Part 17

As he looked about his rooms he almost smiled at his few possessions. Some long shelves of books, a rack of music, a few pelt rugs, a high-post bed behind an alcove curtain, chairs, a long oak table upon the end of which stood a great bird-cage, while half a dozen smaller ones hung by the window. A porcelain stove stood under the mantel-shelf, and above it was a litter of pipes and broken foils, while on one corner, in a little place apart, shrine-like and surrounded by growing ivy, the portrait of a young girl looked at him. It was merely a photograph taken with the crude art of a provincial town, but the stiff posing could not mar the charm of the face, and Gurth looked longingly. Leaving the window he moved slowly toward it until, resting his elbows on the shelf, he touched her lips with his, and then started at the unconscious act. To see her once more, to-morrow, Stephen’s Day, and then go away! His heart and its primitive instinct whispered, “Marry her—take her with you!” What he considered his reason said,—“Where to? It is winter; the sea is deep and wide, the journey long. Make the home; wait for spring!” Ah, this was one of the many matters in which what is called impulse would have been wiser because the more direct of the two. It was morning before Gurth had thought the matter to a conclusion, and the streets had slept and were waking again before he threw himself upon the bed, still dressed.

He spent the following day in destroying papers and in writing letters to a friend or two. He had the equivalent of about five thousand dollars, to begin life with, and he resolved to hoard the money as carefully as if he were indeed a peasant starting for the New World. This money represented the land, the home; his own brain and hands must do the rest. A trunk of books, his violin, some of his plainest clothes, were all that he would take; a rough coat and a fur cap must be bought to supplement his wardrobe.

The bullfinch by the window piped gaily, and the chaffinches in the cages with fantastic dormers chirped in reply, reminding him of their necessities, and, after feeding them, he unhooked their cages and, fastening them, covered them and prepared to go out. He had promised Andrea that he would be with her for supper. It was already five o’clock, and the Clausens lived far outside the city, an hour’s sharp driving on the Klampenborg road, and the sleigh that he had ordered was waiting. Packing the cages under the fur robes, he started the horse at a brisk pace. It seemed already, so powerful is imagination, as if this decision had given him a greater sense of liberty.

In a long, low-studded room, whose polished board floor was relieved by a few squares of bright carpet, two young girls were preparing the supper table. The youngest was at an age when her closely braided hair lacked the dignity of being put up, and her skirts were still a few inches from the ground. She was squarely built, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and rosy with good nature. She held a large loaf, beautifully light and baked evenly brown, which she was regarding with great glee. “Lift it, Andrea!” she cried. “See how light it is, and how sweet it smells! Now that my baking is as good as yours, you can be married, for you know that father said a year ago you could not marry until I baked good bread!” and Theresa laughed teasingly. Andrea, so addressed, looked at the loaf carefully, then silently kissed the face that was smiling above it. She was half a head taller than her sister, with an oval face surrounded by thick, smooth, bright golden hair that was parted and braided in two wide bands and coiled around her head. Her cheek-bones, a trifle high for good proportion, were relieved by great, dark-blue eyes, with jet-black lashes; the chin was firm, the mouth not small but opening over long white teeth. The indescribable charm of the face came from the eyes. The kiss was the only answer that she gave her sister, who rattled on from one theme to another as she brought in the different dishes, occasionally joining in with the four little boys who were singing carols in a group around a battered piano at the other end of the room, mingling their shrill voices with the pastor’s tenor.

“Mark my footsteps, good my page, Tread thou in them boldly: Thou shalt find the winter’s rage Freeze thy blood less coldly!”

Gurth paused on the threshold an instant listening to the singing, then entered without knocking. The little boys rushed to hang about him and explore his pockets, and the pastor and Theresa welcomed him warmly. It was Andrea alone who saw a change in his whole demeanour, and wondered at the bird-cages. The evening meal was soon eaten, and the boys went to the kitchen with the toys that Gurth had brought them; the pastor, scenting something, sat erect in his arm-chair, all forgetful of his pipe and expectant of some news, while Theresa hung over him. Gurth stood by the stove, nervous and uncertain how to begin.

Andrea went to him, and, putting her hand through his arm, said quietly, but with an infinite tenderness in her voice, “You are going away, dearest, and you have brought your birds for me to keep for you.”

It was as if her voice smoothed away his fears and perplexities, so all four together they discussed the situation without reserve.

Gurth, forgetting his prudent plans, begged the pastor to marry them then, or at the latest in a few days, when the necessary legalities could be complied with, so that he might leave Andrea as his wife. Upon this point the pastor was obdurate. His practical instinct, born partly of the peasant suspicion of another class, and partly of hard experience, forbade this. Among his parishioners many a wedding had taken place on the eve of parting, and the husband had been swallowed up in that vast new world, while the poor girl at home waited in vain, not knowing whether she was wife or widow.

He liked Gurth in a way, but he was sadly disappointed in his failure to reconcile his mother to the marriage, and, while he believed him sincere at present, he did not know how the separation might affect either of the young people; so he insisted upon delay. If Gurth had established himself by the next Christmas, he might return and marry. If not—well, there were other men who, under the circumstances, would be more suitable for Andrea, though he did not voice his opinion. In reality he had no romance in his nature, and he disbelieved in unequal marriages, especially if money was not coupled with the rank.

If, after a year’s trial, Gurth was in a position to come for Andrea,—well and good,—but further than that the pastor could be neither coaxed nor driven.

Moreover, he allowed them little privacy for saying good-by.

“I know how to work, and I like it, but you must learn how,” Andrea whispered, as she clung to him. “But I will be ready, Gurth, and, more, if you can’t return, I will go to you!” This understanding was their farewell.

His mother, when she found that he had gone, laughingly told her friends that Gurth had a foolish love affair, and, taking her advice, he had gone away to travel it off.

II

There is nothing that tends so to destroy the conceit of a man little used to the sea, as an ocean voyage in midwinter, especially if it is made on board an emigrant ship. On a good liner he may prop up his flimsy importance in a dozen ways, from feeing stewards to bring him six meals a day while he lies in his berth, to pulling himself together and wearing the distinction of being the only cabin passenger at table during a furious squall. But on an emigrant ship it is impossible to veil or soften stern reality.

Gurth had chosen this way of travel that he might more quickly realize his changed circumstances. For two weeks or perhaps three he must live in this community. Previously he had a theoretical knowledge of the conditions that surround and make poverty. Now for the first time he saw the reality. His first thought was of the wonderful patience of these people; the next conviction was of their unconquered hope.

A dozen perhaps had settled homes in America and had returned to their native land merely to visit, but the multitude were going, they were not quite sure where, to earn their bread, they did not know how. Doubts did not trouble them, their pink pasteboard tickets seemed the pledge of landing somewhere, and as for the rest, they were used to uncertainty.

The fourth day out, a day when a mild streak and a few hours’ sunshine brought all the grotesque animated bundles of clothes from their berths, Gurth took his violin and, without ado, began to play a native ballad, and then another. Silently the people grouped about him, some stealing below to coax up a comrade who was ill.

The intensely earnest look on their faces stimulated him, and he played on and on, grading his music from grave to gay, to suit each in turn, until at last, feeling his wrist failing, he made the national hymn a final effort. Scarcely had the tune taken form than a chorus rose, at first swaying and uncertain, and then gaining power and steadiness, until the last word was reached. The men rubbed their eyes with the backs of horny hands, and women hugged him, and before he realized the situation, one stolid, square-faced man, who had virtually declined to talk to him the day before, was passing around his peaked fur cap to receive a ready shower of small coin, which Gurth could not refuse. So thus he earned his first money. By his violin and its speech, which, however exquisite, no man feels above him, he was admitted to the freemasonry of his companions.

A carpenter who had been home to see his old parents asked Gurth where he was going to settle, and then he realized that he did not know, save what his port was, and that he did not wish to locate far from the sea, nor in a sultry climate. The carpenter drew from him such scant outline of his schemes as he wished to tell—his plan of buying a farm, after he had learned the country’s ways. This man told him about the village where he lived, which was near a New England town whose railways offered a market for small fruits, and he advised Gurth to work for his board and lodging with one of the numerous fruit-growers until he learned the craft, saying that as he spoke English well, Waldsen might earn a trifle above his board, but that a man who had never done hard work was not worth much.

III

It was a bitterly cold winter; the wind swept fiercely through the cut between Sunset and Rocky hills, rushing down the main street at Glen Village, separating the neighbours on either side more effectively than drifts of snow could have done. However deep, there is something cheerful and exhilarating about snow. Children think that it is sent for their special amusement; the shy young man, who drives his sweetheart over to the “Social” in the next village, needs no excuse for putting his arm around her, for light sleighs have been known to upset suddenly without the slightest warning. The old folks are cheerful in their reminiscences of just such episodes, and compare each storm with some long-remembered one in the thirties, noting always the frail and inferior wearing quality of modern snow.

But Wintry Wind is the most exasperating and prying of nature’s messengers, whose mission is the uncovering of weaknesses in all things animate and inanimate. It soon discovers if your eyes are sensitive, your hat a size too small, that you are subject to rheumatism, that your breath is short when you walk uphill, and that your knees bend as you go down, and so turns your cloak over your head like an extinguisher. It knows precisely which shingle lacks a nail, and will lay bare spots calculated to make obstinate leaks. It also spies out the blind whose catch is loose, the gate with one hinge, the elm that is split in the crotch, and the particular chimney flue that leads to the room where your most important relation (who suffers from bronchitis) is being entertained at tea, and it gauges accurately which article on the clothes-line you value the most.

It was this sort of weather, combined with his daughter Margaret’s delicate health, that made Ezra Tolford, living at the Glen Mill, for which the village was named, resolve to have a hired man.

Now Ezra Tolford had many titles to local distinction. He was Deacon of the First Church, and his parents had been zealous before him, his grandfather having had the hardihood to fly to the woods with the church plate on the approach of the British in 1779, thereby risking his life _via_ wild beasts, Hessians, and exposure,—a fact that is brought up in every local historical discourse to this day. Incidentally it might be mentioned that the plucky ancestor (owing to fright and darkness) was never able afterwards to locate the marshy spot where the precious metal was buried; this fact, however, is usually omitted.

Ezra was also Judge of Probate, thanks to a fragmentary law course taken in days when a fond mother had pinched and saved that her only boy might “make his mark.” Thirdly, he was the owner of the best mill on the Pequotuck. A mill that, in spite of the sale of flour and meal at the village store, kept its wheel going five days out of seven during nine months of the year, sawing wood when no one wished flour, and turning out middlings for the cattle when the stacks grew low. So swift was the river that ice very seldom silenced the song the old wheel hummed as it worked.

Lastly, by wise drainage the deacon had turned a dozen acres of protected meadow-land, heretofore regarded as next to useless, into one of the thriftiest fruit farms in southern New England.

All these things made Ezra’s daughter Margaret of special importance in many eyes besides his own, and it was for her sake that he resolved to have a man to hook up the team for her, when he was busy in the mill or away in the village, and do a thousand and one little errands that the sturdier daughters of his neighbours accomplished for themselves.

The Mill House, as it was called, stood on a hill between the Pequotuck and a little brook that, curving, joined the river below the dam. It was a placid-looking white house of a style of architecture that might be called New England Restored. It had been Colonial, but a modern bay-window, a piazza, and a lean-to in the rear had hybridized it; yet it still possessed a dignity never seen in the rural interpretations of the Queen Anne villa.

This particular house had a very attractive outlook. Raised well above them, it was bounded on the western side by the river and the mill-pond that always held the sunset reflections until the twilight absorbed them, while the old red mill with its moss-mottled roof focussed the view. Toward the north and east the meadows ran slantwise up a hillside, where, dotted here and there like grazing sheep, you could see the stones of the burying-ground, where the inhabitants of the glen took their final rest, as if their friends had left them as near heaven as possible, and safe from the floods that used once to sweep the valley. To the south the road ran tolerably straight for three miles down to Glen Village itself.

The interior of the house differed but slightly from others of its class, and that difference consisted in the greater genuineness of its fittings. Evidently the woman who presided over it appreciated relative values, for the sitting-room had glowing crimson curtains and a fire of logs in place of the usual “air-tight,” while in one corner, in the location usually chosen for the inevitable asthmatic parlour organ, stood an upright piano. On the table was a comfortable litter of books and papers.

By the window, looking down the road, stood Margaret Tolford. At the first glance there was nothing striking about her personality. Medium in height and colouring, her slight frame was wrapped in a soft white shawl that gave her a fragile air. At a second glance the deep gray eyes, that looked from under a brow narrowed by a quantity of smooth, coal-black hair, were magnetic in their intelligent wonder. Her eyes said, “There is much that I would understand, but I cannot;” whereas a shallower nature would have thought, “I am misunderstood!”

The wind whistled in the chimney, and the _pud, pud_, of a heavy flatiron came from the kitchen, with snatches of inharmonious song, as the thick-lipped Polack who was the “help” pummelled the towels and folded them at angles that would have distracted a mathematician. In fact, this very Polack was one of Margaret’s lesser problems, a sort of necessary evil who, in summer, bareheaded and barefooted, pervaded the premises, but having with her gay neckerchief a certain sort of picturesque fitness, which, when brought nearer, booted and confined to the winter kitchen, became an eyesore. Other farmers’ daughters did the cooking and the lighter work, and only had a woman to help with the washing.

Margaret had never done manual labour; her mother, dead now two years, had stood between this only child and all hardship, and coaxed the Deacon to send her to a collegiate school when her playdays were over. In the summer holidays she was petted and caressed and kept from soiling her hands, and when at eighteen she was coming home for good to mingle as an equal with her parents and learn her part in life, her mother died, and her father closed the one tender spot in his stern heart around his daughter. So she lived shut up within herself, craving a more intellectual companionship than the neighbourhood furnished, and starving unconsciously for demonstrative affection.

Tolford was a silent sort of man, who had been so thoroughly understood by his wife that she seemed to know his unvoiced wishes. Because he showed so few signs of an affection that would have won a hearty response from Margaret, he failed to comprehend the difference between a deeply reserved nature and physical weakness, to which cause he laid her abstraction. His love for her, therefore, took the schooltime form of shielding her from work. He liked to hear her play hymns on Sunday evenings, and was very proud to have her train the children of the Sunday School in their carols, but it never occurred to him to ask her advice in any of his plans, or expect aid from her. She stood apart, not understanding the love her mother had drawn from the stern, lonely man, and while he excused her reserve, and told the neighbours she was delicate and peaky, her only ailment lay in lack of motive.

* * * * *

It grew dark, and points of light appeared here and there in the landscape; an icy slip of a moon pierced the driving clouds. Margaret drew the curtains and sat down by the fire, its light sending a glow to her usually colourless face. A brisk, though heavy, footstep came along the entry from the kitchen, and Ezra Tolford opened the door, and, stopping a moment to adjust his eyes to the fitful light, went toward the fire, rubbing his hands. Margaret immediately arose and, pushing a rocking-chair towards him, prepared to light the lamp.

“Never mind that now, daughter,” he said; “sit down, I want to talk a bit. You know I said I’d get a hired man to ‘piece out’ with the work? Well, he’s come!”

The Deacon was, in reality, fairly well educated, but since his wife’s death (she had kept him to her standard, for she had been a schoolmistress) his English had relapsed into localisms, and, besides this, at the present moment he seemed ill at ease. Margaret merely understood the announcement as a roundabout question as to whether any accommodations were prepared for the man, and said: “The shed bedroom is just as Hans Schmidt left it last fall; I suppose a bed could be made up now, and Zella can clean the room to-morrow, but it will be very cold unless you give him a stove.”

“Well—er—you see,” said the Deacon, “I don’t suppose that room will do,—em!—hem! You see in the beginning he is to live with me without wages, and—” here the Deacon came to an embarrassed standstill, and Margaret broke in,—“Without wages! If he is as poor as that, he will scarcely object to the shed room without a fire for the night!” She did not say this because she was at all mean or hard-hearted, but from her experience of the servant question, any one who was willing to work for nothing must either be utterly worthless or bereft of reason.

“Not at all, not at all, daughter! You see, the man is not a common workman, but may buy the Hill Farm some day as a home for his sister, and wants me to teach him to grow small fruits, and learn the way of things here while he gets it to rights. I’ve contracted with him for a year—” and as Margaret did not reply, he continued, “You know Peter Svenson, the carpenter, who went home to Denmark last summer to see his folks? Well, he brought this young man back with him. Peter knows all about him, and says he is perfectly honest and speaks good English, but is close-mouthed, and doesn’t like to talk of his affairs, because his family used to be well fixed, but now they are all dead but one sister. He has a few thousand dollars and is going to make a home and bring her over in a year.

“Peter says he can play a fiddle, but isn’t used to hard work, and advised me not to pay him money, but to offer to show him how I work my farm and give him his board for his services.” Then the Deacon continued, giving the account of Gurth that the garrulous carpenter had pieced together to cover his lack of real knowledge. As Margaret still said nothing, he added:—

“Now I think the attic east room might be straightened up,—it won’t take long, and it can be bettered to-morrow.”

Instantly Margaret was divided between extreme wonderment at this strange arrangement on her father’s part, and fierce resentment at the intrusion of a stranger in the house,—a man who was and was not a servant, who must necessarily eat with them, who would not perhaps leave the room when the meal was finished.

If Margaret had a decided eccentricity, it was her positive resentment of male society, and she bore the reputation of being proud, because, when the village swains drove up in their newly washed buggies with bows of ribbon tied to the whip handles, and with self-satisfied glances asked her to take a drive, the usual rural compliment, she invariably declined, and their irate mothers settled that she either must be in a decline, experiencing religion, or else, woful thought, “engaged to some fellow Northampton way,” where she had been to school.

The truth was that she had, through a wide range of reading and no experience, built up a well-nigh impossible ideal, half mediæval heroism, half modern, intellectual refinement, that was irreconcilable with the type of men with whom she came in contact.

Margaret was thoroughly accustomed to her father’s silent mood and considered him by far (as he was) the best-informed man she knew. He was also fond of reading, not only subscribed to a daily paper, but several weeklies and magazines, and always allowed her to buy any book she fancied, so that their winter evenings, when Margaret read aloud, were comfortably sociable, and sympathetic. It was no wonder, therefore, that she resented the presence of a stranger, and it was with rather a lowering brow that she followed her father to the kitchen.

Deacon Tolford went in first, and said abruptly, but in a tone that Margaret knew was meant to be cordial: “Daughter, this is Gurth Waldsen, who is going to help me out this year; we want to make him feel so much at home that he’ll settle in Glen Village. You’d better tell Zella to hurry supper; I guess we are both of us hungry.”