Part 5

“N-o, I didn’t,” she acknowledged. She hesitated visibly, then added, “They told me you were a school commissioner, and that I must apply to you.”

“Why didn’t you apply to me?” he wanted to know. “Didn’t you think I would be a good sort of person to help you in your desire for independence?”

“I didn’t ask you,” she said, “because——”

“Well?” he questioned sharply. “You didn’t ask me for help because——”

“How could I?” she demanded, with a spirited lift of her head. “I asked you for help before and you refused.”

He looked at her with piercing keenness.

“Did I?” he said gravely. “Well, I offered you—a position. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”

Barbara’s heart beat suffocatingly fast. His eyes were on her face, compelling her, mastering her.

“Would you—Could I take care of Jimmy just the same?” she asked, in a muffled voice.

He gave his horse a sharp cut with the whip before he answered.

“I can’t see why you should bring the boy into our affairs,” he said coldly. “But he can live with us—for the present, if you like. Then there is the Preston farm; as I’ve already told you, you may do as you like with it.”

Barbara looked mistily away over the fields past which they were driving, the sound of meadow-larks, calling and answering, and the soft jubilant gurgle of a bluebird on a nearer fence-rail reaching her like vaguely reproachful voices out of a dead past. Then as now had the meadow-larks called “Sweet! oh, my sweet!”—in the one spring-time when David Whitcomb loved her.

“I shall have to—to think,” she murmured. “I am afraid——”

“Of what?” he demanded. “Of me?”

She did not answer, and again he cut the horse impatiently with his keen whip-lash, holding the spirited creature with a strong grasp on the reins as he did so.

“Well,” he said, after a long silence, “I’m afraid I can’t make myself over, even for you. But I’ll tell you something, my girl, there are worse men in the world than Stephen Jarvis, and perhaps you’ll fall in with some of ’em, if you turn me down. Look at me, will you?”

Unwillingly she turned her face to his.

“I shall not take a silly _no_ for an answer,” he said under his breath. “I never have, and I shan’t begin with you. I need you, and you need me.”

His eyes held her powerfully.

“Do you love another man?”

“No,” said Barbara faintly. She could not bring herself to uncover her one dead love before those pitiless eyes, while the meadow-larks were calling and answering with such piercing sweetness. David Whitcomb was dead. If she had ever loved him it was as another self in a dim past, growing ever dimmer.

“Then,” said the Honorable Stephen Jarvis quietly, “you will marry me.” He broke into a short laugh. “Do you know I couldn’t bear to think of your loving another man? Is that being in love? Tell me, Barbara.”

He laughed again softly, as he bent to peer into her averted face. She felt herself yielding, her weak hold on past and future loosening.

She did not answer, but her red mouth quivered.

He experienced a sudden thrilling desire to touch the fresh innocent lips with his.

“It would be curious,” he murmured unsteadily, “if I should learn what love is for the first time. Shall I tell you how old I am, Barbara?”

She looked up at him without curiosity.

“Well, I’m thirty-seven; and I’ve never loved any woman—I have never loved anything, except money and success. But now—Barbara!”

He bent toward her, his cold eyes alive with passion.

“No—no!” she cried, shrinking from him in sudden terror.

His face stiffened into its accustomed mask.

“You’re thinking I’ve waited too long,” he said bitterly, and the curling lash stung the bay horse in the flank.

Neither spoke again while the wheels spun dizzily along over the mile of road which brought them to the big stone gate-posts of the Preston farm.

He drew up his foaming horse sharply.

“I won’t come in,” he said, “if you’ll get out here.”

She felt herself vaguely humiliated as she stepped down from the high vehicle without assistance.

“Stop!” he ordered as she passed quickly inside, as if in haste to gain shelter.

She looked up at him uncertainly, her eyes wide with an emotion akin to terror.

“I shall not humiliate myself by coaxing or cajoling you,” he said haughtily. “You are best left alone for the present.”

He lifted his hat with a sweeping bow, and the red-wheeled buggy dashed away.

Barbara drew a long, struggling sigh. She felt curiously light and free, as if she had made a breathless escape from some grasping hand, outstretched to seize her.

The sight of Jimmy running swiftly down the driveway toward her heightened the sensation to almost passionate relief.

“Hello, Barb’ra!” shouted the little boy. “I came home from school, an’ you wasn’t here. An’ you can’t guess what I’ve got for you!”

The child’s face, glowing rosily with health and mischief, was uplifted to hers. She stooped and kissed it tenderly.

“What have you got for me, Jimmy?”

“Guess!”

“I can’t guess,” she answered soberly. “You’ll have to tell me.”

“You ain’t cross wiv me, are you, Barb’ra?”

“No, dear, of course I’m not. Why should I be cross? Why, it—it’s a letter! Where did you get it, Jimmy?”

“It’s the one I lost,” said the child, puckering up his chin disappointedly. “I fought you’d be glad. Peg found it. He said he ’membered the wind was blowin’ that day; so he looked all along the road on bof sides, an’ he found it right under a bush.”

Barbara hastily tore the sodden envelope apart. Her fingers trembled as she unfolded the large stained sheet.

“Is it all spoiled?” asked Jimmy anxiously. “Can’t you read it?”

VII

BARBARA stared at the stained and defaced sheet with wide, frightened eyes. Her hands trembled.

“Can’t you read it, Barb’ra?” pleaded Jimmy anxiously, standing on tip-toe to peep at the letter. “Peg said he was ’fraid you couldn’t; but he said maybe you’d know who it was from, an’ if it was ’portant.”

Barbara did not answer. The rain-soaked paper in her trembling fingers faced her like a mute accusing ghost out of the past. The lines of writing folded close upon each other and soaked with rain and the stain of the wet brown earth had been completely obliterated; but two words of the many had escaped; her own name at the beginning of the letter, and another at its close.

“He is not dead!” she murmured. “He is not dead!”

Jimmy clutched her sleeve, dancing up and down in his impatience.

“Is it ’portant, Barb’ra—is it? Can you read it?” he persisted.

She faced the child, her eyes clouded with despair and anger.

“No, I can’t read it!” she cried. “Oh! if you had only brought it to me!”

She turned swiftly and hurried toward the house, leaving the child lagging forlornly in the rear, his blue eyes brimmed with tears.

Peg Morrison, digging a patch of garden in the rear of the house, his battered straw hat drawn low over his eyes, his teeth firmly closed on a twig of apple-tree wood, became presently aware of a small dejected figure lurking in the shadow of the blossoming tree.

“Hello, Cap’n!” he called out cheerfully, relinquishing the twig in favor of a spent dandelion stalk. “Did ye find Barb’ry—heh? An’ did ye give her the letter?”

“I gave it to her; but she—can’t read it. An’—’n’ I’m ’fraid it was ’portant. She’s mad wiv me, Barb’ra is; ’n’ I haven’t had any dinner, either.”

The child manfully swallowed the sob that rose in his throat. Then he selected a tall dandelion with a plumy top which he put in his mouth in imitation of Peg, who watched him with a dubious smile.

“Wall, now, that’s too bad, Cap’n,” sympathized the old man. “But ef Barb’ry can’t read the letter it mus’ be ’cause ’tain’t best she should. Things don’t happen b’ chance, Cap’n. You want t’ remember that. There’s Somebody a-lookin’ out fer things as don’t make no mistakes.”

Jimmy pondered this dark saying while the dandelion stem slowly uncurled itself into a dangling spiral.

“Then it was all right for me to lose that letter, ‘N’ you said——”

Peg frowned thoughtfully at the antics of a pair of barn-swallows swooping in and out from under the eaves.

“No; it wa’n’t right fer you to be careless an’ lose the letter, Cap’n,” he said decidedly. “But the Lord—wall, you see, the Lord is consid’able smarter’n what we be, an’ He c’n fix things up that go wrong. Kind o’ arranges it so’t the universe won’t fly the track, no matter what we do. We ain’t p’mitted t’ disturb the gen’ral peace t’ any great extent. You’ll understan’ these things better when you’re growed up, Cap’n.”

“Will I?” said Jimmy hopefully.

Peg thrust his spade into the ground.

“Guess I’d better walk over t’ the house with you, an’ see if the’s anythin’ I c’n do,” he said briefly.

Barbara was setting the table with quick darting movements of her lithe figure when the two came in range of the kitchen door. She paused abruptly at sight of them.

“You must come in and eat your dinner quick, Jimmy,” she called, “or you’ll be late to school.”

“You g’wan in, Cap’n,” Peg urged in a diplomatic whisper. “I guess she’s pretty nigh all right. But I wouldn’t pester her none ’bout that letter ef I was you. Mebbe she’d ruther not talk ’bout it yet.”

The child stole into the kitchen with hanging head and sat down at the table spread for two. He was very much ashamed of himself in the stormy light of Barbara’s gray eyes; but Mr. Morrison’s remarks concerning the Maker of the universe appeared worthy of passing on. He fortified himself with a large slice of brown bread and butter, thickly overlaid with apple-sauce.

“It couldn’t have been _very_ ’portant, Barb’ra,” he said blandly.

The girl faced about in the act of taking two boiled potatoes out of a saucepan.

“But it was, Jimmy. I know that much, and I can’t read it.”

“Peg says there’s Somebody a-lookin’ out for things, an’ He made that letter fall out o’ my pocket.”

“Peg,” interrupted Barbara wrathfully, “knows nothing about it.”

“‘N’ He let it rain, too,” pursued Jimmy determinedly. “‘N’ He let the ink run, ’n’ the mud get on it. Do you want me to tell you who it was? Do you, Barb’ra?”

“Well, who do you suppose it was?”

“God!” exploded the child dramatically. “Peg said——”

“I don’t want to hear what Peg said. He doesn’t know.”

“I shall put it,” said the child, “in red ink, in my Vallable Inf’mation book. It’s a vallable inf’mation.”

“It would be, if it was true.”

“An’ if it isn’t true, it’s a vallable inf’mation. I’ll put it down that way.”

“I would,” advised Barbara gloomily. Then she repented herself and stooped to kiss the child’s quivering lips. “Anyway,” she said, “I love you; and you didn’t mean to lose the letter.”

After Jimmy’s inquisitive blue eyes were tight shut that night, Barbara examined the blurred sheet once more, holding it between her eyes and the bright light of the lamp. A word here and there appeared to emerge from the chaos, where the sharp penpoint had bitten the paper.

“... never forgotten,” was tolerably distinct. Then followed a hopeless blur of brown earth stains and purple ink. But further down the page she read,

“Write—if you——”

That was all, except his name, “David Whitcomb,” at the foot of the page.

The postmark had resisted the spoiling of both rain and mould, and read distinctly, as Al Hewett had declared, “Tombstone, Arizona,” in a blurred circle, with the date “April 2” and the hour of stamping “2-P.M.”

With a sudden glad impulse Barbara pulled a sheet of paper toward her.

“Dear David [she wrote], Your letter has just reached me, but I can only read a part of it, because——”

She paused and hesitated; then went on firmly:

“Jimmy lost it, and it lay out under a bush in the rain for more than a week. I can make out only a few words here and there, but those few tell me that you have not forgotten, and that you want me to write to you.”

The girl paused to draw a deep, wondering breath.

“I can’t tell you how strange it seems to be writing to you, because I have been thinking of you, David, for nearly three years as dead. They said you were lost on a trail in Alaska. And I thought it must be true. But your letter—even though I can’t read it—has brought me the assurance that you are not in some far-away heaven, where I have tried to picture you, David, but on earth.

“This letter may never reach you, for I can only be sure that your letter to me was mailed in Tombstone; but I want to tell you that only Jimmy and I are left. Father died a year ago, and since then I have been trying to hold the farm for Jimmy. We are the last of the Prestons, you know, and I do want——”

She stopped short, laid down her pen and listened breathlessly. She fancied she had heard the child’s voice calling her from the room above. She glided noiselessly to the foot of the stair, and listened, her slight figure seeming to melt, spirit-like, into the shadows. It was very lonely in the old house. The tall clock on the stair-landing ticked loud and solemnly in the stillness, and the wind in the budding trees without swept past the house with a long sighing breath. The girl shivered as she listened, then she went quickly back to the sitting-room with its cheerful circle of light and its drawn curtains, and paused to read the words she had written to David Whitcomb. They sounded stiff and trite after her brief absence in the shadowy hall. After all, was she not taking too much for granted? Perhaps he was merely asking for information, which he felt sure he could obtain from her on the score of old friendship. He had left some books in the bare little room he had occupied in the village for a year. The minister had them, she had been told. Her cheeks crimsoned slowly as she crumpled the half-written page and tossed it into the waste basket.

Then she chose a fresh sheet and wrote slowly, with frequent pauses: “Dear David: I was very much surprised to receive a letter from you after all these years. I must explain that though I received your letter to-day I have not been able to read it. It had been quite spoiled with rain and mildew. If this reaches you—and I cannot be sure of it, because I have only the postmark to go by—please write to me again, and I will answer at once.”

She signed the letter quite formally and simply with her full name, Barbara Allen Preston.

She mailed the letter the next morning, passing the great Jarvis mansion on her way to the post-office with averted looks. On the sixteenth morning thereafter she received back her letter written to David Whitcomb, with the words printed across the envelope, “Not called for.” She scarcely knew how much she had been expecting from David till her own unopened letter reached her with the effect of a door hard shut in the face of entreaty.

It was on that same day, as she walked slowly toward home, leaving her fruitless letter in a trail of tiny white fragments behind her, that the high-stepping bay horse and the red-wheeled buggy again passed her. She looked up involuntarily, her face white and sad, to receive a cold stare and curt nod from the man on the high seat. His whip-lash curled cruelly around the slender flank of his horse as he passed, and the sensitive creature sprang forward with a lunge and a quiver, only to receive a second and third stinging cut from the lash.

Barbara straightened herself as she watched the light vehicle disappear around a turn in the road.

She was thinking with a vague terror that so he would have tortured and driven her, cruelly, with no hope of escape. She was not prepared to see him return almost immediately at the same furious speed, and still less for his words as he pulled up his foaming horse.

“Get in,” he ordered her roughly. “I must speak to you.”

She looked up at him, her gray eyes sparkling defiance from under their long curling lashes.

“No,” she said loudly, “I will not.”

“Will not?” he repeated. “But I say you shall listen to me.”

She walked on quietly. He stared after her with a muttered oath, as if half-minded to go on. Then he leaped down, jerked his horse roughly to the fence-rail, tied him fast, and strode after the slim figure in the shabby black gown.

He overtook her in a few long strides. She turned to face him in the middle of the muddy road.

“I told you I would leave you to yourself. I meant to. I intended to let you be frightened, harassed, driven to the wall; but I can’t,” he said in a low, choked voice. “I—love you! I love you! Do you hear me?”

She shrank back trembling before the man’s white face and blazing eyes.

“I never knew before what it was like to—to love,” he stammered. “But I do now. What did you mean by saying that you would not—sell yourself for a worn-out farm? Sell yourself—to me? Why, girl, I’d give you all that I have—and my soul to the devil for—— I’ll do anything you say, if you’ll only marry me! I’ll give you a dozen farms. I’ll——”

“Stop!” cried Barbara, her face slowly whitening. “I—I am sorry I said that. I didn’t mean——”

“Do you mean that you’ll marry me, Barbara—Barbara!”

His eyes devoured her.

“Listen,” he went on. “I’ve put in ten such days and nights as I never expected to spend in this or any other world.”

He gripped her by the arm.

“You—must love me,” he stormed. “I—I can’t give you up!”

His shaken voice dropped into a low, pleading tone.

“You’ll not believe it, Barbara. But I—didn’t know what it was like to love anyone. Why should I? I married for money—I’m not ashamed to tell you. But Barbara! Barbara!”

The words rang out in a stifled cry, as he read the fear—the aversion in hers.

She writhed out of his grasp, her breath coming and going in little gasps.

“Stop!” she cried. “I—can’t listen!”

She clutched at the fence-rail as if she feared his violence.

He folded his arms quietly, his face grown suddenly rigid.

“Something has happened since the other day,” he said. “What is it?”

She was silent.

He took two long steps and stood over her, big, powerful, threatening.

“You shall answer me. Who or what is it that has come between us?”

Again he waited for her to speak; but she stood mute with bent head.

His clenched hands dropped at his side.

“You’ll not answer me,” he said, in a cold, hard voice. “Well, be it so; go your way, and I’ll go mine. But—I shall not give you up. You’re killing yourself with hard work; it is I who force you to it. I am your master. You can’t escape me!”

“You are not my master!” she said wildly. “I’m free—free!”

He turned without another look at her, his savage heel grinding an innocent clover blossom into the mud of the road.

VIII

BARBARA stole softly down the creaking stair in the gray obscurity of dawn, her shoes in one hand, a smoking candle in the other. There was much to be done, much to be thought of, and Jimmy must not wake up to hinder for two full hours yet.

It was cold in the kitchen, and the faint pink light streaming from the east shone in uncertainty through misted panes. Barbara sat down, her red lips sternly compressed, her dark brows drawn in a frowning line above her eyes, and applied herself briskly to lacing up her shoes. It was a relief to be accomplishing something real, tangible, after the whirling mist of dreams from which she had emerged shaken and breathless. Dreams of any description seldom visited Barbara’s healthily tired brain, but the vanished darkness of the past night had been haunted with confused visions. Now Stephen Jarvis was pursuing her through trackless forests, where long branches reached down like crooked, grasping hands. Always she managed to elude her pursuer and always he followed, his panting breath in her ears, till suddenly stumbling and falling through a vast crevasse in the darkness she found herself on a wide plain, starred with narcissus, swaying spirit-like in the bright air; high overhead white clouds floated and the winds of May blew cool fragrance into her face. At first she was alone, seeking for something, she knew not what; then David Whitcomb stood at her side.

“Come!” he cried imperiously, and his blue eyes pleaded with hers. “We must make haste to escape before the child overtakes us!”

She turned to follow his pointing finger and saw Jimmy running toward them, his arms outstretched, his bare, rosy feet stumbling amid the folds of his long white gown. Then, with the wild irrelevancy of dreams she heard the raucous voice of Thomas Bellows, the auctioneer from Greenfield Centre, shouting something indistinguishable in the far distance. Instantly the wide plain, the impassioned lover, and the running, stumbling little figure vanished. She was at home now, hurrying in anxious haste from room to room to find everything empty and desolate and the sun shining in through dimmed window-panes on the bare floors. Outside on the lawn a confused pile of household furniture, books, and carpets, looking sadly worn and old in the pitiless light of day, were being rapidly sold under the hammer.

“Here you are, ladies an’ gents,” shouted the auctioneer, “lot number twenty-four, a strong, healthy young woman, kind an’ willin’! A good cook an’ housekeeper. How much am I offered? Come, ladies, let me hear your bids!”

The faint light of morning touching her closed eyelids like a cool finger-tip suddenly aroused the girl to a consciousness of reality (if indeed the experiences of this mortal life be more real than dreams). She rose at once, dressed hastily, and having by now finished the lacing up of her shoes stood gazing out at the familiar door-yard with gathered brows.

“I ought,” said Barbara half-aloud in the silence of the kitchen, “to be good for something.” She looked down at her young strong hands; hands skilled in many uses, her forehead still puckered with unaccustomed thoughts.

Then she opened the back door quietly, for she was still mindful of the sleeping child above, and went out into the frosty dawn. A robin was singing loudly in the top of the budding elm down by the gate.

“Cheer up! Cheer up!” the jubilant bird voice seemed to be saying. Then the song ceased and the strong brown wings spread and carried the voice toward the dawn, which now flung long streamers of rose and gold athwart the frigid blue of the sky. A bright, cold moon swung low in the west and the distant houses of the village, huddled close among dark folds of the hills, began to send up delicate spirals of smoke which ascended and hung motionless in mid-heaven, like unshriven ghosts.

Peg Morrison was washing the mud off the wheels of the old buggy to the tune of Denis, lugubriously wafted to the winds of morning through his nose.

“Blest be-hee th’ tie-hi which bi-inds, Aour ha-ur-uts in Chris-his-chun lo-ove; Th’ fe-hell-o-shi-hip of ki-hin-dred mi-hinds, Is li-hike to tha-hat above!”

“Peg!” cried Barbara, in her imperious young voice.

The old man stopped short in his rendition of Fawcett’s immortal stanzas, an apologetic smile over-spreading his features.

“Good-mornin’, Miss Barb’ry,” he said. “A nice, pleasant mornin’, ain’t it? Thinks I, I’ll wash up this ’ere buggy an’ make it look’s well’s I kin. Then, mebbe, ’long towards arternoon I’ll git ’round t’ call on th’ Hon’rable Stephen Jarvis. I reckon I——”

“No,” interrupted Barbara decidedly, “you mustn’t do that. It wouldn’t do any good,” she added, in anticipation of protest.

“It’s th’ matter o’ th’ onions I was thinkin’ o’ bringin’ to his attention,” said Peg, raising his voice. “‘F I c’n prove to th’ Hon’rable Stephen Jarvis that onions’ll raise that goll-durned mortgage within one year f’om date, I——”

“Peg,” protested Barbara indignantly, “how do you suppose I’m ever going to train Jimmy to speak properly if you persist in using such language?”

“Meanin’ th’ expression goll-durned, o’ course, Miss Barb’ry,” acquiesced the old man meekly. “You’re right, I ain’t no manner o’ business to use swear words b’fore ladies. But that consarned, measly——”

The girl stamped her foot impatiently.

“There’s no use talking to you,” she said sharply. “I’ll just have to keep Jimmy away from you.”