VIII
The Worthingtons' private parlor in the Rideau House was hot and close, although a fog had drifted in at nightfall and cooled the outside air. Two of its occupants, however, were totally unmindful of the heat and the mingled odors of upholstery, gas, and varnish that prevailed within its highly decorated walls. The third, a compact, elderly, prosperous-looking gentleman, whose face wore a slight cloud of ennui, stood by the open window gazing out, not so much from a desire to see what was going on outside as from a good-natured unwillingness to see what was taking place within.
Mr. Frederick Sterling, a shade paler and several shades graver than of old, was looking at the elderly gentleman's daughter in an unmistakable way; and the daughter herself, a fair creature, with the fairness of youth and health and plenty, was returning his gaze with one that was equally unmistakable.
"Do you mean to tell me, Frederick, that the poor thing walked all that distance in that intolerable heat?"
The young man nodded dismally.
"That's what they say, Annette. It makes one feel like a beast."
"I don't see why you need say that, Frederick. I'm sure they ought to have done something, after the awful danger you were in." The young woman swept toward him, with one arm outstretched, and then receded, and let her hand fall on the back of a chair, as her father yawned audibly.
"Of course there was danger, Annette; but that doesn't remove the fact that I was a hot-headed idiot."
"You mustn't talk so. It is not polite to me. I am not going to marry an idiot."
"But you've promised."
The young people laughed into each other's eyes.
"Frederick," said the young girl, after a little silence, during which they drifted into the rigid plush embrace of a sofa, "I'm going up to see that girl and thank her."
The young man leaned forward and caught her wrists.
"You – angel!"
"Yes, I'm going to-morrow. Of course you can't go."
"Oh, good Lord, no," groaned her lover.
"But papa can. There will be plenty of time; we don't leave until evening. And in spite of what her father did, I feel kindly toward the girl. There must be some good in her; she seemed to want to do you justice. How does she look, Frederick?"
The soft-voiced inquisitor drew her wrists from the young fellow's grasp, and flattened his palms between hers by way of an anæsthetic.
"Did you ever see her?"
"Oh, yes, once or twice. A lank, forlorn, little red-headed thing, – rather pretty. Oh, my God, Annette!"
The girl raised the tips of his imprisoned fingers to her lips.
"Couldn't you send her something, Frederick, some little keepsake, something she would like, if she would like anything that wasn't too dreadful?"
The young fellow's face brightened.
"Annette, you are an angel."
"No, I'm not; there are no brunette angels. I am a very practical young woman, and I'm going with you to buy something for that poor girl; men don't know how to buy things." She dropped her lover's hands, and went out of the room, returning with her hat and gloves, and, going to her father's side, she said: "Papa, Frederick and I are going out for awhile. He wants to get a little present for a poor young girl, the daughter of that awful wretch who – that – you know. It seems she saw it all, and came down to say that Frederick was not to blame. Of course it was unnecessary, for the judge and every one saw at once that he did perfectly right; but it was kind of her, and it was a very hot day. Do you mind staying here alone? – or you can go with us, if you like."
"No, thank you; I don't mind, and I don't like," said the elderly gentleman dryly.
"And you'll not be lonely?"
"No, I think not; I've been getting acquainted with myself this trip, and I find I'm a very interesting though somewhat unappreciated old party."
The young girl put down her laughing face, and her father swept a kiss from it with his gray mustache. Then the two young creatures went out into the lighted streets, laughing and clinging to each other in the sweet, selfish happiness that is the preface to so large a part of the world's misery.
They came back presently with their purchase, a somewhat obtrusively ornate piece of jewelry, which Annette pronounced semi-barbarous; being, she said, a compromise between her own severely classical taste and that of Sterling, which latter, she assured her father, was entirely savage.
She fastened the trinket at her throat, where it acquired a sudden and hitherto unsuspected elegance in the eyes of her lover, and then unclasped it, and held it at arm's-length in front of her before she laid it in its pink cotton receptacle.
"I do hope she will be pleased, Frederick," she said, with a soft, contented little sigh.
And the young man set his teeth, and smiled at her from the depths of a self-abasement that made her content a marvel to him.
Annette went up to the mountains with her father the next day, stopping the carriage under the pepper-trees in front of the Withrow cabin, and stepping out a little bewildered by the meanness and poverty and squalor of it all.
The children came out and stood in a jagged, uneven row before her, and the hounds sniffed at her skirts and walked around her curiously. Mrs. Sproul appeared in the doorway with the baby, shielding its bald head from the sun with her husband's hat, and Lysander emerged from between two dark green rows of orange-trees across the way, his hoe on his shoulder.
"I want to see your daughter, the young girl, – the one that walked to Los Angeles the other day," she said, looking at the woman.
"M'lissy?" queried Mrs. Sproul anxiously. "Lysander, do you know if M'lissy's about?"
Her husband nodded backward.
"She's over in the orchard, lookin' after the water. I'll" —
The stranger took two or three steps toward him and put out her hand.
"May I go to her? Will you show me, please? I want to see her alone."
Lysander bent his tall figure and moved along the rows of orange-trees, until he caught a glimpse of Melissa's blue drapery.
"She's right down there," he said, pointing between the smooth trunks with his hoe. "It's rough walkin', – I've just been a-throwin' up a furrow fer the irrigatin'; but I guess you c'n make it."
She went down the shaded aisle between the orange-trees, Mrs. Sproul looking after her dubiously, as a person guilty of a serious breach of decorum in asking to see any one alone.
Melissa leaned on her hoe, and watched her approach with listless amazement. She took in every detail of her daintily clad loveliness, – the graceful sway of her drapery as she walked, the cluster of roses in her belt, and the wide hat with its little forest of curling plumes.
"You are Melissa?" The stranger put out her softly gloved hand, and Melissa took it in limp, rustic acquiescence. "Mr. Sterling wished me to come, – and I wanted to come myself, – to thank you for what you did; it was very kind, and you were very brave to undertake it, and for one you scarcely knew – it was very, very good of you."
Melissa colored to the little ripples of vivid hair about her temples.
"Is he gone away?" she asked, rubbing her hands up and down on the worn handle of the hoe.
"No, but he is going this evening. Of course he could not stay. It would be very painful for him, for all of you. Is there anything he can do for you? He will be so glad if he can be of use to you in any way" – She hesitated, watching the pained look grow in her listener's face.
"Ain't he never comin' back?" asked Melissa wistfully.
Annette opened her brown eyes wide, and fixed them on the girl's face.
"I don't know," she faltered.
"I'd like to keep his hankecher," Melissa broke out tremulously. "I hurt my arm oncet up where they was blastin', and he tied it up fer me with his hankecher. I was takin' it to 'im that Sunday. I had it all washed and done up. I'd like to keep it, though, – if you think he wouldn't care." Her eyes filled, and her voice broke treacherously. "That's all. Tell 'im good-by."
Annette was gazing at her breathlessly. It came over her like a cloud, the poverty, the hopelessness, the dreariness of it all. She made a little impetuous rush forward.
"Oh, yes, yes," she said eagerly, through her tears; "and he is so sorry, and he sent you these," – she took the roses from her belt, her lover's roses, and thrust them into Melissa's nerveless grasp, – "and I – oh, I shall love you always!"
Then she turned, and hurried through the sun and shadow of the orchard back to the carriage.
"I am ready to go now," she said, somewhat stiffly, to her father.
All the way down the dusty mountain road, over which Melissa had traveled so patiently, she kept murmuring to herself, "Oh, the poor thing, – the poor, poor thing!"
Some years afterwards, when Mr. Frederick Sterling's girth and dignity had noticeably increased, he saw among his wife's ornaments a gaudy trinket that brought a curious twinge of half-forgotten pain into his consciousness. He was not able to understand, nor is it likely that he will ever know, how it came there, or why there came over him at sight of it a memory of sycamores and running water, and the smell of sage and blooming buckthorn and chaparral.
ALEX RANDALL'S CONVERSION
I
Mrs. Randall was piecing a quilt. She had various triangular bits of calico, in assorted colors, strung on threads, and distributed in piles on her lap. She had put on her best dress in honor of the minister's visit, which was just ended. It was a purple, seeded silk, adorned with lapels that hung in wrinkles across her flat chest, and she had spread a gingham apron carefully over her knees, to protect their iridescent splendor.
She was a russet-haired woman, thin, with that blonde thinness which inclines to transparent redness at the tip of the nose and chin, and the hand that hovered over the quilt patches, in careful selection of colors for a "star and chain" pattern, was of a glistening red, and coarsely knotted at the knuckles, in somewhat striking contrast to her delicate face.
Her husband sat at a table in one corner of the spotless kitchen, eating a belated lunch. He was a tall man, and stooped so that his sunburned beard almost touched the plate.
"Mr. Turnbull was here," said Mrs. Randall, with an air of introducing a subject rather than of giving information.
The man held a knife-load of smear-case in front of his mouth, and grunted. It was not an interrogative grunt, but his wife went on.
"He said he could 'a' put off coming if he'd known you had to go to mill."
Mr. Randall swallowed the smear-case. His bushy eyebrows met across his face, and he scowled so that the hairs stood out horizontally.
"Did you tell him I could 'a' put off going to mill till I knowed he was coming?"
His thick, obscure voice seemed to tangle itself in the hay-colored mustache that hid his mouth. His tone was tantalizingly free from anger.
"I wish you wouldn't, Elick," said his wife reproachfully; "not before the children, anyway."
The children, a girl of seven and a boy of four, sat on the doorstep in a sort of dazed inertia, occasioned by the shock of the household's sudden and somewhat perplexing return to its week-day atmosphere just as they had adjusted themselves to the low Sabbatic temperature engendered by the minister's presence.
The girl had two tightly braided wisps of hair in varying hues of corn-silk, curving together at the ends like the mandibles of a beetle. She turned when her father spoke, and looked from him to her mother with a round, blue-eyed stare from under her bulging forehead. The boy's stolid head was thrown back a little, so that his fat neck showed two sunburned wrinkles below his red curls. His gingham apron parted at the topmost button, disclosing a soft, pathetic little back, and his small trousers were hitched up under his arms, the two bone buttons which supported them staring into the room reproachfully, as if conscious of the ignominy of belonging to masculine garb under the feminine eclipse of an apron.
Mrs. Randall bent a troubled gaze upon her offspring, as if expecting to see them wilt visibly under their father's irreverence.
"Mary Frances," she said anxiously, "run away and show little brother the colts."
The girl got up and took her brother's hand.
"Come on, Wattie," she said in a small, superior way, very much as if she had added: "These grown people have weaknesses which it is better for us to pretend not to know. They are going to talk about them."
Mrs. Randall waited until the two little figures idled across the dooryard before she spoke.
"I don't think you ought to act the way you do, Elick, just because you don't like Mr. Turnbull; it ain't right."
The man dropped his chin doggedly, and fed himself without lifting his elbows from the table.
"I can't always manage to be at home when folks come a-visiting," he said in his gruff, tangled voice.
"You was at church on Sabbath when Mr. Turnbull gave out the pastoral visitations: he knew that as well as I did. I couldn't say a word to-day. I just had to set here and take it."
"No, you didn't, Matilda: you didn't have to stay any more than I did."
"Elick!"
The woman's voice had a sharp reproof in it. He had touched the Calvinistic quick. She might not reverence the man, but the minister was sacred.
"Well, I can't help it," persisted her husband obstinately. "You can take what you please off him. I don't want him to say anything to me."
"Oh, he didn't say anything, Elick. What was there to say?"
"He doesn't gener'ly keep still because he has nothin' to say."
The man gave a muffled, explosive laugh, and pushed back his chair. Mrs. Randall's eyelids reddened. She laid down her work and got up.
"I guess I'll take off this dress before I clear up the things," she said, in a voice of temporary defeat.
Her husband picked up the empty water-pail as he left the kitchen, and filled it at the well. When he brought it back there was no one visible.
"Need any wood, Tildy?" he called toward the bedroom where she was dressing.
"No, I guess not." The voice was indistinct, but she might have had her skirt over her head. Alex made a half-conciliatory pause. He preferred to know that she was not crying.
"How you been feelin' to-day?"
"Middlin'."
She was not crying. The man gave his trousers a hitch of relief, and went back to his work.
There had been a scandal in Alex Randall's early married life. The scattered country community had stood aghast before the certainty of his guilt, and there had been a little lull in the gossip while they waited to see what his wife would do.
Matilda Hazlitt had been counted a spirited girl before her marriage, and there were few of her neighbors who hesitated to assert that she would take her baby and go back to her father's house. It had been a nine-days' wonder when she had elected to believe in her husband. The injured girl had been an adopted member of the elder Randall's household, half servant, half daughter, and it was whispered that her love for Alex was older than his marriage. Just how much of the neighborhood talk had reached Matilda's ears no one knew. The girl had gone away, and the community had accepted Alex Randall for his wife's sake, but not unqualifiedly.
Mrs. Randall had never been very strong, and of late she had become something of an invalid, as invalidism goes in the country, where women are constantly ailing without any visible neglect of duty. It had "broke her spirit," the women said. Some of the younger of them blamed her, but in the main it was esteemed a wifely and Christian course that she should make this pretense of confidence in her husband's innocence for the sake of her child. No one wondered that it wore upon her health.
Alex had been grateful, every one acknowledged, and it was this fact of his dogged consideration for Matilda's comfort that served more than anything else to reinstate him somewhat in the good opinion of his neighbors. There had been a good deal of covert sympathy for Mrs. Randall at first, but as years went by it had died out for lack of opportunity to display itself. True, the minister had made an effort once to express to her his approval of her course, but it was not likely that any one else would undertake it, nor that he would repeat the attempt. She had looked at him curiously, and when she spoke the iciness of her tone made his own somewhat frigid utterances seem blushingly warm and familiar by contrast.
"It would be strange," she said, "if a wife should need encouragement to stand by her husband when he is in trouble."
Alex had hated the minister ever since, and had made this an excuse for growing neglect of religious duties.
"It is no wonder he dreads to go to preachin', with that awful sin on his conscience," the women whispered to one another. They always whispered when they spoke of sin, as if it were sleeping somewhere near, and were liable to be aroused. Matilda divined their thoughts, and fretted under Alex's neglect of public service. She wished him to carry his head high, with the dignity of innocence. It appalled him at times to see how perfectly she apprehended her own part as the wife of a man wrongfully accused. He was not dull, but he had a stupid masculine candor of soul that stood aghast before her unswerving hypocrisy. She had never asked him to deny his guilt; she had simply set herself to establish his innocence.
Small wonder that she was tried and hampered by his failure to "act like other people," as she would have said if she had ever put her worry into words. It had been one of many disappointments to her that he should go to mill that day, instead of putting on his best coat and sitting in sullen discomfort through the pastor's "catechising." She had felt such pride in his presence at church on Sabbath; and then had come the announcement, "Thursday afternoon, God willing, I shall visit the family of Mr. Alexander Randall." How austerely respectable it had sounded! And the people had glanced toward the pew and seen Alex sitting there, with Wattie on his knee. And after all he had gone to mill, and left her to be pitied as the wife of a man who was afraid to face the preacher in his own house!
Matilda slipped the rustling splendor of her purple silk over her head, and went back to the limpness of her week-day calico with a sigh.
When Alex came in for the milk-pail, she was standing by the stove, turning the long strips of salt pork that curled and sizzled in the skillet. Her shoulders seemed to droop a trifle more in her working-dress, but her face was flushed from the heat of the cooking.
"There wasn't any call to get a warm supper for me, Tildy. I ain't hungry to speak of."
"Well, I guess anyway I'd better make some milk gravy for the children; I didn't have up a fire at noon, see'n' you was away. It ain't much trouble."
Her voice was resolutely cheerful, and Alex knew that the discussion was ended. But after the supper things were cleared away, she said to Mary Frances, "Can't you go and let your pa see how nice you can say your psa'm?"
And the child had gone outside where Alex was sitting, and had stood with her hands behind her, her sharp little shoulders moving in unison with her sing-song as she repeated the verses.
"'That man hath perfect blessedness
Who walketh not astray
In counsel of ungodly men,
Nor stands in sinners' way,
Nor sitteth in the scorner's chair:
But placeth his delight
Upon God's law, and meditates
On his law day and night.'"
The child caught her breath with a long sigh, and hurried on to the end.
"'In judgment, therefore, shall not stand
Such as ungodly are;
Nor in th' assembly of the just
Shall wicked men appear.
For why? The way of godly men
Unto the Lord is known;
Whereas the way of wicked men
Shall quite be overthrown.'"
Then she stood still, waiting for her father's praise.
He caught her thin little arm and drew her toward him, where she could not look into his face.
"You say it very nice, Mary Frances, – very nice indeed."
And Mary Frances smiled, a prim little satisfied smile, and nestled her slim body against him contentedly.
II
Ten years drifted away, and there was a new minister in the congregation at Blue Mound. The Reverend Andrew Turnbull had died, and his successor had come from a Western divinity school, with elocutionary honors thick upon him. Under his genial warmth the congregation had thawed into a staid enthusiasm. To take their orthodoxy with this generous coating of zeal and kindliness and graceful rhetoric, and know that the bitterness that proclaimed it genuine was still there, unimpaired and effective, was a luxury that these devout natures were not slow to appreciate. A few practical sermons delivered with the ardor and enthusiasm of a really earnest youth stamped the newcomer as a "rare pulpiter," and a fresh, bubbling geniality, as sincere as it was effusive, opened a new world to their creed-encompassed souls. Not one of them thought of resenting his youthful patronage. He was the ambassador of God to them, and, while they would have been shocked beyond measure at his appearance in the pulpit in a gray coat, they perceived no incongruity between the brightness of his smile and the gloom of his theology.
This man came into Alex Randall's house with no odor of sanctity about him, and with no knowledge of an unhappy past. Matilda had grown older and stooped more, and her knot of sandy hair was less luxuriant than it had once been, but there were no peevish, fretful lines on her face. It began to grow young again now that she saw Alex becoming "such friends with the minister." Mary Frances was a tall, round-shouldered girl, teaching the summer school, and Wattie was a sturdy boy in roundabouts, galloping over the farm, clinging horizontally to half-broken colts, and suffering from a perpetual peeling of the skin from his sunburned nose. Matilda was proud of her children. She hoped it was not an ungodly pride. She knelt very often on the braided rug, and buried her worn face in the side of her towering feather bed, while she prayed earnestly that they might honor their father and their mother, that their days might be long in the land which the Lord their God had given them. If she laid a stress upon the word "father," was it to be wondered at? And the children did honor their father so far as she knew. If he would only join the church, and share with her the responsibility of their precious souls! It had been hard for her, when Wattie was baptized, to stand there alone and feel the pitying looks of the congregation behind her. Her pulse quickened now at every announcement of communion, and she listened with renewed hopefulness when Mr. Anderson leaned forward in the pulpit and gave the solemn invitation to those who had sat under the kindly influence of the gospel for many years untouched to shake off their soul-destroying lethargy, and come forward and enroll themselves on the Lord's side.
It was the Friday after one of these appeals that Alex came into the kitchen and said awkwardly, —
"I guess I'll change my clothes, Matildy, and go over t' the church this afternoon and meet the Session."
She felt the burden of years lifted from her shoulders. She said simply, —
"I'm real glad of it, Elick. You'll find two shirts in the middle drawer. I think the under one's the best."
Matilda went back to her work, and thought how the stain would be wiped away. "They'll have to give in that he's a good man now," she said to herself. She fought with the smile that would curve her lips. The minister would announce it on Sabbath. "By letter from sister congregations," and then the names; and then, "On profession of faith, Alexander Randall." She tried to stifle her pride. It must be pride, she said, – it must be something evil that could make her so very, very happy.