The Harvester Part 44

"I am so glad you have come," she said.

"I hope you are not lonesome already," laughed the doctor.

"I don't think any one with brains to appreciate half of this ever could become lonely here," answered the Girl. "No, it isn't that."

"A-ha!" cried the doctor, turning to his wife. "You see that the beautiful young lady remembers me, and has been wishing I would come. I always said you didn't half appreciate me. What a place you are making, David! I'll run the car to the shade and join you."

For a long time they talked under the trees, then they went to see the new home and all its furnishings.

"Now this is what I call comfort," said the doctor. "David, build us a house exactly similar to this over there on the hill, and let us live out here also. I'd love it. Would you, Clara?"

"I don't know. I never lived in the country. One thing is sure: If I tried it, I'd prefer this to any other place I ever saw. David, won't you take me far enough up the hill that I can look from the top to the lake?"

"Certainly," said the Harvester. "Excuse us a little while, Ruth!"

As soon as they were gone the Girl turned to the doctor.

"Doctor Carey, David says you are great. Won't you exercise your art on me. I am not at all well, and oh! I'd so love to be strong and sound."

"Will you tell me," asked the doctor, "just enough to show me what caused the trouble?"

"Bad air and water, poor light and food at irregular times, overwork and deep sorrow; every wrong condition of life you could imagine, with not a ray of hope in the distance, until now. For the sake of the Harvester, I would be well again. Please, please try to cure me!"

So they talked until the doctor thought he knew all he desired, and then they went to see the gold flower garden.

"I call this simply superb," said he, taking a seat beneath the tree roof of her porch. "Young woman, I don't know what I'll do to you if you don't speedily grow strong here. This is the prettiest place I ever saw, and listen to the music of that bubbling, gurgling little creek!"

"Isn't he wonderful?" asked the Girl, looking up the hill, where the tall form of the Harvester could be seen moving around. "Just to see him, you would think him the essence of manly strength and force. And he is! So strong! Into the lake at all hours, at the dry-house, on the hill, grubbing roots, lifting big pillars to support a bridge roof, and with it all a fancy as delicate as any dreaming girl. Doctor, the fairies paint the flowers, colour the fruit, and frost the windows for him; and the winds carry pollen to tell him when his growing things are ready for the dry-house. I don't suppose I can tell you anything new about him; but isn't he a perpetual surprise? Never like any one else!

And no matter how he startles me in the beginning, he always ends by convincing me, at least, that he is right."

"I never loved any other man as I do him," said the doctor. "I ushered him into the world when I was a young man just beginning to practise, and I've known him ever since. I know few men so scrupulously clean. Try to get well and make him happy, Mrs. Langston. He so deserves it."

"You may be sure I will," answered the Girl.

After the visitors had gone, the Harvester told her to place the old blue dishes as she would like to arrange them on her table, so he could get a correct idea of the size, and he left to put a few finishing strokes on the bridge cover. She went into the dining-room and opened the china closet. She knew from her peep in the work-room that there would be more pieces than she had seen before; but she did not think or hope that a full half dozen tea set and plates, bowl, platter, and pitcher would be waiting for her.

"Why Ruth, what made you tire yourself to come down? I intended to return in a few minutes."

"Oh Man!" cried the laughing Girl, as she clung pantingly to a bridge pillar for support, "I just had to come to tell you. There are fairies!

Really truly ones! They have found the remainder of the willow dishes for me, and now there are so many it isn't going to be a table at all.

It must be a little cupboard especially for them, in that s.p.a.ce between the mantel and the bookcase. There should be a shining bra.s.s tea canister, and a wafer box like the arts people make, and I'll pour tea and tend the chafing dish and you can toast the bread with a long fork over the coals, and we will have suppers on the living-room table, and it will be such fun."

"Be seated!" cried the Harvester. "Ruth, that's the longest speech I ever heard you make, and it sounded, praise the Lord, like a girl. Did Doc say he would fix something for you?"

"Yes, such a lot of things! I am going to shut my eyes and open my mouth and swallow all of them. I'm going to be born again and forget all I ever knew before I came here, and soon I will be tagging you everywhere, begging you to suggest designs for my pencil, and I'll simply force life to come right for you."

The Harvester smiled.

"Sounds good!" he said. "But, Ruth, I'm a little dubious about force work. Life won't come right for me unless you learn to love me, and love is a stubborn, contrary bulldog element of our nature that won't be driven an inch. It wanders as the wind, and strikes us as it will.

You'll arrive at what I hope for much sooner if you forget it and amuse yourself and be as happy as you can. Then, perhaps all unknown to you, a little spark of tenderness for me will light in your breast; and if it ever does we will buy a fanning mill and put it in operation, and we'll raise a flame or know why."

"And there won't be any force in that?"

"What you can't compel is the start. It's all right to push any growth after you have something to work on."

"That reminds me," said the Girl, "there is a question I want to ask you."

"Go ahead!" said the Harvester, glancing at her as he hewed a joist.

She turned away her face and sat looking across the lake for a long time.

"Is it a difficult question, Ruth?" inquired the Harvester to help her.

"Yes," said the Girl. "I don't know how to make you see."

"Take any kind of a plunge. I'm not usually dense."

"It is really quite simple after all. It's about a girl----a girl I knew very well in Chicago. She had a problem----and it worried her dreadfully, and I just wondered what you would think of it."

The Harvester shifted his position so that he could watch the side of the averted face.

"You'll have to tell me, before I can tell you," he suggested.

"She was a girl who never had anything from life but work and worry. Of course, that's the only kind I'd know! One day when the work was most difficult, and worry cut deepest, and she really thought she was losing her mind, a man came by and helped her. He lifted her out, and rescued all that was possible for a man to save to her in honour, and went his way. There wasn't anything more. Probably there never would be. His heart was great, and he stooped and pitied her gently and pa.s.sed on.

After a time another man came by, a good and n.o.ble man, and he offered her love so wonderful she hadn't brains to comprehend how or why it was."

The Girl's voice trailed off as if she were too weary to speak further, while she leaned her head against a pillar and gazed with dull eyes across the lake.

"And your question," suggested the Harvester at last.

She roused herself. "Oh, the question! Why this----if in time, and after she had tried and tried, love to equal his simply would not come would----would----she be wrong to PRETEND she cared, and do the very best she could, and hope for real love some day? Oh David, would she?"

The Harvester's face was whiter than the Girl's. He pounded the chisel into the joist savagely.

"Would she, David?"

"Let me understand you clearly," said the man in a dry, breathless voice. "Did she love this first man to whom she came under obligations?"

The Girl sat gazing across the lake and the tortured Harvester stared at her.

"I don't know," she said at last. "I don't know whether she knew what love was or ever could. She never before had known a man; her heart was as undeveloped and starved as her body. I don't think she realized love, but there was a SOMETHING. Every time she would feel most grateful and long for the love that was offered her, that 'something' would awake and hurt her almost beyond endurance. Yet she knew he never would come. She knew he did not care for her. I don't know that she felt she wanted him, but she was under such obligations to him that it seemed as if she must wait to see if he might not possibly come, and if he did she should be free."

"If he came, she preferred him?"

"There was a debt she had to pay----if he asked it. I don't know whether she preferred him. I do know she had no idea that he would come, but the POSSIBILITY was always before her. If he didn't come in time, would she be wrong in giving all she had to the man who loved her?"

The Harvester's laugh was short and sharp.

"She had nothing to give, Ruth! Talk about worm-wood, colocynth apples, and hemlock! What sort of husks would that be to offer a man who gave honest love? Lie to him! Pretend feeling she didn't experience. Endure him for the sake of what he offered her? Well I don't know how calmly any other man would take that proceeding, Ruth, but tell your friend for me, that if I offered a woman the deep, lasting, and only loving pa.s.sion of my heart, and she gave back a lie and indifferent lips, I'd drop her into the deepest hole of my lake and take my punishment cheerfully."