The Wind Before the Dawn Part 58

CHAPTER XXV

"THE WEIGHT OF A DOLLAREE AND OUT OF DEBT DON'T FORGET THAT"

Nathan Hornby moved promptly over to the Hunter farm, and established himself in Hugh's old room upstairs.

The farm work prospered under Elizabeth's management. She was fortunate enough to trade a young heifer with a calf at her side for Silas's pony, and because feed was scarce she sold most of the stock, keeping only such as she desired to open farming with the next spring. The hogs were marketed early, and the few steers left when the cattle had been taken to Mitch.e.l.l County were sold to the first buyer who offered a reasonable figure for them; the cows which gave evidence of increase were kept and the rest sold. Altogether money enough was raised to pay the note for the team and all the outstanding indebtedness except the note for five hundred dollars. The latter did not mature till May and could stand. The expense of feeding discouraged the farmers and prices dropped steadily all winter.

When April came the Johnson land was sold to a stranger, who came and offered to buy the west eighty of Elizabeth's land. The five hundred would be due the next month. The new neighbour coveted that eighty, and Elizabeth decided that if she could get a price warranting its sale she would sell, pay off the five hundred, and put the rest into calves while they were cheap. She offered the land for thirty-five dollars an acre. It was unheard of! No one had ever asked so much for land in that country, but the man wanted to add that land to his farm, and after some bargaining paid the price.

Frugal and cautious, Elizabeth paid the five hundred with the first check she drew against the price of the land. That left two thousand for calves and three hundred for running expenses. John had taken one horse out of the new team when he went away, and Elizabeth decided not to buy another, but to hire a horse in harvesting time. There were three full teams for the plows, besides the horse which had been hurt in the runaway. It had recovered and, though scarred and stiffened, could be used for ordinary work. She took good care to have it hitched beside a solid, trusty mate and treated gently to soothe its wild nature.

No word had come from John except when Doctor Morgan wrote him of the apprais.e.m.e.nt of the land. Then a curt letter had been received saying that whatever they did would be satisfactory to him and that when the deeds came he would sign them. Not to be outdone, Elizabeth bought the portion of land which did not have the house and buildings, agreeing to rent the home eighty until such time as he should choose to sell it, and expressing a desire, since Jack had been born there, to buy the home if John should ever wish to part with it. To his suggestion that she use the home without rent--in fact, an offer of it as his share of support of the child--Elizabeth refused to listen.

"I'll rent it of him as I would of anybody, Doctor," she had replied, and made out a note on the spot.

John had written that he was in the commission business in Chicago, and did not say whether his mother was with him nor not. To Elizabeth he did not write, but to Jack he sent loads of toys and a sled at Christmas time.

Elizabeth had not attempted to communicate with John direct, but had rented his share of the land from him through Doctor Morgan. The sale of the west eighty gave her enough money to stock the place with every animal it would hold. When the girl began to look about her for calves, she found that because of the price of corn many farmers were selling their hogs at a sacrifice. Hogs were quick money. She invested in such as were ready for increase, and by harvest time there was a fine lot of pigs on the Hunter farm. Every cow had been milked, and the calves raised by hand so as to have the milk for the young pigs till the early corn could be gathered.

Milking was hard work, but Elizabeth Hunter's pride was up.

Elizabeth's pride had had some sore p.r.i.c.ks. In spite of every effort to avoid hearing the small talk regarding herself, Elizabeth had been obliged to listen to such portions as dribbled through from her mother, and an occasional remark from Sadie Hansen. Sadie Hansen's life was a reorganized one, but there were small lapses, and from force of habit she repeated things, though she was in the main about the kindest neighbour Elizabeth had. With Mrs. Farnshaw the case was different. She was Elizabeth's mother, and certain privileges must be accorded her because of the relationship. When she chose to disapprove of the separation of her daughter from her husband, the daughter was compelled to recognize her right to protest, and often inadvertently to listen to the gossip which her mother urged as reasons for her objections. Mrs. Farnshaw came often and talked volubly. Elizabeth shielded herself as best she could from her mother's prattlings, but had to endure many tearful complaints, for her mother was suffering much loneliness and discomfort since her daughter's marriage. Josiah Farnshaw did not forget, nor let his wife forget, the disaffection of Elizabeth.

Once when Mrs. Farnshaw had gone beyond the mark where her daughter could receive it in silence, urging that Elizabeth call her husband home and submit herself to the matrimonial yoke, the girl turned upon her in annoyance:

"You'd have me just where you are yourself, ma. You say pa mistreats you--that's just what was coming to me. If I didn't have money enough that was all my own to live on, my husband would be sneering at me and keeping me in hot water all the time, exactly as pa sneers at you."

"But you're separated!" Mrs. Farnshaw cried.

"Yes," the girl said slowly, "and because we are separated I can go to town if I like, I can go to church, I can go to see a neighbour, or my mother, without hating to ask for a horse to drive or being told when to come home, and when Jack is naughty I can talk to him without having anybody set his little will against mine and make it harder to deal with him. Oh, mother mine! Can't you see that I'm happier than you are?"

"But, you're livin' apart and--and folks is a talkin'!" the mother exclaimed hopelessly.

"Let them talk. Their talk don't hurt me, and it shouldn't hurt you. They don't talk before me."

"But they talk behind your back, Lizzie," Mrs. Farnshaw said with a wise nod of the head.

"They talked about us when John was here, ma, and they always talk about us; it doesn't matter much what they talk about; they wouldn't pay off the mortgage, nor the interest, nor raise Jack right, nor give me a chance to rest on washday. Some will say I was in the wrong, some that John was, and they all said that I was stuck-up and wouldn't visit with them when it wasn't so at all. They are looking to see _who_ was wrong; I have reasoned out _what_ was wrong. It's principles, not personalities, that get people into troubles that don't seem to have any way out. Oh! can't you see, ma, that I'm free, and the women that talk about me are just where they've always been. Free! and don't forget that I'm out of debt. That's more than you've got by staying with your husband, and you haven't been able to keep people from talking after all. Free, and out of debt! Don't forget it."

"Well, you wouldn't 'a' been free, either, if Mr. Noland hadn't 'a' left you th' money," Mrs. Farnshaw replied.

Elizabeth dropped into a retrospective mood for a moment before she answered, and then said slowly:

"I know that. G.o.d in Heaven, how well I know it! And do you know I think about it every day--what could be done for the poor women on these hot Kansas prairies if there were some way to see that every girl that loves a man enough to marry him could have money enough to keep her if she couldn't live under the work and children he crowds on her. I'm free, because I have money enough all my own to live on. That's the weight of a dollar. Don't forget that, you poor ma, who have never had a dollar except what has been doled out to you by the man you married. The weight of a dollar," Elizabeth added meditatively, "that's what it is!"

Mrs. Farnshaw, who had bought the groceries for her little family with the b.u.t.ter and eggs, and whose sugar had sometimes been short because there was a supply of Horse Shoe Plug to provide also, had no answer ready.

CHAPTER XXVI

"WAS--WAS MY PAPA HERE THEN?"

Two years of favourable weather and good fortune with her livestock saw the money Elizabeth had invested in hogs doubled and trebled, and later, when the Johnson land was again offered for sale, she was able to buy it for cash and have the place well stocked after it was done. Silas Chamberlain, who watched Elizabeth with the same fatherly interest he had felt when her child was born, and who glowed with secret pride at the way in which she had won her way back into the country society about them, came in often and offered his measure of good-natured praise. He had prophesied the first time she had cooked for harvest hands that she would become a famous cook, but he had not expected to find her a famous farmer.

What was still more astonishing to the old man was that she had become noted in quite other ways. The move she had made in going to meeting the first Sunday after John's departure, and Hepsie's explanation of it, had worked to her advantage in reestablishing her in the community as one of its factors, and opened to her the opportunity to wield the influence which Luther had pointed out to her the best educated woman in a community should wield. She took a cla.s.s in the little Sunday school at the schoolhouse, not so much because she was an enthusiastic churchwoman as because it was the place where contact could be had. Elizabeth belonged to no church, but Elizabeth could turn the conversation of the church members, among whom she mingled, from gossip to better things, and there was not a quilting bee nor an aid society meeting in the country around to which she was not invited, and which she did not raise to a higher standard by her presence.

The snubs which the neighbour women were at first anxious to deliver fell flat in the quiet unconsciousness with which they were met. Elizabeth felt that much of the treatment she received was given in righteous indignation, and pursued the policy when possible to do so of not seeing it, and when it must be met to meet it with perfect good humour. She kept her credit good among the men with whom she bartered for young stock, and there began to creep in a better feeling for her within the first six months after she a.s.sumed the care of the farm and the problematical position of a "gra.s.s widow" in the neighborhood. Doctor Morgan, Hepsie, Jake, and Luther were splendid a.s.sets in the race with public feeling, and Silas saw his young neighbour's affairs straighten out with chuckles of delight. He watched her manoeuvre with her business deals and saw the cool-headedness of them with growing enthusiasm. He pa.s.sed Nathan on his way to the field one spring morning and noticed that Nathan was using a seeder from the Hunter farm. It was bright with a coat of freshly dried paint.

"That's what she borrowed my brushes for last week," he exclaimed to Nathan. "Ever see anything like 'er?" he asked admiringly. "Takes care of everything. Did you ever see th' likes of them hogs? She's made more money sellin' that land an' buyin' of it back 'n most of us old heads 'll make in five year. Everything she touches seems t' have a wad stuck under it somewheres."

Elizabeth was more than merely successful in money matters; she was a reorganized woman from the standpoint of health also. She was no more the weary, hara.s.sed woman who had churned, baked, and cooked for sh.e.l.lers, and had so nearly found an early grave. The satisfaction of working unrestrained, of resting when nature and woman's const.i.tution demanded, and the whole matter of living without fear, had given her a sound and healthy body and a mind broader and less liable to emotional bias. The principle which she had demanded from her husband in their last conversation she put into practice. Hepsie ruled the house very much as if it were her own. Elizabeth knew from experience the dreariness of housework where all individuality is denied the worker. Hepsie came and went as the exigencies of the work permitted, and there was always a horse provided for her journeys away from the place; in fact, Hepsie was much more free than her mistress had been in her first three years in the same house. Elizabeth demanded good service, but she gave good service also, and from being a good joke to work for the gra.s.s widow, it came to be recognized that the Hunter farm was a good place to live, and when the spring came around the men who had worked there the season before always presented themselves for fresh hiring.

Two years more pa.s.sed, and Master Jack Hunter was seven years old. On his seventh birthday his mother dressed him and herself carefully and rode over to the lonely graveyard. She did not go flower-laden. Rather, she went as was her custom, to spend an hour with the quiet dead in silent thought. Hugh Noland's sacrifice had not been in vain. The life he had laid down had, whatever its mistakes and weaknesses, been a happy one to himself, and had carried a ray of cheer to all with whom it had come in contact, while his death had pointed toward an ideal of purity, in spite of failures. That brief period during which Elizabeth had been compelled to live a double life for his sake had held many lessons, and had forever weaned her from duplicity of any sort. Those special hours--the hours spent beside Hugh Noland's grave--were spent in searching self-inquiry, in casting up accounts, in measuring herself against the principles with which she struggled. People had gone out of her wrestlings; principles remained. Here Elizabeth meditated upon the fact that because the neighbourhood sentiment and discussion centred around their home, she and John Hunter had missed a golden opportunity in not having become a force for good during those first years of their marriage.

The hour spent beside Hugh's grave was her sacrament. There she went to renew her faith in her own powers, which Hugh's interest and estimates had first taught her to recognize; there she went to renew her vows of higher living, and there to contemplate the freedom which Hugh Noland had given her. But for the land and stock which gave her an independent income she would have been as tearful, worn, and despondent as many of the women about her. Her heart was very tender toward Hugh as she sat beside his grave to-day. She held his letter--the only one he had ever written, her--in her hands. As she read it over, part of its last sentence, "and will, I hope, help toward emanc.i.p.ating you from care," struck her attention, and her eyes filled with tears.

"What is it, mamma? What hurts?" Jack asked, always quick to respond to his mother's moods.

"Nothing, dear, but Uncle Hugh's letter. He wrote it just before he died.

He was very kind to me," she said, patting the face thrust up for a kiss.

"Was--was my papa here then?" the child asked, curious about the life he could not remember, and trying to relate things as he heard of them in their true relation to the father who was a mysterious personage and therefore interesting.

When his mother did not answer, he crept closer and, laying his head against her arm, said wistfully:

"Mamma, will my papa ever come back to us?"

"I don't know, Jack," she answered quietly. "Perhaps. If he don't, you shall go and see him when you are a big boy. Now run away, and leave mamma a chance to think for a whole ten minutes."

The child ran off to the horses, and Elizabeth faced the life she led. A curious thing was made plain to her in that hour--namely, that Hugh, whom she remembered tenderly, was but a memory, while John Hunter, the father of her child, whom she had no other cause to love, was a living force in her life, and that at the child's simple question a longing flamed up, and a feeling that she wished he were there. She remembered him as he would ride with his hat in his hand, his fair, soft hair wind-blown about his temples, and she would have been glad to go forth to meet him and try anew to build a life together which would be livable to both.

A long time she pondered, and the impulse to write to him came over her, but that impulse was followed by retrospection, and as one thing after another arose out of the past in solemn procession, closing with the unloved and unwished-for child which she had lost five years ago, she knew that she would not open a correspondence. At that point, and with the memory of the sweltering day and the unnecessary churning, her tender memory of Hugh, who had made her free and economically independent, welled up in her in one glad tide of thanksgiving, and she thought of her mother and the thousands of other women on these Kansas prairies who had not been saved from such a fate by being made independent landowners, and she pondered on their fate till she longed for a way out for all women who were mothers.

"This income could have set John free too, if he would only have thought it over," she said to herself. "He need not have been burdened with us while he was getting his depths in the business world," she concluded.

Wherever Elizabeth's thoughts turned to-day, John was the centre of them.

Elizabeth had never been resentful toward her husband, and the never-ceasing cause of speculation and comment in the neighbourhood had been upon the fact that though she lived apart from him, she never seemed to think of divorce. Elizabeth's att.i.tude toward John was that of a mother who waits for a child to find the real light on a situation. She rarely heard from him, and never directly. She knew of some of his affairs through Doctor Morgan, with whom John corresponded when business required, but she wrote regularly to Mrs. Hunter, who had gone to her son the second year he had been away, and who had written to her at that time. Elizabeth had been glad of so simple a means of keeping the link unbroken between him and his child. It had been no part of her plan to separate Jack from his father. She would not ask John to return, but she wished him to have such knowledge of his son as his temper would permit. She wrote such details of the home and the child as would interest them, knowing that John would read the letters. Somehow, to-day she wished that she could write to him direct, but as she thought she shook her head.

"It cannot be," she said aloud.

"Mamma, if you don't come we won't have time to go for the mail," Jack called.

The pleasant afternoon had waned; Elizabeth Hunter gazed about her in astonishment; it was indeed late.

She stooped and pa.s.sed her hand over the name cut in the marble slab.

"Hugh Noland, aged twenty-nine."