Stories of the Foot-hills Part 11

Tell 'im good-by."

Annette was gazing at her breathlessly. It came over her like a cloud, the poverty, the hopelessness, the dreariness of it all. She made a little impetuous rush forward.

"Oh, yes, yes," she said eagerly, through her tears; "and he is so sorry, and he sent you these,"--she took the roses from her belt, her lover's roses, and thrust them into Melissa's nerveless grasp,--"and I--oh, _I_ shall love you always!"

Then she turned, and hurried through the sun and shadow of the orchard back to the carriage.

"I am ready to go now," she said, somewhat stiffly, to her father.

All the way down the dusty mountain road, over which Melissa had traveled so patiently, she kept murmuring to herself, "Oh, the poor thing,--the poor, poor thing!"

Some years afterwards, when Mr. Frederick Sterling's girth and dignity had noticeably increased, he saw among his wife's ornaments a gaudy trinket that brought a curious twinge of half-forgotten pain into his consciousness. He was not able to understand, nor is it likely that he will ever know, how it came there, or why there came over him at sight of it a memory of sycamores and running water, and the smell of sage and blooming buckthorn and chaparral.

ALEX RANDALL'S CONVERSION.

I.

Mrs. Randall was piecing a quilt. She had various triangular bits of calico, in a.s.sorted colors, strung on threads, and distributed in piles on her lap. She had put on her best dress in honor of the minister's visit, which was just ended. It was a purple, seeded silk, adorned with lapels that hung in wrinkles across her flat chest, and she had spread a gingham ap.r.o.n carefully over her knees, to protect their iridescent splendor.

She was a russet-haired woman, thin, with that blonde thinness which inclines to transparent redness at the tip of the nose and chin, and the hand that hovered over the quilt patches, in careful selection of colors for a "star and chain" pattern, was of a glistening red, and coa.r.s.ely knotted at the knuckles, in somewhat striking contrast to her delicate face.

Her husband sat at a table in one corner of the spotless kitchen, eating a belated lunch. He was a tall man, and stooped so that his sunburned beard almost touched the plate.

"Mr. Turnbull was here," said Mrs. Randall, with an air of introducing a subject rather than of giving information.

The man held a knife-load of smear-case in front of his mouth, and grunted. It was not an interrogative grunt, but his wife went on.

"He said he could 'a' put off coming if he'd known you had to go to mill."

Mr. Randall swallowed the smear-case. His bushy eyebrows met across his face, and he scowled so that the hairs stood out horizontally.

"Did you tell him I could 'a' put off going to mill till I knowed he was coming?"

His thick, obscure voice seemed to tangle itself in the hay-colored mustache that hid his mouth. His tone was tantalizingly free from anger.

"I wish you wouldn't, Elick," said his wife reproachfully; "not before the children, anyway."

The children, a girl of seven and a boy of four, sat on the doorstep in a sort of dazed inertia, occasioned by the shock of the household's sudden and somewhat perplexing return to its week-day atmosphere just as they had adjusted themselves to the low Sabbatic temperature engendered by the minister's presence.

The girl had two tightly braided wisps of hair in varying hues of corn-silk, curving together at the ends like the mandibles of a beetle.

She turned when her father spoke, and looked from him to her mother with a round, blue-eyed stare from under her bulging forehead. The boy's stolid head was thrown back a little, so that his fat neck showed two sunburned wrinkles below his red curls. His gingham ap.r.o.n parted at the topmost b.u.t.ton, disclosing a soft, pathetic little back, and his small trousers were hitched up under his arms, the two bone b.u.t.tons which supported them staring into the room reproachfully, as if conscious of the ignominy of belonging to masculine garb under the feminine eclipse of an ap.r.o.n.

Mrs. Randall bent a troubled gaze upon her offspring, as if expecting to see them wilt visibly under their father's irreverence.

"Mary Frances," she said anxiously, "run away and show little brother the colts."

The girl got up and took her brother's hand.

"Come on, Wattie," she said in a small, superior way, very much as if she had added: "These grown people have weaknesses which it is better for us to pretend not to know. They are going to talk about them."

Mrs. Randall waited until the two little figures idled across the dooryard before she spoke.

"I don't think you ought to act the way you do, Elick, just because you don't like Mr. Turnbull; it ain't right."

The man dropped his chin doggedly, and fed himself without lifting his elbows from the table.

"I can't always manage to be at home when folks come a-visiting," he said in his gruff, tangled voice.

"You was at church on Sabbath when Mr. Turnbull gave out the pastoral visitations: he knew that as well as I did. I couldn't say a word to-day. I just had to set here and take it."

"No, you didn't, Matilda: you didn't have to stay any more than I did."

"Elick!"

The woman's voice had a sharp reproof in it. He had touched the Calvinistic quick. She might not reverence the man, but the minister was sacred.

"Well, I can't help it," persisted her husband obstinately. "You can take what you please off him. I don't want him to say anything to me."

"Oh, he didn't _say_ anything, Elick. What was there to say?"

"He doesn't gener'ly keep still because he has nothin' to say."

The man gave a m.u.f.fled, explosive laugh, and pushed back his chair. Mrs.

Randall's eyelids reddened. She laid down her work and got up.

"I guess I'll take off this dress before I clear up the things," she said, in a voice of temporary defeat.

Her husband picked up the empty water-pail as he left the kitchen, and filled it at the well. When he brought it back there was no one visible.

"Need any wood, Tildy?" he called toward the bedroom where she was dressing.

"No, I guess not." The voice was indistinct, but she might have had her skirt over her head. Alex made a half-conciliatory pause. He preferred to know that she was not crying.

"How you been feelin' to-day?"

"Middlin'."

She was not crying. The man gave his trousers a hitch of relief, and went back to his work.

There had been a scandal in Alex Randall's early married life. The scattered country community had stood aghast before the certainty of his guilt, and there had been a little lull in the gossip while they waited to see what his wife would do.

Matilda Hazlitt had been counted a spirited girl before her marriage, and there were few of her neighbors who hesitated to a.s.sert that she would take her baby and go back to her father's house. It had been a nine-days' wonder when she had elected to believe in her husband. The injured girl had been an adopted member of the elder Randall's household, half servant, half daughter, and it was whispered that her love for Alex was older than his marriage. Just how much of the neighborhood talk had reached Matilda's ears no one knew. The girl had gone away, and the community had accepted Alex Randall for his wife's sake, but not unqualifiedly.

Mrs. Randall had never been very strong, and of late she had become something of an invalid, as invalidism goes in the country, where women are constantly ailing without any visible neglect of duty. It had "broke her spirit," the women said. Some of the younger of them blamed her, but in the main it was esteemed a wifely and Christian course that she should make this pretense of confidence in her husband's innocence for the sake of her child. No one wondered that it wore upon her health.