IX
BY THE LOOM
On Monday, Mason saw with regret that Barbara was not at school. On Tuesday he felt solicitous, and would have made inquiry if it had not been for an impulse of secretiveness. By Wednesday he began to fear that his words spoken to her at the meadow fence had something to do with her absence. He questioned the past. He could not remember that she had ever repelled his attentions, or that she had seemed displeased when he had spoken his fervent and unpremeditated words. Aware that his bearing toward Barbara had attracted the observation of the school, he did not summon courage to ask about her until Thursday. Then when the voluble Mely McCord came to him before the beginning of the afternoon session, to ask how she should proceed to divide 130 by 9, he inquired if Barbara was ill.
"No, I don't 'low she's sick," responded Mely. "I sh'd 'a' thought she'd tole you, 'f anybody, what't wuz kep' 'er"; and Mely laughed a malicious little snicker, which revealed her belief that the master was in confidential relations with his algebra scholar. "She thinks the worl'n'all of the school an' the master." Mely gasped a little as she ventured this thrust, and quickly added, "An' of algebray – she's that fond of algebray; but I sh'd thought she'd 'a' tole you what kep' 'er, ur'a' sen' choo word. But I 'low it's got sumpin' to do weth the trouble in the family."
Mely made what the old schoolmasters called a "full stop" at this point, as though she considered it certain that Mason would know all about Barbara's affairs.
"Trouble? What trouble?" asked the master.
"W'y, I 'low'd you'd 'a' knowed," said the teasing creature, shaking her rusty ringlets, with a fluttering, half-suppressed amusement at the anxiety she had awakened in Mason's mind. "Hain' choo h-yeard about her brother?"
"No; which brother? The one that's in Moscow?"
"W'y, lawsy, don'choo know't she hain't got nary nuther one? The res' 's all dead an' buried long ago. Her brother Tom lost 'is sitooation along of gamblin' an' the like. They say he lost the boots offviz feet an' the coat offviz back." Here Mely had to give vent to her feelings in a hearty giggle; Tom's losses seemed to her a joke of the best, and all the better that the master took it so seriously. "I 'low it's cut Barb'ry up more'n a little. She sot sech store by Tom. An' he is smart, the smartest feller you'd find fer books an' the like. But what's the use a-bein' so smart an' then bein' sech a simple into the bargain? I say."
Mason did not like to ask further questions about Barbara's family affairs. He could hardly bear to hear Mely canvass them in this unsympathetic way. But there was one more inquiry that he made about Tom.
"Does he drink?"
"Mighty leetle. I 'xpect he takes a drop ur two now an' then, jest fer company's sake when he's a-cavortin' 'roun' weth the boys. But I 'low he hain't got no rale hankerin' fer the critter, an' he's that fond of Barb'ry 'n' 'is mother, an' they're so sot on 'im, that he would n' noways like to git reg'lar drunk like. But he's always a-gittin' into a bad crowd, an' tryin' some deviltry'r nuther; out uv one scrape an' into t'other, kind-uh keerless like; head up an' never ketchin' sight 'v a stump tell he's fell over it, kerthump, head over heels. His uncle's been a-schoolin' 'im, an' lately he's gone 'n' put 'im weth Squire Blackman to learn to be a lawyer; but now he's up 'n' sent him home fer a bad bargain. Ut's no go't the law, an' he won't never stan' a farm, yeh know. Too high-sperrited."
Possessed of a share of Mely McCord's stock of information about Barbara's troubles, Hiram Mason saw that his resolution against calling on his pupil at her own house would have to go the way of most of his other resolutions on this subject. He set himself to find arguments against keeping this one, but he was perfectly aware, all the time, that his going to the Graysons' would not depend on reasons at all. He reflected, however, that Barbara's trouble was a new and unforeseen condition. Besides, his regulative resolutions had been so far strained already that they were not worth the keeping. It is often thus in our dealings with ourselves; we argue from defection to indulgence.
Mely McCord felt sure of having the master's company after school as far as she had to go on the road leading to the Graysons'. But he went another way to Pearson's, where he was boarding out the proportion due for three pupils. Mrs. Pearson had intermitted the usual diet of corn-dodgers, and had baked a skilletful of hot biscuits, in honor of the master; she was a little piqued that he should absorb them, as he did, in a perfectly heartless way, and she even apologized for them, asserting that they were not so good as usual, in the vain hope that the master would wake up and contradict her. As soon as the early supper was over Hiram left the house, without saying anything of his destination. He took a "short cut" across a small prairie, then through the woods, and across Butt's corn-field, until he came out on the road near the place at which he had several times helped Barbara over the fence. By her path through the meadow he reached the house just as the summer twilight was making the vault of the sky seem deeper and mellowing all the tones in the landscape. In that walk Mason's mind had completely changed front. Why should he try to maintain a fast-and-loose relation with Barbara? She was in need of his present sympathy and help. Impulses in his nature, the strength of which he had never suspected, were beating against the feeble barriers he had raised. Of what use was this battle, which might keep him miserable awhile longer, but which could end in but one way? As he walked through the narrow meadow path, in the middle of which the heavy overhanging heads of timothy grass, now ready for the scythe, touched one another, so that his legs brushed them aside at every step, he cast away the last tatters of his old resolves. The dams were down; the current might flow whither it listed. He would have it out with Barbara this very evening, and end the conflict.
It is by some such only half-rational process that the most important questions of conduct are usually decided – sometimes luckily; in other cases, to the blighting of the whole life. Is it not rather a poor fist of a world after all, this in which we live, where the most critical and irrevocable decisions must be made while the inexperienced youth is tossed with gusts of passion and blinded by traditional prejudices or captivated by specious theories? The selection of wives and vocations, the two capital elements in human happiness and success, is generally guided by nothing higher than the caprice of those whose judgments are in the gristle. Often the whole course of life of the strong, clear-seeing man yet to come is changed forever by a boy's whim. The old allegorists painted the young man as playing chess with the devil; but chess is a game of skill. What the young man plays is often a child's game of pitch and toss, cross or pile, heads or tails, for stakes of fearful magnitude. Luckily for Hiram, as you and I know from our present acquaintance with Barbara, nothing more disastrous than disappointment was likely to happen to him from his inability to keep his mortifying resolves. The abandonment of them had simplified his feelings and brought him present relief. When he knocked on the jamb of the open front door of the Grayson farm-house, and was invited to come in by the mother, there was a wholeness in his feelings and purposes to which he had been a stranger for weeks.
"Barb'ry," said Mrs. Grayson as she entered the kitchen, after giving Hiram a chair, "here's the master come to see you. I 'low he thought you mought be sick ur sumpin'."
Barbara sat perched on the loom-bench, with her back to the web she had been weaving. Just now she was peeling, quartering, and coring summer apples to dry for winter stores. She untied her apron and went from the kitchen into the sitting-room, where Mason was looking about, as was his habit, in a quizzical, half-amused way. He had noted the wide stone fire-place, the blackness of whose interior was hidden by the bushy asparagus tops which filled it, and the wooden clock on the unpainted mantel-piece, which had a print of the death-bed of George Washington impaneled in its door. A stairway winding up in one corner gave picturesqueness to the room; diagonally across from this was a high post bed; there were some shuck-bottom chairs, a splint-bottom rocking-chair, and a bureau with a looking-glass on top. The floor was covered with a new rag-carpet, and the comfortable, home-like sentiment excited in Hiram's mind by the general aspect of the room was enhanced by a hearth cricket, which, in one of the crevices of the uneven flag-stones, was already emitting little vibrant snatches like the black fiddler that he was, tuning up for an evening performance.
The sight of Mason dissipated for the moment the clouds that darkened Barbara's thoughts; she saw blue sky for the first time since Tom's first return. It was a pleased and untroubled face that met his gaze when she extended her hand to him.
"Howdy, Mr. Mason!"
Mason fixed his eyes on her in his odd fashion, half turning his head aside, and regarding her diagonally.
"Well, Barbara, you're the lost sheep," was his greeting. "I was afraid you wouldn't come back to the flock if I didn't come into the wilderness and look you up."
"There's been such a lot of things to do this week," she answered hurriedly, "I didn't know how to get time to go to school."
This was truthful, but it was far from being frank, and it was not on these terms that Mason wished to meet her. His first thought was to put her more at ease.
"Can't we sit out on the porch?" he said; "I'm warm with walking." And he lifted two of the chairs and carried them to the covered porch. There would soon be no light outside but what came from the night sky, and what a dim candle in the sitting-room, when it should be lighted, might manage to spare through the open door. Hiram had a notion that in this obscurity he could coax Barbara out of the diplomatic mood into the plain indicative. But before they had sat down he had changed his plan.
"Hold on," he said, more to himself than to her; and added, "What were you doing when I came?"
"Only peeling some apples to dry."
"Let me help you; we'll have an apple-peeling all to ourselves."
"No," said Barbara, hesitatingly; but Mason went through the sitting-room and, opening the kitchen door, thrust his head through and said:
"Mayn't I sit out there and help Barbara peel apples, Mrs. Grayson?"
"You may do what you like, Mr. Mason," said the old lady, pleased with his familiarity; "but peelin' apples ain't jest the kind of work to set a schoolmaster at."
"Schoolmasters a'n't all of them so good for nothing as you think. Come on, Barbara, a little apple-peeling will make it seem like home to me; and this living 'round in other people's houses has made me homesick."
Barbara came out and took her old place on the loom-bench, beside the great three-peck basket of yellow apples. Her seat raised her considerably higher than Mason, who occupied a low chair. In front of Barbara was another chair, on which sat a pan to hold the quarters of apples when prepared for drying; on one of the rungs of this Barbara supported her feet. The candle which Mrs. Grayson lighted shed a dim yellow light from one end of the high smoke-blackened mantel-shelf, which extended across the chimney above the cavernous kitchen fire-place. The joists of the loft were of heavy logs, and these, and the boards which overlaid them, and all the woodwork about this kitchen, were softened and sombered by the smoke that had escaped from the great, rude chimney; for the kitchen was the original log-cabin built when Tom's father, fresh from Maryland, had first settled on the new farm; the rest of the house had grown from this kernel.
The mother, who had not dreamed of any relation between Barbara and Hiram Mason more friendly than that of master and pupil, was a little surprised at the apparently advanced stage of their acquaintance; but she liked it, because it showed that the schoolmaster was not "stuck up," and that he understood that "our Barb'ry" was no common girl. Tom looked in at the open outside door of the kitchen after a while, and was pleased. "Barb deserved a nice beau if ever anybody did," he reflected, and it might keep her from feeling so bad over his own failures. Not wishing to intrude, and wearied to exhaustion with his first day of farm-work since his return, he went around to the front door and through the sitting-room upstairs to bed. When the mother had finished "putting things to rights" she went into the sitting-room, and the apple-peelers were left with only the loom, the reel, and the winding-blades for witnesses.
They talked of school, of their studies, and of many other things until the great basket of apples began to grow empty while the basket of parings and corings was full. The pan of apple-quarters having overflowed had been replaced by a pail, which was also nearly full, when, after a playful scuffle of hands in the basket, Hiram secured the last apple and peeled it. Then laying down his knife, he asked:
"You'll be back at school next week?"
Barbara had been dreading this inquiry. She wished Mason had not asked it. She had heartily enjoyed his society while they talked of things indifferent, but the question brought her suddenly and painfully back into the region of her disappointment and perplexities.
"I'm afraid I can't come any more. Things haven't gone right with us." The wide spaces between her words indicated to her companion the effort it cost to allude to her affairs.
Mason was more than ever puzzled. By what means could he establish such a ground of confidence between them as would enable him to enter into her difficulties and give her, at the least, the help of his sympathy and counsel? There seemed no way so good as that by direct approach.
"Barbara," he said, drawing his chair nearer to the loom-bench and leaning forward toward her, "won't you please tell me about your affairs, if – if you can do it? I don't want to intrude, but why can't you let me be your best friend and – help you if I can?"
This speech had a different effect from what Mason had intended. Barbara's pride resented an offer of help from him. Of all things, she did not wish to be pitied by the man she was beginning to love. He would always think of her as lower than himself, and she had too much pride to relish anything like the rôle of Cophetua's beggar maid.
"I can't do it, Mr. Mason; there's nothing anybody can do." She spoke with her eyes downcast. Having ventured so much and gained nothing, Mason leaned back in his chair and turned his head about to what a photographer would call a "three-quarters position," and looked at Barbara from under his brows without saying anything more. He was like a pilot waiting for the fog to lift. This silent regard made Barbara uneasy. She could not help feeling a certain appreciation of his desire to help her, however disagreeable it might be to her feelings. Perhaps she was wrong to repel his confidence so abruptly.
"I suppose you know about poor Tom?" she said, making so much concession to his kindness, but half swallowing the rapidly spoken words.
"Yes," said Hiram; "I heard he had got into a scrape such as many a bright boy gets into. A village like Moscow is a hard place for a boy raised in the country. But he'll pull out of that."
It lifted a weight from Barbara's mind that Mason did not take a too serious view of Tom. She wished, however, that he would not look at her so long in that askance fashion.
"Did the trouble cost you much money?" he ventured to inquire after a while.
"Well, no, not much for some folks, but a good deal for us; we're rather poor, you know." There is a pride that conceals poverty; there is a greater pride that makes haste to declare it, feeling that only hidden poverty is shameful. "You know father was a smart man in some ways," Barbara continued, "but he hadn't any knack. He lost most of his money before he came to Illinois; and then when he got here he made the mistake, that so many made, of settling in the timber, though very little of the prairie had been taken up yet. If he hadn't been afraid of the winters on the prairie, we might have been pretty well off; but it's been a hard struggle opening a farm in the woods. Then we have had nothing but misfortune. My father died of a congestive chill, and then my three brothers and my sister died, and Tom and I are all that's left to mother. And there are doctor's bills to pay yet, and a little debt on the farm."
"Yes, yes," said Hiram, wounded in thinking of the pain he was giving Barbara in forcing her to speak thus frankly of the family troubles. "I know what it is. Poverty and I are old acquaintances; regular old cronies. She's going to stand by my side till I graduate, anyhow; but as I have known her ever since I was born, I can afford to laugh in her face. There's nothing like being used to a thing."
Barbara made no reply to this. Mason sat and looked at her awhile in silence. There was no good in trying to help her on his present footing. He leaned forward, resting his elbow on the loom-bench by her side.
"Look here, Barbara," he said, with abrupt decision, "let's, you and me, go in partnership with our poverty some day, and see what'll come of it. I suppose, so far as money is concerned, the equations would be about equal without the trouble of figuring it out."
Barbara looked at her hands in her lap with her eyes out of focus, and made no reply. After a while Hiram spoke again.
"Did I – make you mad, Barbara?" He used the word "mad" in the sense attached to it in that interior country, meaning angry.
"No, not mad," said Barbara. "Not that – but – I don't know what to say. I don't believe what you propose can ever be."
Mason waited for her to explain herself, but she did not seem to be able to get her own consent. At length he got up and went to the mantel-piece and took down Barbara's slate.
"Let's talk about algebra awhile," he said.
Barbara was fond enough of algebra, but it seemed droll that Mason, with an unsettled proposition of marriage on hand, should revert to his favorite study. She could not see what he was writing, but when he passed the slate to her, she read:
a = another lover.
b = objections to H. Mason.
c = interfering circumstances.
x = a + b + c.
"Now," said Mason, when she looked up, "I'd like you to help me to get the exact value of x in this little equation. It's a kind of fortune-telling by algebra. We must proceed by elimination; you may strike out such of the letters on the right side of the last equation as do not count for anything."
But instead of proceeding as the master suggested, Barbara, whose reserve was partly dissipated by her amusement, took the pencil that he offered her, and after a moment's reflection wrote below:
a = 0
b = 0
x = c
"I never saw an equation more to my taste," said Hiram. "If it's only circumstances, then circumstances and I are going to fight it out. You think there are things that will keep us from making an equation between Barbara and Hiram?"
"There wouldn't be any equation," she said, looking out of half-closed eye-lids, as she always did when speaking with feeling. "Your family is an educated one, and your father and mother wouldn't approve of us. Mother never had any chance to learn, and her talk is very old-fashioned, but she's just as good as good can be, all the same. Tom's unsteady; I hope he'll get over that yet; but your father and mother and your sisters wouldn't like it."
"Yes, they would, if they knew you," said Mason, with enthusiasm; "and, besides, I don't see that I'm bound to get their consent."
"But that wouldn't change matters," persisted Barbara, despondingly. "If they didn't like it, it wouldn't be nice."
"Don't you bother about my happiness, Barbara. If I have you, do you think anything else will trouble me?" He got up and snuffed the candle with his fingers like the brave man that he was.
"I'm not bothering about you at all," said Barbara. "I'm not so good as you think I am. I let you take care of yourself in this matter; you're strong, and such things won't worry you." She was picking at her dress as she spoke. "Ever since you said what you did when you helped me over the fence last," – Barbara took a long breath as she thought of that scene; she had often retraced all its details in her memory, – "I've known that you felt so toward me that you would face any thing. But I– I couldn't bear it if your folks should look down on me and I be – your wife." It was hard to say the last words; they sounded strangely, and when they were uttered, the sound of them put her into a trepidation not altogether disagreeable.
"Look down on you?" said Hiram, with a vehemence Barbara had never known him to manifest before. "Do you think my folks are such idiots? They don't meet a person like you often enough to get the habit of looking down on such."
"But you don't know women folks," said Barbara.
"I know my family better than you do, and you've got mighty curious notions about them and about yourself. You've always lived here in the woods, and you don't know what you're worth."
He lifted the empty apple-basket out of the way and sat down by her.
"Now, Barbara, you say you know how I feel toward you. You are the girl of all girls in the world for me. And now you won't spurn me, will you?" he said entreatingly.
Barbara's lips quivered and she seemed about to lose control of herself. However, after a little period of silence and struggle, she suppressed her feelings sufficiently to speak:
"I couldn't spurn you," she said. Then, after another pause: "Maybe you don't care any more for me than I do for you. But I'm in such trouble – that I can't tell what to say. Won't you wait and give me a little time? Things may be better after a while."
"How long shall I stay away? A week?" Mason's voice had a note of protest in it.
"Don't be hurt," she said, lifting her eyes timidly to his. "But I'm in such a hard place. Let me have two weeks or so to think about it, and see how things are going to turn." It was not that Barbara saw any chance for a change of circumstances, but that she could not resolve to decide the question either way, and wished to escape from her present perplexity by postponement.
"Just as you say," said Mason, regretfully; "but I tell you, Barbara, it's two weeks of dead lost time."
Then he got up and held out his hand to her.
"Good-bye, Barbara."
"Good-bye, Mr. Mason."
"Oh, call me Hiram! It's more friendly, and you call all the other young men by their first names."
"But you're the master."
"I'm not the master of you, that's clear. Besides, you've left school." He was holding her hand in gentle protest all this time.
"Well, good-bye – Hiram!" said Barbara, with a visible effort which ended in a little laugh.
Mason let go of her hand and turned abruptly and walked out of the door, and then swiftly down the meadow path. Barbara stood and looked after him as long as she could see his form; then she slowly shut and latched the kitchen door and came and covered with ashes the remaining embers of the fire, and took the candle from the mantel-piece and went through the now vacant sitting-room to her chamber above.