Part 9

“To-day, to-morrow—I cannot tell. I am ready to go now.”

“To be gone five years,” he said thoughtfully. “Very well; we will finish this business at once. Let me advise you to attend to your taxes promptly hereafter; and if——”

“Thank you,” interrupted Barbara haughtily. “I shall be able, I am sure, to meet all obligations in the future. The farm may be worthless, worn out, but it will pay for itself.”

He did not appear to have heard her last words. He was busily arranging various papers. And presently he handed her the cancelled bond and mortgage, and the receipted tax bills, all neatly arranged. In return she counted out to him, with fingers which trembled in spite of herself, the crisp bills for which she had sold her youth.

“There!” she said rather breathlessly. “Is that all?”

“All,” he repeated quietly. “And it is all quite right. Thank you.”

She looked at him uncertainly. His head was bent, his eyes fixed upon the pile of rustling bank-notes which she had just pushed toward him.

A sudden unreasoning sense of dismay fell upon the girl, shadowing the triumph in her face. She made swift retreat toward the door, casting a half-frightened backward look at the sombre figure behind the desk.

He did not lift his eyes from their unseeing contemplation of the money, even when the jarring sound of the hard-shut door told him she was gone.

Left quite alone Stephen Jarvis slowly folded the notes, sealed them securely in a stout envelope and locked them in his safe.

XIII

YOUNG WHITCOMB sat quite at his ease in Donald Preston’s big arm-chair, one leg flung carelessly over the other, his handsome head thrown back, its riotous curls shining in the lamp-light. His blue eyes, full of laughter, were set upon Barbara.

“So you thought I was dead, did you?” he asked, in a bantering tone; “but it didn’t appear to bother you much. You’re looking handsomer than ever, Barbara. I had an idea I’d find you—changed.”

He waited for some sort of reply; but Barbara was trying hard to reconcile the ruddy, smiling man, who sat so unconcernedly in her dead father’s place, with the pallid, serious, large-eyed phantom of her dreams. She had been looking at him in puzzled silence, and now her glance disengaged itself from his with an effort.

“I’ll wager,” he said, “that you have been thinking of me with ’a crown upon my forehead, a harp within my hand,’ the way we used to sing in Sunday school when we were kids. Now own up! And you’re disappointed to find that I’m such a commonplace, live-looking chap—eh, Barbara?”

“I find you—changed,” she confessed, in a low voice, “greatly changed.”

David Whitcomb laughed triumphantly.

“Yes; I flatter myself that the pious pedagogue has been pretty well knocked out of me in the last five years. Good Lord! what a solemn, sentimental ass I must have been in those days. It was a lucky thing for me that you sent me about my business. Still,—Barbara, I’d give a gold nugget to know just what you thought when they told you I’d passed in my checks. Did you picture poor David lying cold and pale under some frozen cairn along the Yukon trail? That’s the way they dispose of unlucky prospectors up north; just dig a hole in the snow and drop ’em in; then pile stones on top to keep off the wolves. Ugh! I can hear ’em howl, if I stop to to think, now. Did you drop a tear on that imaginary grave of mine up in the Arctic; did you, Barbara?”

Her eyes evaded his smiling blue gaze.

“Why should you ask?” she hesitated. “It was a great surprise—a great shock.”

“You refer, of course, to the news of my death,” he said. “But you survived the shock, as you call it, and—you are far more beautiful than I remembered you.”

He leaned forward and rested his head on his clasped hands, his eyes searching her face with smiling boldness.

“There are not many men,” he went on, “who come back from the grave the way I did to find—everything so unchanged.”

He sprang from his chair and paced the floor excitedly.

“If I’d only come yesterday!” he cried. “I had saved enough—I could have prevented that absurd fiasco.”

He stopped in front of her.

“Why didn’t you answer my letter, Barbara?”

“I couldn’t read it,” she murmured, a sudden vivid color fluttering in her cheeks. “Jimmy lost it on the way home from the office, and it lay out in the rain a week. I knew, though, that you were not—dead.”

“And that I had not forgotten you,” he urged. “You must have wondered, though, why I had not written before. But I couldn’t. I swore when I went away that I would get money—somehow. That I would get enough to save you out of the slavery you were in then. I meant to hire a caretaker for your father, a nurse for the boy. But I had the devil’s own luck. Three times I won, only to lose. Then I made a little pile—not enough; but still I thought—I hoped—— Do you want me to tell you what I hoped, Barbara?”

“No,” she said faintly. “I—can’t listen.”

“Why?” he urged. “Do you—love someone else?”

She looked at him imploringly.

“You were here, and you know——”

“Yes,” he said sharply. “I know what happened. You must have been out of your mind with anxiety, Barbara, to have thought of such a thing. Why did you do it?”

“I wanted to save the farm—for Jimmy.”

He shrugged his shoulders, with a muttered exclamation.

“You got the money?”

“Yes.”

“And so you’re sold into slavery for five years?”

She made no reply.

“Now, see here, Barbara. I won’t stand for anything of the sort. It’s an outrage. I haven’t enough—quite—to pay the other fellow out; but I’ll arrange it with him—or her. Is it a man or a woman slave-holder, Barbara?”

She hesitated.

“I—don’t know,” she said, “not yet.”

“You don’t know?” he echoed. “Why, this is more preposterous than the other. Of course you’ll have to know.”

“It is quite true,” she said quietly. “I only know that I must be ready to leave home at a minute’s notice.”

He bent over her with sudden passion.

“Marry me, Barbara,” he begged in a low, shaken voice. “If you only will, I’ll manage it somehow.”

“I—can’t,” she murmured. “I am in honor bound. Don’t you see? I’ve accepted the money, and paid a part of it for debts.”

He threw himself down in his chair and pulled it toward hers impatiently.

“Let me think,” he said quickly. “You’ve paid off your mortgage. How much was it?”

She told him, and he set down the figures rapidly.

“Who held your mortgage?” he wanted to know.

“Stephen Jarvis,” she said, with a singular reluctance at which she wondered, even while she perceived it.

“Miserly old crab; I remember him,” said David Whitcomb.

His face brightened suddenly.

“Hurrah!” he cried. “I have it! With what you’ve got left and my little pile we’ve more than enough to buy you back. Don’t you see? Marry me, dear, and we’ll call the sale off, pay back the money, and——”

He stopped short at sight of her unresponsive face.

“I’ve signed a contract,” she objected.

“What if you have?” he urged. “The contract can be quashed. You’ll give me the right to get you out of it, Barbara?”

She hesitated, her eyes averted from his anxious face.

“Do you mean that you don’t—that you can’t—? Barbara, do you prefer slavery—to me?”

“I mean,” she said slowly, “that I cannot—promise you anything until——”

“But don’t you see, dear, that it would be better, safer that way? As your husband—even as your promised husband—I could—Good Lord! what a preposterous situation! You must give me the right to get you out of it.”

She shook her head.

“I did it voluntarily,” she said, “and I must fulfil my agreement.”

His face reddened with quick anger.

“Then you will go peacefully away with this person—man or woman—and stay five years, when the matter might easily be arranged by paying back the money, and by proving a prior claim. My claim is prior, Barbara. I loved you five years ago. I love you now. Give me the right to break this absurd bond. Won’t you, Barbara?”

His lips, his eyes, pleaded with his eloquent voice. He dropped to his knees beside her chair; his arm stole about her waist.

“Barbara!” he murmured, his face close to hers.

She broke from him with a little shuddering cry.

“What is it? What have I done?”

“Do you know—did you hear how my father—died?” she asked, in a frightened voice.

He sprang to his feet, his face crimson with shame and fury.

“I drank a glass of wine before I came here to-night—a single glass,” he said. “Is it that you mean?”

His eyes demanded instant answer.

“If you had suffered what I suffered——” she began; then her voice broke. “I couldn’t help it, David; I—remembered.”

It was the first time she had called him by his name. He looked at her in silence for a minute.

“I understand,” he said gently. “I won’t offend again. I promise you.”

“To-morrow,” she went on hurriedly, “I shall hear; someone will call for me. I am all ready—to go. But I will—try, I will explain——”

She put out her hand to forestall his quick protest.

“No; please. I—cannot promise anything—yield anything, until I have arranged the matter. If I succeed——”

He waited for her to go on.

“I must have time to think,” she murmured. “I—am not sure of myself.”

He went away, bidding her a brief good-night, his eyes hurt and angry.

Barbara watched his straight, lithe figure, as he strode away from the little circle of her lamp-light into the dripping gloom of the spring night. So had she sent him away from her long ago into the rain and the darkness. Then, as now, she was in honor bound to a lonely task.

She turned to find her newly engaged housekeeper standing behind her in the semi-obscurity of the passage. Martha Cottle was a tall, angular woman with a pallid, uncertain complexion, a long thin nose, and an air of perpetual inquiry.

“Was that the party you expect to work for?” she demanded. “I thought,” she added, with a slightly offended air, “that you’d call me in and introduce me. I was waiting in the dining-room.”

Barbara wondered if the spinster’s large, flat ears had caught any of the conversation, carried on unguardedly on the other side of the door.

She shook her head. “That wasn’t the person,” she said. “Perhaps to-morrow——” She hesitated. “Of course it will be soon.”

Miss Cottle pushed authoritatively into the room where Barbara had been sitting.

“I haven’t had a real good opportunity to talk things over with you,” she said. “If you’re expecting to be called away sudden, perhaps this will be as good a time as any. I want to tell you what I think about that child.”

Barbara drew a deep breath.

“Well?” she murmured interrogatively.

“I see you’ve spoiled him pretty completely,” pursued Miss Cottle. “But I’ll soon get him in hand.”

She compressed her thin lips.

“He got into a regular tantrum to-night because I took a book of his to look at. ‘Vallable Inf’mation,’ he calls it. Nearly every word in it is spelled wrong. I wonder at you for permitting anything of the sort. I took the book away from him. Here it is.”

Barbara looked at the woman in a sudden panic of apprehension.

“Oh!” she protested, “you ought not to have done that. The book was a birthday present. It is one of Jimmy’s dearest treasures.”

“I believe you said you wanted I should look after James’s education,” intoned the spinster. “If I am to stay here, I shall do it con-sci-en-tiously.”

She pronounced the last word with due regard to every syllable, it being a favorite adverb modifying every possible activity.

Barbara was turning over the pages of the book, several of which were quite covered with Jimmy’s scrawling characters in red ink.

“A Vallable Information ’bout getting mad [she read]. Dont get mad Ezy. It dont Do enny Good, an sum the tim it gets a fello in Trubble. Peg says this is portant.”

Barbara smiled as she shut the covers gently together.

“I shall give this book to Jimmy,” she said quietly, “and please, Miss Cottle, don’t take it away from him again. Jimmy is such a little boy, and I—he has always been loved. I hope you——”

“I don’t believe in sozzling over a child,” interrupted the woman severely. “I’ll see that the boy gets plenty of good bread and butter, and that he goes to school and Sabbath services regularly. By the time you get back I guess you’ll see quite a change in him. When do you expect to start, to-morrow?”

Miss Cottle’s tone expressed a growing impatience.

“I supposed you’d get off this afternoon. I see your trunk is packed and all. There’s no use of hanging back and procrastinating when there’s work to do. That’s one thing I shall teach James.”

She compressed her lips severely, as if anxious to begin.

“I am ready to go,” Barbara told her, with lips which trembled in spite of herself. “I hope you won’t be too severe with Jimmy—at first; he isn’t used to it.”

“Yes,” agreed Miss Cottle, with an acid smile, “it’s easy enough to see that you’ve spoiled the child completely. But I’ll soon straighten him out. My method with children has never been known to fail. Their wills want breaking the first thing; after that they’ll mind, I can tell you.”

“But I don’t want Jimmy’s will broken,” protested Barbara, “please don’t try to do that.”

Miss Cottle tossed her head majestically.

“I shall use my own judgment,” she said firmly, “and I don’t expect no interference; and that reminds me, I want to speak about that hired man of yours. He’s brought more truck into that back bedroom, where you said he was to sleep, than anybody could keep track of. I told him I wouldn’t have it, and he answered back in a way I’m not accustomed to hear. You’ll have to speak to him. Once you’re out the house, I’ll try to get things regulated. But if I should be sick—and I may as well tell you that I’m subject to bad spells of malaria—I shall have to send for my sister from New Hampshire. She’s a widow with one daughter; of course she’d have to bring Elvira along. I thought I’d tell you, because once you’re gone you won’t be able to get back. I suppose your idea is that I’ll do with everything the same as if it was my own for the five years?”

Miss Cottle’s voice held a rising inflection, and Barbara murmured something vaguely acquiescent.

“Of course I couldn’t do any other way,” pursued the spinster; “having left my own nice home to come here and do for you. The butter and egg money will be mine, I suppose, and the young chickens? I couldn’t think of doing any other way than what I’ve been used to. There! I hear that boy calling you. That sort of thing will have to be broken up, right in the beginning—once you’re out of the house to stay. A great big boy like that!”

Barbara fled upstairs, the little red book in her hand, to find Jimmy, in his white night-gown, standing at the top of the stairs. She caught the child in her strong young arms, cuddling his cold little body against her breast.

“I wanted you,” grieved the child, half strangling her with his eager kisses. “Why do we have that woman, Barb’ra? I don’t like her. She took my Vallable Inf’mation book, ’n’—’n’—I scwatched her, ’n’ she slapped me. Send her away, Barb’ra; we don’t want her; do we?”

The girl wrapped a blanket warmly about the child and sat down with him in a chair by the window. The iron of her new chain bade fair to eat into her very soul as she soothed and rocked into forgetfulness of his troubles the beloved little cause of all her perplexities. Why, after all, had she done this thing? Was there not a heavier debt than could be paid in money? And was she not bankrupt still in love and peace?

In that hour of darkness all the terrifying consequences of her attempt to break away from Jarvis crowded upon her mind. Unless the person who had paid four thousand dollars for five years of her life could be induced to release her, she must indeed pay heavily for Jimmy’s inheritance. Her baffled thoughts hovered about the unknown personality of this arbiter of her future.

“To-morrow,” she thought aloud, “I shall know.”

XIV

THE blossoms had fallen in showers of fragrant pink and white petals from the wide-spreading boughs of the Preston orchards and already Peg Morrison’s dreams of a great harvest were beginning to show faint promise of fulfilment in long lines of slender green onion shoots; yet Barbara found herself still waiting the summons of her unknown master. Her little trunk, locked and strapped, stood in the closet of her chamber; her shabby travelling cloak, hat, and gloves lay ready for instant use. Each morning she dressed Jimmy, brushed his yellow curls, and saw him off to school with smiles and kisses, not knowing whether he would find her upon his return; and each evening she lavished upon the little boy the hungry affection hoarded for a lonelier night in some distant city.

“You love me more’n you used to, don’t you, Barb’ra?” the child asked, puzzled by the look in her eyes. “You kiss me kind o’ hard.”

“I always loved you with all my heart, Jimmy,” she answered. “I couldn’t love you any more.”

“An’ I love you, Barb’ra,” declared the little boy, “I love you more’n anybody. But,” he added darkly, “I ’spise that Miss Cottle wiv all my insides an’ all my outsides. Make her go ’way, Barb’ra.”

“Miss Cottle is a good woman, Jimmy,” the girl told him seriously. “She would take care of you if—I should be obliged to go away.”

The child flung himself upon her with an inarticulate cry of protest.

“You wouldn’t go away an’ leave me, would you, Barb’ra?”

“I shouldn’t want to, precious; but—something—might—happen. You will be a good boy, won’t you, Jimmy? I want you to try and—love Miss Cottle.”

The child considered this difficult undertaking in grieved silence for a minute. Then he manfully swallowed something that arose in his throat and threatened to choke him.

“I—guess I’ll be pretty good, Barb’ra,” he quavered, “if you want t’ go off an’ take a trip. She said you wanted to take a trip; but I told her you wouldn’t go anywhere an’ leave me. You wouldn’t, would you, Barb’ra?”

“Not unless I was forced to,” murmured Barbara, “for your sake, Jimmy; for your sake!”

She winked back the tears, smiling resolutely.

“Anyway, we won’t cross any bridges till we get to them, precious.”

“That’s in my book of Vallable Inf’mation,” Jimmy said proudly. “I copied it out o’ Peg’s. You have to get to bridges b’fore you cross ’em; you can’t get over any other way. I told that to Peg, ’n’ he said it was a Vallable Inf’mation, ’n’ he wrote it down in his book in red ink. We tell each other things to write down. I like Peg, an’ he likes me; but we don’t love Miss Cottle. Peg says, in his opinion, she’s an ornary female, even if she can spell. Peg says spellin’ ain’t everythin’.”

As the days passed, this particular bridge of Barbara’s own building loomed large in the landscape of her every day, always retreating mirage-like into the misty horizon of her to-morrow.

Martha Cottle was of the opinion that it was a mighty queer performance; she discussed the subject with Barbara with ever-recurring interest and poignancy in the intervals of her work. Miss Cottle was a woman bent upon an excruciating cleanliness and order, and the immaculate back steps and the painfully scoured kitchen floor uprose as altars upon which she daily offered oblations and sacrifices of all the gentler amenities of life.

“That young one,” as she began to call Jimmy, together with Peg Morrison, appeared to vie with one another in wanton profanation of these hallowed precincts.

“It’s enough,” the worthy spinster assured Barbara, her nose and eyes reddened with animosity, “to make a saint mad clear through. Once you’re out of the house for good I’ll see to it that they wipe their feet _before they eat_.”

The veiled threat in the last words was not lost on Mr. Morrison. “Me an’ the Cap’n hes et our victuals together more’n once in the loft t’ the barn,” he observed placidly. “‘N’ we kin do it ag’in on a pinch. I kin cook ’s well ’s some others I c’d name, an’ I will, if necessary.”

Barbara, with one foot on her bridge of passage, strove to reconcile these opposing forces.

“Miss Cottle,” she assured Peg, “is really a very conscientious woman. She’ll keep everything clean and comfortable for you and Jimmy.”

“You bet she’s conscientious, Miss Barb’ry,” acquiesced the old man dryly. “So’s a skunk. Y’ reelly can’t beat them animals fer a conscientious pufformance of their duty, es they see it. But it ain’t what you’d call reelly pleasant fer the dog.”

“But you’ll try, won’t you, Peg, to get along with Miss Cottle?” implored Barbara. “If she should leave you after I’m gone, I can’t think what Jimmy would do.”

“Now, Miss Barb’ry, don’t you worry none. Me an’ the Cap’n an’ Marthy Cottle ’ll git along like three kittens in a basket. You bet we will. I’ll kind o’ humor her, come muddy weather; an’ I’ll see t’ it that she don’t aggravate the Cap’n beyond what he can make out t’ bear. Mebbe it’ll stren’then his char’cter t’ put up with her ways. Viewed in th’ light of a Vallable Inf’mation I shouldn’t wonder if both me an’ the Cap’n ’ud git consid’able profit out o’ the experience, even ef we ain’t exac’ly hankerin’ fer it. Meanwhile the onions is comin’ on famous, likewise the apples. I never see a finer crop o’ young fruit set.”

To await the slow unfoldment of events, cultivating the while the cardinal virtues of tranquillity and faith is the task set before each human being; but there are times when the lesson becomes poignantly difficult. As one who awaits the coming of a delayed train endures the unfruitful minutes with scant patience, so Barbara lingered on the verge of her unknown experience, alternately dreading and longing for the summons which would put an end to the painful suspense. She found the days speeding by, gathering themselves into weeks, and the weeks, in their turn, rolling themselves up into months.

“I guess you’ve said to me about all there is to be said on the subject of this house and the care of that child,” Miss Cottle observed in tones of exasperation. “I’d never have come when I did if I hadn’t supposed you were going right off. I didn’t bargain to be your hired girl.”

And David Whitcomb, who had taken up his quarters in the village inn with the avowed intention of “having it out” with the owner and arbiter of Barbara’s future, expressed himself with still greater frankness on the subject.

“Has it occurred to you,” he asked Barbara, “that perhaps you’ll not be sent for at all?”

The two were sitting in the long, sweet twilight of a June evening, on the narrow, old-fashioned porch. The giant locusts in front of the house were in full bloom and the clouds of fragrance from their pendant white clusters mingled with the odorous breath of the honeysuckles. There was a whir of humming-bird moths among the vines, and a song-sparrow intent upon feeding her young ones while the daylight lasted darted in and out with anxious glances of her bright eyes.

“Hush!” warned Barbara, wincing. “Don’t let Jimmy hear you speak of my going.”

“Pooh!” said David; “the little beggar knows all about it. Did you suppose he didn’t?”

Barbara looked at him indignantly.

“Did you tell him?”

“No; but I daresay the Cottle person has. Besides, the auction is town talk. Everybody is wondering, and some are saying—— Do you want me to tell you what old Hewett asked me to-night?”

Barbara’s face, burning with shamed crimson, was turned away from his.

“No,” she said frigidly. “I don’t want to hear it.”

David passed his fingers through his thick, curling hair, with an impatient gesture.

“I am sorry I spoke of it, Barbara,” he said seriously; “but the fact is, whether you know it or not, you’ve been placed in a very unpleasant position.”

He waited for her to speak; but she was obstinately silent, her eyes fixed on Jimmy, who was helping Peg load a wheelbarrow with the dried grass left in the wake of the lawnmower.