Wayside Courtships

by Garland, Hamlin

  "Mr. Lohr, how can you say such cruel——"

  "Don't mind him now," said Mrs. Welsh. "I'm his mother now, and he's goin' to do just as I tell him to—ain't you, Albert?"

  He dropped his eyelids in assent, and went off in a doze. It was all very pleasant to be thus treated. Hartley was devotion itself, and the doctor removed his bandages with the care and deliberation of a man with a moderate practice; besides, he considered Albert a personal friend.

  Hartley, after the doctor had gone, said with some hesitation:

  "Well, now, pard, I ought to go out and see a couple o' fellows I promised t' meet this morning."

  "All right, Jim; all right. You go right ahead on business; I'm goin' t' sleep, anyway, and I'll be all right in a day or two."

  "Well, I will; but I'll run in every hour 'r two and see if you don't want something. You're in good hands, anyway, when I'm gone."

  "Won't you read to me?" pleaded Albert in the afternoon, when Maud came in with her mother to brush up the room. "It's getting rather slow business layin' here like this. Course I can't ask Jim to stay and read all the time, and he's a bad reader, anyway; won't you?"

  "Shall I, mother?"

  "Why, of course, Maud!"

  So Maud got a book, and sat down over by the stove, quite distant from the bed, and read to him from "The Lady of the Lake," while the mother, like a piece of tireless machinery, moved about the house at the never-ending succession of petty drudgeries which wear the heart and soul out of so many wives and mothers, making life to them a pilgrimage from stove to pantry, from pantry to cellar, and from cellar to garret—a life that deadens and destroys, coarsens and narrows, till the flesh and bones are warped to the expression of the wronged and cheated soul.

  Albert's selfishness was in a way excusable. He enjoyed beyond measure the sound of the girl's soft voice and the sight of her graceful head bent over the page. He lay, looking and listening dreamily, till the voice and the sunlit head were lost in his deep, sweet sleep.

  The girl sat with closed book, looking at his face as he slept. It was a curious study to her, a young man—this young man, asleep. His brown lashes lay on his cheek; his facial lines were as placid as a child's. As she looked she gained courage to go over softly and peer down on him. How boyish he seemed! How little to be feared! How innocent, after all!

  As she studied him she thought of him the day before, with closed eyes, a ghastly stream of blood flowing down and soaking her dress. She shuddered. His hands, clean and strong and white, lay out on the coverlet, loose and open, the fingers fallen into graceful lines. Abruptly, a boy outside gave a shout, and she leaped away with a sudden spring that left her pale and breathless. As she paused in the door and looked back at the undisturbed sleeper, she smiled, and the pink came back into her thin face.

  Albert's superb young blood began to assert itself, and on the afternoon of the second day he was able to sit in his rocking chair before the fire and read a little, though he professed that his eyes were not strong, in order that Maud should read for him. This she did as often as she could leave her other work, which was "not half often enough," the invalid grumbled.

  "More than you deserve," she found courage to say.

  Hartley let nothing interfere with the book business, and the popular sympathy for Albert he coined into dollars remorselessly.

  "You take it easy," he kept saying to his partner; "don't you worry—your pay goes on just the same. You're doing well right where you are. By jinks! biggest piece o' luck," he went on, half in earnest. "Why, I can't turn around without taking an order—fact! Turned in a book on the livery bill—that's all right. We'll make a clear hundred dollars out o' that little bump o' yours."

  "Little bump! Say, now, that's——"

  "Keep it up—put it on! Don't get up in a hurry. I don't need you to canvass, and I guess you enjoy this 'bout as well." He ended with a sly wink and cough.

  Yes; the convalescence was delicious; afterward it grew to be one of the sweetest weeks of his life. Maud reading to him, bringing his food, and singing for him—- yes; all that marred it was the stream of people who came to inquire how he was getting along. The sympathy was largely genuine, as Hartley could attest, but it bored the invalid. He had rather be left in quiet with Walter Scott and Maud, the drone of the long descriptive passages being a sure soporific.

  He did not say, as an older person might, that she was not to be held accountable for what she did under the stress and tumult of that day; but he unconsciously did so regard her actions, led to do so by the changed conditions. In the light of common day it was hurrying to be a dream.

  At the end of a week he was quite himself again, though he still had difficulty in wearing his hat. It was not till the second Sunday after the accident that he appeared in the dining room for the first time, with a large traveling cap concealing the suggestive bandages. He looked pale and thin, but his eyes danced with joy.

  Maud's eyes dilated with instant solicitude. The rest sprang up in surprise, with shouts of delight, as hearty as brethren.

  "Ginger! I'm glad t' see yeh!" said Troutt, so sincerely that he looked almost winning to the boy. The rest crowded around, shaking hands.

  "Oh, I'm on deck again."

  Ed Brann came in a moment later with his brother, and there was a significant little pause—a pause which grew painful till Albert turned and saw Brann, and called out:

  "Hello, Ed! How are you? Didn't know you were here."

  As he held out his hand, Brann, his face purple with shame and embarrassment, lumbered heavily across the room and took it, muttering some poor apology.

  "Hope y' don't blame me."

  "Of course not—fortunes o' war. Nobody to blame; just my carelessness.—Yes; I'll take turkey," he said to Maud, as he sank into the seat of honor at the head of the table.

  Then the rest laughed and took seats, but Brann remained standing near Albert's chair. He had not finished yet.

  "I'm mighty glad yeh don't lay it up against me, Lohr; an' I want 'o say the doctor's bill is all right; you un'erstand, it's all right."

  Albert looked at him a moment in surprise. He knew this, coming from a man like Brann, meant more than a thousand prayers from a ready apologist; it was a terrible victory, and he made it as easy for his rival as possible.

  "Oh, all right, Ed; only I'd calculated to cheat him out o' part of it—that is, turn in a couple o' Blaine's 'Twenty Years' on the bill."

  Hartley roared, and the rest joined in, but not even Albert perceived all that it meant. It meant that the young savage had surrendered his claim in favor of the man he had all but killed. The struggle had been prodigious, but he had snatched victory out of defeat; his better nature had conquered.

  No one ever gave him credit for it; and when he went West in the spring, people said his love for Maud had been superficial. In truth, he had loved the girl as sincerely as he had hated his rival. That he could rise out of the barbaric in his love and hate was heroic.

  When Albert went to ride again, it was on melting snow, with the slowest horse Troutt had. Maud was happier than she had been since she left school, and fuller of color and singing. She dared not let a golden moment pass now without hearing it ring full, and she did not dare to think how short this day of happiness might be.

  IV.

  At the end of the fifth week there was a suspicion of spring in the wind as it swept the southern exposure of the valley. February was drawing to a close, and there was more than a suggestion of spring in the rapidly melting snow which still lay on the hills and under the cedars and tamaracks in the swamps. Patches of green grass, appearing on the sunny side of the road where the snow had melted, led to predictions of spring from the loafers beginning to sun themselves on the salt-barrels and shoe-boxes outside the stores.

  A group sitting about the blacksmith shop were talking it.

  "It's an early seedin'—now mark my words," said Troutt, as he threw his knife into the soft ground at his feet. "The sun is cr
ossing the line earlier this spring than it did last."

  "Yes; an' I heard a crow to-day makin' that kind of a—a spring noise that kind o'—I d' know what—kind o' goes all through a feller."

  "And there's Uncle Sweeney, an' that settles it; spring's comin' sure!" said Troutt, pointing at an old man much bent, hobbling down the street like a symbolic figure of the old year.

  "When he gits out the frogs ain't fur behind."

  "We'll be gittin' on to the ground by next Monday," said Sam Dingley to a crowd who were seated on the newly painted harrows and seeders which "Svend & Johnson" had got out ready for the spring trade. "Svend & Johnson's Agricultural Implement Depot" was on the north side of the street, and on a spring day the yard was one of the pleasantest loafing places that could be imagined, especially if one wished company.

  Albert wished to be alone. Something in the touch and tone of this spring afternoon made him restless and full of strange thoughts. He took his way out along the road which followed the river bank, and in the outskirts of the village threw himself down on a bank of grass which the snows had protected, and which had already a tinge of green because of its wealth of sun.

  The willows had thrown out their tiny light green flags, though their roots were under the ice, and some of the hard-wood twigs were tinged with red. There was a faint, peculiar but powerful odor of uncovered earth in the air, and the touch of the wind was like a caress from a moist magnetic hand.

  The boy absorbed the light and heat of the sun as some wild thing might, his hat over his face, his hands folded on his breast; he lay as still as a statue. He did not listen at first, he only felt; but at length he rose on his elbow and listened. The ice cracked and fell along the bank with a long, hollow, booming crash; a crow cawed, and a jay answered it from the willows below. A flight of sparrows passed, twittering innumerably. The boy shuddered with a strange, wistful longing and a realization of the flight of time.

  He could have wept, he could have sung; he only shuddered and lay silent under the stress of that strange, sweet passion that quickened his heart, deepened his eyes, and made his breath come and go with a quivering sound. Across the dazzling blue arch of the sky the crow flapped, sending down his prophetic, jubilant note; the wind, as soft and sweet as April, stirred in his hair; the hills, deep in their dusky blue, seemed miles away; and the voices of the care-free skaters on the melting ice of the river below came to the ear subdued to a unity with the scene.

  Suddenly a fear seized upon the boy—a horror! Life, life was passing! Life that can be lived only once, and lost, is lost forever! Life, that fatal gift of the Invisible Powers to man—a path, with youth and joy and hope at its eastern gate, and despair, regret, and death at its low western portal!

  The boy caught a glimpse of his real significance—a gnat, a speck in the sun: a boy facing the millions of great and wise and wealthy. He leaped up, clasping his hands.

  "Oh, I must work! I mustn't stay here; I must get back to my studies. Life is slipping by me, and I am doing nothing, being nothing!"

  His face, as pale as death, absolutely shone with his passionate resolution, and his hands were clinched in a silent, inarticulate desire.

  But on his way back he met the jocund party of skaters going home from the river, and with the easy shift and change of youth joined in their ringing laughter. The weird power of the wind's voice was gone, and he was the unthinking boy again; but the problem was only put off, not solved.

  He had a suspicion of it one night when Hartley said: "Well, pardner, we're getting 'most ready to pull out. Some way I always get restless when these warm days begin. Want 'o be moving some way."

  This was as sentimental as Hartley ever got; or, if he ever felt more sentiment, he concealed it carefully.

  "I s'pose it must 'a' been in spring that those old chaps, on their steeds and in their steel shirts, started out for the Holy Land or to rescue some damsel, hey?" he ended, with a grin. "Now, that's the way I feel—just like striking out for, say, Oshkosh. This has been a big strike here, sure's you live; that little piece of lofty tumbling was a big boom, and no mistake. Why, your share o' this campaign will be a hundred and twenty dollars sure."

  "More'n I've earned," replied Bert.

  "No, it ain't. You've done your duty like a man. Done as much in your way as I have. Now, if you want to try another county with me, say so. I'll make a thousand dollars this year out o' this thing."

  "I guess I'll go back to school."

  "All right; don't blame you at all."

  "I guess, with what I can earn for father, I can pull through the year, I must get back. I'm awfully obliged to you, Jim."

  "That'll do on that," said Hartley shortly; "you don't owe me anything. We'll finish delivery to-morrow, and be ready to pull out on Friday or Sat."

  There was an acute pain in Albert's breast somewhere; he had not analyzed his case at all, and did not now, but the idea of going affected him strongly. It had been so pleasant, that daily return to a lovely girlish presence.

  "Yes, sir," Hartley was going on; "I'm going to just quietly leave a book on her center table. I don't know as it'll interest her much, but it'll show we appreciate the grub, and so on. By jinks! You don't seem to realize what a worker that woman is. Up five o'clock in the morning—By the way, you've been going around with the girl a good deal, and she's introduced you to some first-rate sales; now, if you want 'o leave her a little something, make it a morocco copy, and charge it to the firm."

  Albert knew that he meant well, but he couldn't, somehow, help saying ironically:

  "Thanks; but I guess one copy of Blaine's 'Twenty Years' will be enough in the house, especially——"

  "Well, give her anything you please, and charge it up to the firm. I don't insist on Blaine; only suggested that because——"

  "I guess I can stand the expense of my own."

  "I didn't say you couldn't, man! But I want a hand in this thing. Don't be so turrible keen t' snap a feller up," said Hartley, turning on him. "What the thunder is the matter of you anyway? I like the girl, and she's been good to us all round; she tended you like an angel——"

  "There, there! That's enough o' that," put in Albert hastily. "F'r God's sake don't whang away on that string forever, as if I didn't know it!"

  Hartley stared at him as he turned away.

  "Well, by jinks! What is the matter o' you?"

  He was too busy to dwell upon it much, but concluded his partner was homesick.

  Albert was beginning to have a vague under-consciousness of his real feeling toward the girl, but he fought off the acknowledgment of it as long as possible. His mind moved in a circle, coming back to the one point ceaselessly—a dreary prospect, in which the slender girl-figure had no place—and each time the prospect grew more intolerably blank, and the pain in his heart more acute and throbbing.

  When he faced her that night, after they had returned from a final skating party down on the river, he was as far from a solution as ever. He had avoided all reference to their separation, and now he stood as a man might at the parting of two paths, saying: "I will not choose; I can not choose. I will wait for some sign, some chance thing, to direct me."

  They stood opposite each other, each feeling that there was more to be said; the girl tender, her eyes cast down, holding her hands to the fire; he shivering, but not with cold. He had a vague knowledge of the vast importance of the moment, and he hesitated to speak.

  "It's almost spring again, isn't it? And you've been here—" she paused and looked up with a daring smile—"seems as if you'd been here always."

  It was about half past eight. Mrs. Welsh was setting her bread in the kitchen; they could hear her moving about. Hartley was downtown finishing up his business.

  Albert's throat grew dry and his limbs trembled. His pause was ominous; the girl's smile died away as he took a seat without looking at her.

  "Well, Maud, I suppose—you know—we're going away to-morrow."

  "Oh, must you? But y
ou'll come back?"

  "I don't expect to—I don't see how."

  "Oh, don't say that!" cried the girl, her face as white as silver, her clasped hands straining.

  "I must—I must!" he muttered, not looking at her, not daring to see her face.

  "Oh, what can I do—we do, without you! I can't bear it!"

  She stopped and sank back into a chair, her breath coming heavily from her twitching lips, the unnoticed tears falling from her staring, pitiful, wild, appealing eyes, her hands nervously twisting her gloves.

  There was a long silence. Each was undergoing a self-revelation; each was trying to face a future without the other.

  "I must go!" he repeated aimlessly, mechanically.

  The girl's heavy breathing deepened into a wild little moaning sound, inexpressibly pitiful, her hungry eyes fixed on his face. She gave way first, and flung herself down upon her knees at his side, her hands seeking his neck.

  "Albert, I can't live without you now! Take me with you! Don't leave me!"

  He stooped suddenly and took her in his arms, raised her, and kissed her hair.

  "I didn't mean it, Maud; I'll never leave you—never! Don't cry!"

  She drew his face down to hers and kissed it, then turned her face to his breast and laughed and cried. There was a silence; then joy and confidence came back again.

  "I know now what you meant," the girl cried gayly, raising herself and looking into his face; "you were trying to scare me, and make me show how much I—cared for you—first!" There was a soft smile on her lips and a tender light in her eyes. "But I don't mind it."

  "I guess I didn't know myself what I meant," he said, with a grave smile.

  When Mrs. Welsh came in, they were sitting on the sofa, talking in low voices of their future. He was grave and subdued, while she was radiant with love and hope. The future had no terrors for her. All plans were good and successful now. But the boy unconsciously felt the gravity of life somehow deepened by his love.