Tillie, a Mennonite Maid Part 27

She spoke with a firmness that made the dull youth suddenly realize a thing of which he had never dreamed, that however slightly Tillie resembled her father in other respects, she did have a bit of his determination.

She took a step toward the stairs, but Absalom seized her skirts and pulled her back. "You needn't think I'm leavin' you act like that to me, Tillie!" he muttered, his ardor whetted by the difficulties of his courting. "Now I'll learn you!" and holding her slight form in his burly grasp he kissed her again and again.

"Leave me go!" she cried. "I'll call out if you don't! Stop it, Absalom!"

Absalom laughed aloud, his eyes glittering as he felt her womanly helplessness in his strong clasp.

"What you goin' to do about it, Tillie? You can't help yourself--you got to get kissed if you want to or no!" And again his articulate caresses sounded upon her shrinking lips, and he roared with laughter in his own satisfaction and in his enjoyment of her predicament. "You can't help yourself," he said, crushing her against him in a bearish hug.

"Absalom!" the girl's voice rang out sharply in pain and fear.

Then of a sudden Absalom's wrists were seized in a strong grip, and the young giant found his arms pinned behind him.

"Now, then, Absalom, you let this little girl alone. Do you understand?" said Fairchilds, coolly, as he let go his hold on the youth and stepped round to his side.

Absalom's face turned white with fury as he realized who had dared to interfere. He opened his lips, but speech would not come to him.

Clenching his fingers, he drew back his arm, but his heavy fist, coming swiftly forward, was caught easily in Fairchilds's palm--and held there.

"Come, come," he said soothingly, "it isn't worth while to row, you know. And in the presence of the lady!"

"You mind to your OWN business!" spluttered Absalom, struggling to free his hand, and, to his own surprise, failing. Quickly he drew back his left fist and again tried to strike, only to find it too caught and held, with no apparent effort on the part of the teacher. Tillie, at first pale with fright at what had promised to be so unequal a contest in view of the teacher's slight frame and the brawny, muscular strength of Absalom, felt her pulses bound with a thrill of admiration for this cool, quiet force which could render the other's fury so helpless; while at the same time she felt sick with shame.

"Blame you!" cried Absalom, wildly. "Le' me be! It don't make nothin'

to you if I kiss my girl! I don't owe YOU nothin'! You le' me be!"

"Certainly," returned Fairchilds, cheerfully. "Just stop annoying Miss Tillie, that's all I want."'

He dropped the fellow's hands and deliberately drew out his handkerchief to wipe his own.

A third time Absalom made a furious dash at him, to find his two wrists caught in the vise-like grip of his antagonist.

"Tut, tut, Absalom, this is quite enough. Behave yourself, or I shall be obliged to hurt you."

"YOU--you white-faced, woman-faced mackerel! YOU think you kin hurt me!

You--"

"Now then," Fairchilds again dropped Absalom's hands and picked up from the settee the book which the youth had presented to Tillie. "Here, Absalom, take your 'What a Young Husband Ought to Know' and go home."

Something in the teacher's quiet, confident tone cowed Absalom completely--for the time being, at least. He was conquered. It was very bewildering. The man before him was not half his weight and was not in the least ruffled. How had he so easily "licked" him? Absalom, by reason of his stalwart physique and the fact that his father was a director, had, during most of his school life, found pleasing diversion in keeping the various teachers of William Penn cowed before him. He now saw his supremacy in that quarter at an end--physically speaking at least. There might be a moral point of attack.

"Look-ahere!" he bl.u.s.tered. "Do you know my pop's Nathaniel Puntz, the director?"

"You are a credit to him, Absalom. By the way, will you take a message to him from me? Tell him, please, that the lock on the school-room door is broken, and I'd be greatly obliged if he would send up a lock-smith to mend it."

Absalom looked discouraged. A Harvard graduate was, manifestly, a freak of nature--invulnerable at all points.

"If pop gets down on you, you won't be long at William Penn!" he bullied. "You'll soon get chased off your job!"

"My job at breaking you in? Well, well, I might be spending my time more profitably, that's so."

"You go on out of here and le' me alone with my girl!" quavered Absalom, blinking away tears of rage.

"That will be as she says. How is it, Miss Tillie? Do you want him to go?"

Now Tillie knew that if she allowed Absalom Puntz to leave her in his present state of baffled anger, Fairchilds would not remain in New Canaan a month. Absalom was his father's only child, and Nathaniel Puntz was known to be both suspicious and vindictive. "Clothed in a little brief authority," as school director, he never missed an opportunity to wield his precious power.

With quick insight, Tillie realized that the teacher would think meanly of her if, after her outcry at Absalom's amorous behavior, she now inconsistently ask that he remain with her for the rest of the evening.

But what the teacher might think about HER did not matter so much as that he should be saved from the wrath of Absalom.

"Please leave him stay," she answered in a low voice.

Fairchilds gazed in surprise upon the girl's sweet, troubled face. "Let him stay?"

"Yes."

"Then perhaps my interference was unwelcome?"

"I thank you, but--I want him to stay."

"Yes? I beg pardon for my intrusion. Good night."

He turned away somewhat abruptly and left the room.

And Tillie was again alone with Absalom.

IN his chamber, getting ready for bed, Fairchilds's thoughts idly dwelt upon the strange contradictions he seemed to see in the character of the little Mennonite maiden. He had thought that he recognized in her a difference from the rest of this household--a difference in speech, in feature, in countenance, in her whole personality. And yet she could allow the amorous attentions of that coa.r.s.e, stupid cub; and her protestations against the fellow's liberties with her had been mere coquetry. Well, he would be careful, another time, how he played the part of a Don Quixote.

Meantime Tillie, with suddenly developed histrionic skill, was, by a Spartan self-sacrifice in submitting to Absalom's love-making, overcoming his wrath against the teacher. Absalom never suspected how he was being played upon, or what a mere tool he was in the hands of this gentle little girl, when, somewhat to his own surprise, he found himself half promising that the teacher should not be complained of to his father. The infinite tact and scheming it required on Tillie's part to elicit this a.s.surance without further arousing his jealousy left her, at the end of his prolonged sitting-up, utterly exhausted.

Yet when at last her weary head found her pillow, it was not to rest or sleep. A haunting, fearful certainty possessed her. "Dumm" as he was, Absalom, in his invulnerable persistency, had become to the tired, tortured girl simply an irresistible force of Nature. And Tillie felt that, struggle as she might against him, there would come a day when she could fight no longer, and so at last she must fall a victim to this incarnation of Dutch determination.

XVIII

TILLIE REVEALS HERSELF

In the next few days, Tillie tried in vain to summon courage to appeal to the teacher for a.s.sistance in her winter's study. Day after day she resolved to speak to him, and as often postponed it, unable to conquer her shyness. Meantime, however, under the stimulus of his constant presence, she applied herself in every spare moment to the school-books used by her two cousins, and in this unaided work she succeeded, as usual, in making headway.

Fairchilds's attention was arrested by the frequent picture of the little Mennonite maiden conning school-books by lamp-light.

One evening he happened to be alone with her for a few minutes in the sitting-room. It was Hallowe'en, and he was waiting for Amanda to come down from her room, where she was arraying herself for conquest at a party in the village, to which he had been invited to escort her.

"Studying all alone?" he inquired sociably, coming to the table where Tillie sat, and looking down upon her.

"Yes," said Tillie, raising her eyes for an instant.