Part 7

“Hullo,” said one, with a grin. It was Rob Blaydon, carrying in his hand something from which they caught a quick gleam as he passed. The veterinary was with him. Both went up to Hermann and held a hurried consultation, and during this the family fell silent. Presently the three men parted. Hermann spoke up in a high, quavering voice.

“Well, Momma, they say it’s jest got to be done. We jest got to give her up, and put her out of her misery. I don’t know where we’re a-goin’ to git another one like her. I don’t know--that I don’t. Poor old Molly. She’s been with us now longer than my boy there, pretty near as long as Lilly here. It breaks me up to lose her. Yes, sir, it goes hard, but there ain’t no helping it.”

“That’s the way to look at it, Hermann,” said Rob, with gruff good nature.

Hal raised his voice from where he stood with Moira at some distance.

“I’ll give you another horse, Dietz,” he said. Moira squeezed his arm.

“Thank you, thank you, Mr. Hal,” the farmer responded, obsequiously, peering for him in the weak light. “Now, Momma, ain’t that fine! Well, children, I guess we better be movin’ in. Poor Molly--I’d rather not see you do it, gentlemen, if you don’t mind.”

The family turned to obey, exhibiting a variety of expressions, from fright to the deepest woe, but Moira observed that there was one who had not shared the general grief--the short, mature, straw-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen, whose face bore a stolid, disdainful look. She followed toward the kitchen after Ellen and one of the small children, but as she reached the porch she turned and gazed at Rob Blaydon, fascinated by the revolver in his hand. In the weird light, which cast a romantic glow over her figure and uncouth clothing, Moira thought the girl had a touch of beauty, fresh and coarse and natural as earth.

“Poor Hermann,” she said, “he’s a rustic Pierrot, Hal.”

Just as they topped the ridge they heard the harsh double-fire of Rob Blaydon’s revolver. She was glad to see the lights of Thornhill.

“Well,” said Hal, “Rob had a good hunch to-night--even if it was fun for him. Just the sort of thing he’d love. There’s the boy who needed to go to France. As it is he’ll get over that raw streak very slowly.”

“Rob’s a dear,” she broke in, earnestly. “I’m not one of those who worry about him. He’s a good animal--without a shred of theory in him. I let him get me most beautifully pickled twice last Fall.”

“The devil you did!” exclaimed Hal.

“Why not? He knows everybody everywhere and they like him. And he drives like a wild man--when he’s had a few. Now you wouldn’t be such a good fellow, would you, Hal? You’d be cautious and look after my morals, and count my drinks and take me home early.”

“Yes, I’m afraid I would,” he said. “And I suppose you wouldn’t like it.”

XII

It was Ellen’s night off and after the dispatching of the horse, she stayed with Mrs. Dietz to cheer her up and help put the two youngest children to bed. She had been so long a constant visitor and benefactor that they had ceased to regard her as an emissary from the big house and talked of their troubles freely before her.

The five of them sat about the lamp in the comfortless but warm living room of the farmhouse, listening to a monologue by Hermann Dietz on the virtues of the dead horse. Although he had been born within a hundred feet of that spot, and his father had come to America as a boy, Dietz’ accent, like many of his kind bred to the farms thereabouts, still bore traces of the German. They were a squatter-like tribe, never prosperous.

“Poor old Molly, she was not so old, yet, but it seemed like we had had her always, Mrs. Williams. She did her share, Molly.”

“What did Mr. Robert do to Molly?” asked the boy, plaintively. “Did he shoot her? Can I go see?”

“No, no, you wait until morning. Don’t you mind about Molly. She was sufferin’ terrible, and she’s better where she is. But we’ll miss her. Yes, Johnnie, when you was a little bit of a feller, two, three years old, Poppa used to put you on Molly’s back and hold you, and you’d laugh and holler and she’d walk so easy just as if she knew you was a baby.”

“Things was different in them days,” piped his wife. “Them automobile horns, now. We didn’t never used to hear them. But nowadays it’s half the night, Mrs. Williams. I can’t get used to ’em. They keep me awake so.”

“Ah, they wouldn’t be so bad,” put in the girl Lilly, “if we could ride in ’em now an’ then, the way others do. Johann Hunker’s got a m’chine.”

“Ach, you are always bellerin’ about a m’chine,” her father burst out. “When you got one you got a hole to throw money in. Listen to them rich people even, talkin’ about how much they cost. What have I got to do with a m’chine? An’ whose goin’ to run it, your Momma? I ain’t goin’ to take no risks with ’em, not since I got that sunstroke last August anyways. I git so dizzy sometimes I think I can’t get home to the house.”

“I could run it,” grumbled Lilly.

“You now, Lilly! You’ve got plenty to do without that. You don’t tend to your work the way it is.”

“She’s gettin’ so lazy she’s got no head to remember anything,” put in her mother. “I don’t dare leave the children with her.”

“M’chine!” Dietz quavered on, “I ain’t got no money for ’em if I wanted one.”

“You’ve got the money, I guess,” said Mrs. Dietz querulously, “the same as Johann Hunker, if you wanted to spend it.”

“Now, Momma, I told you twenty times already I’m takin’ care of your money. Who’s goin’ to keep it safe for a rainy day, if it ain’t me?”

“Well, we don’t see anything of it, Hermann, not since you got hold of it ... sellin’ off the farms, an’ leavin’ us with hardly a place to put foot to the ground.”

“Yes, Momma,” rejoined her husband earnestly. “I did sell off the farms. But you know what Mr. McNutt said. He said if I didn’t want to take that two hundred dollars an acre Mr. Blaydon offered, they’d all go somewheres else an’ build, and our land never would git a high price. You couldn’t git a hundred for it in them days.”

“There’s some of them waited longer an’ got more. Johann Hunker did.”

“Johann Hunker may be a slick feller, but if I hadn’t sold when I did they mightn’t have come here at all, an’ then where would Johann Hunker be? Never you mind about that money. It’s a-drawin’ good interest.”

Dietz lifted his tall, bent form from his chair and shuffled over to the stove to dump his pipe. Then he turned again to his wife, a sudden grin spreading over his cheeks.

“Well, Momma, what about a little wine? Seeing Mrs. Williams is here, eh? A little home-made wine and coffee cake. We’ll give the childern some wine to-night, eh? Lilly, bring up the chairs to the table.”

The girl rose languidly to obey and Mrs. Dietz departed for the bedroom, returning a moment later with a long bottle. Lilly brought glasses and placed them on the red-figured table cover.

“Get the coffee cake, Lilly,” her mother ordered.

Dietz toyed affectionately with the stem of his glass filled with bright red liquid.

“Ach, the home-made wine--that is good! Well, it is like old times, Momma--when the older children, Lena and Fred was here, and Lilly was a little girl about Johnnie’s size. Yes, it was fine then. None of these rich people with big houses and all that. We was the bosses then.”

“We had all the land,” put in Mrs. Dietz gloomily. “We could get enough off of it to sell a good crop every year and plenty of vegetables to the commission men, and you always had money, if you needed it for anything, like Molly dying. Now it’s in the bank and we can’t spend nothing. No, the land was better than the money.”

“Mr. Blaydon, he gives me sixty dollars a month, and all the feed for the stock, and half the money from the truck. That is something, sixty dollars sure every month.”

“But you’ve got to work for Mr. Blaydon, and I do, and even the childern. It ain’t the same as when we worked for ourselves.”

“Poppa,” broke in Lilly, as she cut the long flat sections of coffee cake, “Mary Hunker was selling some of Johann’s wine over at Corey’s last week. She got a big price, enough to buy a new dress. Can I sell some of Momma’s wine? We can’t ever drink up what we got every year.”

“Ach Himmel!” Dietz cried, bringing his glass down with a rattle upon the table. “There is that girl. We have the land and sell that. We have the wine and we got to sell that too. Ain’t there nothing we can call our own? No, Lilly, you let the wine be.”

“I never get clothes at all like the Hunker girls,” she replied sullenly. “I saw a green dress, a pretty one, over at town that was only thirteen dollars and fifty cents.”

“But, Lilly, your sister Lena never bought no dresses for thirteen dollars and fifty cents. And Lena always looked nice. She married a man with a fine bakery business on Oak Street. He took Lena already because she was a neat, sensible girl and wouldn’t throw away his money for him. I don’t know what to think of you, Lilly. A honest, Christian girl, the way you’ve been brought up. You ain’t like your sister, is she, Momma?”

“You wouldn’t expect all girls would be alike, Hermann,” said her mother. “Lilly is a good girl, but times have changed since Lena was her age. You give me the money, now, and I’ll go with her to look at the dress.”

“Well, well, I guess so,” replied Hermann, mollified by his wife’s firmness. “That is a lot of money, but Lilly is a pretty girl, eh? I’ll give you the money to-morrow and maybe you can buy the dress before Sunday. Then them Hunker girls won’t be so fresh up at church.”

“Pour some more wine for Mrs. Williams, Lilly,” said Mrs. Dietz.

“No,” said Ellen, “I must be going.”

“Yes, a night cap, Mrs. Williams,” said Dietz, in his best manner. “A little more wine for all of us, and then we’ll go to bed. I got to get Meyer, if I can, or Ed Becker, to help me bury poor Molly to-morrow. You got to dig a big hole for a horse.”

As Ellen left the cottage and started homeward she did not know whether to laugh or cry. It was always the same story, poverty and hard work, and the vanity of the young girl tempted as she had been most of her life by the strange, glamorous panorama of the rich at her very doorstep. And she had not the sense of pride the older folks had enjoyed, the knowledge of having been masters of the neighbourhood. Mrs. Dietz’ remark haunted her mind. “The land was better than the money.” For such as these people, it was. It had given them all they had, all they could possibly have, to live for.

The shortest path up the hill to the Blaydon house was rocky and steep, and a third the way up Ellen stopped for breath and regretted she had not walked around the longer way. It was dark under the trees and hard to stick to the path. She sat down to remove a pebble from her low shoe. As she stood up again facing the foot of the hill, she could see a broad patch of Dietz’ field through an opening in the branches. At that moment a figure stepped out from the trees into the open space and came to a stop as if waiting. It was a man undoubtedly, she thought, but she was curious to make sure. So few prowlers ever disturbed the peace of the place. She crept down the path, holding on to the shrubs and tree-trunks and making as little noise as possible. She decided she would wait until the man moved on and go around by the road after all. Reaching the bottom she found herself within a few yards of Rob Blaydon. A moment later, nearer the already dark and silent Dietz house, she saw another figure stirring. What could Rob be up to and who was his confederate? Then swiftly, Lilly darted from the shadow of the house and joined him. The two disappeared, exchanging whispers, around the side of the hill.

Ellen started impulsively, as though she would stop them, but she did not go far. What could she do? She knew Rob Blaydon too well to think that he would take any interference from her or from any inferior. He was not a mean boy, but he was headstrong. He would tell her that he thought her a busybody and a nuisance. And supposing she went to Lilly? Lilly would be frightened and cowed for the moment. But Ellen realized, far more sharply than the girl’s family, how deep her rebellion lay. In the end she would throw advice to the winds.

There was left the alternative of warning Mathilda or Sterling Blaydon. If she did so what could she prove? Rob was bold enough to make the thing appear in any light he desired, some boyish escapade in which he had inveigled the girl to join. To excite the Dietz family about the girl’s danger was as useless. They could not control her in any case, and it might fire her to desperate measures. Ellen could do nothing that would result in any good, nothing except create a scandal.

She sat down and wondered if she cared. She certainly cared about the child’s welfare, but now that she felt it was impossible to prevent what was happening, she could reason about it calmly. Life was a dreadfully sad thing any way you took it. But could this love affair do the girl more harm than she was sure to meet with in any event--perhaps at the hands of worse men? Might it not come to mean something to her she would cherish despite its cost? Ellen’s only answer to these questions was her own experience. Perhaps it had been worth while. Her daughter was happy, with an unclouded future, and she was contented. Knowledge of herself had suddenly shaken her faith in the creed that one must inevitably suffer pain because of sin.

XIII

From the house far above them came the indistinct sound of Mathilda at the piano. Was it “_Reflets dans l’eau_” she was playing? As the music stopped the chaotic noises of life took up their endless staccato rhythm--cows lowing in the pasture, a workman calling to another, the beat of a hammer in some farmhouse, the restless twitter and trilling of birds, the snapping and stirring of branches, a motorhorn sounding a thousand miles away, it seemed--the music of the universe that was flowing through her now in a full stream. Moira opened her book at random:

“Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see; Let the dew-fall drench either side of me; Clear apple leaves are soft upon that moon Seen side-wise like a blossom in the tree; Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon....”

She stopped and looked off through the leaves to the wide fields where the sun lay.

“Don’t you love it, Hal,” she said, “just the sound of it, the perverse beauty of it? Is there anything more wonderful?”

Hal rolled over upon the flat of his back staring thoughtfully up from the shady chamber of green, the tiny grotto at the cliff-foot, up at the grey old overhanging boulders, like moles and maculations on the brow of an ancient crone, the massy tangle of branches and leaves bursting from among them and cutting off half his vision of the glittering blue heaven, wherein floated great flocks of clouds as artificial in their sheer whiteness and hard outlines as puff-balls on a pool. His muscular brown arms and neck were bare to the white bathing shirt. His bright blonde hair was tousled over his face, which was mature and strong. The girl’s voice made little ripples of pleasure run over his limbs; it gave the words a significance which would never have reached him without her--

“The grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie, Kissed upon either cheek and either eye. I turn to thee as some green afternoon Turns toward sunset and is loth to die; Ah God, ah God, that day should come so soon.”

That certainly he could feel supremely, experience in himself. He let his gaze rest upon her. The fine black hair, bobbed at last in spite of Aunt Mathilda’s anxious objections, made a quaint pattern on the face. Against it the glow of her skin and lips was the more brilliant by contrast, and beneath the white angle of brow, the eyes, looking suddenly at him from the page, were as clear, cool, vivid blue as violets in a snowbank.

There was in that face the necessary balance between strength and frailty, self-possession and emotion, at least, so he thought, the features not quite absolutely regular. He preferred that touch of oddness; it was the stamp of her will, her curious insights, her traits of unusual justice. It mitigated too much beauty. Greek models were all very well in statues, but in a woman one wanted a lively difference.... Moira’s book suddenly snapped shut, as though his slowly relished inspection were too much for her. Her short laugh came like a chain of melody from her whole body.

“Poor Hal,” she cried, “aren’t you sorry you will have to listen to Swinburne all your life?”

He reached out an Indian forearm and drew her to him. They were silent for a long time. Then she sat back, her eyes admiring the relaxed strength of his body.

“God!” he muttered, “and I once thought because we were cousins this could never happen--I should never be allowed to speak.”

“Such a good little boy,” she said. “You would have waited to be allowed.”

“It’s odd how I’ve never been able to think of you as Aunt’s daughter.”

“Neither have I,” she replied. “But it is easy to explain. It takes a man--a father--about the house to establish parentage. Mother is a dilettante on her job, anyway. But I have some qualities from her, I know.... What _was_ father like?”

“I wasn’t exactly his playmate, you know!” he laughed. “I don’t remember him any more than you do. But he must have been a regular, from all I’ve heard. He was your father, all right.”

“H’m.... Ned Seymour _sounds_ like a man who might be my father. And names are wonderful--better than portraits--to read people by. I can’t tell much by father’s looks. Poor Daddy, Maman stood by him, I’m glad of that. She’s always been a heretic among her own. But if Daddy was so ambitious, so indifferent to the world and all that, why didn’t he leave me a sign, why didn’t he leave glorious works? He should have.”

“He left you,” laughed Hal.

“The work of an idle moment.”

“Aren’t they the best? But I rather like that about your father, the fact that he was a spectator rather than a spouter. So many darned people aren’t content with their limitations. They have to puddle about with paint and ink.”

“As I do.”

“It’s yours by right, I suppose. At least, you really like it.”

“I have invented a litany, Hal. Will you listen to it? I invented it for the saddest people in the world. It goes like this: O God, be merciful to those who are free and must live with the fettered; to the scornful laughers who are bound to the humourless; to the swift who walk by the slow; and the idle who are bondsmen to the busy--and especially, O God, be merciful to all those whose spirits were young and whose generation denied them youth’s chance, amen. There must have been many like Daddy in his day.”

Through the trees the half moon glowed like the polished end of a woman’s nail against a pink and sapphire West. It was an infinitely tender moment, the end of a week of betrothal, the eve of his departure for a trip North.

“Let me, please, once more,” whispered Moira, “one I love.” And she quoted:

“La lune blanche Luit dans les bois, De chaque branche Parte une voix, Sous la ramée, Oh, bien-aimée.

“Une vaste et tendre Apaisement Semble descendre Du firmament Que l’astre irise.... C’est l’heure exquise!”

“You gave me those,” she said. “They were a peace offering one Christmas, one year you had treated me very badly. I love them because they are all young, all fresh, ageless. Let’s you and I, dear, resolve to be young forever. Let’s make a bond of youth, cherish it, study to keep it, never let it go.”

“Moira, you will never be older than this day.”

“I think it is easy to stay young if one keeps one’s unreasonable likes. One should always like things that are a little twisted and strange, in spite of what people think. One must like Verlaine’s absinthe as well as Verlaine, Swinburne and Swinburne’s perversity also, Rob and his wickedness--the wickedness he doesn’t understand. You know, Hal, I didn’t go to college after all, because I was afraid it would make me old, it would give me ‘interests.’ I hate the word. As if everything wasn’t an interest!”

They walked around by the flat, broad meadow, hushed in the dusk. The first whip-poor-will was calling. She clung to his arm, enjoying the sensation of firm muscles flexing under her hand.

“I don’t care,” she cried. “I’m not afraid of anything. I would as soon give myself to you, all of me, now, to-night. The rest, all the fuss, does not count. What is there to fear in this glorious wide world, Hal?”

“Nothing--but fear, I suppose,” he replied.

Two white figures swaying together across the dusty furrows, they merged into the darkness like birds fluttering out of sight in the clouds.

XIV

Moira had considered Mathilda not at all in the swift, sudden, almost cyclonic romance with Hal Blaydon, no more indeed than in any of her flirtations. There had been many others, of all ages, from her own up to fifty, and she had vaguely realized that when her choice was made, if she made a choice, her mother would have to be counted in. At times during the past week of incredible magic, she had feared the possibility of a clash between them, owing to the good Episcopalian views, to which Mathilda still clung, despite the advanced and advancing habits of thought that surrounded her. But the logic with which the girl faced this possibility was serene: harmony had always prevailed between them, too much harmony perhaps, and some conflict was inevitable sooner or later. It had better occur over this biggest and most important choice of her youth.

She had begun to wonder, of late, just how she felt toward her mother. Certainly she was very fond of her, but it seemed hardly a filial fondness. She admired Mathilda’s little fantasticalities; it was clear that she had in her time been something of an idol-breaker; but it was equally clear that her cherished image of herself as a person of great independence of mind was somewhat out-worn. The daughter had gone far beyond the older woman, or so she thought, and there lurked small matters on which they concealed their opinions from each other. Moreover, Moira had loved her most for the brightness and charm of her manner and these were becoming clouded by a new development that touched her closely--a secret in her brother’s life. Mathilda had discovered the truth with amazement, but to all appearances had reconciled herself to it. So long, she argued, as the apartment he kept in town remained only a rendezvous for discreet meetings, she did not greatly care. But more and more this other establishment was taking Blaydon away from them. Could her brother possibly bring himself to marry the woman--not now perhaps--but when age had weakened his resistance and laid him open to appeals to sentiment and protection? He was already far from a young man.... It was a situation that had a profound effect upon her accustomed poise, because it was one which she could not influence nor even speak of in his presence.

After Hal had left on his trip that night, Moira put up her car--she had driven him to the station herself--and walked into the library. She found Mathilda embroidering, a pastime in which she was skilful, and took a frank pride. It was her substitute for artistic expression, as she said, a gift she had always honestly envied. Everybody they knew, Moira thought, longed for artistic expression--and Hal had been right to scorn it. There were Mary Cawthorn and Tempe Riddle--as soon as people like that had taken up writing verse, she herself had dropped it. She had turned exclusively to her painting. That, at least, you couldn’t do at all, without some foreground, some knowledge and practice. She was happy that her youth had been industrious enough to bring her a measure of these. And she did not take it seriously.

“Well,” said Mathilda, “you’ve seen your darling off?”

The girl did not attempt to conceal her surprise. Then she laughed.