Chapter 5. Reaching Hungry Hands Toward A Symbol

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_ CHAPTER V. REACHING HUNGRY HANDS TOWARD A SYMBOL

Susan Hornby's delight over Elizabeth's coming was the most satisfying thing Nathan had seen since his return from Topeka. He had traded the land to please his wife, by getting nearer Elizabeth, but the presence of the girl in the house was so overwhelmingly surprising that Susan was swept by its very suddenness into shedding tears of actual joy. Elizabeth was put to the disconcerting necessity of explaining that her mother somewhat resented Aunt Susan's influence upon her daughter's life when she found her friends enthusiastically planning visits in the near future. She softened the details as much as possible and passed it over as only a bit of maternal jealousy, but was obliged to let this dear friend see that it was rather a serious matter in her calculations. Susan Hornby now understood why Elizabeth had never visited her in these four years.

With the eyes of love Aunt Susan saw that four years in a position of authority had ripened her darling, and made of her a woman of wit and judgment, who could tell a necessary thing in a right manner or with a reserve which was commendable. Eagerly she studied her to see what the changes of those formative years had brought her. She listened to Elizabeth's plans for going to Topeka, and rejoiced that the intellectual stimulus was still strong in her. Elizabeth was obliged to explain away her parent's attitude regarding further education, and left much for the older woman to fill in by her intuitions and experience of the world, but there again Susan Hornby saw evidences of strength which made her feel that the loss was offset by power gained. Elizabeth Farnshaw had matured and had qualities which would command recognition. John Hunter had shown that he recognized them--a thing which Elizabeth without egotism also knew.

It was a new experience to go to sleep thinking of any man but Hugh. In the darkness of the little bedroom in which Elizabeth slept that night Hugh's priority was met face to face by John Hunter's proximity. Possession is said to be nine points in the law, and John Hunter was on the ground. The girl had been shut away from those of her kind until her hungry hands in that hour of thought, reached out to the living presence of the cultured man, and her hungry heart prayed to heaven that she might not be altogether unpleasing to him.

In the hour spent with John Hunter she had learned that he had come to Kansas to open a farm on the only unmortgaged piece of property which his father had left him when he died; that his mother intended to come to him as soon as he had a house built; and by an accidental remark she had also learned that there were lots in some eastern town upon which enough money could be raised to stock the farm with calves and that it was the young man's intention to farm this land himself. It seemed so incredible that John Hunter should become a farmer that by her astonished exclamation over it she had left him self-satisfied at her estimate of his foreignness to the life he was driven to pursue.

Elizabeth saw that if John Hunter must needs run a farm that he would do his best at it, but that he did not wish to appear one with a role, and being young and with her own philosophy of life in a very much muddled condition, she liked him the better for it. Crucified daily by the incongruities of her own home, she craved deliverance from it and all it represented.

Just now Elizabeth Farnshaw was going home with something akin to fear in her heart. She rated herself soundly for the useless advice she had thrust upon her mother and for the entangling difficulties which her thoughtless words had produced. That the union of her parents was unclean, that it was altogether foul and by far worse than a divorce, she still felt confident, but she saw that her mother was totally unable to comprehend the difference between a clean separate life and the nagging poison dealt out as daily bread to the husband with whom she lived; but she saw that because of that very inability to understand the difference, the mother must be left to find the light in her own way. In her desire to help, Elizabeth had but increased her mother's burdens, and she tried to assume an attitude of added tenderness toward her in her own mind, and puckered her young face into a frown as she let Patsie limp slowly from one low hill to another.

"I'll do everything I can to square the deal for ma," she resolved, but in her heart there was a sick suspicion that all she could do was not much, and that it had small chance really to avail.

Elizabeth had started early for home, but the sun rode high in the heavens before she arrived. Albert, who was herding the cattle on the short grass a half mile from home, warned her as she passed that she would do well to hurry to the house.

"Pa waited for you to do the milking, Bess, an' you didn't come. He's mad as a hornet, an' You'll have t' bring th' cows out after he gets through."

It was a friendly warning. To be milking at that hour, when all the men in the neighbourhood were already following plow and harrow, was an important matter on the farm. Plainly it had been arranged to make Elizabeth feel a hindrance to the business of getting in the crops, and it was with increased apprehension that she approached home.

The storm broke as soon as she was within hailing distance.

"It's time you brought that horse home, young lady. You see to it that it's harnessed for th' drag as quick as ever you can. Next time you get a horse You'll know it."

When Elizabeth started on and Mr. Farnshaw saw that Patsie was lame his anger knew no bounds, and the sound of his exasperated voice could have been heard half a mile away as he poured out a stream of vituperation.

Elizabeth dodged into the barn as soon as its friendly door could be reached, thankful that the cows were as far as they were from it. Joe was harnessing a team in the far corner.

"You better shy around pa, Sis; and get t' th' house," he cautioned.

"All right. He told me to harness Patsie, but she's so lame I know she can't work--what will I do?"

"If she can't work, she can't. How did it happen?"

"She strained herself just before I got to Mr. Chamberlain's. I was passing a young man by the name of Hunter and she fell flat. Say, do you know anything about Mr. Hunter?"

"Yes, yes. Jimmie Crane says he's a stuck-up, who's goin' t' show us country jakes how t' farm; but th' best thing you can do is t' get in an' not let pa get any excuse for a row."

Mr. Farnshaw had taken the milkpails to the house while they were talking and it was Elizabeth's fate to encounter him on the doorstep as she ran up to the kitchen door.

"Where were you last night?"

"I'm awfully sorry about the horse, pa. I hurried this morning, but Patsie was so lame and I had to come all the way from the Chamberlain district. The Haddon school board didn't meet this week and the director of number Twelve was away, and it was so late last night that I couldn't get home."

"Oh, you've always got a good excuse. I bet you didn't get a school after all."

Elizabeth had been edging toward the door as her father was speaking and now made her escape to the inside of the house as she replied over her shoulder in a perfectly respectful tone:

"Oh, yes, I did, and it begins Monday."

"Well, it's better than I expected. Now see to it that you get that riding skirt off an' come an' drive my team while I finish them oats."

The daughter stopped where she stood and was going to reply that she must get ready if she were to go to Aunt Susan's the next day, but on second thought closed her mouth down firmly. She knew she would do well if she escaped with no harder tax laid upon her temper than that of putting off her arrival at the Hornby home, and she turned to do as she was bidden.

When Elizabeth found her homecoming unpleasant and her father sullen and evidently nursing his wrath, she faced the storm without protest, took all that was said quietly, helped in the fields and endeavoured to make up for her unfortunate words in every helpful way possible. In all, she was so subtly generous with her assistance that it was impossible to bring on a quarrel with her, and the sour demeanour of her father was so carefully handled that Friday arrived without an open break having occurred. A new dress had been one of the longed-for accomplishments of the week's work, but certain of Aunt Susan's help when she was safely entrenched in her home, Elizabeth retired to the attic whenever she saw her father approach the house. His attitude was threatening, but the anxious girl was able to delay the encounter. It could only be delayed, for Mr. Farnshaw made a virtue of not forgetting unpleasant things.

The only unfortunate occurrence of the week was the presence of Sadie Crane and her mother when Mr. Hunter drove up to the back door for Elizabeth's trunk, but even this had had its beneficial side, for Josiah Farnshaw had been mending harness, because a shower had made the ground too wet to plow, and the presence of neighbours made it possible to get the trunk packed without unpleasantness. When John Hunter drove up to the back door, Mr. Farnshaw rose from his chair beside the window and went to help put his daughter's possessions in the wagon. Sadie crossed over to the window to get a look at Lizzie's new beau.

Sadie Crane was now sixteen years old, and being undersized and childish of appearance had never had the pleasure of the company of a young man. The yearning in her pettish face as she stood unevenly on the discarded harness, looking out of the window toward John Hunter, caught Elizabeth's attention and illuminated the whole affair to the older girl.

"Dude!" Sadie exclaimed spitefully, facing about and evidently offering insult.

But Elizabeth Farnshaw had seen the unsatisfied look which preceded the remark and it was excused. Sadie was just Sadie, and not to be taken seriously.

"He'd better soak his head; he can't farm."

No one replied, and Elizabeth said hurried good-byes and escaped.

But though Sadie Crane was undersized and spoke scornfully, she was old enough to feel a woman's desires and dream a woman's dreams. She watched the pair drive away together in pleasant converse on the quilt-lined spring seat of the farm wagon, and swallowed a sob.

"Lizzie always had th' best of everything," she reflected.

The roads were slippery and gave an excuse for driving slowly, and the young man exerted himself to be agreeable. The distaste for the presence of the Cranes at her home when he came for her, his possible opinion of her family and friends, the prolonged struggle with her father, even the headache from which she had not been free for days, melted out of Elizabeth's mind in the joy of that ride, and left it a perfect experience. It began to rain before they were halfway to their destination, and they sat shoulder to shoulder under the umbrella, with one of the quilts drawn around both. There was a sack of butterscotch, and they talked of Scott, and Dickens, and the other books Elizabeth Farnshaw had absorbed from Aunt Susan's old-fashioned library; and Elizabeth was surprised to find that she had read almost as much as this college man, and still more surprised to find that she remembered a great deal more of what she had read than he seemed to do. She asked many questions about his college experiences and learned that he had lacked but a year and a half of graduation.

"Why didn't you finish?" she asked curiously.

"Well, you know, father died, and I didn't have hardly enough to finish on, so I thought I'd come out here and get to making something. I didn't care to finish. I'd had my fun out of it. I wish I hadn't gone at all. If I'd gone into the office with my father and been admitted to the Bar it would have been better for me. I wouldn't have been on the farm then," he said regretfully.

"Then why didn't you go into the law? You could have made it by yourself," Elizabeth said, understanding that it hurt John Hunter's pride to farm.

The young man shrugged his dripping shoulders and pulled the quilt tighter around them as he answered indifferently:

"Not very well. Father left very little unmortgaged except mother's own property, and I thought I'd get out of Canton. It ain't easy to live around folks you know unless you have money."

"But you could have worked your way through college; lots of boys do it," the girl objected.

"Not on your life!" John Hunter exclaimed emphatically. "I don't go to college that way." After a few moments' musing he added slowly, "I'll make money enough to get out of here after a while."

"I only wish I'd had your chance," Elizabeth said with a sigh.

"Let's talk about something cheerful," young Hunter replied, when he realized that the ride was nearly over. "When may I come to see you again?" he asked. "You are to see a good deal of me this summer if you will permit it."

Elizabeth Farnshaw caught a happy breath before she replied. He wanted to come; she was to see much of him this summer if she would permit it! Could nature and fate ask for more?

When Elizabeth arrived, the old couple bustled about the bright carpeted room, making it comfortable, and cooing over the return of their prodigal, till a heaven of homeness was made of her advent.

Half an hour later Elizabeth, dry and warm and with a cup of tea beside her which she had found it easier to accept than to refuse, looked about her and invoiced the changes of four years which in her preoccupied state of mind during her former visit she had neglected to think upon. There were many little changes in the household arrangement, due to the observations of the winter spent in Topeka. In personal appearance Aunt Susan herself showed improvement.

When Elizabeth's attention was turned to Nathan, however, the glad little enumeration became a more sober one. In the days when they had fed the motherless Patsie together Nathan Hornby had been portly, even inclined to stoutness, and his face, though tough from wind and sun, inclined to be ruddy. The genial gray eyes had sparkled with confidence in himself and good-will toward all about him. At Silas Chamberlain's house a week ago the girl had noticed that Nathan let others arrange the business details of contracts and credentials, but his joy at meeting her had obscured the habitual sadness of his present manner. She had noticed that he was thinner, but to-night she saw the waste and aging which had consumed him. The belt line which had bulged comfortably under the vest of five years ago was flat and flabby, the thick brown hair which had shown scarcely a thread of white was now grizzled and thin, the ruddy cheeks had fallen in, and two missing lower teeth made him whistle his s'es through the gap with a sound unlike his bluff speech of their first acquaintance, so that without the face which accompanied the words she could hardly have recognized the connection between the man who had and the man who did embody the same personality. The cogitations of the first half hour in the white counterpaned bed that night left Elizabeth in a maze of wonder over his physical as well as mental collapse.

Aunt Susan was evidently aware of changes also, for she hovered over him solicitously. Nathan Hornby was a broken man.

School opened auspiciously on Monday; John Hunter came and stayed to walk home with Elizabeth on Tuesday afternoon, and the glad weeks which followed were but the happy record of so many rides, walks, and talks, and the dreams of Elizabeth Farnshaw and John Hunter. He was with the girl daily. Elizabeth never expressed the smallest desire for anything human hand could obtain for her that John Hunter did not instantly assure her that she should receive it. If she stayed to sweep out the schoolhouse, John would almost certainly appear at the door before she had finished--his fields commanded a view of her comings and goings--if she went to Carter's to have a money order cashed he accompanied her; if she wished to go anywhere she had but to mention it and John Hunter and his team were at her service.

Elizabeth could not have been otherwise than happy. The spring, with its freshness and promise, was symbolical of the gladsome currents of her life that joyous April and May. Her lightest wish was the instant consideration of the man she admired above all others, and that man, in refinement of appearance and knowledge of the world, was as far above those of the country community in which they lived as the sun was above the smoky kerosene lamps by which the members of that community lighted themselves to bed.

John Hunter, during the season of his courtship, served the girl of his choice almost upon his knees. He made her feel that she could command his services, his time, and himself. By his request he ceased to ask when he could come again, but encouraged, even commanded, her to tell him when and where she wished to be taken and to let him come to see her unannounced. He paid tribute to her as if she had been a goddess and he her devotee.

Silas looked on and chuckled.

"Didn't take 'em long," he remarked to Liza Ann, and when as usual his wife did not reply, he added: "Glad we're to have 'em for neighbours. She's about th' liveliest meadow lark on these prairies, an' if she don't sing on a fence post it's 'cause she ain't built that way, an' can't; she's full enough to."

Susan Hornby looked on and had her misgivings. She saw the devotion the young man poured out at her darling's feet, and she knew that it was the fervour of the courting time in a man's life that made him abandon his own interests and plans while he plumed himself and pursued his desired mate. She saw the rapturous, dreamy look of love and mating time in Elizabeth's eyes, and she knew that the inevitable had happened, but she was not content. Premonitions which she sought to strangle shook her whenever the pair wandered away on real or fictitious errands. She saw that no word of love had yet been spoken, but every look cried it aloud and the day could not be far distant.

Between corn planting and corn plowing the foundations of the new house had been laid and work on it had progressed fitfully and whenever the young man could find time to help the occasional mason who laid brick and stone for simple foundations, and who had crops of his own to tend between times. The work had progressed slowly, but at last the wall had been finished and the carpenters had come to do their share. It gave excuse for many trips in the evening twilight. They usually went on horseback, and Silas's pony with Liza Ann's sidesaddle on its back had more business on hand that month than in all the other years of its lazy existence.

Susan Hornby watched the pair ride away one evening the first week in June. Nathan stood at her side on the doorstep.

"Of course he loves her; how could he help it? and yet----"

"And yet, what?" Nathan asked impatiently. "She wants him, an' he wants her, an' you stand there lookin' as if that wasn't enough."

Susan Hornby turned to her husband with some uncertainty regarding his comprehension of the subject, and with a gentle patience with his mood. Nathan was often impatient of late.

"Yes, I know--only it seems as if----"

"Well, now what's lacking?" her husband asked when she again broke off the sentence doubtfully. "He's got a good farm, an' he needs a wife to help him run it. From what he says, his mother's too old t' be of any help. He can't run it alone, an' seems t' me it's a good thing for both of 'em."

"That's just it!" Susan Hornby broke out, turning back, her eyes following the progress of the pair toward the crimson west, her thoughts running ahead to the unknown future where the progress of the soul would be helped or hindered; "that's just it! He has a farm; now he's going to need a wife to help run it--just as he needs a horse. If he'd only be fair about it, but he's misleading her. She thinks he'll always do things the way he's doing them now, and he won't; there'll be an end to that kind of thing some day--and--and when they're married and he's got her fast, that kind of man won't be nice about it--and--they'll live on the farm--and life's so hard sometimes! Oh! I can't bear to see her broken to it!" she cried with such intensity that the man at her side caught his breath with a sort of sob.

"Anybody'd think to hear you talk, Susan, that marryin' was a thing to be feared, an' that I'd been mean t' you."

What had she done? There was a half-frightened pause as Susan Hornby struggled to bring herself back to the husband standing beside her who was broken by failure.

"Bless your old soul, Nate," she answered quickly, and with the flush of confusion on her face strangely like the flush of guilt, "if he's only half as good to her as you've been to me, She'll never have anything to complain of nor need anybody's sympathy."

Susan understood that her assurance did not wholly reassure that bleeding heart, and to turn Nathan's thoughts to other things she slipped one hand through his arm, and picking up the milk pails from the bench at her side with the other, said with a little laugh:

"There now! I'll do your milking for that. You throw down the hay while I do it. There's nothing the matter with you and me, except that I've done a washing to-day and you don't sleep well of late. I haven't one thing in all this world to complain of, and this would be the happiest year of my life if you weren't a bit gloomy and under the weather. Come on--I'm nervous. You know I never am well in hot weather."

Nathan knew that Susan was really worried over Elizabeth's prospects, but her luckless remark upon the marriage of farmers cut into his raw, quivering consciousness of personal failure like a saw-bladed knife, torturing the flesh as it went. His failure to place her where her own natural characteristics and attainments deserved had eaten into his mind like acid. In proportion as he loved her and acknowledged her worth he was humiliated by the fact that she was not getting all out of life of which she was capable, as his wife, and it left him sensitive regarding her possible estimate of it.

"She always seems satisfied," he said to himself as he turned his pitchfork to get a hold on the pile into which he had thrust it, "but here she is pityin' this here girl that's goin' t' be married as if she goin' t' be damned."

The Adam's apple in his wrinkled throat tightened threateningly, and to keep down any unmanly weakness it indicated he fell upon the hay savagely, but the suspicion stayed with him and left its bitter sting. _

Read next: Chapter 6. "Didn't Take 'Em Long"

Read previous: Chapter 4. A Cultured Man

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