One of Ours
Book I: On Lovely Creek
Chapter XIX
The weather, after the big storm, behaved capriciously. There was a partial
thaw which threatened to flood everything,—then a hard freeze. The whole
country glittered with an icy crust, and people went about on a platform of
frozen snow, quite above the level of ordinary life. Claude got out Mr.
Wheeler's old double sleigh from the mass of heterogeneous objects that had for
years lain on top of it, and brought the rusty sleighbells up to the house for
Mahailey to scour with brick dust. Now that they had automobiles, most of the
farmers had let their old sleighs go to pieces. But the Wheelers always kept
everything.
Claude told his mother he meant to take Enid Royce for a sleigh-ride. Enid
was the daughter of Jason Royce, the grain merchant, one of the early settlers,
who for many years had run the only grist mill in Frankfort county. She and
Claude were old playmates; he made a formal call at the millhouse, as it was
called, every summer during his vacation, and often dropped in to see Mr. Royce
at his town office.
Immediately after supper, Claude put the two wiry little blacks, Pompey and
Satan, to the sleigh. The moon had been up since long before the sun went down,
had been hanging pale in the sky most of the afternoon, and now it flooded the
snow-terraced land with silver. It was one of those sparkling winter nights when
a boy feels that though the world is very big, he himself is bigger; that under
the whole crystalline blue sky there is no one quite so warm and sentient as
himself, and that all this magnificence is for him. The sleighbells rang out
with a kind of musical lightheartedness, as if they were glad to sing again,
after the many winters they had hung rusty and dustchoked in the barn.
The mill road, that led off the highway and down to the river, had pleasant
associations for Claude. When he was a youngster, every time his father went to
mill, he begged to go along. He liked the mill and the miller and the miller's
little girl. He had never liked the miller's house, however, and he was afraid
of Enid's mother. Even now, as he tied his horses to the long hitch-bar down by
the engine room, he resolved that he would not be persuaded to enter that formal
parlour, full of new-looking, expensive furniture, where his energy always
deserted him and he could never think of anything to talk about. If he moved,
his shoes squeaked in the silence, and Mrs. Royce sat and blinked her sharp
little eyes at him, and the longer he stayed, the harder it was to go.
Enid herself came to the door.
"Why, it's Claude!" she exclaimed. "Won't you come in?"
"No, I want you to go riding. I've got the old sleigh out. Come on, it's a
fine night!"
"I thought I heard bells. Won't you come in and see Mother while I get my
things on?"
Claude said he must stay with his horses, and ran back to the hitch-bar. Enid
didn't keep him waiting long; she wasn't that kind. She came swiftly down the
path and through the front gate in the Maine seal motor-coat she wore when she
drove her coupe in cold weather.
"Now, which way?" Claude asked as the horses sprang forward and the bells
began to jingle.
"Almost any way. What a beautiful night! And I love your bells, Claude. I
haven't heard sleighbells since you used to bring me and Gladys home from school
in stormy weather. Why don't we stop for her tonight? She has furs now, you
know!" Here Enid laughed. "All the old ladies are so terribly puzzled about
them; they can't find out whether your brother really gave them to her for
Christmas or not. If they were sure she bought them for herself, I believe
they'd hold a public meeting."
Claude cracked his whip over his eager little blacks. "Doesn't it make you
tired, the way they are always nagging at Gladys?"
"It would, if she minded. But she's just as serene! They must have something
to fuss about, and of course poor Mrs. Farmer's back taxes are piling up. I
certainly suspect Bayliss of the furs."
Claude did not feel as eager to stop for Gladys as he had been a few moments
before. They were approaching the town now, and lighted windows shone softly
across the blue whiteness of the snow. Even in progressive Frankfort, the street
lights were turned off on a night so glorious as this. Mrs. Farmer and her
daughter had a little white cottage down in the south part of the town, where
only people of modest means lived. "We must stop to see Gladys' mother, if only
for a minute," Enid said as they drew up before the fence. "She is so fond of
company." Claude tied his team to a tree, and they went up to the narrow,
sloping porch, hung with vines that were full of frozen snow.
Mrs. Farmer met them; a large, rosy woman of fifty, with a pleasant Kentucky
voice. She took Enid's arm affectionately, and Claude followed them into the
long, low sitting-room, which had an uneven floor and a lamp at either end, and
was scantily furnished in rickety mahogany. There, close beside the hard-coal
burner, sat Bayliss Wheeler. He did not rise when they entered, but said,
"Hello, folks," in a rather sheepish voice. On a little table, beside Mrs.
Farmer's workbasket, was the box of candy he had lately taken out of his
overcoat pocket, still tied up with its gold cord. A tall lamp stood beside the
piano, where Gladys had evidently been practising. Claude wondered whether
Bayliss actually pretended to an interest in music! At this moment Gladys was in
the kitchen, Mrs. Farmer explained, looking for her mother's glasses, mislaid
when she was copying a recipe for a cheese souffle.
"Are you still getting new recipes, Mrs. Farmer?" Enid asked her. "I thought
you could make every dish in the world already."
"Oh, not quite!" Mrs. Farmer laughed modestly and showed that she liked
compliments. "Do sit down, Claude," she besought of the stiff image by the door.
"Daughter will be here directly."
At that moment Gladys Farmer appeared.
"Why, I didn't know you had company, Mother," she said, coming in to greet
them.
This meant, Claude supposed, that Bayliss was not company. He scarcely
glanced at Gladys as he took the hand she held out to him.
One of Gladys' grandfathers had come from Antwerp, and she had the settled
composure, the full red lips, brown eyes, and dimpled white hands which occur so
often in Flemish portraits of young women. Some people thought her a trifle
heavy, too mature and positive to be called pretty, even though they admired her
rich, tulip-like complexion. Gladys never seemed aware that her looks and her
poverty and her extravagance were the subject of perpetual argument, but went to
and from school every day with the air of one whose position is assured. Her
musicianship gave her a kind of authority in Frankfort.
Enid explained the purpose of their call. "Claude has got out his old sleigh,
and we've come to take you for a ride. Perhaps Bayliss will go, too?"
Bayliss said he guessed he would, though Claude knew there was nothing he
hated so much as being out in the cold. Gladys ran upstairs to put on a warm
dress, and Enid accompanied her, leaving Mrs. Farmer to make agreeable
conversation between her two incompatible guests.
"Bayliss was just telling us how you lost your hogs in the storm, Claude.
What a pity!" she said sympathetically.
Yes, Claude thought, Bayliss wouldn't be at all reticent about that incident!
"I suppose there was really no way to save them," Mrs. Farmer went on in her
polite way; her voice was low and round, like her daughter's, different from the
high, tight Western voice. "So I hope you don't let yourself worry about it."
"No, I don't worry about anything as dead as those hogs were. What's the
use?" Claude asked boldly.
"That's right," murmured Mrs. Farmer, rocking a little in her chair. "Such
things will happen sometimes, and we ought not to take them too hard. It isn't
as if a person had been hurt, is it?"
Claude shook himself and tried to respond to her cordiality, and to the
shabby comfort of her long parlour, so evidently doing its best to be attractive
to her friends. There weren't four steady legs on any of the stuffed chairs or
little folding tables she had brought up from the South, and the heavy gold
moulding was half broken away from the oil portrait of her father, the judge.
But she carried her poverty lightly, as Southern people did after the Civil War,
and she didn't fret half so much about her back taxes as her neighbours did.
Claude tried to talk agreeably to her, but he was distracted by the sound of
stifled laughter upstairs. Probably Gladys and Enid were joking about Bayliss'
being there. How shameless girls were, anyhow!
People came to their front windows to look out as the sleigh dashed jingling
up and down the village streets. When they left town, Bayliss suggested that
they drive out past the Trevor place. The girls began to talk about the two
young New Englanders, Trevor and Brewster, who had lived there when Frankfort
was still a tough little frontier settlement. Every one was talking about them
now, for a few days ago word had come that one of the partners, Amos Brewster,
had dropped dead in his law office in Hartford. It was thirty years since he and
his friend, Bruce Trevor, had tried to be great cattle men in Frankfort county,
and had built the house on the round hill east of the town, where they wasted a
great deal of money very joyously. Claude's father always declared that the
amount they squandered in carousing was negligible compared to their losses in
commendable industrial endeavour. The country, Mr. Wheeler said, had never been
the same since those boys left it. He delighted to tell about the time when
Trevor and Brewster went into sheep. They imported a breeding ram from Scotland
at a great expense, and when he arrived were so impatient to get the good of him
that they turned him in with the ewes as soon as he was out of his crate.
Consequently all the lambs were born at the wrong season; came at the beginning
of March, in a blinding blizzard, and the mothers died from exposure. The
gallant Trevor took horse and spurred all over the county, from one little
settlement to another, buying up nursing bottles and nipples to feed the orphan
lambs.
The rich bottom land about the Trevor place had been rented out to a truck
gardener for years now; the comfortable house with its billiard-room annex— a
wonder for that part of the country in its day—remained closed, its windows
boarded up. It sat on the top of a round knoll, a fine cottonwood grove behind
it. Tonight, as Claude drove toward it, the hill with its tall straight trees
looked like a big fur cap put down on the snow.
"Why hasn't some one bought that house long ago and fixed it up?" Enid
remarked. "There is no building site around here to compare with it. It looks
like the place where the leading citizen of the town ought to live."
"I'm glad you like it, Enid," said Bayliss in a guarded voice. "I've always
had a sneaking fancy for the place myself. Those fellows back there never wanted
to sell it. But now the estate's got to be settled up. I bought it yesterday.
The deed is on its way to Hartford for signature."
Enid turned round in her seat. "Why Bayliss, are you in earnest? Think of
just buying the Trevor place off-hand, as if it were any ordinary piece of real
estate! Will you make over the house, and live there some day?"
"I don't know about living there. It's too far to walk to my business, and
the road across this bottom gets pretty muddy for a car in the spring."
"But it's not far, less than a mile. If I once owned that spot, I'd surely
never let anybody else live there. Even Carrie remembers it. She often asks in
her letters whether any one has bought the Trevor place yet."
Carrie Royce, Enid's older sister, was a missionary in China.
"Well," Bayliss admitted, "I didn't buy it for an investment, exactly. I paid
all it was worth."
Enid turned to Gladys, who was apparently not listening. "You'd be the one
who could plan a mansion for Trevor Hill, Gladys. You always have such original
ideas about houses."
"Yes, people who have no houses of their own often seem to have ideas about
building," said Gladys quietly. "But I like the Trevor place as it is. I hate to
think that one of them is dead. People say they did have such good times up
there."
Bayliss grunted. "Call it good times if you like. The kids were still
grubbing whiskey bottles out of the cellar when I first came to town. Of course,
if I decide to live there, I'll pull down that old trap and put up something
modern." He often took this gruff tone with Gladys in public.
Enid tried to draw the driver into the conversation. "There seems to be a
difference of opinion here, Claude."
"Oh," said Gladys carelessly, "it's Bayliss' property, or soon will be. He
will build what he likes. I've always known somebody would get that place away
from me, so I'm prepared."
"Get it away from you?" muttered Bayliss, amazed.
"Yes. As long as no one bought it and spoiled it, it was mine as much as it
was anybody's."
"Claude," said Enid banteringly, "now both your brothers have houses. Where
are you going to have yours?"
"I don't know that I'll ever have one. I think I'll run about the world a
little before I draw my plans," he replied sarcastically.
"Take me with you, Claude!" said Gladys in a tone of sudden weariness. From
that spiritless murmur Enid suspected that Bayliss had captured Gladys' hand
under the buffalo robe.
Grimness had settled down over the sleighing party. Even Enid, who was not
highly sensitive to unuttered feelings, saw that there was an uncomfortable
constraint. A sharp wind had come up. Bayliss twice suggested turning back, but
his brother answered, "Pretty soon," and drove on. He meant that Bayliss should
have enough of it. Not until Enid whispered reproachfully, "I really think you
ought to turn; we're all getting cold," did he realize that he had made his
sleighing party into a punishment! There was certainly nothing to punish Enid
for; she had done her best, and had tried to make his own bad manners less
conspicuous. He muttered a blundering apology to her when he lifted her from the
sleigh at the mill house. On his long drive home he had bitter thoughts for
company.
He was so angry with Gladys that he hadn't been able to bid her good-night.
Everything she said on the ride had nettled him. If she meant to marry Bayliss,
then she ought to throw off this affectation of freedom and independence. If she
did not mean to, why did she accept favours from him and let him get into the
habit of walking into her house and putting his box of candy on the table, as
all Frankfort fellows did when they were courting? Certainly she couldn't make
herself believe that she liked his society!
When they were classmates at the Frankfort High School, Gladys was Claude's
aesthetic proxy. It wasn't the proper thing for a boy to be too clean, or too
careful about his dress and manners. But if he selected a girl who was
irreproachable in these respects, got his Latin and did his laboratory work with
her, then all her personal attractions redounded to his credit. Gladys had
seemed to appreciate the honour Claude did her, and it was not all on her own
account that she wore such beautifully ironed muslin dresses when they went on
botanical expeditions.
Driving home after that miserable sleigh-ride, Claude told himself that in so
far as Gladys was concerned he could make up his mind to the fact that he had
been "stung" all along. He had believed in her fine feelings; believed
implicitly. Now he knew she had none so fine that she couldn't pocket them when
there was enough to be gained by it. Even while he said these things over and
over, his old conception of Gladys, down at the bottom of his mind, remained
persistently unchanged. But that only made his state of feeling the more
painful. He was deeply hurt,—and for some reason, youth, when it is hurt, likes
to feel itself betrayed.