CHAPTER VI.

THE IRON WILL.

“_Good is a man’s death which destroys the evils of life._”—_Publilius Synus._

Bard delayed two years before he began horse-breeding in earnest. By that time the war had become a fixture, with more promise of an endless continuance than an early peace, and as it was impossible to hire help for farm work, he grew weary of carrying on his arduous agricultural labor with only his two sons to assist him. Consequently he determined to put less soil under seed and to confine his attentions to horses, since the army would afford an apparently inexhaustible market for their purchase. The news of his new determination was received with gladness by William, who had begun to tire of his strenuous labors, and with indifference by Mauney, who, since his rejection at Lockwood, had remained at home, mechanically submitting to his fate, and caring little what turn events might take.

A month previously the casualty lists had contained the name of Snowball, who had been killed in action in France.

“Don’t seem natural,” Bard had admitted simply, “Poor old Snowball. If he hadn’t been such a fool he’d be right here to-day, same as the rest of us.”

But Mauney questioned whether the fate of their former servant was not indeed preferable to his own. In quiet moments—too quiet and too numerous for his liking—he secretly envied Snowball, for it seemed that a few months of death-rewarded struggle in France were infinitely easier than the drab years of Lantern Marsh promising no release. Long since he had forgotten his reception on returning from Lockwood—the jeers, the confident “I told you so” of his father, the stern promise of sterner treatment if he repeated the nonsense. The cause of his rejection by the army seemed unbelievably trivial, but on later consulting a civil oculist in Lockwood some kind of eye-trouble was discovered, with the result that Mauney adopted glasses. Even with this correction he was advised that he would not be able to qualify for general service abroad, and the prospect of entering home service in some dismal camp dissuaded him from further efforts to be accepted. By this time a few of the younger set in Beulah had enlisted, thereby establishing among their relatives a local cult of patriots who were never backward in snobbishly cutting others who had not gone. William was too thick-skinned to feel this, while Mauney was proud enough never to explain his very sufficient reason for remaining at home.

Then came rumors of conscription, the first feature of the war that promised to affect the Bard household. Bard himself was furious for he saw plainly that his elder son fell into the first group of unmarried men who would be called up. Mauney took a silent delight in the discomfiture of both. As the date approached for the new law to go into force he kept picturing the cataclysm of feelings that would be aroused, the unwilling departure of his husky brother and his father’s unavailing expostulation. It was the latter which really delighted Mauney, since he had come to regard his father’s will as the one stupendously efficient thing in life, never to be crossed or defeated. A great eagerness possessed him to see the law in force and to behold, just for once, with his own eyes, the spectacle of his father’s spiritual collapse. The time approached with much rebellious comment from within his own home and that of other farmers who had until now had few reminders of war except higher prices for all their products. At last the evening arrived, the last evening of freedom for all potential conscripts, and Mauney sat in the kitchen with his father, awaiting the return of his brother who had gone to Beulah apparently to make a closer survey of the impending situation. At a late hour, William returned.

“Well?” said Bard, eagerly rising as his son entered the kitchen, “What about it?”

“It’s all right,” William replied with a sly smile. “They won’t get me, Dad.”

He had married Evelyn Boyce.

Mauney’s astonishment was only less than his instinctive hatred of an action so basely material and selfish. When he learned the facts of William’s evening sojourn in the village he flushed and regarded his brother with eyes that the brother could read only too plainly.

“What’s the matter?” William blurted.

“With whom?” Mauney asked.

“You.”

“I’m feeling sorry.”

“What for?”

“For Evelyn Boyce, of course.”

William’s face colored quickly and the big veins of his neck stood out. He stood, stiffening his arms, then with a savage glare, he shook his fist at his brother.

“You better keep your mouth shut,” he fumed, “or I’ll shut it for you. What I do is my business, not yours.”

In this principle William had the full paternal support and Mauney once more witnessed the complete success of his father’s will. The plans had been made out carefully, beforehand. It was not many days until the bride was established with her husband on the McBratney farm and only three were left at the old homestead. Mrs. William Bard was a brainless, pretty girl of small physique, with a novel love of chickens, and of a screeching gramophone whose music could be heard each evening, when the wind was in the east. Occasionally she accompanied her husband on short evening visits to her father-in-law’s, and quite won Bard’s affections by sitting on his knee and lighting matches for him on the sole of her shoe. Toward her brother-in-law she adopted a surprising attitude of coquetry, that displeased her husband, and caused Mauney a degree of nausea. It was soon evident that she was not born to be the wife of William Bard. Beneath her empty hilarity there was to be gradually discerned a growing girlish discontent with things. Her attentions to her father-in-law grew less spontaneous and her flirting manner with Mauney came to have suggestions of pathetic appeal. Mauney felt that he could read beneath the surface the awakening to consciousness of one, who, having been bought for a purpose, would insist on demanding her price, for, vapid though her mind was, she possessed a sharp sense of justice in matters affecting herself. In the following summer William purchased a motor-car under pressure, and began taking his wife for evening drives, much to the elder Bard’s outspoken disapproval.

“There’s too much gadding about, Bill,” he said one day as they talked matters over. “You’ve got to cut out this here flyin’ all over the country.”

“What am I goin’ to do?” demanded William, impatiently. “You know I didn’t want to marry her, but you advised me to. So now, you can put up with what I got, see!”

Life offered no solution for Mauney’s inner troubles. If there had been one cheerful event to annul the interminable gloom of these years of war, or one friend to brighten the unlifting fogs that settled down upon him like the vapors of Lantern Marsh itself, he might have borne his discontent with greater patience. But the raw wound in his nature, made by no sudden sword-gash, but worn there by the attrition of dreary seasons, grew more unbearable. Every hope that had dared to rise had been forced down as by a vigilant, hateful fate. Every finer instinct had met its counterpart of external opposition. Every aspiration that trembled gently upward had been tramped by heavy feet, as violets in the path of horses. He had lived with his newspaper. He had watched the verdure of the springtimes fade beneath the dry suns of autumn, the green apples of his orchard redden and fall to earth, the birds of the swamp wing away to their southern homes, when ice bound the Lantern Marsh in its grip and biting winds hurled the snow in deep banks about the home. And as unchanging as the seasons he had watched his father’s character deepen to its fixed qualities of greed and selfishness.

But an end was in sight.

Through the hot summer of endless labor in the fields, and of endless mind gropings, came vague breezes that touched his cheeks with promise of liberty. They breathed a new hope that he scarcely dared to heed, for these mysterious breezes, as if they were the breath of fearless gentle angels, brought indistinguishable whisperings, to which he more and more bent his ear. Pausing in the field to lean momentarily on the handle of his hay-fork his eye turned quickly as if to catch an elusive presence that he felt nearby. But there was no one. He was quite alone save for his father and the others casting up great cocks of hay upon the wagon. But as he sat of an evening on the front steps of the farmhouse this haunting presence would come again, eluding his gaze that sought it among the orchard trees, heavy with their apple harvest. In his room at night he felt it directly behind him, and came to realize at length that it was the man he wanted to be, the prefigurement of a new Mauney Bard.

And the wisps of angel breath, with their sybilline intonations, began to be articulate, telling of a world of promise for the valiant, of knowledge, of friends, of hope.

He had waited for life to help him, but it offered no help. With spirits partially crushed by the mundane atmosphere and the endlessly sordid philosophy of his detested home he had waited in dejection. But, in the summer of 1916, recognizing at length that no power existed to help him but himself, he openly rebelled. One day he went to his father after dinner, as the latter smoked idly in the kitchen, chatting with the hired woman. Mauney was finally beside himself.

“Look here,” he said without introduction, “I’m just about through with you and Lantern Marsh. Here I’ve been cooped up for years, just simply staying because there was nothing else to do. I want an education and, by heavens, I’m going to have it. I think you ought to give me enough to go to college. But if you won’t, I’m going anyway.”

The woman, recognizing the private nature of their conversation, left them alone in the room.

The weight of Mauney’s ultimatum lay as heavily on Bard’s face as the noon sun on the yard outside the window. For minutes he sat with his head between his large, knotty hands, staring blankly at the table oil-cloth, Mauney felt a flickering pity for him, presented thus with a flat proposition from which no selfish escape seemed possible. Bard did not speak, nor did his face betray his thoughts. It was the tired face of a man weary with his efforts to coerce life, confronted at last with a problem that lay beyond his personal power.

“Well,” he said, looking up at length like one, who, though unable to command, still hopes to barter. “If you’ll stay on here I’ll will you the farm and give you a quarter interest in the business now.”

“Dad, you don’t understand,” said Mauney, “I want education. I’m sick of farming and don’t intend to stay with it. I want to go to College and, as I told you, I’m going, anyway—”

“All right,” said Bard simply and nodded his head many times. “You may regret this, boy, I think you will. Your first duty is to me. And I—”

The sound of horses’ steps distracted his attention and, turning toward the window, he recognized a well-known stallion being led by a man in a sulky.

“There’s Thompson, now,” he said. “I have to go to the barn. But that’s all I’ve got to say, Maun.” He paused to strike the table with his fist. “Stay with me and I’ll share up. But if you want to pull out, you do it on your own hook. Not a cent from me, sir—not a cent!”

He walked toward the door, but turned to cast a glance at Mauney’s serious face.

“You better think it over,” he said. “It’s a purty big step, sir—a purty big step, I tell yuh.”

As he left to direct Thompson and the stallion to the barn, Mauney buried his face in his arms.

There could be no turning back on his resolve. His father’s offer was no inducement. Life at Lantern Marsh had taken all these years to reach its logical termination—he must go. To himself he owed something and the debt disturbed him. Beyond the confines of the present he dreamed of self development and a great happiness. He did not know how long he had sat at the table, thrilled by his new determination, but it must have been many minutes. He was suddenly disturbed by the sound of hurrying feet and by the woman’s voice, as she dashed into the kitchen.

“Maun!” she cried excitedly. “Get into Thompson’s gig and go get the doctor. Your father’s hurt!”

“What happened him?” asked Mauney, rising.

“Don’t know. He was in with the horses. Hurry Maun, fer God’s sake, I’m afraid he’s killed by the way Thompson ran out.”

Mauney ran across the yard to untie Thompson’s horse, but could see no evidence of tragedy. The sun lay heavily upon the manure pile and no sound disturbed the blue shadows of the stable windows. As he jumped into the sulky and, reaching for the whip, drove quickly down the lane, he saw the woman running toward the barn with a pail of water. His mind was a blank during that race to Beulah. He forgot everything that had turned in his brain a few moments before. He only felt that something horrible had happened. He caught mental images of his father’s face, rendered grotesque and abominable, but he put the pictures from him, and glanced for relief at the placid meadows along which he was flying at top speed. It seemed that he would never complete his journey when, all at once, he pulled up the lathered horse by Dr. Horne’s lamp post.

He jumped out and had run only half-way to the office door when he beheld the burly physician, bare-headed, carrying his satchel.

“What’s the matter, young fellow?” he asked.

“My father’s kicked by a horse,” Mauney quickly explained, “and I guess it’s bad.”

“Where is he?”

“Down in our barn.”

Horne pointed to the office.

“Go in there, young fellow,” he said. “On the back of the back door is the key to my barn. Hitch up my horse and follow me. I’ll drive this race horse of Thompson’s. Take your time, young fellow,” he added, as Mauney ran toward the office. “You aren’t the doctor. Just drive down slow, mind.”

Later when Mauney had nervously succeeded in hitching up Doctor Horne’s horse and was driving quickly homeward he wondered why he had been asked to drive so slowly. The horse seemed in good condition and in the habit of running, so he made no effort to stop him. Suddenly, though, at the outskirts of the town, as they passed the last houses, the horse slowed down to an easy trot, a matter of habit, too, as Mauney humorously reflected. At length, he reached home, but saw nobody in the yard. Thompson’s horse was wandering slowly by the end of the drive shed, nibbling the short grass. Mauney got out and tied the doctor’s horse to the iron weight which he had taken from the buggy. For a moment he gazed toward the barn. There was the open stable door, the empty windows, the enlarging blue shadow of the building creeping toward the end of the manure heap, but no movement, save that of a white hen, picking in the straw that littered the ground. He slowly turned and entered the kitchen where, stretched upon the sofa, he discovered the woman, sobbing hysterically.

“How is he?” Mauney asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” she managed to say, turning over on her face and biting her finger. “I went over to get Bill, but he’s in the back field. I guess you better get him, Maun. I—I can’t walk no further!”

On his way to the lane Mauney saw the doctor, in his shirt sleeves, coming across the barnyard toward the kitchen. He waited for him, reflecting that he had never seen the physician walk so slowly.

“Well, Mauney,” he said seriously, as he came up. “God knows this isn’t the kind of thing I like to do. I feel damned sorry for you.”

“Is he—is he dead, doctor?”

Horne slowly nodded his big, black head, while tears filled his big, black eyes.

“Yes, sir, poor Seth Bard,” he said with a sigh. “He was a good farmer, was Seth. He never knew what hit him. Well, that’s the way it goes.”