CHAPTER VI.

A SUMMER AT HOME.

Until the present summer Mauney had never gone back to the farm at Lantern Marsh, so that now, with his new mental outlook, he was for the first time enjoying it. William was living on his father’s place and renting the old McBratney property to an Englishman. Time had brought about changes. William was no longer the insupportable person he had once been. His wife Evelyn had adapted herself, cheerfully, to her circumstances. She found no time now to indulge her former love of gramophones and motoring. The two were living happily together, while the wonted sombreness of the old home was gratefully relieved by the shrill voices of two healthy children. William, once the scoffer, was now proud of his brother, while Mauney had learned a tolerance that made William’s bad English even lovably picturesque.

“Well, Maun,” William would say, “you’ve got the book learning fer the hull crowd. But while you’ve been a-studyin’ I’ve been raisin’ a family, an’ there ain’t no good o’ us two tryin’ to argue which is the best. But I’ll take the family every time!”

Then Mauney would laugh and reply, “There’s nothing like being happy, Bill, whatever you have to do to get there.”

He felt that he himself was very gradually arriving. Ahead lay the treasures of history to be expounded to a new generation. With his own hands he was to lift before their eyes the ideals which he had won. It took no more than this glorious prospect to make him very content.

There was sadness, though, in every memory of Lantern Marsh. Time after time during the summer months, thoughts rushed unbidden upon him to shake his being—those family sentiments of past scenes, pathetic differences of opinion, once so important, but now so irrevocable and small. The eye of retrospect sees with a tender sight. Mauney kept fancying that his father’s big form must soon appear at the lane entrance carrying a whiffletree, or his harsh voice be heard swearing at his horses. The man had lived up to his light. Experience forgave him his faults. But now Seth Bard, with all his gruffness and strength, was silent and vanished. Once he had seemed the most immovable body on earth, the one great, availing magnitude. But even the winds that blew from unseen quarters across the desolate marsh were more enduring than he.

And Mauney’s sadness found a strange kind of comfort as he gazed upon that never-ending swamp. It had been there always. Since he had known anything he had known that swamp—bleak and horrid and fascinating, as changing as the phases of his own life; never the same for two days in succession, and yet always the same. On sunny afternoons, great, white clouds hung over it and the blue of the sky lay mirrored in the long, narrow strips of water far out. Then would come the disturbing breezes, growing into winds that moved the trees and reed banks, then into the hurricane that transformed it all, till it vibrated like a living and suffering being, its green acres of sedge whipped to a surface like shot silk, its channels churned to a muddy red, the moving sky glaring with storm, and the stunted hemlocks, huddling frantically together along its edges. This old swamp, hated and loved, defeated, but eternal, was relic of all that Mauney regretted in those sad hours that came upon him during the summer months.

But these remembrances were being pushed back farther and farther out of sense, while the vital events of life occupied him more and more. Coming into the house, tired, but satisfied, after the day’s work in the hayfield, he would sit quietly on the kitchen verandah, watching the sun sink beyond the corner of the big, dark barn. The sound of crickets filled the air with a metallic vibration. His contentment was as deep as the gulf of crimson sky above him, and his happiness as much a-quiver as the air. As he sat here, lulled into grateful meditation, perhaps Evelyn would interrupt him.

“I’ll bet a dollar, Maun, you’re in love!” she would venture.

And he would wonder if it was possible that any love was ever quite as wonderful as his for Freda. Never since human life began had any woman been as dear as she was to him. She was so real. There was not an atom of dissimulation about her. Freda—who had flashed upon him like a blinding light, who had believed in him—had become constant in his thoughts. Freda was the great reality. Nothing could daunt him, nothing could make him one little bit unhappy, so long as he knew that ultimately he would possess her.

But he purposely refrained from seeing her much. The few calls that he made at her home were in response to her invitations, and he fancied that she understood well enough the reasons for his restraint.

The hot harvest season passed very tardily. The August sun grew more intense as the long, sultry days drew out. There was never even a cloudy day to remove the accumulating tension of the heat. The grey, baked earth cracked into deep fissures. The wells dried up, and even the waters of the marsh sank, day by day, until at the end of the month they were entirely gone. There was no greenness anywhere; the rushes and sedges were burnt into amber shades, with yellow fuzz that blended dully with the parched meadows. And the creatures of the swamp were either silent or departed. Mauney missed them.

The farmers began to talk ruin. William Henry McBratney, passing the lane on a visit from Beulah, pulled up his horse to discuss the weather with Mauney. His evil face, the more evil because of its senile wasting, was painfully worried, and his mad, dim eyes sparkled in accord with his feelings.

“Well, sir, Maun,” he said, striking his knee with his sprawling, bony palm, “I’ve seed a good many dry spells, but nothing like this. It’s nigh onto fifty years since me and my first missus settled here. But, sir, I tell you what! This here harvest has been the driest ever.”

“But I think we’ll get rain, don’t you?” asked Mauney.

“No, sir, I don’t,” affirmed the old man, with an expression of settled gloom. “Every mornin’ I’ve been a-looking for a cloud or two, but that sky, sir, I tell yuh, couldn’t hold a cloud. It’s too damned hot fer to hold a single cloud! An’, if we don’t get rain the cattle’s goin’ to die.”

“But, my dear sir,” persisted Mauney, “rain is bound to come. Did you ever see it fail?”

“All I’m sayin’ is, that since I come here—me an’ the missus—that there marsh hain’t never onct dried up that way. Yer father, Seth, never seed it like that, I tell yuh. No, sir. An’ if it’s me ye’r askin’ I’d deny that there’ll be any rain. Leastways, I’d hev to see it to believe it!”

Such logic was more depressing than convincing.