The Homesteaders Part 11

"You're so pa.s.sive," returned the girl, with a touch of impatience.

"You make me want to fight. Of course it can be helped, but it can't be helped by always giving in."

"Your father has met one of his own mettle at last," said the mother, and the girl fancied she detected a note of pride, but whether of father, or daughter, or both, she could only guess. "Well, it's all very sad. Your father is a good man, Beulah...I should send you back to your bed, but somehow I can't. I--I don't blame you, Beulah."

She had finished the last cow. Beulah helped with the pails of milk, and the two women went back to the house together. When Mary had washed her hands she took her daughter's face between her palms and kissed her on the cheeks. Slowly Beulah's arms stole about her neck, and it took all the steel in her nature to prevent surrender.

"It's not you I'm going from," she managed to say. "You understand that, don't you? I'll write to you often, and we'll surely meet before long...But I've just got to. There's no other way out."

"Stay till morning, Beulah. Your father may be disposed to give and take a little then, and you'll do the same, won't you?...Oh, my girl, don't break up our home like this!"

"You can't break up what you haven't got. Aside from you, why should I call this place home? I work here, and get my board and clothes.

Well, I can work other places, and get my board and clothes. If I've got to be a cog in a money-making machine, I will at least choose the machine."

"What plans have you made? Where are you going?"

"Haven't made any plans, and don't know where I'm going. But I'm going. At present that's enough. The plans will come along as they're needed."

"Have you any money?" asked the mother, with a brisk effort at cheerfulness. She was already planning for her daughter in the new world she was about to enter.

"Enough to start me. That's all I need. I can earn more. It's not work I'm afraid of, although I suppose father won't be able to see it that way. He'll put all this down to laziness and obstinacy. It's neither. It's just a plain human craving to _live_."

"I sometimes wonder whether I'll be able to stand it through to the end," her mother whispered, somewhat fearfully, as though frightened by the admission. "I've--I've seen it coming with you, and I can't help feeling that perhaps this is only the beginning."

"Oh, mother, if you should!" cried the girl. "That would do it--that would open his eyes. He'd see then that there is something in the world besides wheat and cows, after all. You know, I think he's in a kind of trance. He's mesmerized by wheat. It was so necessary in those first years, when he was fighting against actual starvation, that it has become a kind of mania. Nothing short of some great shock will bring him out of it. If you would come--if you would only come too, things would be different."

"But I couldn't do that," said the mother, after a silence, and as though speaking with herself. "He's my husband, Beulah. You don't understand."

They talked then, in secret, sorrowful confidence, of many things, things for their ears only, and the grey was returning in the northern sky when the girl again left the house, and this time swung resolutely down the road that led to Plainville. Her heart was now at rest, even at peace. In the sacred communion of that last hour she had come to see something of her mother's problem and sacrifice; and although she was going out into the world alone, she felt that somewhere, some time, was a solution that would reunite the broken family and tune their varying chords in harmony. The North star shone very brightly amid the myriad finer points of light that filled the heavens. She raised her face to the cold rays. The stars had always a strange fascination for her. Their illimitable distances, their infinite number, their ordered procession--all spelled to her a Purpose--a Purpose that was bigger than wheat and land and money, a Purpose that was life, the life for which she groped vaguely but bravely in the darkness.

From an unhappy sleep in his room upstairs John Harris was awakened by the whine of the cream separator. A quiet smile stole across his strong, still handsome face. "Beulah has decided to be sensible," he whispered to himself.

In the morning the Harris household was early as usual. The farmer and his son gave their attention to the horses while Mary prepared breakfast, and it was not until they were seated at the table that Harris noticed his daughter's absence.

"Where's Beulah?" he demanded.

"I don't know," his wife replied.

"Ain't she up yet?"

"I don't know."

Harris rose from the table and went upstairs. He entered his daughter's room without knocking. The bed had not been slept in, and a strange apprehension suddenly tightened about his chest. He returned quickly to the kitchen.

"Mary," he said, "I want to know where Beulah is."

"I can't tell you where she is, John. She left here last night."

"Left here? Do you mean that she has run away?"

"Not just that, perhaps, but she has gone, and I'm not looking for her back for a while." The mother's voice was dry, and she talked in the restraint of subdued emotion.

"And you knew she was going?"

"I knew before she left. I didn't--"

"No. You didn't think it was worth mentioning to me. Just a matter we could talk about any time. I suppose you thought I wouldn't care."

"Well, you didn't seem to care very much, John. You gave your orders and went to bed. Beulah could obey or get out. You might have known she had enough of your own spirit to soon settle that question. She settled it just as you would have settled it if you had been in her place."

"Oh, of course, I'm to blame for the whole thing," said Harris, and his throat was thick as he spoke. His daughter was very dear to him, and that she would leave home had never entered his head. Why should she? Wasn't he a good father? Didn't he give her a good home, with plenty to eat and wear, and a little money to spend from time to time, and no questions asked? What more could a man do than that?

Already his heart was crying out for his daughter--the cry of broken strings which never knew their strength until they broke. But to show any emotion, or to express regret for anything he had done, meant surrender, and if there was one thing John Harris could not do it was surrender. Not that he felt he had done anything wrong, or even imprudent; he was sincerely sorry for what had happened, but not for his part in it. And, lest gentleness should be mistaken for weakness, he clothed his real feelings in sharp words to his wife.

"Of course, you must take her part. I suppose you advised her to go.

It was an awful thing for me to tell her she must do her work, but a small thing for her to run away. Well, I hope she likes it. If she thinks I'm going to hitch up a buggy and go chasing around the neighbourhood, begging her to come back, she's mistaken. She's gone of her own free will, and she can come back of the same, or not at all."

"I wouldn't look for her back too soon," remarked Allan. "Looks to me as though this thing had all been figured out ahead. Jim went yesterday morning; Beulah goes last night. Just a chance if they ain't married by this time."

"So that's it, is it?" exclaimed Harris, jumping up from his untouched breakfast. There was a fierce light in his eye and a determination in his face that boded ill to any who opposed him. He seized his wife roughly by the shoulder. "And you were a party to this, were you? You--you wouldn't even stop at that? Well, I'll stop it. I'll stop him, if I do it with a bullet. I'll show him whether any--any--_hired man_--can cross me in a matter of my own family."

His wife had risen, and was clinging to his wrists, half for protection, half in suppliance. "Now, John," she pleaded, "don't be rash. You don't know that Beulah's gone with Jim, and you haven't a word of proof of it."

"Proof! What more proof do I want? When did ever Beulah carry on like this before? Didn't she always do as she was told? And haven't they been thick as mola.s.ses this while back? Wasn't it over wasting time with her that Jim got fired, and not a word of admission of the real facts from him? What more do you want than that? And on top of it all you help her away, and keep it a secret from me as long as you can. I daresay you knew their plans from the first. You thought I wouldn't be interested in that, either."

"I didn't know it," she protested, "and I don't believe it. I don't believe either Beulah or Jim had any such thought in their head. But even if they did, Jim Travers is as decent a young man as there is in Plainville district, and you've nothing to be ashamed of except your own temper, that drove them away in the way they went."

"I won't listen to that kind of talk from you any longer," said Harris sternly. "I'll chase the young reprobates to earth, if it takes all summer. And unless you can clear yourself of being mixed up in this--well, there'll be something to settle on that score, too.

Hitch up the drivers, Allan, and be quick about it."

"You're not going to leave your ploughing, are you?" asked his wife.

The words sprang to her lips without any misintent. It was such an unusual thing for her husband, on any account, to leave the farm work unfinished. The practice on the Harris homestead was work first, all other considerations second.

"That's enough of your sarcasm," he snapped. "I would think when our name is threatened with a disgrace like this you would be as anxious to defend it as I am. How is it you go back on me in a moment like this? You're not the woman you once were, Mary."

"And you're not the man you once were, John," she answered. "Oh, can't you see that we're just reaping what has been sown--the crop we're been raising through ail these years? Beulah's very life has been crying out for action, for scope, for room, for something that would give her a reason for existence, that would put a purpose into her life, and we've not tried to answer that cry. I blame myself as much as you, John, perhaps more, because I should have--read her heart--I should have seen the danger signals long ago. But I was so busy, I didn't think. That's the trouble, John, we've been so busy, both of us, we haven't taken time to keep up with her. The present generation is not the past; what was enough for you and me isn't enough for our children. It doesn't do any good to scold--scolding doesn't change conditions; but if we'd stopped and thought and studied over them we might have changed them--or cured them. We didn't, John; you were too busy with your wheat and your cattle, and I was too busy with my house-work, and what have we made of it? We've gathered some property together, and our cares have grown in proportion, but that which was more to us than all the property in the world we have lost--because we valued it less." The tears were slowly coursing down her cheeks, and her thin, work-worn arms were stealing about his neck. "Don't think, dear," she whispered, "that I'm indifferent, or that this hurts me less than you, or that I would shield myself from one iota of my just blame, but let us face the fact that it has been our mistake rather than Beulah's."

He removed her arms, not ungently. "I never thought it would come to this," he said. "I thought I humoured her every way I could. As for our hard work--well, work makes money, and I noticed Beulah could spend her share. There was no protesting about the work that earned the money when she wanted a new hat or a new dress, and she generally got what she wanted."

"You don't understand, John. It wasn't the work, it was the making a G.o.d of work, and giving it so much of our lives that there was none left for her. That's why she looked somewhere else--if she has looked somewhere else."

"Allan works as hard and harder than ever Beulah did, and Allan doesn't feel that way about it."

"That's true," she admitted, "but Allan's ambition is work. He works and is satisfied, but Beulah thinks, and is not satisfied. It's the difference in their nature, and we didn't take it into consideration." In every phrase she tried to link his blame with hers, that the burden might unite instead of separate them.

"If she'd thought a little more before this mad prank it would have been better for everybody," he said, "Well, she'll have plenty of time to think yet." He stepped to the kitchen door, and from the nail above took down the repeating-rifle.