER V
A CLASH OF WILLS
When Lucy reached home she found her aunt in the sitting room bending
disapprovingly over the basket of undarned stockings.
"I see you haven't touched these," she observed, in a chiding tone.
"Where've you been?"
"I went to get some eggs."
"Eggs! What for?"
"For my breakfast to-morrow. You said you couldn't spare any, so I've
bought some."
"Where?"
The word expressed mingled wrath and wonder.
"Next door."
The woman looked puzzled. She thought a moment.
"Where'd you say?" she asked after a pause.
"Next door--at the Howes'."
"The Howes'!" Ellen fairly hissed the name. "You went to the _Howes'_ for
eggs?"
"Why not?"
With a swift motion her aunt strode forward and snatched the box from
Lucy's light grasp.
"You went to the Howes--to the Howes--an' told 'em I didn't give you
enough to eat?"
Livid, the woman crowded nearer, clutching the girl's arm in a fierce,
merciless grip; her blue eyes flashed, and her lips trembled with anger.
"I didn't say you didn't give me enough to eat," explained Lucy, trying
unsuccessfully to draw away from the cruel fingers that held her.
"What did you tell 'em?"
"I just said you couldn't spare any eggs for us to use."
"Spare eggs! I can spare all the eggs I like," Ellen retorted. "I ain't a
pauper. If I chose I could eat every egg there is in that pantry." She
shook her niece viciously. "I only sell my eggs 'cause I'd rather," she
went on.
"I thought you said we couldn't afford to have eggs when they where so
high," explained Lucy. "You said they were sixty-six cents a dozen."
"I could afford to eat 'em if they was a dollar," interrupted Ellen, her
voice rising. "If they were two dollars!"
"I didn't understand."
"'Tain't your business to understand," snapped her aunt. "Your business is
to do as I say. Think of your goin' to the Howes--to the Howes of all
people--an' askin' for eggs! It'll be nuts for them. _The Howes._" The
circling fingers loosened weakly.
"I wonder," she continued, "the Howes sold you any eggs. They wouldn't 'a'
done it, you may be sure, but to spite me. I reckon they were only too
glad to take the chance you offered 'em."
"They weren't glad," protested Lucy indignantly. "They didn't want to sell
the eggs at all, at least two of them didn't; but the one called Jane
insisted on letting me have them."
"What'd they say?"
"I couldn't understand," Lucy replied. "They seemed to be afraid of
displeasing somebody called Martin. They said he wouldn't like it."
"Martin wouldn't, eh?" Ellen gave a disagreeable chuckle. "They're right
there. Martin won't like it. They'll be lucky if he doesn't flay them
alive for' doin' it."
"But why, Aunt Ellen? Why?" inquired Lucy.
"Because the Howes hate us, root an' branch; because they've injured an'
insulted us for generations, an' are keepin' right on injurin' an'
insultin' us. That's why!" Ellen's wrath, which had waned a little, again
rose to a white heat. "Because they'd go any length to do us harm--every
one of 'em." Again the grip on Lucy's arm tightened painfully.
Dragging the girl to the window the old woman cried:
"Do you see that pile of stones over there? That's the wall the Howes
built years an' years ago--built because of the grudge they bore the
Websters, likely. Did you ever look on such an eyesore?"
"Why don't they fix it?" asked Lucy naively.
"Yes, why don't they? You may well ask that!" returned Ellen with scathing
bitterness. "Why don't they? Because they're too mean an' stingy--that's
why. Because they think that by lettin' it go to ruin an' makin' my place
look like a dump heap, they can drive me to spend my money to do it,
so'st they can save theirs. Because they're such lyin', deceitful critters
they actually pretend the wall don't belong to 'em anyhow--that it's mine!
_Mine!_ That's why. So they leave it there, lookin' like the devil's own
playground, hopin' that some day I'll get so sick of seem' it that way
that I'll build it up."
She choked for breath.
"But I shan't," she went on. "I never shall, long's I live. If I was to be
drawn an' quartered I wouldn't do it. No. If Martin Howe thinks he's the
only person in the world who can hold out for a principle, he's mistaken.
I've got a will that can match his, match his an' beat it, too, an' he'll
learn it sometime. I can put up with seein' that wall just as long as he
can."
A light of understanding began to break in on Lucy's bewilderment.
"I don't see----" she began, then halted before her aunt's stern gaze.
"You don't see what? Out with it."
"I don't see why you couldn't build it up together."
"You don't!" sneered Ellen contemptuously, "You'd help those Howes fix
their wall, I s'pose, same's you'd go an' buy their eggs."
The withering intonation of the words echoed through the room.
"I'm goin' to tell you right now, Lucy Webster, that if you have a spark
of pride, an atom of regard for your father, your grandfather, or your
great-grandfather, you'll put all such notions as that plumb out of your
head. You'll have no dealin's with the Howes. You'll just hate 'em as your
folks have always hated 'em; an' you'll vow from now on that if Heaven
ever gives you the chance you'll get even with 'em." The tense voice
ceased.
Through the stillness the whispers of the great elm on the lawn could be
heard blending with the song of a vesper sparrow. Already twilight had
folded the valley in mystery until only the peaks of the hills were tipped
with light.
Contrasted with the peace of the night, man's strivings seemed peculiarly
out of harmony. But to Ellen's heart the scene brought no tranquillity.
"Now you know what your duty is," she concluded, with a final vindictive
outburst.
"If it is my duty," the girl answered, her eyes still upon the distant
landscape.
"Of course it's your duty. There ain't no question about that."
"Each of us must settle with his own conscience what his duty is," Lucy
observed slowly.
"Not if it's been handed down to him," put in Ellen quickly. "I guess your
duty's chalked out for you pretty plain; an' I reckon if you're any sort
of a Webster you'll do it an' not go branchin' off followin' notions of
your own--not after all these years."
"I don't believe in keeping up traditions unless they are good ones."
The older woman's lips tightened.
"You mean you'd break off from what your folks thought?"
"If I felt it to be right, yes."
Ellen drew a quick, impatient breath.
"You mean to say you'd set yourself up as knowin' mor'n your people before
you did?"
"I believe each generation grows wiser, or ought to--wiser and kinder."
"Kindness has nothin' to do with it."
"Yes, it has," persisted Lucy softly. "Unless we become more kind, how is
the world ever to become better?"
"Pish!" ejaculated Ellen. "Now see here. You ain't comin' into my house to
preach to me. I'm older'n you, an' I know without bein' told what I want
to do. So long's you stay under this roof you'll behave like a
Webster--that's all I've got to say. If you ain't a-goin' to be a Webster
an' prefer to disgrace your kin, the sooner you get out the better."
"Very well. I can go."
There was no bravado in the assertion. Had there been, Ellen would not
have felt so much alarmed. It was the fearless sincerity of the remark
that frightened her. She had not intended to force a crisis. She had
calculated that her bullying tone would cow rather than antagonize her
niece. The last result on which she had reckoned was defiance. Instantly
her crafty mind recognized that she must conciliate unless she would lose
this valuable helper whose toil could be secured without expense.
"Of course I don't mean--I wouldn't want you should go away," she hastened
to declare. "I'm just anxious for you to do--well--what's right," she
concluded lamely.
Lucy saw her advantage.
"Now, Aunt Ellen, we may as well settle this right now," she asserted. "I
am quite willing to go back to Arizona any time you say the word. I have
no desire to remain where I am not wanted. But so long as I do stay here,
I must be the one to decide what it is right for me to do. Remember, I am
not a child. I have a conscience as well as you, and I am old enough to
use it."
Ellen did not speak. She realized that Greek had met Greek and in the
combat of wills she was vanquished. Nevertheless, she was not generous
enough to own defeat.
"S'pose we don't talk about it any more," she replied diplomatically.
She was retreating toward the door, still smarting under the knowledge of
having been vanquished, when her eye fell upon the box of eggs, which, in
her excitement, she had forgotten was in her hand. A malicious gleam
lighted her face. A second afterward there was a violent crash in the
kitchen.
"The eggs!" Lucy heard her cry. "I've dropped 'em."
The eggs had indeed been dropped,--dropped with such a force that even the
cooperation of all the king's horses and all the king's men would have
been useless.
When Lucy reached her side Ellen was bending over the wreck on the floor,
a sly smile on her lips.
"They're gone, every one of 'em," she announced with feigned regret. "But
it ain't any matter. You can have all, the eggs you want anytime you want
'em. I ain't so poverty-stricken that we can't have eggs--even if they are
sixty-six cents a dozen."
She got a cloth and began to wipe up the unsightly mass at her feet.
"I paid sixty-seven cents for those," Lucy said.
"Sixty-seven cents! How long have the Howes been gettin' sixty-seven cents
for their eggs, I'd like to know?" Ellen demanded, springing into an
upright position.
"I couldn't say. Jane told me that was the regular market price."
"Why didn't I know it?" her aunt burst out. "They must 'a' gone up a cent,
an' I sellin' mine at the store for sixty-six! Ain't it just like that
meachin' Elias Barnes to do me out of a penny a dozen, the skinflint."
In the face of the present issue, the battle between Howe and Webster was
forgotten.
To be cheated out of a cent by Elias Barnes and at the same time to have
her business ability surpassed by that of Martin Howe! No indignity could
have equaled it.
"Well, I'll get even with Elias," she blustered. "I'm fattening some hogs
for him, an' I'll tuck what I've lost on the eggs right on to 'em. He
shall pay that cent one way or 'nother 'fore he gets through. He needs to
think to beat me. Sixty-seven cents, and I never knowin' it!"
Then the words brought still another bitter possibility to the woman's
mind.
"You didn't mention to the Howes I was gettin' only sixty-six cents a
dozen for eggs, did you?" she asked, wheeling on Lucy.
"No, I didn't speak of price."
"That's good," said her aunt, slightly mollified. "At least Martin Howe
can't go crowin' over me--that is, unless Elias Barnes tells him. 'Twould
be exactly like Elias to do it. He is just that mean."
Although Ellen did not own it, Lucy knew that had the case been reversed,
she would have been the first to crow unhesitatingly not only over Elias
but over Martin. Pityingly she looked at the old woman.
"If you ever get the chance to speak to those Howe women again," her aunt
concluded, with affected nonchalance, "you might tell 'em we never used
their eggs. You could say I smashed 'em. I'd like Martin Howe to know it."
CHAPTER VI
ELLEN ENCOUNTERS AN ENIGMA
Nevertheless, in spite of this bellicose admonition, Lucy had no
opportunity during the next few weeks to deliver to the Howes her aunt's
message, for Ellen, feeling that she was now blessed with an able
assistant whose time must not be wasted, seized upon the mild May weather
to deluge her home from top to bottom with soapsuds, sapolio, and fresh
paint. From morning until night Lucy worked, scrubbing and scouring,
brushing and beating.
As she toiled up the stairs, carrying pails of steaming water, she caught
through the windows glimpses of the valley, its verdant depths threaded by
the river's silvery windings. The heavens had never been bluer. Everywhere
gladness was in the air, and the thrill of it filled the girl with longing
to be in the heart of its magic.
Ellen, however, was entirely oblivious to the miracle taking place in the
universe about her. The glory of the awakening season, with its hosts of
unfurling leaves and opening buds, was nothing to her. Had she not been
dependent on the sun to make her garden grow, she would probably never
have lifted her face to its golden rays. Only as nature furthered her
projects did she acknowledge its presence.
The Howes seemed, to some extent at least, to share this disregard for the
out-of-door world, for like Ellen they, too, surrendered themselves to a
household upheaval quite as merciless as that of the Websters. No sooner
would Martin disappear with horse and plow in the direction of the garden
than the three sisters could be seen feverishly dragging mattresses on to
the piazza roof for a sunning; shaking blankets; and beating rugs.
Now and then, when the sound of their measured blows reached Ellen's ears,
she would leap to close the windows on the side of the house where there
was danger of the Howe germs drifting in and polluting the Webster Lares
and Penates.
It was one day after being thus impelled that Lucy was surprised to see
her linger and stare intently.
"What are them women a-doin'?" she exclaimed at last. "Do come here,
Lucy."
Discarding her mop, the girl crossed the room.
Through the gaps in the trees Mary, Eliza, and Jane Howe were plainly
visible. They had shovels in their hands and were struggling with the turf
at the foot of the big linden tree beside the house.
"They seem to be digging a hole," Lucy said, after watching a moment.
"What for, do you suppose?"
Ellen fidgeted at the casement for a short time and then disappeared, only
to return with an old pair of field glasses. Adjusting them to her eyes,
she stared at her neighbors with unconcealed curiosity.
"They _are_ diggin' a hole," she declared presently. "A good deep one;
whatever can they be settin' out to do?"
For an interval she looked on with interest. Then suddenly she exclaimed
in an excited voice:
"They're goin' to bury somethin'! My land! What do you s'pose it is?
Somethin' all done up in a bag!" She forced the binoculars into Lucy's
hand. "You look and see if you can't make out."
Lucy scanned the scene with mild inquisitiveness.
"They have a canvas sack," she said, "and evidently they are trying to
bury it."
She handed the glass back to Ellen.
"They act as if they were in an almighty hurry," observed Ellen, as she
looked. "They keep watchin' to see if anybody's comin'. Likely they're
afraid Martin will catch 'em. I wish he would. What do you reckon is in
that bag? I'd give worlds to know."
"I can't imagine."
Lucy had returned to her cleaning and was busy wringing out the mop. The
doings of the women next door failed to interest her. But not so Ellen
who, tense with speculation, hovered at the casement.
"They've got the hole dug," she announced triumphantly, "an' they're
lowerin' the bag into it. It must be heavy 'cause they seem to be havin' a
hard time lettin' it down in. They act as if they were afraid to touch the
thing. What can it be?" she repeated for the twentieth time.
"I don't know," Lucy replied wearily.
She was tired and hungry and wished Ellen would abandon spying on her
neighbors and give her a helping hand.
"Yes," commented Ellen from the window, "those women handle that bag as if
they had a chiny image in it. I can't for the life of me figger out what
can be in it."
For an interval there was silence. Lucy set the mop and pail out in the
hall and began to clean the paint.
"They've started to cover it up," chronicled Ellen, after a pause.
"They're shovelin' in the dirt--at least Mary and Jane are; Eliza's
stopped helpin' 'em an' gone to see if anybody's comin'. There's somethin'
dretful queer about it all. Don't you think so?"
"I don't know," answered Lucy a trifle impatiently.
Again Ellen studied the distance.
"Look!" she cried an instant later. "Look! 'Liza's callin' an' motionin'
to 'em. They're droppin' their shovels and runnin' for the house like a
lot of scared sheep. Probably Martin's comin', an' they don't want him to
catch 'em. There! What did I tell you? It _is_ Martin. I can see him
drivin' over the hill. Watch 'em skitter!"
Lured more by the desire to see Martin than to observe his panic-stricken
sisters, Lucy went to the window. It was even as Ellen had said. There
were the retreating forms of the three female Howes disappearing in at the
side door; and there was Martin, his tall figure looming in sight at the
heels of his bay mare.
"He's a fine looking man, isn't he?" Lucy remarked with thoughtless
impulsiveness.
"What!"
"I say he is fine looking," repeated the girl. "What broad shoulders he
has, and how magnificently he carries his head!"
"You call that fine looking, do you?" sniffed her aunt.
"Yes. Don't you?"
"Martin Howe ain't my style of man."
"But he's so strong and splendid!"
"I never saw a splendid Howe yet," was Ellen's icy retort.
She turned from the window, took up a cloth, and went to scrubbing the
paint viciously.
Lucy, realizing the tactlessness of her observation, tried by light,
good-humored chatter to efface its memory; but all attempts to blot it
from her aunt's mind were useless, and the relations between the two
women remained strained for the rest of the day. So strained and
uncomfortable were they that Lucy, wearied out by her hard work, was only
too glad to bid Ellen good night and seek her own room early.
Through its windows long shafts of moonlight fell across the floor,
flecking it with jagged, grotesque images of the trees outside. Once
alone, she did not immediately start to undress, but lingered thoughtfully
looking out into the night. Every muscle in her body ached, and in her
heart was a sinking loneliness. For the first time since her arrival at
Sefton Falls she surrendered herself to the distaste she felt toward her
aunt and her surroundings. Could she stay, she asked herself. The
narrowness of the environment raised an issue vital enough; nevertheless,
grave as it was, it sank into insignificance when weighed against the
vastly more potent factor of Ellen's personality. The girl had come east
with the intention of nursing and caring for her father's sister. She felt
he would have wished her to come; and casting every other inclination
aside, she had obeyed what seemed to her the voice of duty. But she had
been misled, disappointed. None of her father's kindliness lurked in this
embittered, malicious-matured woman, toward whom, although bound by ties
of blood, she felt neither respect nor affection. Nor did her aunt need
her. After all, was it her duty to remain and waste her youth to no
purpose? Could she face the horror of a stretch of years that held in them
no human sympathy? What should she do? What ought she to do? Should she go
or stay?
As she lingered in the darkness, her weary head heavy against the window
frame, she wrestled with the future and conscientiously tried to reach
some conclusion. She was eager to do what was right. Had Ellen been sick
or feeble, as she had been led to suppose, she would not have questioned
leaving her, querulous and tyrannical though she was. But this woman was
all-sufficient and needed no one. Why should she bury her life in this
cruel, rancorous atmosphere? Would her own sweetness survive the daily
companionship of such a person; rather, dominated by Ellen's powerful
character, might she not become inoculated by its poison and herself
harden into a being as merciless and self-centered? So deep was her
reverie that she did not hear the tap upon the door. A second afterward
the knob turned softly and her aunt entered.
"You ain't in bed?" she inquired in a high-pitched whisper.
"No."
"That's lucky, I hoped you wouldn't be. Come in my room quick. I want you
should see what the Howes are doin'. They're out fussin' again over that
thing they buried this afternoon." Ellen was obviously excited.
Sure enough! From the window that looked toward the Howe farm, three
figures could be seen in the silvery light, grouped together beneath the
old linden. They were armed, as before, with shovels, and all of them were
digging.
"It doesn't look as if they were filling in the hole," Lucy remarked,
interested in spite of herself. "They seem to be digging up what they
buried."
"That's just what I thought," responded Ellen.
"Yes, they are shoveling the dirt out again," declared the girl.
For quite a while the two stood watching the frenzied movements of their
neighbors.
Then Ellen gave a cry.
"See! See!" she ejaculated. "They're histin' the bag out. Did you ever see
such doin's? I'd give my soul to know what they're up to. Nothin' good,
you may be sure of that--or they wouldn't take the dead of night to do it.
There, they've got the thing out now, and two of 'em are tugging it off
between 'em. The other one's fillin' in the hole and trampin' down the
earth. Seem's if I'd simply have to go over there an' find out what it's
all about!"
Lucy smiled at her aunt's exasperated tone.
"Why don't you?" she asked mischievously.
Ellen gave a short laugh.
"The only way the Howes will ever get me on their land will be to
chloroform me," said she grimly. "But I should like to know before I go to
bed what they've been doin'. I s'pose it's no use to set up any longer,
though, tryin' to figure it out. We'd both better go to sleep. Good
night."
"Good night," Lucy returned.
Only too glad to escape, she hurried back to her own room, slipped out of
her clothes, and was soon lost in heavy, dreamless slumber.
The day had been a strenuous one, and she was very tired, so tired that
she might not have been awakened promptly had she not stirred in her
sleep and become dimly conscious of a flood of radiance upon her pillow.
The morning sunshine was brilliant in the chamber, and standing in its
circle of gold she beheld Ellen.
"It's six o'clock," she announced breathlessly, "an' I want you should get
right up. Martin Howe's gone off to the village in his wagon, an' I can't
help a-thinkin' that now he's out of the way them sisters of his will
start doin' somethin' more with that bag."
"What bag?" yawned Lucy sleepily.
"Why, the bag they were buryin' last night."
"Oh, yes."
Slowly the girl's latent faculties aroused themselves.
"You hurry up and dress while I go and watch," panted Ellen. "Be quick's
you can, or we may miss somethin'."
She went out, closing the door; but in a few moments her niece heard her
shrill call:
"They're comin' out with it! What'd I tell you? Two of 'em have got it,
carryin' it across the lawn. Ain't you 'most dressed?"
"Yes, I'm coming."
Fastening her belt as she went, Lucy hurried to her aunt's side.
Amid the sparkling, dew-kissed glory of early morning, she could plainly
see the three Howes making their way through the wet grass in the
direction of their pasture.
"Bless me! if they don't mean to sink it in the brook!" whispered Ellen.
"Oh, I never can stand this. I've got to foller 'em an' find out what
they're doin'."
"You wouldn't!" exclaimed Lucy in dismay.
"Indeed I would," her aunt retorted. "I'd go to any length to see what's
in that bag. If they were younger----" she broke off abruptly. "Anyhow,
it's somethin' they're ashamed of, I'm certain of that. They couldn't 'a'
murdered anybody, I s'pose. Bad's I hate 'em, I'd hardly think they're
that wicked. Still what can it be?"
"I can't imagine."
"Well, I'm goin' to track 'em down, anyhow," Ellen announced. "Ain't you
comin'?"
"No."
To spy on the actions of others did not appeal to the younger woman's
honest mind.
"You can get breakfast while I'm gone then," Ellen said, catching up her
coat, "and if I don't come back pretty soon, you go ahead and eat yours.
I'd a thousand times rather ferret out what those Howes are tryin' to bury
than eat. I'd be willin' to starve to do it."
CHAPTER VII
THE UNRAVELING OF THE MYSTERY
LEFT to herself Lucy stood for an instant watching her aunt's resolute
figure make its way under the fringe of lilacs that bordered the driveway.
Then she turned her attention to preparing breakfast, and the Howes and
their mysterious doings were forgotten.
In the meantime Ellen walked on, skirting the shelter of the hedge until
she came into the lee of a clump of elder bushes growing along the margin
of the brook at the juncture of the Howe and Webster land. Here she
secreted herself and waited.
The brook was quite deep at this point and now, swollen by the snows that
had recently melted on the hillsides, purled its path down to the valley
in a series of cascades that rippled, foamed, and tinkled merrily.
As she stood concealed beside it, its laughter so outrivaled every other
sound that she had difficulty in discerning the Howes' approaching tread,
and it was not until the distinct crackle of underbrush reached her ear
that she became aware they were approaching. She peered through the
bushes.
Yes, there they were, all three of them; and there, firm in their grasp,
was the mysterious bag.
It was not large, but apparently it was heavy, and they handled it with
extreme care.
"Let's put it down," puffed Mary, who was flushed and heated, "an' look
for a good deep place. Ain't you tired, 'Liza?"
"I ain't so tired as hot," Eliza answered. "Warn't it just providential
Martin took it into his head to go to the village this mornin'? I can't
but think of it."
"It was the luckiest thing I ever knew," assented Mary. "I don't know what
we'd 'a' done with this thing round the house another day. I'd 'a' gone
clean out of my mind."
"I still can't understand why we couldn't 'a' left it buried," Eliza
fretted.
"I explained why to you last night," Jane answered, speaking for the first
time. "There warn't a spot on the place that Martin might not go to
diggin' or plowin' up sometime. He might even 'a' dug round the roots of
the linden for somethin'. Ain't he always fertilizin' an' irrigatin'? I
didn't dare leave the bag there. If he'd 'a' gone stickin' a pick or a
shovel into it sudden----"
"I see," interrupted Eliza. "'Twas stupid of me not to understand before.
'Course that wouldn't do. Yes, I guess you were right. There ain't much to
do but sink it in the brook. Would you 'a' dreamed there could be anything
in the world so hard to get rid of? All I've got to say is I hope neither
Martin nor old Miss Webster finds it. What do you s'pose they'd say?"
"I wouldn't want Martin to come on to it unexpected. 'Twould worry me to
death." Eliza shuddered.
"But you don't care about old Miss Webster," Jane observed with a laugh.
"I never wished Miss Webster ill, goodness knows that," returned Eliza
gravely. "None of us ever did 'cept Martin, an' he's got no business to. I
s'pose he'd like nothin' better than to have her run across this thing.
You don't s'pose there's any danger that she will, do you, Jane?"
"Danger of her findin' it?"
"No. I mean danger of her gettin' hurt with it," explained Eliza timidly.
"Mercy, no. How could it harm her if it was wet?"
"I dunno," whimpered Eliza. "I'm so scat of such things."
"Well, it's certainly made us trouble enough!" put in Mary, with a sigh.
"I've felt like a criminal ever since the thing came to light. It's seemed
as if we'd never get rid of it."
Jane smiled. "I know it," she said. "Who'd 'a' believed 'twould be so
hard. When I think what we've been through tryin' to make way with it, I
wonder folks ever are wicked. It's so much trouble. 'Tain't half as easy
as it looks. You've got to have your wits about you every second. This
affair's taught me that. Ain't I been all over the face of the earth
tryin' to find a safe place to hide this pesky bag! First I tried the
mountain. Then I was afraid the woodcutters might find it, so I had to
cart it home again. Then it come to me to drive down to the river and dump
it in. Anybody'd have said that was simple enough. But halfway there, I
met Elias Barnes walkin' to the village, an' he asked for a ride. I s'pose
he couldn't see why I couldn't take him in; I had an empty seat an' had
often done it before, so I had to. But when he started lightin' up his
pipe----"
"What did you do, Jane?" cried Mary.
"I guess I nearly screamed," answered Jane, laughing. "He looked some
surprised; anyhow, I told him I just remembered somethin' I'd left behind,
an' I drew up an' put him down quicker'n chain lightnin'. Then I turned
round and drove off lickety-split for home, leaving him stock still in the
middle of the road starin' after me."
"You showed good nerve, Jane, I'll say that," Mary declared with open
admiration.
"Now if it had been me, I'd 'a' just given the whole thing away. I ain't
no good at thinkin' quick."
"Well, we ain't got to think about it any more, thank goodness," Jane
exclaimed, rising from the grass and laying a hand on the bag. "Let's put
an end to the whole thing now and go home. Take a holt of the other end,
and we'll flop it in."
"Wait!" Eliza protested, seized by a sudden idea.
"Well."
"You don't s'pose there'll be any danger 'bout the cows drinkin' here, do
you?" Eliza inquired anxiously. "They do drink here, you know, and in the
summer, when the water's low, they often wade right in. If they was
to----"
She stopped.
"I never thought of that," Jane said in a discouraged tone. "Oh, my land,
what are we going to do with it?"
She let the bag sink to the ground and, straightening herself up,
confronted her sisters. "We've simply got to get it off our hands before
Martin gets back."
"Oh, yes, yes!" pleaded Mary, affrighted. "Do something with it, Jane, no
matter what. I never could stand it to have it carted back to the house
and hidden there. 'Tain't safe. Besides, in these days of German spies,
'twould be an awful thing to be found on us. S'pose the house was to be
searched. We never could make the police believe how we came to have it.
They might take us and shut us all up in prison--Martin and all."
Her voice shook with terror.
"I guess they wouldn't go arrestin' us, Mary," declared Jane soothingly.
"Still, I agree with you that it's just as well for us to be clear of
such a thing; let me think."
While she stood meditating her two sisters watched her with perturbed
faces.
"Ellen Webster's cows don't come up to this end of the pasture much, do
they?" she remarked at last.
"No. Leastways I've never seen 'em here," replied Mary.
"Then why don't we sink the bag just across the wall?"
"On her land?" gasped Eliza.
"It wouldn't do any harm," argued Jane. "She never comes up here, nor her
cows nor horses either. We'll climb right over and dump the thing in.
That'll settle Martin's ever finding it, an' everythin'."
"But s'pose----" Eliza objected once more.
"Oh, 'Liza, we can't stay here s'posin' all day!" Jane declared
decisively. "We got to put this bag somewheres, an' there ain't any spot
that ain't got some out about it. We must take a chance on the best one we
can find."
"I'm frightened to death!" wailed Eliza.
"So'm I!" Mary echoed. "Oh, Jane!"
"No matter. Pull yourself together," ordered Jane sharply. "You two take
a hold of the bag an' bring it along, while I climb the wall."
Ellen, stooping behind the elderberry bushes, held her breath. She saw
Jane clamber over the barrier and help Mary and Eliza to mount it and
lower the sack into her hands; then, just when the three invaders were all
ready to drop their mysterious gray burden into the stream, she stepped
noiselessly into the open and said loudly:
"What you doin' in my brook?"
A cry rose from the two more timorous Howes, and even Jane paled a
little.
"What are you sinkin' in my brook?" repeated Ellen.
No answer came. Angered by their silence, the woman stepped nearer.
"What you got in that bag?" she demanded sternly.
Still there was no reply.
"You ain't got nothin' good in it, I'll be bound," went on the tormentor.
"If you had, you wouldn't be so mighty anxious to get rid of it. Come now,
long's you're intendin' to heave it into the water on my side of the wall,
s'pose you let me have a peep inside it."
Striding forward, she seized a corner of the canvas roughly in her hand.
There was a scream from the three Howes.
"Don't touch it!"
"Keep away!"
"You'd better leave it be, Miss Webster," Jane said in a warning voice.
"It's gunpowder."
"Gunpowder!" repeated Ellen.
"Yes."
"An' what, may I ask, are you doin' with a bag of gunpowder in my brook?
Plannin' to blow up my cows, I reckon."
"No! No, indeed we're not!" protested Mary.
"We wouldn't hurt your cows for anything, Miss Webster," put in Eliza.
"Humph! You wouldn't? Still you don't hesitate to dam my brook up with
enough gunpowder to blow all my cattle higher'n a kite."
"We were only tryin' to----" began Mary; but Jane swept her aside.
"Hush, Mary," she said. "You an' 'Liza keep still an' let me do the
talkin'."
Drawing herself to her full height she faced Ellen's evil smile.
"The day before yesterday, when we were cleanin' the attic, we found a
little door under the eaves that we'd never come across before," she began
desperately. "We discovered it when we were movin' out a big chest that's
always stood there. We were sweepin' behind all the trunks an' things, an'
long's we were, we decided to sweep behind that. 'Twas then we spied the
door. Of course we were curious to know where it went to, an' so we pried
it open, an' inside we found this bag together with an old rusty rifle. It
must 'a' been there years, judgin' from the dust an' cobwebs collected on
it. We were pretty scared of the gun," declared Jane, smiling
reminiscently, "but we were scared a good sight worse when after draggin'
the bag out we saw 'twas marked _Gunpowder._"
She waited an instant.
"We didn't know what to do with it," she went on, speaking more
hesitatingly, "because you see my brother doesn't like us to turn the
house upside-down with cleanin'; he hates havin' things disturbed; an' we
were afraid he would be put out to find what we'd done. So we decided to
wait till some time when he wasn't round an' make way with it."
Jane caught her breath.
"We've tried lots of ways," she confessed wearily, "but none of 'em seemed
to work. First I thought of hidin' it up near Pine Ridge, but I was afraid
some woodsman might happen on it; then I started to take it down to the
river in our wagon; but Elias Barnes would get in an' light his pipe, and
I was so afraid a spark from it might----"
"I wish it had!" interpolated Ellen Webster with fervor.
"In order to get rid of him I had to turn round an' come back," narrated
Jane, paying no heed to the interruption. "Then we tried to bury it, but
afterward we dug it up for fear Martin might plow it up sometime an'
get----"
"'Twould 'a' been an almighty good joke if he had!" again piped Ellen.
"So there didn't seem to be any other way," concluded Jane with dignity,
"but to drop it in the brook; an', as you never seemed to use this end of
your pasture, we decided to sink it here."
The narrative was true, every word of it. Ellen knew that. No one who
looked into Jane Howe's frank face could have doubted the story.
But Ellen was an ungenerous enemy who saw in the present happening an
opportunity to put a screw upon those who had been thus compelled to throw
themselves upon her mercy.
"So! That's how you lie out of it, is it?" she cried scornfully. "An' you
expect me to believe a yarn like that! Do you s'pose I don't know this
country's at war, an' that the authorities are on the lookout for folks
concealin' gunpowder in their houses? How do I know you weren't goin' to
make the stuff into bombs, or carry it somewheres an' blow up somethin' or
other with it?"
"Indeed, oh, indeed we weren't," Mary cried, thoroughly alarmed.
"Oh, what shall we do!" Eliza sobbed, wringing her hands.
"Nonsense," cut in Jane. "You know perfectly well, Miss Webster, we ain't
no German plotters. I'm sorry----"
"You're sorry I caught you before you had a chance to drop that bag in my
brook," said Ellen, a twinkle in her eye. "I'll bet you are. Have you
thought that I can have you arrested for trespassing on my land?"
"Oh, Jane!"
The horrified voices of Mary and Jane greeted with concern this new
danger. Ellen was exulting in her triumph.
"You can, of course, have us arrested if you wish to," said Jane.
"Well, I ain't a-goin' to--at least I ain't, on one condition. An' I'll
promise not to give you over to the police as spies, neither, if you do as
I say."
"What do you want us to do?" inquired Mary and Eliza breathlessly.
Jane was silent.
"Mebbe _you'd_ like to know the condition," sneered the old woman,
addressing Jane.
She waited for a reply, but none came. Ellen looked baffled.
"You'd better accept the chance I give you to buy yourself off," she
said.
"That is my affair."
"Do, Jane! Do promise," begged Mary and Eliza. "Please do, for our
sakes."
"Very well," Jane returned. "But I only do it to protect my sisters. What
is the condition?"
With head thrown back she faced Ellen coldly.
"The condition is that you take that bag of gunpowder back home to your
brother Martin an' tell him Ellen Webster sent it to him with her
compliments. He can use it blastin' out stones to fix up his stone wall."
Then, with a taunting laugh, the woman turned and without more adieu
disappeared in the direction of the Webster homestead, leaving a
speechless trio of chagrined Howes behind her.
CHAPTER VIII
WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY
May came and went, and June, rich in days of splendor, made its advent,
and still Lucy caught only fleeting glimpses of the Howes.
Martin, to be sure, was daily abroad, toiling with the zest of an Amazon
in garden and hay-field. Against the homely background of stubble or brown
earth, his sturdy form stood out with the beauty of a Millet painting. But
his sisters held themselves aloof, avoiding all possibility of contact
with their neighbors.
Doubtless the encounter with Ellen had left its scar; for against their
will they had been compelled to take up the sack of powder and tug it
homeward; and then, in compliance with their promise, deliver it over to
Martin who had first ridiculed their adventure; then berated them; and in
the end set the explosive off so near the Webster border line that its
defiant boom had rattled every pane of glass in the old house.
Ellen had chuckled at this spirited climax to the episode. It was like
Martin, she said. But Lucy regretted the whole affair and found difficulty
in applauding her aunt's dramatic imitation of the affrighted Howes and
their final ignominious retreat. Of course it was only to be expected that
the women next door should resent the incident and that they should
include her, innocent though she was, in this resentment. Nevertheless, it
was a pity that the avenue to further friendly advances between herself
and them should be so summarily closed.
Lucy was very lonely. Having been the center of a large and noisy
household and received a disproportionate degree of homage from her
father's employees, the transition from sovereign to slave was
overwhelming. She did not, however, rebel at the labor her new environment
entailed, but she did chafe beneath its slavery. Nevertheless, her
captivity, much as it irked her, was of only trivial importance when
compared with the greater evil of being completely isolated from all
sympathetic companionship. Between herself and her aunt there existed such
an utter lack of unity of principle that the chasm thereby created was
one which she saw with despair it would never be possible to bridge. Had
the gulf been merely one of tastes and inclinations, it would not have
been so hopeless. But to realize they had no standards in common and that
the only tie that bound them together was the frail thread of kinship was
a disheartening outlook indeed.
It was true that as time went on this link strengthened, for Ellen
developed a brusque liking for her niece, even a shamefaced and
unacknowledged respect. Notwithstanding this, however, the fundamentals
that guided the actions of the two remained as divergent as before, and
beyond discussions concerning garden and home, a few anecdotes relating to
the past, and a crisp and not too delicate jest when the elder woman was
in the humor, their intercourse glanced merely along the shallows.
Over and over, when alone, Lucy asked herself why she stayed on at Sefton
Falls to sacrifice her life on the altar of family loyalty. Was not her
youth being spent to glorify an empty fetish which brought to no one any
real good?
But the query always brought her back to the facts of her aunt's
friendlessness and infirmity. For defy Time as she would, Ellen was old
and was rapidly becoming older. Whether with the arrival of a younger and
more energetic person she was voluntarily relinquishing her hold on her
customary tasks, or whether a sudden collapse of her vitality forced her
to do so, Lucy could not determine; nevertheless, it was perfectly
apparent that she daily attacked her duties more laggingly and complained
less loudly when things were left undone.
When, however, Lucy tried to supplement her diminishing strength by offers
of aid, Ellen was quick to resent the imputation that she was any less
robust than she had been in the past, and in consequence the girl
confronted the delicate problem of trying to help without appearing to do
so.
Parallel with this lessening of physical zeal ran an exaggerated nervous
irritability very hard to bear. Beneath the lash of her aunt's cruel
tongue Lucy often writhed, quivered, and sometimes wept; but she struggled
to keep her hold on her patience. Ellen was old, she told herself, and the
self-centered life she had led had embittered her. Moreover, she was
approaching the termination of her days, and to a nature like hers the
realization that there was no escape from her final surrender to Death
filled her with impotent rage. She had always conquered; but now something
loomed in her path which it was futile and childish to seek to defy.
Therefore, difficult as was Lucy's present existence, she put behind her
all temptation to desert this solitary woman and leave her to die alone.
Was not Ellen her father's sister, and would he not wish his daughter to
be loyal to the trust it had fallen to her to fulfill? Was she not, as a
Webster, in honor bound to do so?
In the meantime, as if to intensify this sense of family obligation, Lucy
discovered that she was acquiring a growing affection for the home which
for generations had been the property of her ancestors. The substantial
mansion, with its colonial doorways surmounted by spreading fans of glass,
its multi-paned windows and its great square chimney, must once have
breathed the very essence of hospitality, and it did so still, even though
closed blinds and barred entrances combined to repress its original
spirit. Already the giant elm before the door had for her a significance
quite different from that of any other tree; so, too, had the valley with
its shifting lights. She loved the music of the brook, the rock-pierced
pasture land, the minarets of the spruces that crowned the hills. The
faintly definable mountains, blue against the far-off sky, endeared
themselves to her heart, weakening her allegiance to the barren country of
her birth and binding her to this other home by the magic of their
enchantment.
Here was the spot where her forefathers had lived and toiled. Here were
the orchards they had planted, the fields they had tilled, the streams
they had fished, the hills they had climbed; and here was the house built
by their hands, the chairs in which they had rested, the beds in which
they had slept. Her former life had contained none of these elements of
permanence. On the contrary, much of the time she had been a nomad, the
mining settlements that gave her shelter being frankly regarded as
temporary halting places to be abandoned whenever their usefulness should
become exhausted.
But here, with the everlasting hills as a foundation, was a home that had
been and should be. Tradition breathed from the very soil, and Lucy's
veneration for the past was deep-rooted. Therefore, despite her aunt's
acrimonious disposition, the opposition of their ideals, despite drudgery
and loneliness, she stayed on, praying each day for increased patience and
struggling to magnify every trace of virtue she could discover in Ellen.
Now that the planting was done, the weeding well in hand, the
house-cleaning finished, the girl contrived to so systematize her work
that she should have intervals of leisure to escape into the sunshine and,
beneath the vastness of the arching heaven, forget for the time being at
least all that was rasping and petty.
It was absurd to be lonely when on every hand Nature's voices spoke with
understanding. Was she joyous? The birds caroled, the leaves danced, the
brook sang. Was she sad? The whisper of the great pines brought peace and
balm to her spirit.
It was in search of this sympathy that she had set forth along the highway
to-day. The late afternoon was a poem of mystic clouds and mysterious
shadows. Far off against the distant horizon, mountains veiled in mists
lifted majestic peaks into the air, their summits lost amid swiftly
traveling masses of whiteness; rifts of purple haze lengthened over the
valley; and the fields, dotted with haycocks, breathed forth the perfume
of drying grass.
As Lucy walked along she began singing softly to herself. Her day's work
was done; and her aunt, who had driven with Tony to bring home a load of
lumber from the sawmill, would not return until late in the evening. Six
delicious hours were her own to be spent in whatever manner her fancy
pleased. It was an unheard-of freedom. Never since she had come to Sefton
Falls had she known such a long stretch of liberty. What wonder that she
swung along with feet scarce touching the earth!
A redwing called from the bracken bordering the brook, and the girl called
back, trying to mimic its glad note. She snatched a flower from the
roadside and tucked it in her hair; she laughed audaciously into the
golden face of the sun. Her exuberance was mounting to ecstasy when she
rounded a curve and suddenly, without warning, came face to face with Jane
Howe.
The woman was proceeding with extreme care, carrying in either hand a
large and well-heaped pail of berries.
Before Lucy thought, she stepped forward and exclaimed impulsively:
"Do let me help you! They must be dreadfully heavy."
"'Tain't so much that they're heavy," Jane answered, smiling, "as that
they're full. I'm afraid I'll spill some."
"Give me one pail."
"Do you really mean it?"
"Of course. I'd be glad to take it."
"All right," replied Jane simply. "I'm sure I'd be only too thankful if
you would. After trampin' miles to pick raspberries, you ain't so keen on
losin' 'em when you're within sight of home."
"Indeed you're not," Lucy assented. "These are beauties. Where did you go
for them?"
"Most up to the pine ridge you see yonder. I took my lunch an' have been
gone since mornin'."
"How I wish I could have gone with you!"
"Would you have liked to?" queried Jane incredulously. "Then I wish you
might have. It was just the sort of a day to walk. I don't s'pose, though,
your aunt would have spared you for an all-day picnic."
There was a hint of scorn in the words.
"I don't often have time to go far from the house," replied Lucy gently,
ignoring Miss Howe's challenge. "There is so much to do."
"So there is," agreed Jane hastily. "Certainly we manage to keep busy all
the time. When it ain't one thing, it's another. There never seems to be
any end to it. But I did steal off to-day. The berries were really an
excuse. Of course we can make 'em into jam. Still, what I really wanted
was to get out in the air."
"I've stolen off too," said Lucy, with a smile. "My aunt and Tony have
gone over to the Crossing for lumber and won't be back until dark, so I am
having a holiday."
Jane was silent a moment.
"Why shouldn't you come over and have tea with us then?" she asked
abruptly. "We're all alone, too. My brother's gone to the County Fair an'
ain't comin' back 'til to-morrow."
Lucy's eyes lighted with pleasure.
"You're very kind," she cried, a tremor of happiness in her tone. "I'd
love to come."
They walked along, balancing their burden of berries and chatting of
garden, weather, and housework.
As they turned in at the Howe gate, Jane motioned proudly toward three
rows of flourishing vines that were clambering up a network of sustaining
brush.
"Those are our sweet peas," she remarked. "The first row is Mary's;
they're white. Then come Eliza's--pink ones. Mine are purple. Martin won't
plant his over here. He has 'em longside of the barn, an' they're all
colors mixed together. We don't like 'em that way, but he does. He's awful
fond of flowers, an' he has great luck with 'em, too. He seems to have a
great way with flowers. But he never cuts one blossom he raises. Ain't
that queer? He says he likes to see 'em growin'."
They were nearing the house.
"I reckon Mary an' 'Liza will be surprised enough to have me come bringin'
you home," observed Jane a trifle consciously. "We ain't done much
neighboring, have we?"
"No," returned Lucy quickly, "and I've been sorry. It seems a pity we
shouldn't be friends even if----" she stopped, embarrassed.
"Even if your aunt an' Martin do act like a pair of fools," interrupted
Jane. "Senseless, ain't it! Besides, it ain't Christian livin' at odds
with people. I never did approve of it."
"I'm sure I don't."
Jane nodded.
"We imagined you were like that," she said. "I told Mary an' 'Liza so the
day you come for the eggs. 'She ain't like her aunt,' I says to Mary, 'not
a mite; an' you can be pretty sure she won't be in sympathy with all this
squabblin' an' back-bitin'.'"
"Indeed I'm not."
"We ain't either, not one of us. We'd like nothin' better'n to be
neighborly an' run in. It's the only decent way of doin' when folks live
side by side. But Martin wouldn't listen to our doin' it, even if your
aunt would--which I know she wouldn't. He's awful set against the
Websters."
"How silly it seems!"
"That's what I tell him," Jane declared. "Of course your aunt's an old
woman, an' 'tain't surprisin' she should harbor a grudge against us. But
Martin's younger, an' had oughter be more forgivin'. It's nonsensical
feelin' you've got to be just as sour an' crabbed as your grandfather was.
I don't humor him in it--at least not more'n I have to to keep the peace.
But Mary an' 'Liza hang on to every word Martin utters. If he was to say
blue was green, they'd say so too. They'd no more do a thing he wouldn't
like 'em to than they'd cut off their heads. They wouldn't dare. I 'spect
they'll have a spasm when they see you come walkin' in to-night."
"Maybe I ought not to come," Lucy murmured in a disappointed voice.
"Yes, you ought," Jane said with decision. "Why should we keep up a
quarrel none of us approve of? Martin ain't home. It's nothin' to him."
"Well, if you're sure you want me," Lucy laughed and dimpled.
"If I hadn't wanted you, you may be pretty sure I shouldn't have asked
you," retorted Jane bluntly. "Mary an' 'Liza will likely be scat to death
at first, but they'll get over it an' thaw out. Don't pay no attention to
'em."
Jane had ascended the steps and her hand was on the latch.
"I feel like a child playing truant," said Lucy, a flush of excitement
tinting her cheek. "You see, my aunt wouldn't like my being here any more
than Mar--than your brother would."
"What they don't know won't hurt 'em," was Jane's brief answer.
"Oh, I shall tell Aunt Ellen."
"I shan't tell Martin. He'd rage somethin' awful."
She threw open the door. Lucy saw her stiffen with resolution.
"I picked up Miss Lucy Webster on the road an' brought her home to tea!"
she called from the threshold.
Mary and Eliza were busy at the kitchen table. At the words they turned
and automatically gasped the one phrase that always sprang to their lips
in every emergency:
"Oh, Jane!"
"Martin's away an' so's Ellen Webster," went on Jane recklessly. "Why
shouldn't we do a bit of neighborin' together, now we've got the chance?"
"But--but Martin!" Eliza managed to stammer.
"He'll never be the wiser--unless you tell him," replied Jane merrily.
"Come, Miss Lucy, take off your hat an' make yourself at home. Supper'll
soon be ready, I guess."
The phrase was a fortunate one, for it brought back to the disconcerted
Howes the memory of their domestic prowess, a thing in which they took
great pride. By nature they were hospitable, and here was a chance to
exercise that long unexercised faculty.
Mary bustled to the stove.
"Yes," she answered, "the biscuits are in the oven, an' I was just makin'
the tea." Then, as if emboldened by Jane's attitude, she added timidly:
"We're real glad to see you, Miss Webster; don't think we ain't."
"Yes," Eliza echoed, "we really are."
The first shock of the adventure having passed, it was amazing to see with
what rapidity the Howe sisters increased the warmth of their welcome. From
the top shelf in the pantry they brought forth the _company preserves_;
fruit cake was unearthed from the big stone crock in the dining-room
closet; and, as a final touch to the feast, Jane beat up a foamy omelet
and a prune whip. In their enjoyment they were like a group of children,
an undercurrent of delight in the forbidden tinging their mirth.
Lucy told stories of her western life, and the three women listened as if
to the tales of Sir John Mandeville. The hours passed, twilight deepened,
night fell, but the revelers heeded it not. What a sweet, wholesome
evening it was! And how kindly, Lucy thought, were these simple souls
whose feeling toward every breathing creature was so benign and
sympathetic. Contrasted with the antagonistic atmosphere of the Webster
house, this home was like paradise. It restored her faith in human nature
and in Sefton Falls. Every one in the place was not, then, bitter and
suspicious. What a comfort to know it!
In the meantime Mary, having reached a pitch of hilarity almost
unprecedented, was starting to tell a story when suddenly her face
stiffened and, turning white, she half rose from her chair.
There was a scuffling of feet in the hall and in another instant Martin
Howe entered.
"The fair wasn't worth my stayin' to," he explained from the doorsill, "so
I came along home to-night instead of waitin' till to-morrow. Looks to me
as if I was just in time for a snack of supper."
Standing in the lamplight, his stern face softened by a smile and a glow
of good humor, he was attractive to look upon. The firm countenance was
lined, it is true, but the lines gave it strength and brought into harmony
the clear eyes, resolute mouth, and well-molded chin. He had a fine
smooth forehead from which his black hair, lightly sprinkled with gray,
was tossed aside in picturesque abandon. Health and power spoke in every
curve of the lithe frame and in the boyish grace with which he moved.
With his coming a hush fell upon the room. Had a group of conspirators
been unexpectedly confronted with their own crimes, they could not have
been more abashed than were the four women seated at the table.
Jane was the first to recover herself. In a voice that trembled but did
not falter she said courageously:
"Miss Lucy Webster's havin' tea with us, Martin."
There was an awkward pause.
Lucy, whose glance had dropped to the floor, raised her eyes appealingly
to the man's face; but she found in it no answering sympathy. In the short
interval it had changed from geniality to a sternness almost incredible of
belief. It was hard now--merciless.
Perhaps, to do Martin justice, he could not have spoken at that moment had
he tried. This creature, with her wealth of golden hair, her radiant
eyes, flashed upon his vision with the glory of a new star. She was a
phenomenon hitherto unknown. No matter what her name, the simple fact of
her presence would have put to flight every other thought and left him
dumb. The proudly poised head, the rounded white throat, the flushed cheek
with its elusive dimples, the tiny hands were all marvels unfamiliar to
Martin Howe.
Could this nymph, this dryad be a product of the same planet that had
given birth to Mary, Eliza, and Jane?
With no attempt to conceal his artless scrutiny, he looked, and before his
ingenuous wonder Lucy felt her pulse bound.
"I must go home," she said, struggling to appear composed and ignoring the
speechless Martin as if he were in reality as many miles away as she had
supposed him. "I had no idea it was so late. Good night and thank you for
my pleasant evening."
None of the Howes attempted to stay her departure, although Jane followed
her with feigned imperturbability to the door, remarking by way of
conversation:
"It's dretful dark outside, ain't it?"
Lucy smiled.
"Yes, but I don't mind."
To have escaped Martin Howe's eyes, which continued to rest upon her, she
would have plunged into a den of lions. The beating of her heart, the
burning of her cheek angered and disconcerted her.
Jane unfastened the door. Then she started back in consternation.
"Mercy!" she cried. "It's rainin'!"
"Rainin'?" Eliza exclaimed.
"Yes, pourin'. It's an awful shower."
"Oh, it doesn't matter," asserted Lucy, impatient to be gone. "I never
mind the rain."
"But this is a regular downpour. You'll get wet to your skin," Jane
objected. "I ain't a-goin' to let you go out in it in that thin dress.
Ain't we got an umbrella somewheres, 'Liza?"
"I dunno," Eliza answered vaguely.
The sudden shower and the furious tossing of the trees did not impress
themselves on her dull mind. Only one thought possessed her brain,--the
sinking dread of the moment when Lucy should be gone and Martin would
empty the vials of his waiting wrath on all their heads.
"Indeed I don't in the least need an umbrella," Lucy protested. "I'll run
right along. Please do not bother."
"You'll get wet an' be sick," Mary declared, launching into the
conversation at the mention of possible chills and fevers.
Lucy laughed unsteadily.
"Oh, no, I shan't. Good night."
She had crossed the veranda and was at the brink of the flight of steps
when heavy feet came striding after her.
"Wait! I'm goin' with you," said a tense voice. It was Martin.
"Thank you very much, but I really don't need anybody."
"I'm goin'," repeated the man doggedly.
"I don't want you to," Lucy returned curtly, nettled into irritability.
"Likely not," observed Martin with stolid determination.
"I wish you wouldn't," fretted Lucy angrily. "I'd much rather----"
It was like a child helplessly dashing itself against a wall. Martin paid
no attention to her protests. With a lighted lantern in one hand and an
umbrella in his other, he set forth with Lucy down the driveway.
Overhead the trees wrenched and creaked, and above the lashings of their
branches the rain could be heard beating with fury upon the tossing
foliage. Once in the blackness Lucy stumbled and, following the instinct
for self-preservation, put out her hand and caught Martin's arm; then she
drew her hand quickly away. They proceeded in silence until they reached
the gate at the foot of the long Webster driveway; then the man spoke:
"'Tain't fur now," he said, halting short. "I'll give you the umbrella."
He held it out to her.
"But you'll get drenched."
"No, indeed!"
"But you will," insisted Lucy with spirit.
"No matter."
"It is matter. Besides, I can't see my way to the house without the
lantern. It's dark as pitch."
"Take 'em both, then."
"Of course I shan't," replied the girl indignantly. "And anyway, if I did,
I couldn't carry the two in this wind. If I can't have but one, I'd rather
have the lantern."
"That's nonsense!" Martin returned.
"What use was there in my bringin' you home if you get soaked now?"
"But I can't see an inch before my face without a light."
"Just as you say, then. Here it is." Holding out the lantern, he took back
the umbrella.
"But you certainly are not going to leave me to go up that long avenue in
the rain," burst out Lucy.
"You said you didn't mind rain," retorted the man ironically.
He stood immovable in the torrent, but the lantern glow showed his face to
be working convulsively.
Lucy, who could not believe that in the present emergency his stubbornness
would persist, waited.
"I ain't comin'," he remarked half to himself with dogged determination,
as if he were bolstering up some inward wavering of principle. "I ain't
comin'."
The touch of her hand still vibrated upon his arm, and he could feel the
flutter of her dress against his body.
"I ain't comin'," he repeated between his closed teeth.
"Very well."
With dignity, Lucy picked up her limp skirts, preparatory to breasting the
storm. "I _can't_ go with you," he suddenly burst out. "Don't you see I
can't?"
A wailing cry from the wind seemed to echo the pain in his voice. The girl
did not answer. Refusing both the light and shelter he offered her, she
stepped resolutely forth into the blackness of the night. Helplessly he
watched her go, the lantern's rays reflecting her white gown.
"I shan't bother you again, Mr. Howe," she called bitterly.
Martin made no reply but raised the lantern higher that it might brighten
the rough path. Unheeding him, the girl stumbled through the darkness, the
rain beating down upon her.
As she neared the house a faint glow flickered through the shrubbery,
making it evident that her aunt had already arrived home. Nervously she
mounted the porch and turned to look behind her. At the foot of the drive
stood Martin, the lantern high in his hands.
Now that Lucy was safely within the shelter of her own domain, her sense
of humor overcame her, and with an irresistible desire to torment him, she
called mischievously from her vantage ground on the veranda:
"Thank you so much for bringing me home, Mr. Howe. Can't I persuade you to
come in?"
There was a smothered exclamation of wrath in the distance, and she saw a
gleam of light precipitate itself hastily into the road, where, for a
moment, it flashed along the tree trunks, then disappeared.
Lucy laughed.
Ellen was in the kitchen when she entered.
"Where on earth have you been?" she demanded. "I should 'a' thought you
might 'a' come back in time to start the fire up an' get supper. It's
awful late. Was it Tony you was talkin' to outside?"
"No."
"It warn't?" she turned a hawklike glance on her niece. "Who was it?" she
asked inquisitively.
"Mr. Howe."
"Mr. Ho---- Not _Martin_ Howe!"
Lucy nodded.
"Yes."
"Martin Howe here--_on my land_! What was he doin'?"
"He wasn't on your land," Lucy said. "He left me at the gate. He was
seeing me home. I've been there to supper."
"What!"
Never had the girl heard so many sensations crowded into one word. There
was surprise, unbelief, scorn, anger. But anger predominated.
"An' how long, pray tell me, have you been goin' backwards an' forrads to
the Howes, an' consortin' with their brother?"
"Only to-night."
Ellen looked at her niece as if, had she dared, she would have torn her in
pieces. "I s'pose it never entered your head it was a mean advantage for
you to take when I was gone," she said shrilly. "You wouldn't 'a' dared do
it if I'd been here."
"I'm not so sure."
The fearless response was infuriating to Ellen.
"Well, I'll tell you one thing," she shouted, bringing her clenched hand
down on the table with such force that every dish rattled. "You ain't to
repeat this night's performance! If you ain't got pride enough not to go
hob-nobbin' with my enemies, I'll forbid it for good an' all--forbid it,
do you hear? I ain't a-goin'----"
Something in the quiet dignity of the girl before her arrested her tongue.
Her eye traveled over the white, rain-drenched figure. Then the corners
of her mouth twitched and curved upward.
"So Martin Howe saw you home, did he?" she observed sarcastically. "Much
good his comin' did! Had you tramped ten miles you couldn't 'a' got much
wetter. I guess he needs some lessons in totin' ladies round same's he
does in most everything else. I always said he didn't have no manners--the
puppy!"
CHAPTER IX
JANE MAKES A DISCOVERY
Martin Howe moved home as if in a trance, the voice of Lucy Webster
ringing in his ears. He recalled every glance, every smile, every gesture
of this enslaving creature, who, like a meteorite, had shot across his
firmament, rocking its serenity with the shock of her presence. How
exquisite she was! How wonderful! He had never realized there were women
like that. Was it to be marveled at that men pursued such enchantresses to
the borderland of eternity? That they were spurred to deeds of courage;
abandoned home, friends, their sacred honor; even tossed their lives away
for such?
Lucy's advent seemed to mark a new era in existence. All that went before
was not; and all that came after, apart from her, mattered not. Only the
vivid, throbbing present was of consequence, and the intensity of it swept
him out of his balance with a force that was appalling.
He was not the Martin Howe of yesterday, nor could he ever again be that
happy, emotionless being. Within him warred a tumult of new sensations
that seethed, flamed, maddened, consumed. The fact that they were the
fires of a volcano that must forever smolder its passion out did not at
first impress his consciousness. All that he knew was that Lucy Webster
was to him what no other woman had ever been or could be; she was his
ideal, his mate, his other soul; the completing element of his incomplete
nature. The emptiness of his life, of which he had hitherto been only
vaguely aware, now translated itself into the concrete terms of heart,
mind, and sex. He had been struggling to make of himself a whole when in
truth he was but a half; to construct from imperfect parts a unit; and not
sensing the hopelessness of the attempt, he had reaped only failure and
disappointment.
How blind he had been not to understand that alone he could never hope to
still loneliness, heartache, and the stirrings of his physical nature. He
had lived a life in which no one shared and with which no one sympathized.
His fostering instincts had lain dormant until they had reverted to the
receptivity of the protected rather than serving their natural functions
and making of him a protector. All the masculinity of his being had been
dwarfed, stifled. Now it awakened, clamoring to possess, guard, cherish,
worship.
What an amazing miracle it was--what a glad, transforming touch of magic!
He laughed in delight! Years slipped from him, and his youth surged up in
all its warmth and eagerness. Why, he was a boy again! A boy at the
threshold of life's wonderland. He was looking open-eyed into a garden of
beauty where his foot had never trod. Mystic realms were there, mazes of
fairy dreams, lights and colors he had never seen. At last the place of
his desire was before him.
This other self, this woman, Lucy Webster,--the name brought with it an
arresting chill that fell upon the fever of his passion with the breath of
a glacier. The girl was a Webster! She was of the blood of those he
scorned and hated; of a kin with an ancestry he had been brought up to
loathe with all his soul. Had he not been taught that it was his mission
to thwart and humble them? Had he not continually striven to do so? He
must have been bewitched to have forgotten the fact for an instant. No
doubt this creature with her rare beauty was a decoy brought hither to
tempt him to betray his heritage.
Ellen Webster was quite capable of formulating such a scheme and setting
it in motion, if only for the cruel pleasure of seeing him ensnared in its
toils. Perhaps even Lucy herself was an accomplice in the plot. Who could
tell? To be sure she appeared artless enough; but what Webster was to be
trusted? And were she only the innocent tool of a more designing hand it
redeemed her but little for, blameless or guilty, she was nevertheless a
Webster. No power under heaven could wipe out her inheritance; for the
penalty of her blood she must pay the price.
Ah, how near he had come to playing the fool! Was it not Delilah who had
shorn Samson of his might? He, Martin Howe, to be false to his traditions,
forfeit his pride, and become a spiritless weakling, forgetting his
manhood in the smile of a woman!
"Bah!" He cried the word aloud into the teeth of the gale. To think he had
almost walked blindfolded into the trap Ellen Webster had baited for him!
Ah, she should see he was not to be enticed away from the stronghold of
his principles by any such alluring snare.
What a sly old schemer Ellen was! She would have liked nothing better than
to behold him on his knees at the feet of this niece of hers and then
wreck his hopes by snatching away every possibility of their fulfillment.
Perhaps she expected that with the girl's beauty as a bribe she could make
him forget his dignity to the extent of rebuilding the wall.
She was mistaken! He was not to be thus cajoled. He had already, to some
extent, betrayed his vows that night by befriending Lucy. Bitterly he
repented of his weakness. Doubtless at this very moment Ellen Webster was
exulting that he had so easily been duped and hoodwinked.
Hot anger sent the blood to his cheek. He had been blind to be thus caught
off his guard. Into what madness had this woman beguiled him! Well, in the
future the siren should chant her Lorelei songs to deaf ears. Her spell
would be in vain.
He had found himself now. His wayward feet had recovered their stand upon
the solid rock of principle, from which for the moment they had been
tempted into straying. He would demonstrate to this Lucy Webster that any
friendliness between them was done and over.
What an ass a clever woman could make of a man! That any one could so
circumvent him was unbelievable. Shaking the rain viciously from his
umbrella, he mounted the steps, blew out the lantern, and stalked into the
house.
Mary, Eliza, and Jane looked up expectantly as he entered. It was evident
that a multitude of questions trembled on their lips.
He hoped they would offer an apology or explanation for their conduct and
thereby furnish him with the opportunity for berating them and relieving
his soul of the bitterness that rankled there. To lash somebody, anybody,
with his tongue would have been a solace.
But although Jane faced him defiantly, and Mary and Eliza with
anticipatory timidity, no one of the three spoke. They seemed to be
waiting for him to strike the first blow. Twice he attempted it, assuming
first an injured then an outraged attitude. But on second thought, he
abandoned the attack. After all, what was there to say? Should he rail at
them for asking Lucy to the house?
The fair face with its uplifted eyes came before his vision. No, he was
not sorry the girl had come. Though he must never see her again, must
never speak to her or touch her hand, he was glad he had been vouchsafed
this one glimpse into Paradise.
He might forbid his sisters ever to have anything more to do with her. But
he could not bring himself to do that either. And even suppose he were to
make the demand. Jane might refuse to comply with it. There was mutiny in
her eyes, a mutiny he might not be able to suppress unless he resorted to
drastic measures; and, smarting as he was from the scorn and humiliation
of his recent defeat, he was in no mood to cut himself off from the only
sympathy within his reach by creating a breach between himself and his
sisters.
Therefore he loitered self-consciously before the stove as if to dry his
wet clothing and then ambled across the room, remarking in offhand
fashion:
"It's settin' in for quite a rain."
"Yes, it's a hard shower," Mary ventured, turning a puzzled glance upon
her brother. "We need it though."
"Yes, the ground was like chalk," agreed Martin.
Thrusting his hands into his trousers pockets, he took a few nervous
strides around the room and, prompted by an impulse he could not have
explained, he stopped and absently drew down the window shade on the side
of the kitchen toward the Webster homestead.
"You didn't get any supper after all, did you, Martin?" Jane remarked
presently. "Why don't you let me bring you a piece of fruit cake an' a
glass of milk?"
"It would taste kinder good."
Although he had no wish for the food, the solicitude that accompanied the
suggestion was just then very soothing.
"We could cook you somethin'," Jane said, rising.
"No, no," broke out the man impatiently. "Don't go fussin'. I don't want
much. Just get me anything you have handy."
Jane went to the pantry and returned with two thick slices of "war cake"
and a tumbler of creamy milk.
"This is the sort of cake you liked so much the other day," she said,
putting it upon the table. "It's somethin' amazin' how it keeps moist. I
s'pose it's the apple sauce in it."
She watched him while he broke it listlessly into fragments. It was
obvious that he was not hungry.
"You're tired, Martin," she murmured at last, in a gentle tone.
"I guess I am a little."
"The trip to the fair was a hard one, I'm afraid."
Again the man found comfort in her voice.
"Oh, no; not particularly hard," he answered with gruff kindness, "but the
train was close an' dusty."
There was a quality in the tone that caused Jane to ponder. Furtively she
studied the bowed head, the twitching fingers, the contracted brow; nor
did the jaded, disheartened droop of the mouth escape her. She could not
recall ever having seen Martin like this before.
Something must be weighing on his mind, something that had not been there
when he had left home in the morning and had not been there when he
returned. The shadow, whatever it was, had fallen since, and she felt it
had some connection with the happenings of the evening. This unprecedented
forbearance of his was a part of it. Of that she was sure. What did it
portend? Was he angry? Or had Lucy Webster dropped some remark that had
shown him the folly and uselessness of his resentment? Jane would have
given a great deal to know just what had occurred on that walk in the
rain. Perhaps Lucy had openly attacked Martin's codes and forced a
quarrel. She was fearless enough to do so; or perhaps she had simply
reproached him and set him thinking.
Well, it was useless to ask questions. Jane knew her brother too well to
presume to do this. If he had come to his senses, so much the better. It
was not to be expected that he would admit it. That was not his way. Any
change in his mental attitude would be quickly apparent, however, in his
actions, his deeds confessing the faults his lips were too proud to utter.
She must await developments.
Hence when he rose, she offered him her customary casual good night and
listened to his slow tread upon the stairs. That unelastic step only
served to further convince her that something recent and deep-acting had
taken hold on the man and was tormenting him.
She was roused from her musings by Eliza's voice:
"What can be the matter with Martin?" she said in a tense whisper. "He
never said a word. Here I was shakin' in my shoes, dreadin' every minute
to have him launch out in one of his tirades. You could 'a' knocked me
over when he didn't do it."
"Maybe he's goin' to wait until to-morrow," Mary replied.
"No. He never waits," Eliza declared. "When he's mad he lets fly while his
temper is up. You know that as well as I do. There's no coolin' off with
him an' then warmin' up the leavin's of his rage the next mornin'. He
believes in servin' things hot an' fresh."
"I never knew him to be so sort of cowed down," reflected Mary. "You don't
s'pose he's sick, do you, Jane?"
Mary turned anxious eyes toward her sister.
"Of course not," Jane retorted promptly. "Don't go worryin', Mary, an'
start to brew him some thoroughwort in the hope of havin' him down with a
fever."
"I don't hope he'll have a fever," objected Mary in an injured tone.
Jane laughed.
"Now you know you'd love to have Martin sick so you could take care of
him," said Jane provokingly. "Don't deny it."
"Jane Howe!"
"Well, you would. But he isn't sick, Mary. He's just tired. I wouldn't
bother him about it if I was you. He hates bein' fussed over."
A sudden light of understanding had broken in on Jane's soul.
It came like a revelation, in an intuitive flash, backed neither by
evidence nor by logic. Had she tried to give a reason for the astonishing
conviction that overwhelmed her, she could not have done so. Nevertheless
she was as certain of it as she was that the night would follow the day.
Martin was neither hungry, angry, tired, worried, nor ill.
_He was in love!_
CHAPTER X
A TEMPTATION
Martin was indeed in love! Before a week had passed no one knew it better
than he.
During the solitary hours when his hands were busy thinning lettuce or
weeding young corn, his mind had abundant leisure for reflection, and the
theme on which his thoughts turned with increasing activity was always the
same. Defy Fate as he would, he faced the realization that he loved Lucy
Webster with every fiber of his being.
It was a mad and hopeless affection,--one which, for the sake of his own
peace of mind if for no other reason, it would be wiser to strangle at its
birth. Nevertheless, he did not strangle it; on the contrary, he hugged
the romance to his breast and fed it upon all the tender imaginings of a
man's first dream of love, conjuring before his vision one empty fantasy
after another.
It was evening, and under the silver light of a thin crescent hanging low
in the heaven he paced beneath the trees, Lucy upon his arm. Or lovely
with the freshness of early morning, she stood with him in the field, the
brightness of her eyes as sparkling as the flash of the dew-drops on the
grass. Again she came before him, gliding quietly amid a maze of humble
domestic tasks, transforming each with the grace of her presence. Or
perhaps she sat quietly watching the embers of a winter's fire that
touched her hair to a glory of glinting copper.
But wherever she moved, the land upon which she trod was _his_ land; the
home where she toiled _his_ home; the hearth that warmed her _his_
hearth.
There were long hours when he was alone in the twilight with only his pipe
for company, when through the smoke he seemed to see her close beside him.
Sometimes she smiled down into his eyes; sometimes she raised her sweet
lips to his; and once she came to him with madonna-like holiness, a
sleeping child in her arms,--her child--and his.
Then Martin would rouse himself to find his pipe smoldering, the lamp dim,
and the chill of the night upon him. With an impatient shrug he would
spring to his feet and tramp upstairs, hoping to find in slumber an escape
from these fair but tormenting reveries. Sleep, however, came but
fitfully, and even from the sacred confines of its privacy it was
impossible to banish subconscious mirages of the day. There was no place
to which he could flee where thoughts of Lucy Webster did not pursue him.
He saw her often now, very often, tripping buoyantly from house to barn,
from barn to garden and back again, her round young arms bearing baskets
of vegetables, or laden with shining milk pails.
How proud her head! How light her step!
One morning she skirted the wall so close that his whisper might have
reached her had he chosen to speak. He could see the fringe of dark lashes
against her skin, the rise and fall of her round bosom, the lilacs that
filled her hands. But he did not speak and neither did she. In fact, she
seemed not to see him, so busy was she toying with her flowers. She must
be fond of flowers, for she was seldom without one tucked in her gown.
These glimpses, however, were fleeting, and after he had yielded to the
temptation of indulging in them he was wont to tax himself severely for
his folly. Was he not already tortured with pain too poignant to be
endured? Why rivet more tightly the fetters that goaded him?
He had fled once and for all from Circe's magic, vowing that never again
should the sorceress work her charm upon him; and that vow he intended to
keep. Nevertheless, it did not prevent him from stealing an occasional
peep at the enchantress, if only to assure himself that her spell was as
potent and deadly as he had supposed it. Surely, if he did not consort
with her, looking could do no harm. Therefore he indulged his fancy,
watching Lucy whenever she was within sight and each time becoming more
helplessly entangled in her fascinations, until any escape from the
thralldom of her beauty became impossible. His days were a cycle of
tantalizing visions which ceased only with the coming of darkness; and
when with the night he would have found release from their misery, it was
only to discover that night an endless stretch of hours that intervened
betwixt him and the moment when the visions might return again.
Poor Martin! He endured a hell of suffering during those radiant summer
days. He was melancholy, ecstatic, irritable by turns, ascending to the
heights and plunging into the depths with an abruptness and
unaccountability that was not only enigmatic to himself but to every one
else with whom he came in contact. He kept Mary in a ferment of excitement
trying to devise remedies for his successive ills. One day she would be
sure he needed a tonic to dispel his listlessness and with infinite pains
would brew the necessary ingredients together; but before the draught
could be cooled and administered, Martin had rebounded to an unheard-of
vitality. Ah, she would reason, it must be his appetite that was at the
bottom of the trouble. She must stimulate his desire for food. No sooner,
however, was her concoction of herbs simmering on the stove than her
erratic patient was devouring everything within sight with the zest of a
cannibal. So it went, the affliction which oppressed him one day giving
place to a new collection of symptoms on the morrow.
"I'd have Doctor Marsh to him if I had any opinion of the man," remarked
Mary one night. "But I ain't ever been able to muster up my respect for
that critter's principles since he left that medicine for 'Liza marked
_'Keep in a Dark Place.'_ That was enough to shake my confidence in him
forever. It was so under-handed. I'd rather had 'Liza sick for the rest of
her life than that she should 'a' been dosed up on some stuff we had to
keep hidden away lest somebody see it. If he was ashamed of the medicine,
or it was anything we'd hadn't ought to had, he shouldn't 'a' given it to
us. I never said nothin' to nobody 'bout it, but I poured the whole
bottleful down the sink, and told Doctor Marsh that he needn't come again.
He pretended he couldn't see why, but I guess he understood, an' I hope
the lesson did him good," concluded Mary with righteous zeal.
"So that was the reason Doctor Marsh stopped comin'!" Jane exclaimed. "I
always wondered. You never told me that before."
"No," said Mary with dignity, "I never did."
"But, Mary,"--Jane broke into a laugh.
"You needn't laugh, Jane. It was a very serious matter."
"If you'd only explained it, Mary, I could have told you----"
"That is precisely why I didn't explain it, Jane," Mary answered. "I knew
you would interfere, an' I felt it was somethin' that laid between me an'
my conscience. No matter what you'd 'a' said, I should 'a' felt the same
way about it. Matters of right an' wrong are the affairs of me an' my
Maker. Nobody else on earth can settle 'em."
There were instances when it was useless to argue with Mary, and Jane saw
that this was one of them.
Had she so willed she could not only have cleared up the mystery about
Doctor Marsh's medicine, but she could have furnished her sister with the
key to Martin's caprices, and thereby saved the metaphysician not only
much worry but also much physical labor.
Mary and Eliza, however, lived in such a miniature world that Jane knew if
Martin's secret were divulged it would become the unending topic of
conversation from that moment on. Moreover, so intense would be his
sisters' excitement concerning the affair, and so keen their interest and
curiosity that they might blunder into destroying the delicate fabric of
the romance altogether. Hence Jane kept her own council, speculating with
amusement as to how long it would be before his two solicitous but
blinded relatives should stumble upon the truth.
In the meantime the neighboring between the two families, so bravely
begun, was not continued. Mary and Eliza Howe had not the courage or the
initiative to attempt a second clandestine tea-party, much as they would
have enjoyed it; and Jane saw no use in urging Lucy to the house. If
Martin decreed to further the affair, he was quite capable of doing so
without any aid of hers; and if he ordained to abandon it, as he evidently
did, wild horses could not turn him from his purpose. Therefore Jane gave
up all her aggressive attempts to heal the breach between Howe and
Webster, and contented herself with waving to Lucy over the wall and
calling a cheery greeting to the girl whenever she came within hailing
distance.
Lucy was disappointed by this retreat of her neighbors into their former
aloofness. Of course their action was traceable to Martin. It was his
fault. No doubt he had gone home and berated his sisters for their
friendliness and had so intimidated them that they had no choice but to
bow to his will. Jane was the only one of them anyway who had the spirit
to defy her brother, and presumably she had decided that the game was not
worth the candle. Perhaps, too, she was right. To live in a daily
purgatory made of life a sorry existence. She herself had found that out.
Her aunt was continually becoming more irritable and less sound of
judgment, and there were times when Lucy feared that the warped mind would
give way under the strain of repeated paroxysms of anger. Could Ellen have
been persuaded to surrender the management of her affairs entirely into
her niece's hands, she might have been spared much annoyance; but frail as
she was, she persisted in retaining to the last her scepter of supremacy.
She went each day into the garden and put Tony out of humor by finding
fault with everything he did; having demoralized his temper, she would
return to the house to rasp Lucy's patience by heaping upon the girl's
blameless head such remnants of wrath as she still cherished toward the
long-suffering Portugese.
For sometime she had contented herself with this daily programme, not
varying it by venturing away from the place, even to carry her garden
truck to market. Therefore Lucy was astounded when one morning her aunt
appeared at breakfast, dressed in her shabby black cashmere and wearing
her cameo pin, and announced she was going to drive to town.
"I've an errand to do," she said without preamble, "an' I shan't be home
till noon. You needn't go falutin' over to the Howes', neither, the minute
my back is turned, as you did the last time I went off."
Lucy smiled good-humoredly.
"I'm goin' to see a lawyer," her aunt went on. "Lawyer Benton."
No reply appearing necessary, Lucy did not speak.
"Well!" piped Ellen, after waiting a moment.
"Well, what?" Lucy asked.
"Ain't you got no interest in what I'm goin' for?" the woman demanded
querulously.
"I'm always interested in anything you wish to tell me," answered the
girl, "but I thought it was not my place to inquire into your business."
"It is my business, an' I can keep it to myself," said Ellen tartly. "But
I'll tell you this much--I'm goin' to get my will made."
The hard blue eyes fixed themselves on Lucy's face narrowly.
"My will!" repeated Ellen, a challenge in her tone. "I s'pose you thought
it was all made long ago; but it warn't. I'm goin' to make it to-day."
At a loss how to reply, Lucy nodded.
"You don't seem much concerned 'bout it," observed her aunt peevishly.
"Ain't you curious to know who I'm goin' to leave my property to?"
"No."
"You ain't!"
"No."
"S'pose I was to give it all to you."
"That would be very kind."
"Yes, it would be--it would be kind," agreed Ellen. "But mebbe I ain't
a-goin' to. Mebbe I'm goin' to will it to somebody else."
"That's your affair."
"I'll bet, for all your indifference, you'd be mad as a wet hen if I was
to leave it to somebody else," went on the woman provokingly.
"No, I shouldn't. Why should I?"
"'Cause you're my next of kin. By rights it had oughter come to you,
hadn't it?"
"I don't know the New Hampshire laws."
With an admiring glance at her niece, Ellen broke into an unpleasant
laugh.
"There's no trappin' you, Miss Lucy Webster, is there?" she exclaimed,
rising from her chair and clapping on her hat. "You're a cute one, an
awful cute one!"
"Why?"
"Oh, you don't need to be told," chuckled Ellen. "Anybody as cute as you
are, _knows._"
With that she was gone.
All the morning the girl busied herself within doors, exchanging one duty
for another. Toward noon, however, she made an excursion to the garden for
lettuce and radishes. Her pathway lay close to the wall, and on her return
to the house she was amazed to see lying on the topmost stone of the
ruined heap a mammoth bunch of sweet peas. There was no mistaking the fact
that the flowers were intended for her, for her name had been hastily
scrawled on a bit of crumpled paper and placed beside them. Nothing could
have surprised her more than to stumble upon this offering.
Evidently the blossoms had just been gathered, for the raindrops of the
previous night still sparkled among their petals, jeweling with brilliancy
their kaleidoscopic riot of color.
She caught them up with delight, burying her face in their cool fragrance.
Where had they come from? She knew no one who raised sweet peas,--no one
except the Howes, and of course----she halted and blushed. Could it have
been the Howes?
"_Mary's are white_" she heard herself automatically repeating in Jane's
phrases. "_'Liza's pink, an' mine are purple. Martin has his in another
place, 'cause he likes all the colors mixed together. But he never picks
his nor lets us. He says he likes to see 'em growin'._"
And now, by some miracle, here were the blossoms of Martin's raising,
their prismatic tints exquisite as a sunset. It was like holding the
rainbow in one's hands. She knew the Howes too well to cherish for an
instant the illusion that any of the three sisters had cut the flowers
from the vines. They would not have dared. No. No hand but Martin's had
plucked them.
With a strange fluttering of her heart, Lucy carried the bouquet to her
own room, a corner of the house where Ellen seldom intruded. There she
bent over it with a happy, triumphant little smile. Then, from behind the
shelter of the muslin curtain, she blew a kiss from her finger tips to
Mr. Martin Howe, who was hoeing potatoes on the hill, with his back set
squarely toward the Webster mansion.
When Ellen returned at noon, there was still a shell-like flush of pink on
the girl's cheek and on her lips a smile for which her aunt could not
account.
"Where you been?" inquired the woman suspiciously.
"Nowhere. Why?"
"You look as if somebody'd sent you a Christmas tree full of presents."
Lucy laughed softly.
"You ain't been to the Howes'?"
"I haven't been anywhere," repeated Lucy, throwing up her chin. "I'm
telling the truth."
Ellen eyed her shrewdly.
"Yes, I reckon you are," she observed slowly. "I ain't never caught you
lyin' yet." Then as if an afterthought had occurred to her, she added:
"Likely you've been thinkin' 'bout the will I've been makin'."
She saw Lucy open her lips, then close them.
"I've got it all done," went on Ellen audaciously. "It's drawn up, signed,
an' sealed. In fact, I brought it home with me. Here it is."
Tossing a large white envelope fastened with a splash of red wax upon the
table, she peered at her niece.
"I'm goin' to give it to you to keep," continued she in a hectoring tone.
"It'll be like havin' Pandora's box around. You can't open it, an' you'll
have the continual fun of wonderin' what's inside."
"I'd rather not take it."
"But I want you to," asserted Ellen. "I'm givin' it to you to take care
of. It'll help to make life interestin'. Besides, who knows but you may be
tempted to break it open some night an' have a peep inside."
Craftily the old woman watched the girl.
"Or mebbe you'll tear it up," she mused. "Who knows? Then if I was to die,
you could pretend I hadn't made no will."
"Take it back. I shan't keep it," Lucy cried, moving toward the door.
"Afraid of yourself, eh?"
"No."
The monosyllable rang with scorn.
"Then prove it," sneered Ellen.
"Give it to me."
Smiling evilly, her aunt pushed the packet across the table. There was a
leer of triumph in the sharp-featured face.
"I 'magine that 'twas gettin' as mad as you are now that kep' the Websters
from ever buildin' up that wall," she called after her niece, as Lucy with
crimson cheeks fled up the stairs, the long white envelope in her hand.
CHAPTER XI
THE CROSSING OF THE RUBICON
"I want you should go to the village to-day," announced Ellen, making her
appearance in Lucy's room on a hot August morning a few weeks later.
"Tony's got to get the scythe mended an' have Dolly shod. Don't it beat
all how somethin's always wearin' out? Long's he's goin', you might's well
drive along with him an' take the eggs an' corn I promised Elias Barnes.
There's some more errands at the store I want done, too."
"All right, Aunt Ellen."
But the woman loitered.
"If you don't want to hang 'round town till Tony gets ready to come back,
mebbe you could find somebody comin' this way who would give you a lift
home. It seems sort of a shame to stay there wastin' the time you could be
usin' here."
Lucy smiled at the characteristic remark.
"An' if you didn't happen on any one," went on Ellen, "likely you
wouldn't mind walkin'; 'twould get you home quicker."
"No, indeed. I always like a walk."
"I reckon 'twill be warm."
"I don't mind."
"That's good."
Ellen was always gracious when her plans went to her satisfaction.
"I want you to be ready to start right after breakfast," she added, as she
went out the door. "The earlier you get off the earlier you'll be back
again. I wish I could go myself an' dicker with Elias. I would if it
warn't that I have to tinker with that pesky cream separator."
"Is the cream separator out of order?"
"Yes," said Ellen wearily. "Trust that Tony to bust everythin' he
touches."
She closed Lucy's door with a spirited bang.
The girl listened to her retreating footsteps and smiled softly. It was
nothing new for Ellen to be sending her to the village to transact the
business she no longer felt able to attend to herself, but the subterfuges
to which she resorted to conceal her real motive were amusing. Lucy knew
well that to-day, if it had not been the cream separator, something else
equally important would have furnished the excuse for keeping her aunt at
home. It seemed so foolish not to be honest about the matter. To pursue
any other method, however, would have been quite foreign to Ellen's
policy, and therefore Lucy, although not blinded by these devices to hide
the truth, always pretended she was, and earnestly condoned with the old
woman about the rebellious potato sprayer, the obstinate pump, or whatever
other offending object chanced to be selected as the plea for casting her
cares on younger shoulders.
The trip to the village was tiresome; of that there was no
doubt,--especially on a day that promised to be as hot as this one.
Already tremors of heat vibrated upward in waves from the piazza roof, and
the sun's scorching rays pierced between the closed blinds. Nevertheless,
Lucy did not regret the prospect of the morning's excursion. She so seldom
had an opportunity to leave the house that any break in the monotony of
her days, uncomfortable though it might be, was a welcome diversion.
Therefore she hurried her dressing and breakfast, and while dawn was still
on the threshold, set off with Tony in the dust-covered surrey that
creaked its way along behind the stumbling gray mare.
The coolness of night was over the awakening earth, although the mounting
sun was speedily drinking up the dew and rousing the locusts into droning
song. Not a leaf stirred. Through the shimmering atmosphere the valley,
with its river yellow as a band of molten gold, lay listless in drowsy
haze; but the birds, butterflies, and bees flitted among the flowers that
bordered the roadside with an alertness which proved that they, at least,
felt no lessening of zest for their honey gathering.
"It's goin' to be an almighty hot day," observed Tony who, after slapping
Dolly's broad back several times with the reins, had decided that further
attempts to accelerate the mare's pace was useless.
"Yes, very hot."
"I hope your aunt won't go pullin' that separator all to pieces while
we're gone," the boy grumbled. "In the first place she ain't got a notion
of how to put it together again; an' in the next place she ain't fit to go
liftin' an' haulin' things about the way she does. She's gettin' to be an
old woman. Ain't she most eighty?"
"She's not far from it," answered Lucy.
"Well, if I was her age an' had her money, you wouldn't see me workin' as
if a slave driver was standin' over me," the Portuguese lad declared.
"What good is it doin' her bein' rich, I'd like to know."
"Oh, I don't think she is rich," said Lucy quickly.
"Folks say she is; that's all I know 'bout it," replied Tony. "Elias
Barnes was calculatin' one day down to the store that she must be worth
thousands. I can believe it, too," added the boy significantly.
"Everything we've got on the farm is tied up with string, or hitched
together with a scrap of wire. Your aunt ain't fur gettin' a thing mended
long's it can be made to hold together. 'Bout everything on the farm wants
overhaulin'. I'd give a fortune to see a smart man come in here an' set
the place to rights. There's a lot of truck in the barn oughter be heaved
out an' burned. 'Tain't fit for nothin'. But Miss Webster would no more
hear to partin' with one stick nor stone she owned than she'd cut off her
head. She'd keep everything that belonged to her if it was dropping to
bits."
The boy paused.
"Well, there's one good thing," he added, smiling, "she can't take the
stuff she's hoarded with her into the next world, an' when it falls to you
you can do as you like with it."
"Falls to me?"
"Why, yes. 'Course all your aunt's property'll be yours some day."
"What makes you think so?" Lucy asked, a suggestion of reserve in her
tone.
"Who else is there to have it?" inquired Tony, opening his eyes very wide.
"Ain't she already left it to you in her will?"
"I don't know."
"You don't!"
Lucy laughed at his incredulousness.
"No."
"Well, they say down to the town that your aunt made her will 'bout three
weeks ago. Even Lawyer Benton himself admitted that much. Folks saw Miss
Webster goin' into his office an' questioned him. He warn't for tellin'
anything 'til they nagged at him; then he did own that the farm an'
everything else was left to _relatives_. Elias Barnes an' some of the
others were mighty quick to hunt up who the Webster relatives were. They
were pretty sure you were the only one, an' it 'pears you are. So it's
you will get the place an' the money, an' goodness knows, Miss Lucy,
you've earnt it. The men all agreed to that."
"You know, Tony, Miss Webster is my aunt," began Lucy in a warning voice,
loyalty resenting this criticism.
"Yes, but there's aunts--an' aunts," interrupted the lad with a grin.
"It's no use pretendin' you ain't drawn the devil of a one, 'cause I know.
Don't I live close at hand, an' ain't I got eyes?"
Lucy did not answer. They were nearing the village and to put an end to
the conversation, she took out her list of errands and began to read it
absently. But in the back of her mind she was turning over Tony's remarks.
She had never allowed herself to dwell on the time when the Webster
homestead would actually be her own. It seemed unfitting to plan on
acquiring property that could only come to her through the death of
another person. Now, however, she suddenly gave her imagination rein and
began to consider what changes she would make when the farm was really in
her hands.
The barn must be cleared out the first thing and be re-shingled. Then she
would strip the farm of its litter of rubbish and repair some of the
tools and household furniture. What a delight it would be to renovate the
old home with chintz hangings and fresh paint and paper! There were great
possibilities for making the interior of the house attractive on a small
expenditure of money. The time-worn mahogany was good, the proportions of
the rooms pleasing, and the great fireplaces, several of which were now
boarded up, were a distinct asset.
Of course she would have to have help with the work. It would be well to
get a capable man to manage the garden for her--some strong, intelligent
person, familiar with the problems of soil, fertilizer, and horticulture;
a person, for example, like, well--like Martin Howe. A flood of color
crept into her cheek.
Although she had never addressed a remark to Martin since the night when
he had abandoned her at the foot of the Howe driveway to face the
onslaughts of that drenching storm, she was perfectly aware that her
goings and comings had become a matter of no little concern to the austere
gentleman who dwelt on the other side of the wall. That he watched her she
knew, for she had been feminine enough to trap him into changing his
position that he might keep her in view.
Besides, was there not the miraculous bunch of flowers? She had, to be
sure, never acknowledged them even by the lifting of an eyelash, nor had
she proof that Martin's hand had really put them within her reach;
nevertheless, she could have staked her oath upon it.
Once she had almost defied his silence by thanking him; in fact, she had
actually ventured to the confines of the Webster land with this intention;
but on arriving within range of his presence, her courage had deserted
her. He looked so forbidding that a foolish agitation had swept over her,
and compelled her to drop her eyes, and walk away in silence.
She had never known herself to be so nervous before. One would almost
think she was afraid of Martin Howe. How absurd! He was nothing to her,
less than nothing.
If she liked to study his fine, athletic figure and the free swing of his
magnificent body as he worked, it was solely from an æsthetic standpoint.
One seldom had an opportunity to see a man as perfectly molded as he. His
face was interesting, too; not handsome, perhaps, but attractive. It was a
pity it was so stern and set, for she was sure he could smile if he
chose; indeed he had smiled that night when he had come home and been
unconscious of her presence in the house. It had been a compelling smile,
charming for its very rareness. She had often thought of it since and
wished she might behold it again. Of course she never would. Yet it would
be pleasant to do so. Probably he smiled often at home,--even laughed
sometimes. How she would like to hear him laugh,--just once.
He was a very fascinating person,--purely as a character study, of course,
nothing more. Since, however, she was indulging in speculations concerning
him, it would be amusing to know what he thought of her; for he did think
of her, that was obvious. What motive prompted him to do it? Perhaps he
admired her, thought her pretty. If he did, why didn't he make some
further effort to talk with her? Usually men were only too eager to
improve the acquaintance of girls they liked. It surely could do Mr.
Martin Howe no harm to call a good morning to her over the wall, as his
sisters did, even if he did deplore the existence of the Websters.
Then the tenor of Lucy's arguments shifted. Probably Martin neither
admired nor liked her. Doubtless, along with her aunt and all that
pertained to the hated blood, he despised her and simply watched her in
disgust. But if so, why did he bother to send flowers to her?
Lucy shook her head. She was back at the point from which she had started
and was no nearer a solution of Martin Howe and his baffling mental
outlook. What did it matter anyway? What he thought or felt was no concern
of hers, and she was silly to burden her mind with speculations that
really interested her so little.
By this time Tony, who had lapsed into a silence as unbroken as her own,
drew up at the smooth stone flagging before Elias Barnes's store and,
leaping out over the wheel, helped his companion to dismount from the
wagon and unload the farm produce they had brought with them for sale.
"I'll get home somehow, Tony," the girl said to him, as he prepared to
drive off. "You needn't come for me."
"All right, Miss Lucy, only I do hope you won't have to foot it back in
this heat."
"I shan't mind."
"It's going to be a terrible day," insisted the lad. "Them buzzin'
locusts is enough to prove that. They're good as a thermometer."
Lucy laughed.
"Don't worry about me," she remarked kindly. "Just as soon as I finish my
errands I shall start home."
"You'd be wise to."
As the mare scuffed off down the road, amid a cloud of dust, Lucy entered
the store.
A stuffy odor of coffee, molasses, and calico greeted her; so, too, did
Elias Barnes, who came forward from behind the counter, extending his damp
and sticky palm and showing every tooth that an expansive smile
permitted.
"So it's you, Miss Lucy," he observed with pleasure. "I was expecting to
see your aunt. She was here the other day."
"Yes, she drove to town last Friday."
"Came on an interestin' errand, too," chirped Elias. "Leastwise, I 'magine
'twas interestin' to you." He grinned slyly.
"Why?"
"Why?" repeated the man, taken aback. "Because--well, ain't such things
always interestin'?"
"What things?"
Elias stared, uncertain as to how to proceed.
Was it possible the girl was ignorant of her aunt's mission?
"Mebbe you didn't know Miss Webster's errand in town," he began eagerly.
"I know she went to see Mr. Benton and get her will made, if that is what
you mean."
"An' don't you call that interestin'?" demanded the discomfited Elias.
"Not particularly."
The storekeeper gasped.
"Likely the matter was all cut an' dried an' nothin' new to you,"
persisted he, with a wan, disappointed smile. "There warn't much choice
left your aunt, fur as relatives went, was there? Still, I reckon she
couldn't 'a' found a better one to pass her property on to than you,"
concluded the man with a leer.
"What makes you so sure she has passed it on to me?" inquired Lucy,
annoyed.
"Well, ain't she?"
"I don't know."
"You don't--by thunder! She ain't told you nothin'?"
"Certainly not."
Elias looked puzzled.
"Why," he said, "most folks thought that was the condition that brought
you to Sefton Falls. Surely nothin' but some sort of a reward, an' a big
one, too, would coax a body to come an' live with such a----"
"You forget you are speaking of my aunt, Mr. Barnes."
"I guess I did forget it a mite, Miss Lucy," mumbled Elias awkwardly. "I
beg your pardon."
The girl inclined her head.
"Suppose we leave personal matters now and settle our business," she
answered, motioning toward the boxes, baskets, and egg cases Tony had set
inside the shop door. "Here is the corn and the butter my aunt promised
you, and here are twelve dozen eggs. If you will pay me for them, I will
start back home before it grows any warmer."
"Lemme see," ruminated Elias, "eggs is bringing----"
"Seventy cents."
"Ain't it sixty-nine?"
"No."
"I seem to have sixty-nine fixed awful firm in my head," protested Elias
tenaciously.
Lucy laughed.
"You'll have to get it out then," she retorted good-humoredly, "for
seventy cents is the market price."
The firm answer told the shopkeeper that further bickering would be
useless.
"Seventy cents then," he said reluctantly, opening his cash drawer. "It's
robbery, though."
"You're not often robbed, Mr. Barnes."
"Ain't I? Well, if I ain't, it's 'cause folks know better than to try to
do me. 'Tain't often I'm beat in a bargain--only when I'm dealin' with a
pretty woman an' give her the advantage." Again he displayed his rows of
teeth. "Ladies first is my motto; an' heiresses----"
"You haven't paid me for the corn or butter yet," cut in Lucy impatiently.
"Five dozen ears of early corn and ten pounds of print butter."
For a second time Elias took from an infinitesimal crack in his money
drawer another handful of change which he grudgingly counted into the
girl's extended hand.
"There you are!" he asserted, as if wiping some disagreeable thought
triumphantly from his memory. "Now we're square an' can talk of somethin'
else."
"I'm afraid I can't stop to talk to-day, Mr. Barnes, for I've got to get
home. Good-by and thank you," and with a smile that dazzled the confounded
storekeeper, Lucy sped out the door.
Elias, who was a widower and "well-to-do," was considered the catch of the
town and was therefore unaccustomed to receiving such scant appreciation
of his advances.
"I'll be buttered!" he declared, chagrined. "If she ain't gone!"
Lucy was indeed far down the level road, laughing to herself as she
thought of the discomfited Elias. This was not the first time he had shown
an inclination to force his oily pleasantries upon her; but it was the
first time she had so pointedly snubbed him.
"I hope it will do him good," she murmured half aloud. "I'd like to
convince him that every woman in Sefton Falls isn't his for the asking."
As she went on her way between the bordering tangle of goldenrod and
scarlet-tinted sumach, she was still smiling quietly. The sun had risen
higher, and a dry heat rose in waves from the earth. Already her shoes
were white, and moist tendrils of hair curled about her brow. Before her
loomed three miles of parching highway as barren of shade as the
woodsman's axe could make it. The picture of Ellen's cool kitchen and
breezy porch made the distance at that moment seem interminable. There was
not a wagon in sight, and unless one came along, she would have to trudge
every step of the way home.
Well, there was no use in becoming discouraged at the outset of her
journey, and she was not, although she did halt a moment to draw a crisp,
white handkerchief from her pocket and fan her burning cheeks. She had no
idea the walk was going to be so hot a one. Despite her aunt's objections,
she almost wished she had waited for Tony. If only she could have the good
luck to be overtaken by somebody! Hark, did she hear wheels?
Yes, as good fortune would have it, from around the curve in the road
behind her a wagon was coming into sight, the measured _clop, clop_ of the
horse's feet reaching her distinctly. The cloud of dust that enveloped the
approaching Jehu made it impossible for her to see who he was;
nevertheless, it did not much matter, for country etiquette stipulated
that those traveling on foot were always welcome to the hospitality of a
passing vehicle.
Therefore Lucy sat down on the wall to await her oncoming rescuer.
Meanwhile the wagon came nearer.
It contained a single occupant who was perched with careless grace astride
a barrel of flour and appeared to be very much hedged in by a multifarious
assortment of small packages and sacks of grain. It did not look as if
there were room in the carriage for an additional ounce, and when the girl
saw how crowded it was, her heart sank; then as she looked again, it
bounded with sudden emotion, for the man who so jauntily urged forward his
steed from his pinnacle on the barrel was none other than Martin Howe.
Resolutely Lucy rose from the wall and, without a glance in the traveler's
direction, set out at a sharp pace along the highway.
She would not ask a favor of Martin Howe if she had to plod every step of
the three scorching miles; and if he were brute enough to let her toil
along in the heat--to walk while he rode--well, that was all she ever
wanted to know about him. Her heart beat tumultuously as she heard the
wheels coming closer.
The horse was beside her now, and the whirl-wind of dust his hoofs raised
made her choke. Would the wagon stop or go on? The horse's head passed
abreast of her, then his white, lathered body. Next the wagon came into
sight, with Martin sitting proudly and stiffly on his perch. Afterward
horse, wagon, and man rolled past, and the girl was left alone.
Her lip trembled. Would he really leave her like this in the dust and
heat? Would he leave even his worst enemy? It was incredible a human being
could be so heartless. And the humiliation of it! To tag along behind him
on foot, smothering in his dust!
Rage possessed her. That should be the end of Mr. Martin Howe! He was no
gentleman. He was not even human.
She sat down on the stone wall once more, waiting for him to disappear and
the dust from his wheels settle.
But to her surprise she saw him come to a stop in the road and, pivoting
around on his perch, face her.
Lucy did not move. She watched him hesitate, waver, then dismount and come
back through the dust.
"If you're on your way home----" he began with clumsy gravity.
The girl smiled up into his face.
"If you're goin' back----" he repeated, and again got no further.
She came to his rescue.
"Have you room to take me in?"
"There ain't much room." She saw the flicker of a smile shadow his face.
"Still, if you don't mind bein' a mite cramped----"
"I don't mind it at all unless it crowds you too much," answered Lucy. "It
is very kind of you." Then she heard herself add without forethought: "I
was afraid you were goin' by."
"I ain't that much of a heathen, I hope," Martin returned gruffly.
Although it was plain he was ill at ease, he helped her into the wagon,
arranging the bags of meal solicitously that she might be as comfortable
as possible. Then he touched the horse with his whip, and they started
off.
"I'm so thankful to have a ride home," sighed Lucy, after waiting a second
or two and finding he had no intention of speaking. "It is very hot
to-day."
"So 'tis. But it is great weather for corn."
"I suppose so," assented the girl. "How is yours coming on?"
"Pretty well. Some blasted crow got a little of it at the beginnin'; but
the rest of it is all right."
"It was a shame you lost any of it."
"I was a good deal put out myself. Still, 'twarn't much, considerin' the
size of the field."
Lucy dimpled.
"Your field is a wonderful sight from our house," she answered,
"especially when the wind blows. You have a fine lot of oats, too. I love
to watch the breeze sweep across it."
"I do myself," agreed Martin with increasing cordiality. "It's a pretty
picture. There's lots of pretty pictures on a farm if you're lookin' for
'em," he added, stealing a glance at her.
"Your sweet peas were a pretty picture," ventured Lucy mischievously.
Martin colored with confusion. He seemed at a loss how to reply. Then,
gathering courage, he remarked shyly:
"You like flowers?"
"I love them!"
"Some folks do," said he hurriedly. "I prefer to see 'em growin'."
"Yet you do cut them sometimes," persisted Lucy playfully.
"Mighty seldom. Only when it's good for the vines."
Again the glint of a smile brightened his countenance, and she saw him
blush sheepishly.
"I wish it would be good for them again sometime," said she, peeping up
into his eyes. "Don't you think there's danger of their goin' to seed?"
She heard a short laugh, but he did not answer. Instead, as if to change a
dangerous topic, he asked:
"How are you likin' Sefton Falls?"
"Oh, I think the place is beautiful. Already I have become very fond of
it. You must love every stick and stone within sight."
"There was one while I didn't," Martin drawled slowly. "But afterward,
when I saw 'twas my duty to stay here, I got to feelin' different. I'd 'a'
liked to have gone to the war. I was too old, though; besides, I had my
sisters."
"I know," murmured Lucy with quiet sympathy. "You see, I had to make my
choice, too. My aunt wrote that she needed me. It wouldn't have been
right for me to desert her and go to France to nurse other people."
"So it's because of her you're stayin' here?"
"Yes."
Martin did not speak again for some time; then he said in a tense, uneven
voice that struggled to be casual:
"If she was to die then, I s'pose you'd start back West where you came
from."
"I'm--not--sure."
He waited as if expecting her to explain herself, and presently she did
so.
"I might decide to make my home here," she went on. "That is, if I could
get some one to help me with the farm."
There was no intimation of coquetry in the remark; merely simple fact. But
the words wrought a miracle in the face of the man beside her.
"Do you like it that much?" he demanded eagerly.
"I love it!"
"Miss Webster has a fine place," ventured Martin at length.
"Both of them are fine old places."
He nodded.
"But yours has been kept up better than ours," continued Lucy. "You see,
Aunt Ellen isn't strong like a man; and besides, she hasn't studied into
new ways of doing things as you have. That's the interesting part of
farming, I think, to use your brains and make two things grow where only
one grew before. If I were a man----"
She broke off, embarrassed by her own girlish enthusiasm.
"What would you do?" inquired Martin eagerly.
"I'd do with our farm what you've done with yours. I'd get new tools, and
I'd find out how to use them. It would be fascinating. But a woman
can't----"
"She can read just the same."
"I haven't a man's strength," returned Lucy, shaking her head gravely.
"It's such a pity."
"Maybe not."
The words slipped from his lips before it was possible for him to recover
them. He flushed.
"What!" exclaimed Lucy.
"Maybe it's as well for you to stay as you were made," he explained in a
strangely gentle voice.
The girl turned her head away. They had reached the foot of the Webster
driveway, and unbidden the horse halted. But as Lucy prepared to climb out
of the wagon, the man stayed her.
"I reckon there's some place I could turn round, ain't there, if I was to
drive in?" he said recklessly.
"Oh, there's plenty of room," Lucy answered, "only hadn't you better drop
me here? My--my--aunt is at home."
"I don't care," Martin retorted with the same abandon. "I ain't goin' to
have you plod up that long driveway in the broilin' sun--aunt or no
aunt."
He laughed boyishly.
"It's awfully good of you. But please, if you mind coming, don't; for
indeed I----"
"You ain't your aunt," asserted Martin with a shy glance into her face.
Lucy met the glance with a blush and a whimsical smile.
"No, I'm not," she responded, "and sometimes I wish you weren't your
father and your grandfather."
"What do you mean?"
"Because if you were just _you_, you'd be more forgiving--I know you
would."
She saw him bite his lips and a dull red tinge his cheek. Without
answering he turned into the long avenue and presently drew up before the
side door.
"There you are!" he remarked stiffly.
Lucy did not need to look at him to sense that the kindliness had left his
countenance, and his jaw had become grim and set.
Had she been able to read his thoughts, she would have realized that the
short detour into Ellen Webster's territory had brought Martin to himself,
and that he was already deploring with inward scorn the weakness that had
led him to do the thing he had pledged his word never to do. He could not
even shunt off the blame for his act and say, as did his illustrious
ancestor: "The woman tempted me and I did eat." No, he had open-eyed
stalked voluntarily into temptation,--willingly, gladly, triumphantly. He
had sinned against his conscience, his traditions, his forbears, and
behold, angry as he was with himself for yielding to it, the sin was
sweet.
CHAPTER XII
THE TEST
Martin had guided his horse round the triangle of sweet-williams and,
still torn by conflicting emotions of ecstasy and self-reproach, was
proceeding down the driveway when a cry of distress reached his ear:
"Martin--Mr. Howe!"
He turned to see Lucy Webster beckoning frantically to him from the door.
"Come back, please," she cried. "Hurry!"
That she was excited was evident. Indeed she must have been quite out of
her mind to have called him Martin in that shameless fashion. The fact
that the name had slipped so spontaneously from her lips and that she
hastened to correct her mistake caused the man to speculate with delight
as to whether she was wont to think of him by this familiar cognomen. This
thought, however, was of minor importance, the flash of an instant. What
chiefly disturbed Martin was the girl's agitation.
Bringing his horse to a stop, he sped back to where she was standing, and
on reaching her side he was startled to see that the face but a short
interval before so radiant had blanched to a deathly pallor.
"My aunt!" she whispered in a frightened tone. "Something terrible has
happened to her!"
If Lucy entertained any doubts as to whether he would aid her in the
present emergency she had either cast them aside or was determined to
ignore such a possibility, for she held the door open with the obvious
expectation that he would follow her into the house.
A year ago, a month, nay--a week, he would never have consented to cross
the Webster threshold, let alone offer any assistance to its mistress; but
the siren who beckoned him on had cast such a potent spell over his will
that now without open protest, although with a certain inward compunction,
he followed her through the hall into the kitchen.
Upon the floor was stretched Ellen Webster--crumpled, helpless, inert--her
eyes closed and her stern face set as in a death mask. How long she had
lain there it was impossible to tell. If she had called for succor it had
been to empty walls.
As with mingled sensations Martin stood looking down upon her unconscious
form, Lucy threw herself upon her knees beside the woman and gently
touched her wrists and heart.
"She isn't dead," she murmured presently. "She must either have had a fall
or some sort of shock. We must get her upstairs and send for a doctor."
The "_we_" told Martin that the girl had not even considered the chance of
his refusing to come to her assistance.
"Tony is in the village," she went on, "and I don't know what I should
have done but for you. How fortunate that you were here!"
Was it fortunate? Martin asked himself.
At last the moment for which he had longed and prayed had come,--the
moment when the fate of his enemy lay in his hands, and it was within his
power to grant or deny succor. There had never been a question in his mind
what he would do should this opportunity arise. Had he not declared over
and over again that Ellen Webster might die before he would lift a finger
to help her? He had meant it too. All the bitterness of his soul had gone
into the vow. And now here he was confronted by the very emergency he had
craved from Fortune. The woman he hated was at his mercy. What should he
do? Should he stand stanchly by his word and let her life go out into the
Beyond when he might perhaps stay its flight? Or should he weakly
repudiate his word and call her from the borderland to continue to taunt
and torment him? If a doctor were not summoned quickly she might die, and
her death be upon his soul. Did he wish to stain himself with this
crime,--for crime it would be. Was the revenge worth the hours of
self-condemnation that might follow? Who was he that he should judge Ellen
Webster and cut off her life before its time? Vengeance is mine: I will
repay, saith the Lord.
The phrase rang insistently in Martin's ears. He tried to stifle
it--ignore it--but still the assertion continued to repeat itself within
his consciousness. Suppose, tempted by his weaker nature and the appealing
eyes of Lucy, he were to yield to his better self and adopt a merciful
attitude, might not Ellen be restored to health and jeer at him to the
end of his days for his magnanimity? Hers was not the creed "If thine
enemy hunger." She would call him coward and accuse him of a feeble,
intimidated will. Were the case to be reversed, she would never curb her
hatred to prolong his existence; of that he was certain. He could see her
now bending over him, her thumb turned down with the majestic fearlessness
of a Cæsar. She would term her act justice, and she would carry out the
sentence without a tremor.
But now that the same chance had come to him, and he saw the old woman
stretched before him, her thin white hair snowy against the wooden
flooring, a vague pity stirred in his heart. Death must come to us all
sometime; but how tragic to have its approach unheralded, granting not an
instant in which to raise a prayer to Heaven. No, he could not let his
worst foe go down to the grave thus. He was the captain of his own soul,
but not of Ellen Webster's.
He glanced up to find Lucy's gaze fixed upon him. There was horror and
anguish in her eyes, and he realized that she had read aright the
temptation that assailed him. She did not speak, she seemed scarcely to
breathe: but the pleading face told him that should he yield to his
darker passions and show no pity, she would forever loathe him for his
cruelty. Plainly as he saw this, however, it was not to her silent
entreaty that he surrendered. Something deeper than love was calling him.
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not
charity----" How persistently the sentences came to him! They seemed to
echo from out his memory--in his mother's voice--the voice of a vanished
past. She had taught him the words when he was a boy, and he had not
thought of them since. Why did they now surge into his mind to weaken his
resolve and cause him to waver in his intention? He wished he could get
away from Lucy's eyes and the sight of the woman upon the floor. Had his
mother lived, she might sometime have been as frail as this and had hair
as white. A sob broke from him, and he stooped over his fallen foe.
"Where do you want I should carry her?" he asked, raising the limp body in
his arms.
Lucy did not answer at once, and when she did her reply was unsteady.
"The room is at the head of the stairs," she said, struggling to speak in
her customary tone. "Maybe I'd better go first."
The hushed intimacy of the tragedy suddenly brought the man and the woman
very close together.
She led the way and he followed with his helpless burden. The form he bore
was not heavy. In fact, it was so fragile that it seemed impossible that
it could harbor so much venom and hatred.
Ellen Webster was, after all, nothing but an old, old woman. Perhaps, he
reflected, in a wave of regret, he should have realized this and made
allowance for it. Then a reaction from his tense emotion swept over him,
and he thought with amusement how angry she would be should she suddenly
regain consciousness and find herself within his grasp.
But she did not come to herself, and when he laid her on the bed that Lucy
had prepared, she was still as unmindful of his touch as she would have
been had the spirit within her really taken flight.
Martin did not linger now. His decision was made.
"I'll step over home an' get the other horse an' team, an' fetch the
doctor back," he said quietly.
"I wish you would."
She did not thank him, accepting the favor with the simplicity of a weaker
nature that leans unabashed on a stronger. Her dependence and her
confession of it thrilled him with pleasure. She heard him creep
cautiously down over the stairs and go out at the side door.
Then she turned her attention to making more comfortable the helpless
woman upon the bed. When at length there was nothing more she could do,
she sat down to wait the doctor's coming. The time dragged on. It seemed
an eternity before help came.
In the meantime Ellen lay immovable as she had done from the first, her
hard, sharp-cut features harder and more sharply defined in their pallor
than the girl had realized them to be. In the furrowed brow, the deep-set
eyes, the pitiless mouth there was not one gentle line which death could
borrow to soften the stamp with which revenge and bitterness had branded
her. So she would look in her coffin, Lucy thought with awe. Majesty might
come into her face in the last great moment; but it would be the majesty
of hate, not of love.
What a sad, sad ending to a life!
As the girl sat thinking of the friendless, isolated existence of the
woman before her, she wondered idly what her aunt would have been, if,
while her nature was still plastic, she had married and sacrificed her ego
in years of service for others. Ah, she would never then have come to this
lonely, embittered old age! Children would have prattled at her knee, and
their children would have made glad the silent house. How full of joy and
opportunity such an existence would have been!
But these blessings, alas, had not been granted Ellen. Perhaps it had been
her own fault. She may deliberately have thrust the gentle visitant, Love,
from her dwelling, and once repulsed he may never have sought again for
entrance.
Or it might be the woman was one at whose door the god had never knocked.
Oh, the pity of it!
For after all did life hold any gift so rare, so supreme, as the perfect
devotion of a man and woman who loved one another. It must be a wonderful
thing, that divine miracle of Love.
Dreamily Lucy's gaze wandered off to the sunny fields, and with solemn
realization it came to her that should Ellen die, they and all the Webster
lands would be hers, to do with as she pleased. There were so many things
she had been powerless to get her aunt to do. The house needed repairs if
it were to be preserved for coming generations: certain patches of soil
had been worked too long and should be allowed to lie fallow; there were
scores of other improvements she would like to see carried out. Now she
would be free to better the property as she saw fit. She would talk with
Martin Howe about it. He was brimming with all the latest farming methods.
She would get him to buy her a cultivator such as he used in his own
garden, and a wheel-hoe. He could advise her, too, about plowing buckwheat
into the soil. And Martin would know what to do about shingling the barn
and cementing the cellar.
In fact, it was amazing to discover how inseparable Martin seemed to be
from her plans. He was so strong, so wise, just the type of man a woman
could depend upon for sympathy and guidance. Absently she twisted the
ring on her finger.
Her mind had traveled to the events of the morning, to his battle with
himself and final victory. How appealing had been his surrender! The stern
personality had melted into a tenderness as winning as a child's.
If he loved a woman and she loved him---- She started guiltily to find
Ellen staring at her with vague, troubled eyes.
"Where--where--am--I--?" asked the woman in a weak, quavering voice.
"Upstairs in your own room, Aunt Ellen," replied Lucy gently.
"How'd I come here?"
"You didn't feel very well."
"Yes. I remember now. I fell, didn't I?"
"I'm afraid so."
"I was fussin' at somethin', an' it made me dizzy. 'Twas the heat, I
guess. Where'd you find me?"
"In the kitchen."
"An' you managed to bring me here?"
Her niece hesitated.
"Yes," she answered firmly.
Ellen paused and with dread the girl awaited her next question. But no
question came. Either the clouded mind was in too vague a mood to grasp
details, or the invalid did not care. She seemed to be thinking.
"So I fell," she repeated at last.
"Yes."
Again there was a pause, and during the stillness Lucy plainly heard the
sound of approaching wagon wheels. It must be Martin with the doctor. She
rose softly.
"Where you goin'?" demanded her aunt.
"Just downstairs a minute. I think the doctor----"
"You didn't send Tony for the doctor!" the invalid exclaimed, a feeble
querulousness vibrating in the words.
"Yes; I didn't know what else to do."
"He can't help any."
"Perhaps he can."
"I tell you he can't," snapped Ellen. "I know well enough what's the
matter with me without bein' told. I've had a shock. My feet are all cold
and numb: I can't feel nothin' in 'em, nor move 'em. There ain't no remedy
for that. You're only wastin' money gettin' the man here to tell me what I
already know. I shan't see him."
Lucy waited a moment.
"I'm sorry I sent for him if you don't want him," she said. "But now that
he is here, don't you think he'd better come up? We don't need to have him
come again."
Ellen did not respond at once. Then with more animation than she had
exhibited, she said:
"I s'pose we'll have to pay him whether he comes up or not, so I may's
well get my money's worth out of him. Go and fetch him. He'll likely be
tickled to death to see with his own eyes how bad off I am so'st he can go
back an' blab the news in the village. Folks will be thankful to have
something new to talk about."
Lucy could not but smile at the characteristic remark. She went out and
soon returned with Doctor Marsh tiptoeing gingerly behind her.
He was a heavy, florid man whom the combination of heat and speed had
transformed into a panting mechanism. Mopping the beads of perspiration
from his brow, he started to seat himself at Ellen's bedside, but the
woman waved him off.
"Don't come any nearer," she called, "and don't bring that bag of pills
and plasters in here, either. I shan't need nothin' you've got. I know
that well's you do; an' I know better'n you do that there ain't no help
for me. You needn't stay, an' you needn't come in. Good mornin'."
Having delivered herself of this ultimatum at a single breath, Ellen
turned her head and closed her eyes.
The doctor looked at her in astonishment but did not move.
"Clip right along home," reiterated the sick woman without looking at the
physician. "My niece'll pay you as you go out. I reckon you won't charge
more'n half price, since you ain't done nothin'."
"I usually have----"
"Mebbe. But this call ain't like your usual ones, is it?"
"No," responded the doctor with dignity, "I can't say that it is."
"Then you can't expect to get so much for it," piped Ellen triumphantly.
"My niece will settle with you. Give him a dollar, Lucy--not a cent more.
He'll have fun enough gossipin' about me to make up the rest of the fee."
Doctor Marsh, his face a study in outraged decorum, stalked indignantly
from the room. Ellen, peeping from beneath her lids, watched him with
satisfaction.
"Has he gone?" she demanded, when Lucy returned.
"Yes."
"Thank the Lord. The fool doesn't know anything, anyway. Now you go back
downstairs an' finish up your work. There ain't no call for you to be
idlin' the day out, even if I am."
"I don't like to leave you alone."
"Pooh, pooh! I can't no more'n die, an' if I was to start doin' that you
couldn't stop me."
Lucy moved toward the door; then turning she remarked gently:
"I'm so sorry, Aunt Ellen."
"Eh?"
"I'm sorry you're ill."
"Are you?" questioned the old woman, searching the girl's face with her
small, flinty eyes. "Mebbe you are. You generally tell the truth. I guess
if you do feel so, you're the only one; an' I don't quite see how even you
can be."
"I am."
Her aunt fingered the sheet nervously.
"You're a good girl, Lucy," she presently observed in a weary tone. "You
won't lose nothin' by it, neither."
Embarrassed, her niece started from the room.
"Come back here a minute," muttered the woman drowsily. "I want to speak
to you."
Lucy recrossed the threshold and bent over Ellen, who had sunk back on the
pillows and was beckoning to her with a feeble, exhausted hand.
"You'll stay by me, won't you?" she pleaded in a whisper, for the first
time displaying a consciousness of her helpless, dependent condition.
"Promise you won't desert me. I'm leavin' you the place an' ten thousand
dollars."
CHAPTER XIII
MELVINY ARRIVES
When Lucy descended to the kitchen she was surprised to be confronted by
Jane Howe.
"Martin told us your aunt was sick, so I came over to see what I could
do," said the visitor softly. "I reckon you're all up in a heap. Sickness
makes a sight of trouble. I know what it is 'cause I've had it. Let me
take right hold and put the kitchen to rights for you."
The words were hearty with sincerity, and the woman's intention of
rendering neighborly assistance genuine, for she promptly produced a large
pinafore from under her arm and proceeded to put it on.
"You're just as good as you can be," Lucy exclaimed. "But indeed I
couldn't think of letting you do my work, especially on such a hot day as
this."
"Why not? Didn't I just tell you I came to help? If you wasn't to let me
lend a hand when you were in a tight place, I'd feel it warn't kind of
you," protested Jane, aggrieved. "Fetch the broom, an' I'll go straight to
sweepin' up. My, but you have a fine big kitchen here, haven't you?"
As she rolled up her sleeves she glanced about.
"It's a monstrous house though," she went on a minute later. "You'll never
be able to do all there'll be to do now, unless you have help. Let alone
the work, you never can manage to lift your aunt by yourself. I reckon
you'll have to send for Melviny Grey."
"And who, pray, is she?"
"Melviny? Ain't you never heard of Melviny?"
Jane regarded Lucy with astonishment.
"No."
"Oh, well, that's because you warn't born and raised here," she explained.
"Why, Melviny's one of the institutions of Sefton Falls. Nothin' goes on
in the way of tribulation without Melviny bein' to it."
"Oh, I see. She's a nurse."
"No, you couldn't really call her that," replied Jane thoughtfully. "An'
still I don't know but you might as well tag her that way as any. 'Twould
be hard to tell just what Melviny is. She ain't only a nurse, 'cause
she's a dressmaker; an' she ain't exactly a dressmaker, 'cause she makes
bonnets; besides that she cleans house for folks, puts up pickles, and
tends all the new babies. Melviny's just a sort of present help in time of
trouble."
Lucy smiled.
"I believe, too, she ain't busy just now--not more'n ordinarily busy, I
mean," Jane hastened to add quickly. "As I remember it, the Bartons'
baby's just come, an' the Wheeler one ain't due yet; so I guess Melviny's
yours for the askin'. An' if you can get her, you'll have a whole team."
"I don't know whether Aunt Ellen----" began Lucy uneasily, but Jane
interrupted her:
"Oh, it ain't to be expected your aunt will want her," she cut in
serenely. "She won't want anybody. 'Twill drive her well-nigh crazy to
think of spendin' the money. But 'tain't right for you to try to do all
there is to be done alone, an' you mustn't undertake it. Just go right
ahead an' get somebody in, whether your aunt likes it or not. That's the
way I'd do if it was Martin. Besides, 'tain't as if Melviny was different.
She fits in anywhere. She warn't ever known not to. She asks no questions
an' has got no opinions. She just sorter goes along as if she was walkin'
in her sleep, turnin' neither to the right nor to the left. Whatever house
she's in, it's all the same to her. I believe she'd jog up to a patient
with a breakfast tray if the stairs was burnin' under her. Nothin' moves
her."
There was a rippling laugh from Lucy.
"We'd have to have somebody like that," she said.
"You certainly would," agreed Jane. "That's why I feel Melviny's just the
one for you."
"It is so good of you to be interested."
"Bless your heart, I reckon the whole town's interested in Miss Webster
bein' took down," confessed Jane naively. "But I don't deserve no credit
for this plan; 'twas Martin's idea."
"Mar--your brother's?"
"Yes. Martin's awful upset 'bout your aunt bein' sick," announced Jane.
"He must 'a' heard it in the village when he was there this mornin', for
the minute he got back he sent me over to urge you to get somebody in.
'Course he wouldn't come himself. That would be too much to expect. But he
actually said that if you decided to fetch Melviny he'd go and get
her--an' from him that means a heap. I 'most fell over backwards when he
suggested it, for you know how Martin feels toward your aunt."
Lucy nodded in confusion. She had an uncomfortable sense that she was not
being quite frank with Jane.
"Martin would do 'bout anything for you, Miss Lucy," the woman asserted in
a sudden burst of confidence. "I----"
A cry from upstairs cut short the sentence.
"Lucy!"
"Yes, Aunt Ellen, I'll be right there."
"Go right up: I'll finish things here," whispered Jane hurriedly. "All is,
if you want Martin to go for Melviny, you have only to say the word. You
can wave a handkerchief out of the window, an' he'll understand."
"Where does Miss Grey----"
"For the land sake don't call her that. Nobody'd know who you meant, an'
she wouldn't, either."
"Well, Melviny, then--where does she live?"
"Down in the valley--King's Hollow, they call it."
"Why, it's miles!" protested Lucy in dismay. "I can't send your brother
way down there. He's been doing nothing but errands all day."
"I know it," Jane replied. "He's been to town twice already. He came home
this noon with a load of grain an' then changed horses an' went right back
to the village again 'cause he forgot something. Likely you noticed him
drivin' past."
The girl colored before Jane's friendly glance. She longed to tell the
whole truth, for by nature she was a person of great frankness. Since,
however, Martin had not seen fit to enlighten his sisters, perhaps it was
wiser that she should not do so. He may have had his own reasons for
keeping them in ignorance.
"Lucy!"
"Yes, I'm coming, Aunt Ellen."
"Do go along," implored Jane; "she may suspect something. I'll leave the
house all picked up, tidy as a pin. You won't forget to wave to Martin if
you want him."
"No. Thank you a thousand times, Ja--Miss Howe."
"Jane'll do," smiled the woman kindly. "I'm more used to it."
Catching her visitor's hand in a quick grasp, Lucy pressed it warmly and
then sped up the stairs.
"Whatever have you been putterin' about so long?" queried Ellen
petulantly.
"I was clearing up."
"That's good. I guess the place needed it," sighed her aunt. "I warn't
half through straightenin' things in the kitchen. I thought I heard you
talkin'."
"Heard me?"
"Probably 'twas a notion. My head kinder buzzes." Then she suddenly turned
suspiciously on the girl, adding sharply:
"You ain't been over to the Howes'?"
"No."
"That's right. An' don't you go, neither. We don't need no help from
them."
A pause followed.
"Did you want me for something?" Lucy at last inquired, after waiting for
her aunt to speak.
"Yes, I did."
Nevertheless Ellen made no further remark for some time. Finally she burst
out fretfully:
"I'm almighty afraid I'll have to hire in somebody, after all."
The last two words were peculiarly illuminating.
"You mean somebody to help?"
"Yes," grumbled the older woman with peevish shrillness. "We've got a pull
ahead of us; I know that well enough. An' I s'pose you ain't got enough
muscle to lift me. Likely you couldn't even raise me up on the pillows if
you was to try. How you ever got me upstairs beats all."
Lucy hastily turned her head aside.
"They do say, though," continued Ellen, "that sometimes when folks are
scat to death they can do things they can't do any other time. You were
scat, I s'pose."
"Yes, I was."
"Mebbe you was scat worse when you found I warn't dead," chuckled the sick
woman disagreeably.
The girl did not reply. Ellen paused; then seemed to regret her ill
humor.
"Now 'bout a woman----" She halted abruptly.
"Have you any one in mind?" Lucy asked timidly.
"No," returned Ellen emphatically, "I haven't. I hate all the folks in
this town about equally--that is, all except the Howes," she concluded
with significant emphasis.
"Isn't there a nurse in the village?"
"There's Melviny Grey."
"Is she a nurse?" the girl inquired innocently.
"Melviny ain't never been classified," retorted Ellen grimly. "She's
neither fish, flesh nor fowl. She's taught school; laid out the dead; an'
done the Lord only knows what durin' her lifetime. She can turn her hand
to most anything; an' they do say she's mum as an oyster, which is a
virtue out of the common in a woman."
"Suppose I see if we can get her?" suggested Lucy.
"Well," returned Ellen, with a reluctant groan, "I reckon you'll have to.
You can send Tony for her when he gets back, though how he'll find her I
don't know. You might's well hunt for a needle in a haystack as to track
down Melviny. She's liable to be most anywheres tendin' babies or trimmin'
bunnits; an' Tony's such a numskull."
"I guess we can locate her."
"Well, pack him off anyhow, the minute he gets home; an' tell him not to
do any unnecessary travelin', an' to keep where the ground is smooth if
he can. There's no use wearin' out Dolly's new shoes by trapesin' over the
stones in 'em the first thing. Don't be afraid to speak up good and sharp
to Tony. He's used to it an' understands it better. Ain't it the devil's
own luck I should be chained down here like this!"
"Maybe you'll be better before long."
"Don't be a fool," snarled Ellen. "Of course I shan't."
She closed her eyes, and Lucy saw her face first harden into a rebellious
frown, then relax into sleep. As soon as the girl was quite sure she would
not be heard, she went to the window and, drawing aside the curtain, waved
her handkerchief.
Evidently Martin Howe was awaiting the signal, for on receiving it he
sprang up from the chopping block where he was sitting and, returning the
salute, disappeared into the barn from which he presently emerged with his
surrey and bay mare.
Lucy lingered to see him rattle out of the yard and pass over the crest of
the hill. Then with a strange sense of comfort and companionship she went
back to her aunt's room. She sat there until dusk, watching the sleeping
woman upon the bed.
Then Melvina arrived. She proved to be a large, placid-faced woman with a
countenance from which every human emotion had been eliminated until it
was as expressionless as a bronze Buddha. If she had ever known sorrow,
delight, affection, surprise, it was so long ago that her reactionary
system had forgotten how to reflect these sensations. It was obvious that
nothing concerned her outside her immediate calling and that she accepted
this with a stoical immovability which was neither to be diverted nor
influenced.
Taking Lucy's hand in a loose, pudgy grasp she remarked:
"A shock?"
"Yes, you see, my aunt----"
"How old is she?"
"A little over seventy-five. I was away and when I----"
"First shock?"
"Yes."
"Where is she?"
"Upstairs. But before you see her I want to explain that she is a
little--well, peculiar. You may find that she----"
"I shan't pay no attention," replied Melvina indifferently. "I've seen all
sorts--fretters, groaners, whiners, scolders; they're all one to me. So
you needn't give yourself any uneasiness."
She spoke in a voice as humdrum and colorless as was her round, flabby
face, and Lucy smiled in spite of herself.
"I fancy it isn't really necessary for me to tell you anything then," she
answered good-humoredly. "Of course you have had a wonderful chance to
study personalities."
"I never had a chance to study anything," responded Melvina in a
matter-of-fact manner. "All I know I've picked up as I went along."
"By study I mean that you have had a wide opportunity to observe human
nature," explained Lucy.
"If by human nature you mean folks, I have," Melvina said in her habitual
monotone.
After answering the remark, however, she made no further attempt at
conversation but lapsed into a patient silence, regarding Lucy with her
big, faded blue eyes. As she stood there, one gained an impression that
she could have stood thus for an indefinite length of time--forever, if
necessary. Not once did her gaze wander to her surroundings, and when Lucy
conducted her to the room that had been assigned her she entered it
without curiosity.
"I hope you will be comfortable here," the girl murmured with a hostess's
solicitude.
"I shall be."
"And if there is anything you want----"
"I'll ask for it."
Although there was no rebuke in the utterance, before this monument of
composure, Lucy, like David Copperfield in the presence of the waiter,
suddenly felt very young.
"Thank you; I wish you would," she managed to stammer, hastily closing the
door.
She reflected with amusement, as she made her retreat, that there were
several things she had intended to caution the new nurse not to mention,
one being that it was Martin Howe who had brought her hither. But after
having once seen Melvina Grey, such warnings became superfluous and
absurd. There was no more probability of Melvina's imparting to Ellen the
circumstances of her coming than there was of the rocks on the mountain
side breaking into speech and voicing their past history. Therefore she
crept downstairs to the kitchen to prepare supper, pondering as she went
as to how Ellen and this strangely stolid attendant would get on
together.
"It will be like a storm dashing against granite cliffs," she thought
whimsically. "Well, there is one merciful thing about it--I shall not have
to worry about Melviny gossiping or telling tales."
In this assumption Lucy was quite right. Melvina Grey proved not only to
be as dumb as an oyster but even more uncommunicative than that
traditionally self-contained bivalve. Notwithstanding her cheery
conversation about the weather, the crops, Sefton Falls, the scenery, she
never trespassed upon personalities, or offered an observation concerning
her immediate environment; nor could she be beguiled into narrating what
old Herman Cole died of, or whether he liked his son's wife or not. This
was aggravating, for Melvina had been two years a nurse in the Cole family
and was well qualified to clear up these vexed questions. Equally futile,
too, were Ellen's attempts to wring from her lips any confidential
information about the Hoyles' financial tangles, despite the fact that she
had been in the house during the tragedy of Samuel Hoyle's failure and
had welcomed the Hoyle baby into the world.
"Why, the woman's a clam--that's what she is!" announced the exasperated
patient. "You can get nothin' out of her. She might as well not know
anything if she's going to be that close-mouthed. I don't believe hot
irons would drag the words out of her. Anyhow, she won't go retailin' our
affairs all over town after she goes from here; that's one comfort!"
Lucy endorsed the observation with enthusiasm. It was indeed just as well
that Melvina did not report in the sick room all that went on downstairs.
What, for example, would have been Ellen's feeling had she known that
every morning some one of the Howe sisters came stealing across the fields
to help with the Webster housework? And what would she have said on
discovering that it was her hereditary enemy Martin himself who not only
directed the cultivation of her garden but assumed much of its actual
work.
Ah, Ellen would have writhed in her bed had such tidings been borne to
her. She would, in truth, probably have done far more than writhe had she
been cognizant that every evening this same Mr. Martin Howe, arrayed with
scrupulous care, leaped the historic wall and came to sit on the Webster
doorstep and discuss problems relative to plowing and planting. And if, as
frequently happened, the talk wandered off from cabbages and turnips to
sunsets and moon glades, and if sometimes there were conscious intervals
when there was no talk at all, who was the wiser? Certainly not Ellen, who
in her dim chamber little suspected that the pair who whispered beneath
her window had long since become as oblivious to the fact that they were
Howe and Webster as were Romeo and Juliet that they were Montague and
Capulet.
No, the weeks passed, and Ellen lay in blissful ignorance that the shuttle
of Fate, ever speeding to and fro, was subtly entangling in its delicate
meshes these heirs of an inherited hatred.
Martin's sisters saw the romance and rejoiced; and although she gave no
sign, Melvina Grey must also have seen it.
As for the man and his beloved, they dwelt apart in an ephemeral world
where only the prosaic hours when they were separated were unreal. Their
realities were smiles, sighs, glances,--the thousand and one nothings
that make up the joys and agonies of a lover's existence. Thus the weeks
passed.
In the meanwhile, as a result of rest and good care, Ellen steadily became
stronger and soon reached a point where it was no empty platitude to
assure her that she was really better.
"I do believe we shall have you downstairs yet, Aunt Ellen," said Lucy
gaily. "You are gaining every minute."
"It's time I gained," Ellen retorted with acidity.
"You're gainin' all right," echoed Melvina. "I plan to have you settin' up
soon. Sometime, when you're havin' a good day an' feel real spry, I mean
to hist you into a chair an' let you take a look at the view."
The date for this innovation came sooner than either Lucy or the
optimistic nurse foresaw, for Ellen continued to mend so rapidly that one
afternoon, when twilight was deepening into purple, Melvina proposed to
attempt the experiment of moving the invalid.
"How'd you like to try settin' up a spell to-night?" she inquired without
preamble. "I'll get a chair ready, and fix you in it, an' shove you over
to the window so'st you can look out. There ain't much to see, to be sure;
still the change will rest you, an' mebbe you'll sleep better after it."
Ellen did not demur. Melvina had proved herself a trustworthy pilot and
demonstrated that her suggestions were worth considering.
"All right," she replied. "Only hadn't you better call Lucy?"
"What for?"
"To help you."
A contemptuous smile curled Melvina's lips.
"Bless your soul an' body, I've no need of help," was her answer. "You
don't weigh nothin', an' even if you did, I've moved so many folks that I
wouldn't hesitate. You ain't afraid, are you?"
"Mercy, no."
"There's no cause for you to be," went on the nurse reassuringly. "I know
what I'm about. All you've got to do is to mind what I tell you."
Ellen's jaw squared itself.
"I 'spect that's about all I'll ever do again," she returned in a biting
tone.
The proposed adventure subsequently resolved itself into a much simpler
undertaking than it had promised, for Ellen was light as a feather and
Melvina strong, deft, and experienced. Hence without mishap the invalid
was transferred to the big chair and rolled to the window, where she could
look out on the valley melting into the shadows of evening.
Had she restricted her observations to the scenery she might have returned
to her couch refreshed both in mind and body; but unluckily she chanced to
let her glance wander to the garden, and there an astonishing sight met
her eyes.
In the seclusion of the lilac hedge stood two figures, that of a man and a
woman. The man held in his hand a trowel and was transplanting in the rich
brown soil some tender green things which the woman was handing him from a
basket. The presence of a stranger who was apparently so much at home
within her boundaries was in itself sufficient to arouse Ellen's
curiosity; but what whetted curiosity to indignation was the manner in
which the pair were performing the simple task. Even a person blind to
romance and deaf to sentiment could not help realizing that the planting
was a very immaterial part of the pastoral tableau, and there was much
more significance in the drama than the setting out of young seedlings.
Fascinated, Ellen gazed, her wrath rising.
"Melviny!" she burst out at last, "come here!"
"Yes, Miss Webster."
"Who's that out in the garden?"
"Where?"
"Over there near the lilac hedge," specified Ellen impatiently.
Melvina rubbed her glasses then smothered a little gasp; but she quickly
recovered her wonted stolidity.
"It's Miss Lucy, I reckon," she said slowly.
"But the man--the man!" persisted Ellen. "Who is he?"
"Oh, the man. That's Mr. Howe--the one that lives next door."
"Martin Howe?"
"Yes, I believe they do call him Martin," responded Melvina imperturbably,
resuming her interrupted task of turning the mattress and plumping its
feathers into luxurious billows of softness.
Ellen did not speak immediately. When she did it was to ask:
"What's Martin Howe doin' on my land?"
"Helpin', I s'pose," Melvina replied with indifference. "He often does."
"He comes over here an' works?"
"Yes, marm."
Ellen brought her fist down on the arm of the chair with an exclamation of
anger. Her lips were white, and she trembled. Raising her unsteady finger,
she pointed toward the unconscious culprits.
"You go straight out there, Melvina," she cried, "an' tell Lucy I want
her."
"Yes, marm."
"Hurry!"
"Yes."
She watched while Melvina plodded across the grass and delivered her
message. Instantly Lucy dropped the basket and hastened toward the house.
Another moment the girl stood before her.
"You're worse, Aunt Ellen?" she said, panting for breath.
But Ellen ignored the question.
"What's Martin Howe doin' in my garden?" she demanded fiercely.
Lucy paled.
"He came over to help me transplant the larkspur."
"By what right does he come over here, I'd like to know?"
No reply came.
"Has he been over before?" interrogated Ellen ruthlessly.
"Yes."
"When?"
"Oh, off an' on. He's been trying to help out since you've been ill."
"Help out!" repeated Ellen scornfully. "The coward! He wouldn't have dared
set foot on the place if I'd been well."
"He isn't a coward!"
Lucy had drawn herself to her full height and now confronted her aunt with
blazing eyes. Ellen, however, was not to be deterred.
"He _is_ a coward!" she reiterated. "A coward an' a blackguard! A curse on
the Howes--the whole lot of 'em!"
"Stop!"
The intonation of the single word brought Ellen's harangue to an abrupt
cessation.
"You shan't speak so of Martin Howe or of his family," cried the girl. "He
is no coward. If he had been as small-minded and cruel as you, he would
have left you to die on the floor the day you fell, instead of bringing
you upstairs and going for a doctor--you, who have cursed him! You had
better know the truth. Did you think it was I who placed you on this bed?
I couldn't have done it. I am not strong enough. It was Martin--Martin
Howe!"
Ellen stared stupidly.
"I'd rather have died!" she muttered between clinched teeth.
"Yes, you would," retorted Lucy. "You would rather have gone down to your
grave with bitterness in your soul and a curse upon your lips than to have
accepted aid from Martin Howe. You would not have helped him had he been
in trouble. You would have been glad to see him suffer--glad!"
The woman listened as if spellbound.
"But Martin Howe is too much of a Christian for that. Yes, you can sneer.
He is a Christian and a gentleman. You are not worthy to touch the ground
beneath his feet. He would not leave you without help. Since you have been
ill, he has given part of each day to working in your garden; and he is
busy and tired, too. He's done it that your crops might not fail. It is
Martin Howe that you have to thank for your harvest, whether you like it
or not--Martin Howe!"
Breathlessly she paused.
"You seem to have a terrible high opinion of Martin Howe," scoffed Ellen,
with scathing sarcasm.
"I have."
"Likely you're in love with him," jibed the tormentor.
"Yes, I love him."
The simple confession came proudly from the girl's lips.
"An' he loves you, no doubt," continued the old woman with a laugh. "At
least he's probably told you so."
"No, he hasn't."
"Oh-ho! He hasn't, eh?"
"No."
"An' never will," shouted the harpy triumphantly. "He ain't marryin' no
Websters--don't you think it for one minute. He's just makin' a fool of
you. That's his idea of revenge--your Christian gentleman!"
She rubbed her dank hands together.
"I don't believe it."
"You wouldn't be likely to," returned Ellen sharply. "I didn't expect it.
No girl is ever willin' to believe her lover's a scoundrel. But mark my
words--Martin Howe is playin' with you--playin'--just the way a cat plays
with a mouse. He's aimin' to get you into his clutches an' ruin you--wait
an' see if he ain't. Oh, he's a deep one, this gentleman you seem to think
so much of!"
"I'll not believe it," repeated Lucy hotly.
"You'd marry him, I s'pose," Ellen hissed.
"If he asked me, yes."
"You traitor! An' you a Webster!"
"I don't care."
The woman surveyed her niece in silence.
"Well," she said finally, "you can put your soul at rest. Martin Howe will
never marry you--never! He would no more marry anybody of the Webster
blood than he'd hang himself. Go on lovin' him if you want to. No good
will come of it."
With this parting prophecy Ellen shut her lips, and Lucy, throbbing from
the stripes of the encounter and seeing further parley fruitless, slipped
from the room and fled to the quiet of the still night's solitude.
After she had gone and Ellen was once more in bed, Melvina tried in vain
to quiet the increasing restlessness of her patient, but all attempts to
soothe the invalid were without avail. Tossing from side to side on the
pillows, her fingers picking nervously at the coverings, Ellen stared into
the darkness, breaking from time to time into fragments of angry
dialogue.
The benediction of the evening's peace, musical with the rustling of
leaves and laden with the perfume of blossoming vines, brought no solace
to her heart. Presently, unable to endure the silence longer, she started
up.
"Melviny," she called to the woman sitting beside her.
The nurse rose from the deepening gloom and stood erect in the moonlight,
her figure throwing upon the whitewashed wall a distorted, specterlike
silhouette.
"Yes, marm."
"Is Lucy still outdoors?"
"Yes."
Ellen waited an instant; then she said:
"There's somethin' in her room I want you should get for me."
"All right, Miss Webster."
"It's a long white envelope. You'll find it somewheres. It'll likely be in
her desk or the table drawer. It's sealed with red wax. You'll know it
when you come across it."
Although Melvina nodded, she did not move.
"You needn't be afraid to fetch it," explained Ellen querulously. "It's
mine. I gave it to Lucy to keep for me."
"I see."
Melvina started promptly on her quest.
"Don't be all night about it," was Ellen's parting admonition.
While the messenger was gone, the invalid gave vent to her impatience by
drumming rhythmically on the wooden edge of the bedstead, and this
measured tattoo increased in speed until it beat time with the feverish
bounding of her pulse and the throbbing of her heart.
"Ain't you found it yet?" she shouted at last.
"Yes, I've just come on it. It was under----"
"No matter where it was. Bring it here."
"I'm comin'."
Bearing the envelope, Melvina appeared in the doorway.
"Let me see it," said Ellen.
She took it in her hand and, while Melvina held the candle, examined the
package critically.
"Humph!" she muttered. "It's good as new."
For some unaccountable reason she seemed disappointed at the discovery.
"Now run downstairs and put it in the stove," she commanded excitedly.
"Wait till every smitch of it's burned up an' then come back."
"Yes, marm."
But again Melvina loitered.
"I tell you the thing is mine to do with as I please," declared Ellen
angrily.
"Yes, marm."
"Ain't you going?"
"Y-e-s."
As she heard the nurse's reluctant step on the stairs, an evil light came
into the old woman's face.
"I'll fix that!" she whispered aloud.
It took Melvina some time to fulfill her errand, but at length she
returned, and the moment she was inside the door Ellen's shrill query
greeted her:
"Well, did you burn it?"
"Yes, marm."
"Every scrap of it?"
"Yes."
"You didn't leave nothin'?"
"No."
The woman in the bed drew a satisfied breath.
"That's all right then. Now get me a drink of water, an' I'll go to
sleep."
The sleep she craved, however, did not come, for throughout the night she
continued to move unceasingly.
"Your aunt didn't so much as close her eyes," announced Melvina to Lucy
the next morning, while the two sat at breakfast. Nevertheless, although
she advanced this information, with characteristic secretiveness she said
nothing of the happenings of the previous evening.
Truly if "Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from
troubles," Melvina's eternal serenity of spirit was assured.
CHAPTER XIV
A PIECE OF DIPLOMACY
When Lucy, radiant in her own happiness, entered her aunt's room, she was
surprised to find that all Ellen's recent anger had apparently vanished,
and that she had dropped into a lethargic mood from which it was difficult
to rouse her. It was not so much that the elder woman was out of
temper--that was to be expected--as that she seemed to be turning over in
her mind some problem which was either unsolved or unpleasant, and which
knitted her brow into a web of wrinkles, forcing her lips together with an
ominous curl.
Lucy, who stood at the table arranging a vase of freshly gathered pansies,
furtively studied the invalid's sullen reverie.
"How are you feeling to-day, Aunt Ellen?" she at last inquired with
courageous effort.
"No different."
"Melvina said she was afraid you did not have a comfortable night."
The blue eyes flashed a suspicious glance of inquiry over the questioner's
countenance, then closed wearily.
"I didn't," was all she said.
"I am sorry to hear that."
The regret was uttered with gentle sincerity. In an existence cloudless as
her own, magnanimousness required little effort. Moreover, Lucy was
forgiving by nature; and had she not been, the helplessness and
friendlessness of the lonely soul before her would have presented a
powerful plea for pity.
Ellen did not respond to the words.
"What was the trouble?" went on Lucy, after waiting a suitable length of
time and sensing that no answer was to be forthcoming. "Were you in
pain?"
At the interrogation a flame of hatred leaped into the woman's face,
flickered there, and then died down, leaving it cold and hard as marble.
"I got to thinkin'," she returned briefly.
"I hope what I said did not worry you, Aunt Ellen."
"It did last night; but it don't now," responded Ellen, with a
disagreeable laugh.
"That's good. I should be sorry to have been the cause of your lying here
fretting."
"I ain't doin' no frettin' now," repeated Ellen. Then, changing a subject
both seemed to regard as a delicate one, she asked in a more natural tone:
"What were you plannin' to do this mornin'?"
"Oh, just the regular things," Lucy said cordially, glad to be once more
on safer ground. "Why?"
"'Cause I'm possessed of a hankerin' for some raspberries," said Ellen. "I
like 'em, an' I ain't had any for a long time. Somehow it seems as if
they'd taste awful good."
Lucy's face lighted.
"Why, I'd be glad to try and get some for you, Aunt Ellen," she cried.
"You know I'd love to get anything you wanted if I could. I'm so pleased
that you mentioned it."
Ellen twisted her head on the pillow and began outlining the figures on
the counterpane with her long, misshapen finger.
"I s'pose you couldn't find enough for a shortcake, could you?" she
ventured skeptically.
"I don't know but I could. At least, I could try. Of course it's late in
the season for them."
The lean finger continued to follow the flowered design of the
bedcovering.
"There used to be some late ones up at the top of Pine Ridge," remarked
the invalid casually. "That would be quite a walk though, an' likely
further than you'd care to go."
"No, indeed it wouldn't!"
There was fervor in the protest. Already visions of a morning in the blue
and gold world were shaping themselves in the girl's mind. No doubt Jane
Howe would go with her; probably Martin would be too busy to leave his
work; but if he were not, what a bit of Paradise they could have
together!
Ellen, who read her niece's thoughts almost as readily as if they had been
openly expressed, smiled a malevolent smile.
"It's a good four miles to the Ridge," she remarked. "Goin', comin', an'
pickin' would take you the whole mornin', I reckon."
"I'm afraid it would," agreed Lucy. "Could you spare me as long as that?"
"Yes. I don't need nothin'; an' if I do, Melviny can get it. I'd rather
have you go than not. If you could get me enough berries for a shortcake
it would be worth it."
The note of suppressed eagerness in the words caused Lucy to regard her
aunt with quick, indefinable suspicion.
But Ellen met the glance unflinchingly, and with a baffled sense of being
mistaken the girl hurried from the room. When she returned shortly
afterward and paused in the doorway, she presented a winning picture.
She had donned a short khaki skirt and a pair of riding leggings such as
she had been accustomed to wear in the West, and the broad sombrero
crowning her golden hair outlined it like a halo. A simple blouse turned
away to give freedom to the firm white throat completed the costume.
Dimpling with anticipation, she held up her tin pail.
"I'm off, Aunt Ellen," she called. "You shall have your shortcake if there
is a berry within five miles."
The woman listened to the fall of the light step on the stairs and the
fragment of a song that came from the girl's lips until the last note of
the music died away; then she called Melvina.
"Melviny!"
"Yes, marm."
"I want you should find Tony and tell him to harness up. There's
somethin' I need done in the village."
"All right, Miss Webster."
"Bring me a sheet of paper an' a pencil before you go."
The nurse entered with the desired articles.
"I'm sendin' to town for Lawyer Benton," announced the patient with
elaborate carelessness.
Neither Melvina's voice nor her face expressed the slightest curiosity.
"There's some business I must see to right away, an' I reckon I may's well
get it fixed up this mornin'."
"Yes, marm."
"Give Tony this note for Mr. Benton and tell him to fetch him back soon's
he can."
Nodding acquiescence, Melvina disappeared.
During the interval between the time the wheels rattled out of the yard
and rattled in again, Ellen fidgeted at a high-pitched excitement,
starting nervously at every sound. Sometimes she scowled; and once she
burst into a harsh, cracked peal of laughter. Her thoughts, whatever they
were, seemed to amuse her vastly.
The moment the tramp of the horse's hoofs sounded on the gravel outside,
she was alert and called to Melvina, stationed at the window:
"Is that Tony?"
"Yes, marm."
"Has he got Mr. Benton with him?"
"Yes, Miss Webster. An' there's somebody else, too."
"That's good. Show Mr. Benton right up here. You needn't wait. I'll call
you when I need you. Let the other man sit in the kitchen 'til we want
him."
Whatever the mysterious business was, it took no great while, for before
an hour had passed Melvina, waiting in the hall outside the chamber door,
heard a shrill summons.
"You can come in now, Melviny," Ellen said. "There's something here I want
you should put your name to; an' you can fetch that man who's downstairs,
an' Tony."
"All right."
When, however, a few seconds later Melvina, accompanied by the stranger
and the wondering Portuguese boy, entered the patient's room, it was Mr.
Benton who stepped into the foreground and who came obsequiously forward,
pen in hand, to address the attendant.
"The paper which you are about to sign, Miss Grey," he began pompously,
"is----" But Ellen cut short his peroration.
"It don't make no difference to Melviny what it is, Mr. Benton," she said
impatiently. "All she's got to do is to watch me write my name, an' then
put hers down where you tell her, together with Tony an' the other
witness. That will end it."
"But don't you think, Miss Webster, that in justice to Miss Grey, you
should inform her----"
"No, I don't," snapped Ellen. "Melviny don't care nothin' about my
affairs. I'll write my name. Then you can give her the pen an' let her
sign. That's all she's got to do."
Although Mr. Benton was a man of heavy, impressive appearance, he was in
reality a far less effectual person to combat opposition than he seemed,
and sensing that in the present instance it was easier to yield than to
argue, he allowed himself to be cowed into submission and meekly gave the
pen to Melvina who with blind faith inscribed her name on the crisp white
paper in a small cramped hand. Caleb Saunders, the witness Mr. Benton had
brought with him, next wrote his name, forming each letter with such
conscientiousness that Ellen could hardly wait until the painstaking and
elaborate ceremonial was completed.
"Now let Tony sign," she ordered imperiously. "He needn't stop to wash his
hands. A little dirt won't be no hindrance, an' I'm in a hurry to get this
thing out of the way so Mr. Benton can go back."
Yet notwithstanding Ellen's haste, for Tony to affix his name to the
document in question proved to be little short of a life work. Six times
he had to be instructed on which line to write; and when on the seventh
admonition his mind but vaguely grasped what was required of him, the
lawyer took his stand at his elbow and with finger planted like a
guidepost on the paper indicated beyond all chance of error where the
signature was to be placed. When, however, the pen was redipped and
upraised for the final legal touch, again it faltered. This time the delay
was caused by uncertainties of spelling, which, it must be confessed, also
baffled the combined intellects of the lawyer and the two women.
Paponollari was not a name commonly encountered in New England. The three
wrestled with it valiantly, but when a vote was taken, and it was set down
in accordance with the ruling of the majority, it was disheartening to
discover that, when all was said and done, the Portuguese lad was not at
all sure whether Tony was his Christian name or not.
"Good Lord!" ejaculated Ellen when, after more debating, the signature was
finally inscribed, "I'm clean beat out. Why, I could have deeded away the
whole United States in the time it's taken this lout of a boy to scribble
his name. Is it any wonder that with only a stupid idiot like this for
help, my garden's always behind other folks', an' my chores never done?"
Then to the bewildered, nerve-wracked alien she thundered:
"Don't blot it, you fool!--don't blot it! Can't you keep your fingers out
of the wet ink? Heavens, Melviny, do get him out of here!"
Tony was only too ready to retire. The ordeal had strained his patience
and had left his brain feeling the stress of unaccustomed exercise.
Therefore, allowing Melvina to drive him before her much as she would have
driven a docile Jersey from a cabbage patch, he made his way downstairs,
followed by the perspiring lawyer.
It was not until both of them were safely on the road to the village, and
the house had assumed its customary calm that Lucy arrived, her hair
tumbled by the wind and her eyes glowing like stars.
"I've got your berries, Aunt Ellen," she said, holding aloft a pail heaped
with fruit. "See what beauties they are! You shall have a royal
shortcake."
Ellen's appreciation for some reason was, however, scanty and confused.
She averted her glance from her niece's face, and even at noontime when
the girl appeared bearing a marvelously baked and yet more marvelously
decorated masterpiece of culinary art, she had not regained sufficient
poise to partake of the delicacy in any mood save that of furtive and
guilty silence.
Lucy, ever sympathetic, ventured the fear that the invalid was over-tired,
and after the meal drew the shades that her aunt might rest.
In the dim light Ellen seemed more at ease and presently fell into a deep
slumber that lasted until midnight and was broken only by some phantasy of
her dreams which intermittently brought from her lips a series of
muttered execrations and bitter, insinuating laughs.
Toward morning she roused herself and gave a feeble cry of pain. Instantly
alert, Melvina hastened to her bedside. But by the time a candle was
lighted all human aid was vain. Ellen Webster was dead.
CHAPTER XV
ELLEN'S VENGEANCE
It was useless to pretend that Ellen's death did not bring to Lucy Webster
a sense of relief and freedom. It was as if some sinister, menacing power
that had suppressed every spontaneous impulse of her nature had suddenly
been removed and left her free at last to be herself. Until now she had
not realized how tired she was,--not alone physically tired but tired of
groping her way to avoid the constant friction which life with her aunt
engendered.
For the first few days after the funeral she kept Melvina with her and did
nothing but rest. Then returning energy brought back her normal desire for
action, and she began to readjust her plans. Together the two women
cleaned the house from top to bottom, rooting into trunks, chests, and
cupboards, and disposing of much of the litter that Ellen had accumulated.
Afterward Melvina took her leave, and Lucy turned her mind to
renovations.
She would have new paper and fresh paint, she decided; also the
long-coveted chintz hangings; and to this end she would make an expedition
to the village to see what could be procured there in the way of artistic
materials. It might be necessary for her to go to Concord, or even to
Boston for the things she wanted.
In the meantime, since she was driving to town, perhaps she had better
take along her aunt's will. There must be formalities to be observed
regarding it, and although she was not at all sure what they were, Mr.
Benton would of course know.
But search as she would, the white envelope with its imposing red seal was
nowhere to be found. She went through every drawer in her bureau, every
pigeonhole in her desk; she ransacked closet and bookshelf; she even
emptied all her belongings upon the bed and examined each article
carefully to see if the missing document had by any chance strayed into a
fantastic hiding place; but the paper failed to come to light.
What could have become of it? The envelope had been there, that she knew.
Only a week ago she had seen it in the top drawer of her desk. She would
stake her oath that she had not removed it. Vague disquietude took
possession of her. Tony had always been honest, and of Melvina's integrity
there could be no question. As for Ellen, had she not herself put the will
into the girl's keeping--as a weapon with which to meet this very
emergency? It was incredible, preposterous to assume that she had taken it
back, especially when one considered her helplessness to do so unaided.
That solution might as well be dismissed as ridiculous.
The paper was lost, that was all there was to it. Lost!
In her own absent-mindedness, or in a moment of confusion and weariness,
she had either accidentally destroyed it, or she had removed it from its
customary place to a safer spot and forgotten where she had put it.
Yet, after all, how foolish it was of her to worry. Doubtless Mr. Benton
had a copy of the document, and if she made full confession of her
stupidity he would know what to do. Didn't lawyers always keep copies of
every legal paper they drew up? They must of course do so.
Therefore without breathing a word of her troubles to the Howes--not even
to Martin--she set forth to the village, her dreams of redecorating the
house being thrust, for the time being, entirely into the background by
this disquieting happening.
Mr. Benton was alone in his stuffy little office when she arrived.
Evidently his professional duties were not pressing, for he was hunched up
over a small air-tight stove and amid a smudge of tobacco smoke was
reading "Pickwick Papers." At the entrance of a client, however, and this
client in particular, he rose in haste, and slipping simultaneously into
his alpaca coat and his legal manner--the two seemed to be a one-piece
garment--held out his hand with a mixture of solicitude and pleasure.
"My dear Miss Webster," he began. "I hope you are well. You have sustained
a great loss since I last beheld you, a great loss."
He drew forward a second armchair similar to the one in which he had been
sitting and motioned Lucy to accept it.
"Your aunt was a worthy woman who will be profoundly missed in the
community," he continued in a droning voice.
Lucy did not answer. In fact the lawyer did not seem to expect she would.
He was apparently delivering himself of a series of observations which
came one after the other in habitual sequence, and which he preferred
should not be interrupted.
"Death, however, is the common lot of mankind and must come to us all," he
went on in the same singsong tone, "and I hope that in the thought of your
devotion to the deceased you will find comfort."
Having now terminated the introduction with which he was accustomed to
preface his remarks on all such occasions, he regarded the girl in the
chair opposite him benignly.
"I was intending to come to see you," he went on more cheerfully, and yet
being careful to modulate his words so that they might still retain the
bereavement vibration, "but you have forestalled me, I see. I did not wish
to hurry you unduly."
"I have been tired," Lucy replied simply, "but I am rested now and quite
ready to do whatever is necessary."
"I am glad to hear that, very glad," Mr. Benton returned. "Of course there
is no immediate haste; nevertheless it is well to straighten out such
matters as soon as it can conveniently be done. When do you contemplate
leaving town?"
Lucy met the question with a smile.
"Oh, I don't intend to leave Sefton Falls," she said quickly. "I have
grown very fond of the place and mean to remain here."
"Indeed," nodded Mr. Benton. "That is interesting. I am glad to hear we
are not to lose you from the village."
He rubbed his hands and continued to nod thoughtfully.
"About how soon, if I might ask so personal a question, do you think you
could be ready to hand over the house to the new tenant?" he at last
ventured with hesitation.
"I'm afraid I don't understand you."
The lawyer seemed surprised.
"You knew of your aunt's will?"
"I knew she had made a will, yes, sir. She gave it to me to keep for
her."
"You were familiar with the contents of it?"
"Not entirely so," Lucy answered. "I knew she had left me the house and
some money. She told me that much."
"U--u--m!" observed Mr. Benton. "But the second will--she spoke to you of
that also?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"You were not cognizant that a few days before the deceased passed--shall
we say, away"--he paused mournfully,--"that she made a new will and
revoked the previous one?"
"No."
"No one told you that?"
"No, sir."
The lawyer straightened himself. Matters were becoming interesting.
"There was a second will," he declared with deliberation. "It was drawn up
one morning in your aunt's room, with Miss Melvina Grey, Mr. Caleb
Saunders, and the boy Tony as witnesses."
Lucy waited breathlessly.
"This will," went on Mr. Benton, "provides for quite a different
disposition of the property. I must beg you to prepare yourself for a
disappointment."
The girl threw back her head.
"Go on, please," she commanded.
"Quite a different disposition of the property," repeated Mr. Benton,
dwelling on the cadence of the phrase.
"What is it?"
The man delayed.
"Have you any reason to suppose, Miss Webster, that your aunt was--shall
we say annoyed, with you?"
"I knew she did not like the way I felt about some things," admitted
Lucy.
"But did not some vital difference of opinion arise between you recently?"
Mr. Benton persisted.
"I spoke my mind to Aunt Ellen the other day," confessed the girl. "I had
to."
"Ah! Then that explains matters!"
"What matters?"
"The somewhat strange conditions of the will."
Having untangled the enigma to his own satisfaction, Mr. Benton proceeded
to sit back and enjoy its solution all by himself.
"Can't you tell me what they are?" Lucy at last inquired impatiently.
"I can enlighten you, yes. In fact, it is my duty to do so."
Rising, he went to the desk drawer and made a pretense of fumbling through
his papers; but it was easy to see that the document he sought had been
carefully placed on the top of the sparse, untidy pile that cluttered the
interior of the rickety piece of furniture.
"Perhaps," he remarked, "there is no real need to burden your mind with
legal formalities; nevertheless----"
"Oh, don't bother to read me the whole will," broke out Lucy sharply.
"Just tell me in plain terms what Aunt Ellen has done."
It was obvious that Mr. Benton did not at all relish the off-handedness of
the request.
He depended not a little on his professional pomposity to bolster up a
certain lack of confidence in himself, and stripped of this legal regalia
he shriveled to a very ordinary person indeed.
"Your aunt," he began in quite a different tone, "has left her property to
Mr. Martin Howe."
Lucy recoiled.
"To whom?"
"To Martin Howe."
There was an oppressive pause.
"To Martin Howe?" the girl stammered at length. "But there must be some
mistake."
Mr. Benton met her gaze kindly.
"I fear there is no mistake, my dear young lady," he said.
"Oh, I don't mean because my aunt has cut me off," Lucy explained with
pride. "She of course had a right to do what she pleased. But to leave the
property to Martin Howe! Why, she would scarcely speak to him."
"So I have gathered," the lawyer said. "That is what makes the will so
remarkable."
"It is preposterous! Martin will never accept it in the world."
"That contingency is also provided for," put in Mr. Benton.
"How?"
"The property is willed to the legatee--house, land, and money--to be
personally occupied by said beneficiary and not sold, deeded, or given
away on the conditions--a very unusual condition this second one----"
Again Mr. Benton stopped, his thumbs and finger neatly pyramided into a
miniature squirrel cage, over the top of which he regarded his client
meditatively. His reverie appeared to be intensely interesting.
"Very unusual indeed," he presently concluded absently.
"Well?" demanded Lucy.
"Ah, yes, Miss Webster," he continued, starting at the interrogation. "As
I was saying, the conditions made by the deceased are unusual--peculiar,
in fact, if I may be permitted to say so. The property goes to Mr. Martin
Howe on the condition that in six months' time he personally rebuilds the
wall lying between the Howe and Webster estates and now in a state of
dilapidation."
"He will never do it," burst out Lucy indignantly, springing to her feet.
"In that case the property goes unreservedly to the town of Sefton Falls,"
went on Mr. Benton in an even tone, "to be used as a home for the
destitute of the county."
The girl clinched her hands. It was a trap,--a last, revengeful, defiant
act of hatred.
The pity that any one should go down into the grave with such bitterness
of heart was the girl's first thought.
Then the cleverness of the old woman's plot began to seep into her mind.
All unwittingly Martin Howe was made a party in a diabolical scheme to
defraud her--the woman who loved him--of her birthright, of the home that
should have been hers.
The only way he could restore to her what was her own was to marry her,
and to do that he must perform the one deed he had pledged himself never
to be tempted into: he must rebuild the wall. Otherwise the property would
pass into other hands.
Nothing could so injure the Howe estate as to have a poor farm next door.
Ellen of course knew that. Ah, it was a vicious document--that last Will
and Testament of Ellen Webster.
Mr. Benton's voice broke in upon Lucy's musings.
"The deceased," he added with a final grin of appreciation, "appoints Mr.
Elias Barnes as executor, _he being_," the lawyer quoted from the written
page, "_the meanest man I know_."
Thus did the voice of the dead speak from the confines of the grave! Death
had neither transformed nor weakened the intrepid hater. From her aunt's
coffin Lucy could seem to hear vindictive chuckles of revenge and hatred,
and a mist gathered before her eyes.
She had had no regrets for the loss of Ellen's body; but she could not but
lament with genuine grief the loss of her soul.
CHAPTER XVI
LUCY COMES TO A DECISION
Slowly Lucy drove homeward, her dreams of rosy wall papers and gay chintz
hangings shattered. Thrusting into insignificance these minor
considerations, however, was the thought of Martin Howe and what he would
say to the revelation of Ellen's cupidity.
She would not tell him about the will, on that she was determined. She
would not mention it to anybody. Instead she would go promptly to work
packing up her few possessions and putting the house in perfect order.
Fortunately it had so recently been cleaned that to prepare it for closing
would be a simple matter.
As for herself and Martin, the dupes of an old woman's vengeance, both of
them were of course blameless. Nevertheless, the present twist of Fate had
entirely changed their relation to one another.
When she had defied her aunt and voiced with such pride her love for the
man of her heart, it had been in a joyous faith that although he had not
made similar confession, he would ultimately do so. The possibility that
he was making of her affection a tool for vengeance had never come into
her mind until Ellen had put it there, and then with involuntary loyalty
she had instantly dismissed the suggestion as absurd. But here was a
different situation. She was no longer independent of circumstances. She
was penniless in the world, all the things that should have been hers
having been swept away by the malicious stroke of a pen. It was almost as
tragic to be married out of spite as out of pity.
She knew Martin's standards of honor. He would recognize, as she did, the
justice of the Webster homestead and lands remaining in her possession;
and since the will stipulated that he must personally occupy these
properties and could neither sell, transfer, nor give them to their
rightful owner, she felt sure he would seize upon the only other means of
making her freehold legally hers. Whether he loved her or not would not
now be in his eyes the paramount issue. In wedding her he would feel he
was carrying out an act of justice which under the guise of affection it
would be quite legitimate to perform.
This solution of the difficulty, however, cleared away but the minor half
of the dilemma. Had she been willing to accept Martin's sacrifice of
himself and marry him, there still remained the wall,--the obstacle that
for generations had loomed between the peace of Howe and Webster and now
loomed 'twixt her and her lover with a magnitude it had never assumed
before.
Martin would never rebuild that wall--never!
Had he not vowed that he would be burned at the stake first? That he would
face persecution, nakedness, famine, the sword before he would do it? All
the iron of generations of Howe blood rung in the oath. He had proclaimed
the decree throughout the county. Everybody for miles around knew how he
felt. Though he loved her as man had never loved woman (a miracle which
she had no ground for supposing) he would never consent to such a
compromise of principles. The being did not exist for whom Martin Howe
would abandon his creed of honor.
She knew well that strata of hardness in his nature, the adamantine will
that wrought torture to its possessor because it could not bend. Even the
concessions he had thus far made, had, she recognized, cost him a vital
struggle. On the day of her aunt's seizure had she not witnessed the
warfare between pity and hatred, generosity and revenge? The powers of
light had triumphed, it is true; but it had been only after the bitterest
travail; and ever since she had been conscious that within his soul Martin
had viewed his victory with a smoldering, unformulated contempt. Even his
attentions to her had been paid with a blindfolded, lethargic
unwillingness, as if he offered them against the dictates of his
conscience and closed his eyes to a crisis he would not, dared not face.
It was one thing for her to light-heartedly announce that she loved Martin
Howe and would marry him; but it was quite another matter for him to reach
a corresponding conclusion. To her vengeance was an antiquated creed, a
remnant of a past decade, which it cost her no effort to brush aside.
Martin, on the contrary, was built of sterner stuff. He hated with the
vigor of the red-blooded hater, fostering with sincerity the old-fashioned
dogmas of justice and retribution. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth" was a matter of right; and the mercy that would temper it was not
always a virtue. More often it was a weakness.
To be caught in Ellen Webster's toils and own himself beaten would, Lucy
well understood, be to his mind a humiliating fate.
Only a compelling, unreasoning love that swept over him like some mighty
tidal wave, wrenching from its foundations every impeding barrier, could
move him to surrender; and who was she to arouse such passion in any
lover? She was only a woman human and faulty. She had indeed a heart to
bestow, and without vain boasting it was a heart worth the winning; she
held herself in sufficient esteem to set a price on the treasure. But was
it jewel enough to prompt a man to uproot every tradition of his moral
world for its possession?
Sadly she shook her head. No, Martin would never be lost in a mood of such
over-mastering love as this for her. If he made a proposal of marriage, it
would be because he was spurred by impulses of justice and pity; and no
matter how worthy these motives, he would degenerate into the laughing
stock of the community the instant he began to carry out the terms of the
will and reconstruct the wall. She could hear now the taunts and jests of
the townsfolk. Some of them would speak in good-humored banter, some with
premeditated malice; but their jibes would sting.
"So you're tacklin' that wall in spite of all you said, are you, Martin?"
"Ellen Webster's got you where she wanted you at last, ain't she,
Martin?"
"This would be a proud day for the Websters, Martin!"
There would even be those who would meanly assert that a man could be made
to do anything for money.
Ah, she knew what the villagers would say, and so, too, would Martin. How
his proud spirit would writhe and smart under the lash of their tongues!
Neither pity nor love for her should ever place him in a position of such
humiliation.
Before he was confronted by the choice of turning her out of doors, or
marrying her and making himself the butt of the county wits, she must
clear his path from embarrassment and be gone. She had a pittance of her
own that would support her until she could find employment that would
render her independent of charity. Her future would unquestionably be
lonely, since she must leave behind her not only the man she loved but the
home about which her fondest dreams centered. Nevertheless, she had never
lacked courage to do what must be done; and in the present emergency the
pride of the Websters came surging to re-enforce her in her purpose.
Nobody must know she was going away--nobody. There must be no
leave-takings and no tears. The regrets she had at parting with all she
held dear she would keep to herself, nor should any of her kindly
acquaintances have the opportunity to offer to her a sheltering roof as
they had to old Libby Davis, the town pauper.
Laughing hysterically, she dashed aside the tears that gathered in her
eyes. Would it not be ironic if the Webster mansion became a poor farm and
she its first inmate?
As for Martin--a quick sob choked her. Well, he should be left free to
follow whatever course he ordained. Perhaps he would scornfully turn
Ellen's bequest back to the town; perhaps, on the other hand, he would
conquer his scruples, rebuild the wall, and become rich and prosperous as
a result. With an augmented bank account and plenty of fertile land, what
might he not accomplish? Why, it would make him one of the largest
land-owners in the State!
A glow of pleasure thrilled her. She hoped he would accept the legacy; she
prayed he would.
Then, even though she were lonely and penniless, she would have the
satisfaction of knowing that what she had forfeited had been for his
betterment. There would be some joy in that. To give over her ancestral
homestead for a pauper institution that was neither needed nor necessary,
and was only a spiteful device of Ellen's to outwit her was an empty
charity.
Having thus formulated her future action, Lucy hastened to carry out her
plans with all speed. Before Mr. Benton imparted to Martin the terms of
the will, before any hint of them reached his ears, she must be far from
Sefton Falls; otherwise he might anticipate her determination and thwart
her in it.
How fortunate it was that there was so little to impede her flight! All
she owned in the world she could quickly pack into the small trunk she had
brought with her from the West. Not to one article in the house had she
any claim; Mr. Benton had impressed that upon her mind. Even the family
silver, the little dented mug from which her father had drunk his milk had
been willed away.
However, what did it matter now? Sentiment was a foolish thing. There
would never be any more Websters to inherit these heirlooms. She was the
last of the line; and she would never marry.
Having reached this climax in her meditations, she turned into the
driveway and, halting before the barn door, called to Tony to come and
take the horse. Afterward she disappeared into the house.
All the afternoon she worked feverishly, putting everything into
irreproachable order. Then she packed her few belongings into the little
brown trunk. It was four o'clock when she summoned the Portuguese boy from
the field.
"I want you to take me and my trunk to the station, Tony," she said,
struggling to make the order a casual one. "Then you are to come back here
and go on with your work as usual until Mr. Howe or some one else asks you
to do otherwise. I will pay you a month in advance, and by that time you
will be told what you are to do."
Tony eyed her uncomprehendingly.
"You ain't leavin' for good, Miss Lucy?" he inquired at last.
"Yes."
"B--u--t--t--how can you? Ain't this your home?"
"Not now, Tony."
The bewildered foreigner scratched his head.
The girl had been kind to him, and he was devoted to her.
"I don't see----" he began.
"By and by you will understand," said Lucy gently. "It is all right. I
want to go away."
"To go away from here?" gasped the lad.
Lucy nodded.
"Is it that you're lonely since Miss Ellen died?"
"I guess so."
Tony was thoughtful; then with sudden inspiration he ventured the remark:
"Mebbe you're afraid to stay alone by yourself in the house nights."
"Maybe."
"You ain't seen a ghost?" he whispered.
"I'm going away because of a ghost, yes," Lucy murmured half to herself.
"Then I don't blame you," exclaimed Tony vehemently. "You wouldn't ketch
me stayin' in a house that was haunted by spirits. Where you goin'--back
out West?"
"Perhaps so."
She helped him to carry the trunk out to the wagon and strap it in; then
she got in herself.
As they drove in silence out of the yard, not a soul was in sight; nor was
there any delay at the station to give rise to gossip. She had calculated
with such nicety that the engine was puffing round the bend in the track
when she alighted on the platform.
Hurriedly she bought her ticket, checked her trunk, and put her foot on
the step as the train started.
Waving a good-by to the faithful servant, who still lingered, she passed
into the car and sank down into a seat. She watched the valley, beautiful
in amethyst lights, flit past the window; then Sefton Falls, flanked by
misty hills, came into sight and disappeared. At last all the familiar
country of the moving panorama was blotted out by the darkness, and she
was alone.
Her eyes dropped to the ticket in her lap. Why she had chosen that
destination she could not have told. It would, however, serve as well as
another. If in future she was to be forever cut off from all she loved on
earth, what did it matter where she went?
CHAPTER XVII
THE GREAT ALTERNATIVE
After Lucy left the office, Mr. Benton sat for an interval thinking. Then
he yawned, stretched his arms, went to his desk drawer, and took out the
will which he slipped into his waistcoat pocket.
With hands behind him he took a turn or two across the room.
He was a man not lacking in feeling, and impulses of sympathy and mercy
until now had deterred him from the execution of his legal duties. Since,
however, it was Lucy Webster who had rung up the curtain on the drama in
which an important part had been assigned him, there was no need for him
to postpone longer the playing of his rôle. He had received his cue.
His lines, he admitted, were not wholly to his liking--not, in fact, to
his liking at all; he considered them cruel, unfair, vindictive.
Notwithstanding this, however, the plot was a novel one, and he was too
human not to relish the fascinating uncertainties it presented. In all his
professional career no case so remarkable had fallen to his lot before.
When as a young man he had attacked his calling, he had been thrilled with
enthusiasm and hope. The law had seemed to him the noblest of professions.
But the limitations of a small town had quickly dampened his ardor, and
instead of righting the injustices of the world as he had once dreamed of
doing, he had narrowed into a legal machine whose mechanism was never
accelerated by anything more stirring than a round of petty will-makings,
land-sellings, bill collections and mortgage foreclosures.
But at last here was something out of the ordinary, a refreshing and
unique human comedy that would not only electrify the public but whose
chief actors balked all speculation. He could not help owning that Ellen
Webster's bequest, heartily as he disapproved of it, lent a welcome bit of
color to the grayness of his days. Ever since he had drawn up the
fantastic document it had furnished him with riddles so interesting and
unsolvable that they rendered tales of Peter Featherstone and Martin
Chuzzlewit tame reading. These worthies were only creations of paper and
ink; but here was a living, breathing enigma,--the enigma of Martin Howe!
What would this hero of the present situation do? For undoubtedly it was
Martin who was to be the chief actor of the coming drama.
The lawyer knocked the ashes from his pipe, thrust it into his pocket and,
putting on his hat and coat, stepped into the hall, where he lingered only
long enough to post on his office door the hastily scrawled announcement:
"Will return to-morrow." Then he hurried across the town green to the shed
behind the church where he always hitched his horse. Backing the wagon out
with care, he jumped into it and proceeded to drive off down the high
road.
Martin Howe was in the field when Mr. Benton arrived. Under ordinary
conditions the man would have joined him there, but to-day such a course
seemed too informal, and instead he drew up his horse at the front door
and sent Jane to summon her brother.
Fortunately Martin was no great distance away and soon entered, a flicker
of curiosity in his eyes.
The lawyer began with a leisurely introduction.
"I imagine, Howe, you are a trifle surprised to have a call from me," he
said.
"Yes, I am a bit."
"I drove over on business," announced Mr. Benton.
Nevertheless, although he prefaced his revelation with this remark, he did
not immediately enlighten his listener as to what the business was. In
truth, now that the great moment for breaking silence had arrived, Mr.
Benton found himself obsessed with a desire to prolong its flavor of
mystery. It was like rolling the honied tang of a cordial beneath his
tongue. A few words and the secret would lay bare in the light of common
day, its glamor rent to atoms.
Martin waited patiently.
"On business," repeated Mr. Benton at last, as if there had been no break
in the conversation.
"I'm ready to hear it," Martin said, smiling.
"I came, in fact, to acquaint you with the contents of a will."
Yet again the lawyer's tongue, sphinxlike from habit, refused to utter
the tidings it guarded.
"The will," he presently resumed, "of my client, Miss Ellen Webster."
He was rewarded by seeing a shock of surprise run through Martin's frame.
"I don't see how Miss Webster's will can be any concern of mine," Martin
replied stiffly.
The attorney ignored the observation. Continuing with serenity, he
observed:
"As I understand it, you and Miss Webster were not----" he coughed
hesitatingly behind his hand.
"No, we weren't," cut in Martin. "She was a meddling, aggravating old
harridan. I hated her, and I'm glad she's gone."
"That is an unfortunate sentiment," remarked Mr. Benton, "unfortunate and
disconcerting, because, you see, Miss Ellen Webster has left you all her
property."
"_Me_! Left _me_ her property!"
The dynamic shock behind the words sent the man to his feet.
Mr. Benton nodded calmly.
"Yes," he reiterated, "Miss Webster has made you her sole legatee."
Martin regarded his visitor stupidly.
"I reckon there's some mistake, sir," he contrived to stammer.
"No, there isn't--there's no mistake. The will was legally drawn up only a
few days before the death of the deceased. No possible question can be
raised as to her sanity, or the clearness of her wishes concerning her
property. She desired everything to come to you."
"Let me see the paper!" cried Martin.
"I should prefer to read it to you."
Slowly Mr. Benton took out his spectacles, polished, and adjusted them.
Then with impressive deliberation he drew forth and unfolded with a mighty
rustling the last will and testament of Ellen Webster, spinster. Many a
time he had mentally rehearsed this scene, and now he presented it with a
dignity that amazed and awed. Every _whereas_ and _aforesaid_ rolled out
with due majesty, its resonance echoing to the ceiling of the chilly
little parlor.
As Martin listened, curiosity gave place to wonder, wonder to indignation.
But when at last the concluding condition of the bequest was reached, the
rebuilding of the wall, an oath burst from his lips.
"The harpy!" he shouted. "The insolent hell hag!"
"Softly, my dear sir, softly!" pleaded Mr. Benton in soothing tones.
"I'll have nothin' to do with it--nothin'!" stormed Martin. "You can
bundle your paper right out of here, Benton. Rebuild that wall! Good God!
Why, I wouldn't do it if I was to be flayed alive. Ellen Webster knew that
well enough. She was perfectly safe when she left me her property with
that tag hitched to it. She did it as a joke--a cussed joke--out of pure
deviltry. 'Twas like her, too. She couldn't resist giving me one last jab,
even if she had to wait till she was dead and gone to do it."
Like an infuriated beast Martin tramped the floor. Mr. Benton did not
speak for a few moments; then he observed mildly:
"You understand that if you refuse to accept the property it will be
turned over to the county for a poor farm."
"I don't care who it's turned over to, or what becomes of it," blustered
Martin.
The attorney rubbed his hands. Ah, it was a spirited drama,--quite as
spirited as he had anticipated, and as interesting too.
"It's pretty rough on the girl," he at last remarked casually.
"The girl?"
"Miss Webster."
Violently Martin came to himself. The fury of his anger had until now
swept every other consideration from his mind.
"It will mean turning Miss Webster out of doors, of course," continued Mr.
Benton impassively. "Still she's a thoroughbred, and I fancy nothing her
aunt could do would surprise her. In fact, she as good as told me that,
when she was at my office this morning."
"She knows, then?"
"Yes, I had to tell her, poor thing. I imagine, too, it hit her pretty
hard, for she had been given to understand that everything was to be hers.
She hasn't much in her own right; her aunt told me that."
An icy hand suddenly gripped Martin's heart. He stood immovable, as if
stunned. Lucy! Lucy penniless and homeless because of him!
Little by little Ellen's evil scheme unfolded itself before his
consciousness. He saw the cunning of the intrigue which the initial
outburst of his wrath had obscured. There was more involved in his
decision than his own inclinations. He was not free simply to flout the
legacy and toss it angrily aside. Ellen, a Richelieu to the last, had him
in a trap that wrenched and wrecked every sensibility of his nature. The
more he thought about the matter, the more chaotic his impulses became.
Justice battled against will; pity against vengeance; love against hate;
and as the warring factors strove and tore at one another, and grappled in
an anguish of suffering, from out the turmoil two forces rose
unconquerable and stubbornly confronted one another,--the opposing forces
of Love and Pride. There they stood, neither of them willing to yield.
While Love pleaded for mercy, Pride urged the destruction of every gentler
emotion and clamored for revenge.
Mr. Benton was not a subtle interpreter of human nature, but in the face
of the man before him he saw enough to realize the fierceness of the
spiritual conflict that raged within Martin Howe's soul. It was like
witnessing the writhings of a creature in torture.
He did not attempt to precipitate a decision by interfering. When,
however, he had been a silent spectator of the struggle so long that he
perceived Martin had forgotten his very existence, he ventured to speak.
"Maybe I'd better leave you to reconsider your resolution, Howe," he
remarked.
"I--yes--it might be better."
"Perhaps after you've thought things out, you'll change your mind."
Martin did not reply. The lawyer rose and took up his hat.
"How long before you've got to know?" inquired Martin hoarsely.
"Oh, I can give you time," answered Mr. Benton easily. "A week, say--how
will that do?"
"I shan't need as long as that," Martin replied, looking before him with
set face. "I shall know by to-morrow what I am going to do."
"There's no such hurry as all that."
"I shall know by to-morrow," repeated the younger man in the same dull
voice. "All the time in the universe won't change things after that."
Mr. Benton made no response. When in his imaginings he had pictured the
scene, he had thought that after the first shock of surprise was over, he
and Martin would sit down together sociably and discuss each petty detail
of the remarkable comedy. But comedy had suddenly become tragedy--a
tragedy very real and grim--and all desire to discuss it had ebbed away.
As he moved toward the door, he did not even put out his hand; on the
contrary, whispering a hushed good night and receiving no reply to it, he
softly let himself out and disappeared through the afternoon shadows.
If Martin were conscious of his departure, he at least gave no sign of
being so, but continued to stand motionless in the same spot where Mr.
Benton had left him, his hands gripped tightly behind his back, and his
head thrust forward in thought.
Silently the hours passed. The sun sank behind the hills, tinting the
ridge of pines to copper and leaving the sky a sweep of palest blue in
which a single star trembled.
Still Martin did not move. Once he broke into a smothered cry:
"I cannot! My God! I cannot!"
The words brought Jane to the door.
"Martin!" she called.
There was no answer and, turning the knob timidly, she came in.
"Oh!" she ejaculated. "How you frightened me! I didn't know there was
anybody here. Don't you want a light?"
"No."
"Has--has Mr. Benton gone?"
"Yes."
"That's good. Supper's ready."
"I don't want anything."
"Mercy, Martin! You ain't sick?"
"No."
"But you must be hungry."
"No. I'm not."
Still the woman lingered; then making a heroic plunge, she faltered:
"There--there ain't nothin' the matter, is there?"
So genuine was the sympathy beneath the quavering inquiry that it brought
to Martin's troubled heart a gratifying sense of warmth and fellowship.
"No," he said, his impatience melting to gentleness. "Don't worry, Jane.
I've just got to do a little thinking by myself, that's all."
"It ain't money you're fussin' over then," said his sister, with a sigh of
relief.
"No--no, indeed. It's nothin' to do with money."
"I'm thankful for that."
Nevertheless as he mounted to his room, Martin reflected that after all it
was money which was at the storm center of his difficulties. He had not
thought at all of the matter from its financial aspect. Yet even if he had
done so in the first place, it would have had no influence upon his
decision. He didn't care a curse for the money. To carry his point, he
would have tossed aside a fortune twice as large. The issue he confronted,
stripped of all its distractions, was simply whether his love were potent
enough to overmaster his pride and bring it to its knees.
Even for the sake of Lucy Webster, whom he now realized he loved with a
passion more deep-rooted than he had dreamed, could he compel himself to
do the thing he had staked his oath he would not do?
Until this moment he had never actually examined his affection for the
girl. Events had shaped themselves so naturally that in cowardly fashion
he had basked in the joy of the present and not troubled his mind to
inquire whither the phantasies of this lotus-eater's existence were
leading him. When a clamoring conscience had lifted up its voice, he had
stilled it with platitudes. The impact of the crisis he now faced had,
however, jarred him out of his tranquillity and brought him to an
appreciation of his position.
He loved Lucy Webster with sincere devotion. All he had in the world he
would gladly cast at her feet,--his name, his heart, his worldly
possessions; only one reservation did he make to the completeness of his
surrender. His pride he could not bend. It was not that he did not wish to
bend it. The act was impossible. Keenly as he scorned himself, he could
not concede a victory to Ellen Webster,--not for any one on earth.
The jests of the townsfolk were nothing. He did not lack courage to laugh
back into the faces of the jeering multitude. But to own himself beaten by
a mocking ghost, a specter from another sphere; to relinquish for her
gratification the traditions of his race and the trust of his fathers; to
leave her triumphant on the field,--this he could not do for any woman
living--or dead.
Ah, it was a clever net the old woman had spun to ensnare him, more clever
than she knew, unless by some occult power she was cognizant of his
affection for Lucy. Could it be? The thought arrested him.
Had Ellen guessed his secret, and, armed with the knowledge, shaped her
revenge accordingly? If so, she was a thousand times more cruel than he
had imagined her capable of being, and it gave quite a different slant to
her perfidy. Suppose she had suspected he loved Lucy and that Lucy loved
him. Then her plot was one to separate them, and the very course he was
following was the result she had striven to bring about. She had meant to
wreck his happiness and that of the woman he loved; she had planned,
schemed, worked to do so.
Martin threw back his head and laughed defiantly up at the ceiling. Well,
she should not succeed. He would marry Lucy, and he would rebuild the
wall: and with every stone he put in place he would shout to the confines
of the universe, to the planets where Ellen Webster's spirit lurked, to
the grave that harbored her bones:
_Amor Vincit Omnia!_
With jubilant step he crossed to the window and looked out. A slender arc
of silver hung above the trees, bathing the fields in mystic splendor. It
was not late. Only the maelstrom of torture through which he had passed
had transformed the minutes to hours, and the hours to years. Why, the
evening was still young, young enough for him to go to Lucy and speak into
her ear all the love that surged in his heart. They had been made for one
another from the beginning. He would wed her, and the old homestead she
venerated should be hers indeed. It was all very simple, now.
With the abandon of a schoolboy he rushed downstairs, pausing only an
instant to put his head in at the kitchen door and shout to Jane:
"I'm goin' over to the Websters'. I may be late. Don't sit up for me."
Then he was gone. Alone beneath the arching sky, his happiness mounted to
the stars. How delicious was the freshness of the cool night air! How
sweet the damp fragrance of the forest! The spires of the pines richly
dark against the fading sky were already receding into the mists of
twilight.
He went along down the road, his swinging step light as the shimmer of a
moonbeam across a spangled pool.
The Webster house was in darkness. Nevertheless this discovery did not
disconcert him, for frequently Lucy worked until dusk among her flowers,
or lingered on the porch in the peace of the evening stillness.
To-night, however, he failed to find her in either of her favorite haunts
and, guided by the wailing music of a harmonica, he came at last upon Tony
seated on an upturned barrel at the barn threshold, striving to banish his
loneliness by breathing into the serenity of the twilight the refrain of
"Home, Sweet Home."
"Hi, Tony!" called Martin. "Do you know where Miss Lucy is?"
"I don't, sir," replied the boy, rising. "She didn't 'xactly say where she
was goin'."
"I s'pose she's round the place somewhere."
"Land, no, sir! Didn't she tell you? Why, she went away on the train this
afternoon."
"On the train?" Martin repeated automatically.
"Yes, sir."
"When is she comin' back?"
"She ain't comin' back," announced the Portuguese. "She's goin' out West
or somewheres to live."
A quick shiver vibrated through Martin's body, arresting the beat of his
pulse. Scarcely knowing what he did, he caught the lad roughly by the
shoulder.
"When did she go?" he demanded. "What time? What did she say?"
Tony raised a frightened glance to his questioner's face.
"She went this afternoon," gasped he, "about five o'clock it was. She took
the Boston train. She said she guessed she'd go back out West 'cause she
didn't want to stay here any more. She was afraid of ghosts."
"Ghosts!"
Tony nodded.
"I'm to leave the key of the house at Mr. Benton's in the mornin' an' tell
him everythin's cleaned up an' in order. An' Miss Lucy said I was to stay
here an' go on with the work till you or somebody else told me to stop."
Without comment Martin listened. Slowly the truth made its impress on his
mind. Lucy had gone! Gone!
With the knowledge, all the latent affection he felt for her crystallized
into a mighty tide that rushed over and engulfed him in its current.
Hatred, revenge, pride were no more; only love persisted,--love the
all-powerful, the all-conquering, the all-transforming.
Lucy, dearer to him than his own soul, had gone. Either in anger, or
driven forth by maiden shyness, she had fled from him; and until she was
brought back and was safe within the shelter of his arms, nothing remained
for him in life.
Tony saw him square his shoulders and turn away.
"Good night, Mr. Howe," he called.
"Good night, Tony."
"Any orders for to-morrow?"
"No. Go on with your work as usual. Just be sure to water Miss Lucy's
flowers."
"I will, sir."
"An' by the way. You needn't drive into town with that key. I'm goin' to
Mr. Benton's myself, an' I'll take it."
"All right."
The boy watched Martin go down the driveway; but at the gate the man
wheeled about and shouted back:
"You'll be sure not to forget Miss Lucy's flowers, Tony."
"I'll remember 'em."
"An' if I should have to be away for a while--a week, or a month, or even
longer--you'll do the best you can while I'm gone."
"I will, sir."
"That's all. Good night."
With a farewell gesture of his hand Martin passed out of the gate. To have
witnessed the buoyancy of his stride, one would have thought him
victorious rather than defeated. The truth was, the scent of battle was in
his nostrils. For a lifetime he had been the champion of Hate. Now, all
the energies of his manhood suddenly awakened, he was going forth to fight
in the cause of Love.
CHAPTER XVIII
LOVE TRIUMPHANT
Serene in spirit, Martin turned into the road, his future plain before
him. He would search Lucy out, marry her, and bring her back to her own
home. How blind he had been that he should not have seen his path from the
beginning! Why, it was the only thing to do, the only possible thing!
There might be, there undoubtedly would be difficulties in tracing his
sweetheart's whereabouts, but he did not anticipate encountering any
insurmountable obstacle to the undertaking: and should he be balked by
circumstance it was always possible to seek assistance from those whose
business it was to untangle just such puzzles. Therefore, with head held
high, he hastened toward home, formulating his plans as he went along.
With the dawning of to-morrow's sun he must set forth for the western town
which, if Tony's testimony was to be trusted, was Lucy's ultimate
destination. It was a pity his fugitive lady had twelve hours' start of
him. However, he must overtake her as best he might.
It was unquestionably unfortunate too, that it was such a bad season of
the year for him to be absent from home. Harvest time was fast
approaching, and he could ill be spared. But of what consequence were
crops and the garnering of them when weighed against an issue of such life
import as this? To plant and gather was a matter of a year, while all
eternity was bound up in his and Lucy's future together.
In consequence, although he realized the probable financial loss that
would result from his going on this amorous pilgrimage, the measure of his
love was so great that everything else, even the patient toil of months,
was as nothing beside it.
It came to him that perhaps, if he confided his present dilemma to his
sisters, they might come to his rescue, and in the exigency of sudden
frosts save at least a portion of his crops from loss. They were fond of
Lucy. Sometimes he had even thought they guessed his secret and were
desirous of helping on the romance. At least, he felt sure they would not
oppose it, for they had always been eager that he should marry and leave
an heir to inherit the Howe acreage; they had even gone so far as to urge
it upon him as his patriotic duty. Moreover, they were very desirous of
demolishing the barrier that for so many years had estranged Howe and
Webster.
The more he reflected on taking them into his confidence, the more
desirable became the idea, and at length he decided that before he went to
bed he would have a frank talk with the three women of his household and
lay before them all his troubles. If he were to do this he must hasten,
for Sefton Falls kept early hours.
When, however, he reached his own land, he found the lights in the house
still burning, and he was surprised to see Jane, a shawl thrown over her
head, coming to meet him.
"Martin!" she called, "is that you?"
The words contained a disquieting echo of anxiety.
"Yes, what's the matter?"
"Oh, I'm so glad you've got back!" she exclaimed. "I was just goin' over
to the Websters' to find you. A telephone message has just come while
you've been gone. Lucy----"
"Yes, yes," interrupted Martin breathlessly.
"There's been an accident to the Boston train, an' they telephoned from
the hospital at Ashbury that she'd been hurt. They wanted I should come
down there!"
She saw Martin reel and put out his hand.
"Martin!" she cried, rushing to his side.
"Is she much hurt? When did the message come?" panted the man.
"Just now," Jane answered. "The doctor said her arm was broken an' that
she was pretty well shaken up an' bruised. He didn't send for me so much
because she was in a serious condition as because her bag with all her
money an' papers was lost, an' she was worryin' herself sick over being
without a cent, poor child. He didn't tell her he'd sent for me. He just
did it on his own responsibility. Oh, Martin, you will let me go an' bring
her back here, won't you? Mary an' 'Liza an' I want to nurse her,
ourselves. We can't bear to think of her bein' a charity patient in a
hospital."
Jane's voice trembled with earnestness.
"Yes, you shall go, Jane," Martin answered quickly. "We'll both go. I'll
see right away if we can get Watford to take us in his touring car. We
ought to make the distance in four hours in a high-power machine."
"Mercy, you're not goin' to-night?"
"I certainly am."
"But there's no need of that," protested Jane. "The doctor said Lucy was
gettin' on finely, an' he hoped she'd quiet down an' get some sleep, which
was what she needed most."
"But I'd rather go now--right away," Martin asserted.
"'Twould do no good," explained the practical Jane. "We wouldn't get to
Ashbury until the middle of the night, an' we couldn't see Lucy. You
wouldn't want 'em to wake her up."
"N--o."
"It'll be much wiser to wait till mornin', Martin."
"Perhaps it will."
The brother and sister walked silently across the turf.
"I'm--I'm glad you're willin' we should take care of Lucy," murmured Jane,
after an awkward pause. "Mary, 'Liza, an' I love her dearly."
"An' I too, Jane."
The confession came in a whisper. If Martin expected it to be greeted
with surprise, he was disappointed.
Jane did not at first reply; then she said in a soft, happy tone:
"I guessed as much."
"You did."
The man laughed in shamefaced fashion.
"I ain't a bat, Martin."
Again her brother laughed, this time with less embarrassment. It had
suddenly become very easy to talk with Jane.
Welcoming her companionship and sympathy, he found himself pouring into
her listening ear all his difficulties. He told her of Ellen's will; of
the wall; of Lucy's flight; of his love for the girl. How good it was to
speak and share his troubles with another!
"How like Lucy to go away!" mused Jane, when the recital was done. "Any
self-respectin' woman would have done the same, too. She warn't goin' to
hang round here an' make you marry her out of pity."
"But I love her."
"Yes, but how was she to know that?"
"She must have known it."
"You never had told her so."
"N--o, not in so many words."
"Then what right, pray, had she to think so?" argued Jane with warmth.
"She warn't the sort of girl to chance it."
"I wish I'd told her before."
"I wish you had," was Jane's brief retort. "You may have trouble now
makin' her see you ain't marryin' her 'cause you're sorry for her."
"Sorry for her!"
Jane could not but laugh at the fervor of the exclamation.
"My land! Martin," she said, "I never expected to live to see you so head
over ears in love."
"I am."
"I ain't questionin' it," was Jane's dry comment.
When, however, he set foot on the porch, his lover's confidence suddenly
deserted him, and he was overwhelmed with shyness.
"You tell Mary an' 'Liza," he pleaded. "Somehow, I can't. Tell 'em about
the will an' all. You'll do that much for me, won't you?"
"You know I will."
The words spoke volumes.
"That's right. An' be ready to start for Ashbury on the mornin' train.
We'd better leave here by six, sharp."
"I'll be on hand. Don't worry."
"Good night, Jane."
"Good night."
Still Jane lingered. Then drawing very close to her brother's side, she
added bashfully:
"I can't but think, Martin, that instead of puttin' up walls, Ellen
Webster's will has broken some of 'em down."
For answer Martin did something he had never done before within the span
of his memory; he bent impulsively and kissed his sister's cheek.
Then as if embarrassed by the spontaneity of the deed, he sped upstairs.
* * * * *
In the morning he and Jane started for Ashbury. The day was just waking as
they drove along the glittering highway. Heavy dew silvered field and
meadow, and the sun, flashing bars of light across the valley, transformed
every growing thing into jeweled splendor.
Martin was in high spirits and so was Jane. While the man counted the
hours before he would be once more at the side of his beloved, the woman
was thinking that whatever changes the future held in store, she would
always have it to remember that in this supreme moment of his life it had
been to her that Martin had turned. She had been his confidant and helper.
It was worth all that had gone before and all that might come after. There
was no need for conversation between them. The reveries of each were
satisfying and pregnant with happiness.
Even after they had boarded the train, Jane was quite content to lapse
into meditation and enjoy the novelty of the journey. Traveling was not
such a commonplace event that it had ceased to be entertaining. She
studied her fellow passengers with keenest interest, watched the pictures
that framed themselves in the car window, and delighted in a locomotion
that proceeded from no effort of her own. It was not often that she was
granted the luxury of sitting still.
They reached Ashbury amid a clamor of noontide whistles, and took a cab to
the hospital. Here the nurse met them.
"Miss Webster has had her arm set and is resting comfortably," announced
the woman. "There is not the slightest cause for alarm. We telephoned
merely because she was fretting and becoming feverish, and the doctor
feared she would not sleep. The loss of her purse and bank books worried
her. We found your address in her coat pocket. She was too dazed and
confused to tell who her friends were."
"Is she expectin' us?" inquired Jane.
"No," the nurse answered. "The doctor decided not to tell her, after all,
that we had telephoned. For some reason she seemed unwilling for people to
know where she was. To be frank, we rather regretted calling you up, when
we discovered how she felt about it. But the mischief was done then----"
"It warn't no mischief," Jane put in with a smile. "It was the best thing
that could 'a' happened."
"I'm glad of that."
"Could I see her, do you think?" demanded the visitor presently.
"Yes, indeed. She is much better this morning. Perhaps, however, one
caller at a time will be enough; she still has some fever."
"Of course."
Jane turned to Martin; but he shook his head.
"You go," he said.
"I'll do whatever you want me to."
"I'd rather you went first."
"Just as you say. I won't stay long though."
After watching the two women disappear down the long, rubber-carpeted
corridor, he began to pace the small, spotlessly neat office in which he
had been asked to wait. It was a prim, barren room, heavy with the fumes
of iodoform and ether. At intervals, the muffled tread of a doctor or
nurse passing through the hall broke its stillness, but otherwise there
was not a sound within its walls.
Martin walked back and forth until his solitude became intolerable. There
were magazines on the table but he could not read. Would Jane never
return? The moments seemed hours.
In his suspense he fell to every sort of pessimistic imagining. Suppose
Lucy were worse? Suppose she declined to see him? Suppose she did not love
him?
So sanguine had been his hopes, he had not seriously considered the latter
possibility. The more he meditated on the thought of failing in his suit,
the more wretched became his condition of mind. The torrent of words that
he had come to speak slowly deserted his tongue until when Jane entered,
a quarter of an hour later, wreathed in smiles, he was dumb with terror.
"She's ever so much better than I expected to find her," began his sister
without preamble. "An' she was so glad to see me, poor soul! You can go up
now with the nurse; only don't stay too long."
"Did you tell her----" began the discomfited Martin.
"I didn't tell her anything," Jane replied, "except that I was going to
take her home with me in a day or two."
"Doesn't she know I'm here?"
"No."
"You don't know, then, whether she----"
"I don't know anything, Martin," Jane replied, nevertheless beaming on him
with a radiant smile. "An' if I did I certainly shouldn't tell you. You
an' Lucy must settle your affairs yourselves."
With this dubious encouragement and palpitating with uneasiness, Martin
was forced to tiptoe out of the room in the wake of his white-robed
conductor. As he walked down the long, quiet hall, he said to himself that
every step was bringing him nearer to the crisis when he must speak, and
still no words came to his lips. When, however, he turned from the
dinginess of the passageway into the sunny little room where Lucy lay, he
forgot everything but Lucy herself.
She was resting against the pillows, her hair unbound, and her cheeks
flushed to crimson. Never had she looked so beautiful. He stopped on the
threshold, awed by the wonder of her maidenhood. Then he heard her voice.
"Martin!"
It was only a single word, but the yearning in it told him all he sought
to know. In an instant he was on his knees beside her, kissing the brown
hand that rested on the coverlid, touching his lips to the glory of her
hair.
Jane, waiting in the meantime alone in the dull, whitewashed office, had
ample opportunity to study every nail in its floor, count the slats in the
slippery, varnished chairs, and speculate as to the identity of the
spectacled dignitaries whose portraits adorned the walls.
She planned her winter's wardrobe, decided what Mary, Eliza and herself
should wear at the wedding, and mentally arranged every detail of the
coming domestic upheaval. Having exhausted all these subjects, she began
in quite indecent fashion to select names for her future nieces and
nephews. The first boy should be Webster Howe. What a grand old name it
would be! She prayed he would be tall like Martin, and have Lucy's eyes
and hair. Ah, what a delight she and Mary and Eliza would have bringing up
Martin's son and baking cookies for him!
It was just when she was mapping out the educational career of this same
Webster Howe and was struggling to decide what college should be honored
by his presence that Martin burst into the room. A guilty blush dyed
Jane's virgin cheek.
Martin, however, took no notice of her abstraction. In fact he could
scarcely speak coherently.
"It's all right, Jane," he cried. "I'm the happiest man on earth. Lucy
loves me. Isn't it wonderful, unbelievable? We are goin' to be married
right away, an' I'm to start buildin' the wall, so'st it will be done
before the cold weather comes. We're goin' to leave a little gate in it
for you an' Mary an' 'Liza to come through. An' we're goin' to put up a
stone in the cemetery to Lucy's aunt with: _In grateful remembrance of
Ellen Webster_ on it."
Jane sniffed.
"I can think of a better inscription than that," she remarked with
unwonted tartness, lapsing into Scripture. "Carve on it:
"He that soweth iniquity shall reap vanity; and the rod of his anger shall
fail."
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