Between Whiles Part 13

"And so vas he ven he come home," said Farmer Weitbreck; "he make dat ve all laugh and laugh, like notings ever vas before, never before he open his mouth to speak; he vas like at funeral all times, night and day. But now he seem full of joy. It is de most strange ting as I haf seen in my life."

"I do not think so, father," said John. "I do not wonder he was glad to be rid of his burden."

It proved of no use to try to induce Hans Dietman to keep poor Carl's secret. He saw no reason why a murderer should be sheltered from disgrace. To have his name held up for the deserved execration seemed to Hans the only punishment left for one who had thus evaded the hangman; and he proceeded to inflict this punishment to the extent of his ability.

Finding that the tale could not be kept secret, John nerved himself to tell it to Carlen. She heard it in silence from beginning to end, asked a few searching questions, and then to John's unutterable astonishment said: "Wilhelm never killed that man. You have none of you stopped to see if there was proof."

"But why did he fly, Liebchen?" asked John.

"Because he knew he would be accused of the murder," she replied. "They might have been fighting at the edge of the precipice and the shepherd fell over, or the shepherd might have been killed by some one else, and Wilhelm have found the body. He never killed him, John, never."

There was something in Carlen's confident belief which communicated itself to John's mind, and, coupled with the fact that there was certainly only circ.u.mstantial evidence against Wilhelm, slowly brought him to sharing her belief and tender sorrow. But they were alone in this belief and alone in their sorrow. The verdict of the community was unhesitatingly, unqualifiedly, against Wilhelm.

"Would a man hang himself if he knew he were innocent?" said everybody.

"All the more if he knew he could never prove himself innocent," said John and Carlen. But no one else thought so. And how could the truth ever be known in this world?

Wilhelm was buried in a corner of the meadow field he had so loved.

Before two years had pa.s.sed, wild blackberry vines had covered the grave with a thick mat of tangled leaves, green in summer, blood-red in the autumn. And before three more had pa.s.sed there was no one in the place who knew the secret of the grave. Farmer Weitbreck and his wife were both dead, and the estate had pa.s.sed into the hands of strangers who had heard the story of Wilhelm, and knew that his body was buried somewhere on the farm; but in which field they neither asked nor cared, and there was no mourner to tell the story. John Weitbreck had realized his dream of going West, a free man at last, and by no means a poor one; he looked out over scores of broad fields of his own, one of the most fertile of the Oregon valleys.

Alf was with him, and Carlen; and Carlen was Alf's wife,--placid, contented wife, and fond and happy mother,--so small ripples did there remain from the tempestuous waves beneath which Carl Lepmann's life had gone down. Some deftly carved boxes and figures of chamois and their hunters stood on Carlen's best-room mantel, much admired by her neighbors, and longed for by her toddling girl,--these, and a bunch of dried and crumbling blossoms of the Ladies' Tress, were all that had survived the storm. The dried flowers were in the largest of the boxes.

They lay there side by side with a bit of carved abalone sh.e.l.l Alf had got from a Nez Perce Indian, and some curious seaweeds he had picked up at the mouth of the Columbia River. Carlen's one gilt brooch was kept in the same box, and when she took it out of a Sunday, the sight of the withered flowers always reminded her of Wilhelm. She could not have told why she kept them; it certainly was not because they woke in her breast any thoughts which Alf might not have read without being disquieted. She sometimes sighed, as she saw them, "Poor Wilhelm!" That was all.

But there came one day a letter to John that awoke even in Carlen's motherly and contented heart strange echoes from that past which she had thought forever left behind. It was a letter from Hans Dietman, who still lived on the Pennsylvania farm, and who had been recently joined there by a younger brother from Germany.

This brother had brought news which, too late, vindicated the memory of Wilhelm. Carlen had been right. He was no murderer.

It was with struggling emotions that Carlen heard the tale; pride, joy, pa.s.sionate regret, old affection, revived. John was half afraid to go on, as he saw her face flus.h.i.+ng, her eyes filling with tears, kindling and s.h.i.+ning with a light he had not seen in them since her youth.

"Go on! go on!" she cried. "Why do you stop? Did I not tell you so? And you never half believed me! Now you see I was right! I told you Wilhelm never harmed a human being!"

It was indeed a heartrending story, to come so late, so bootless now, to the poor boy who had slept all these years in the nameless grave, even its place forgotten.

It seemed that a man sentenced in Mayence to be executed for murder had confessed, the day before his execution, that it was he who had killed the shepherd of whose death Carl Lepmann had so long been held guilty.

They had quarrelled about a girl, a faithless creature, forsworn to both of them, and worth no man's love or desire; but jealous anger got the better of their sense, and they grappled in fight, each determined to kill the other.

The shepherd had the worst of it; and just as he fell, mortally hurt, Carl Lepmann had come up,--had come up in time to see the murderer leap on his horse to ride away.

In a voice, which the man said had haunted him ever since, Carl had cried out: "My G.o.d! You ride away and leave him dead! and it will be I who have killed him, for this morning we fought so they had to tear us apart!"

Smitten with remorse, the man had with Carl's help lifted the body and thrown it over the precipice, at the foot of which it was afterward found. He then endeavored to persuade the lad that it would never be discovered, and he might safely return to his employer's farm. But Carl's terror was too great, and he had finally been so wrought upon by his entreaties that he had taken him two days' journey, by lonely ways, the two riding sometimes in turn, sometimes together,--two days' and two nights' journey,--till they reached the sea, where Carl had taken s.h.i.+p for America.

"He was a good lad, a tender-hearted lad," said the murderer. "He might have accused me in many a village, and stood as good chance to be believed as I, if he had told where the shepherd's body was thrown; but he could be frightened as easily as a woman, and all he thought of was to fly where he would never be heard of more. And it was the thought of him, from that day till now, has given me more misery than the thought of the dead man!"

Carlen was crying bitterly; the letter was just ended, when Alf came into the room asking bewilderedly what it was all about.

The name Wilhelm meant nothing to him. It was the summer before Wilhelm came that he had begun this Oregon farm, which he, from the first, had fondly dedicated to Carlen in his thoughts; and when he went back to Pennsylvania after her, he found her the same as when he went away, only comelier and sweeter. It would not be easy to give Alf an uncomfortable thought about his Carlen. But he did not like to see her cry.

Neither, when he had heard the whole story, did he see why her tears need have flowed so freely. It was sad, no doubt, and a bitter shame too, for one man to suffer and go to his grave that way for the sin of another. But it was long past and gone; no use in crying over it now.

"What a tender-hearted, foolish wife it is!" he said in gruff fondness, laying his hand on Carlen's shoulder, "crying over a man dead and buried these seven years, and none of our kith or kin, either. Poor fellow! It was a shame!"

But Carlen said nothing.

Little Bel's Supplement.

"Indeed, then, my mother, I'll not take the school at Wissan Bridge without they promise me a supplement. It's the worst school i' a' Prince Edward Island."

"I doubt but ye're young to tackle wi' them boys, Bel," replied the mother, gazing into her daughter's face with an intent expression in which it would have been hard to say which predominated,--anxiety or fond pride. "I'd sooner see ye take any other school between this an'

Charlottetown, an' no supplement."

"I'm not afraid, my mother, but I'll manage 'em well enough; but I'll not undertake it for the same money as a decent school is taught.

They'll promise me five pounds' supplement at the end o' the year, or I'll not set foot i' the place."

"Maybe they'll not be for givin' ye the school at all when they see what's yer youth," replied the mother, in a half-antagonistic tone.

There was between this mother and daughter a continual undercurrent of possible antagonism, overlain and usually smothered out of sight by pa.s.sionate attachment on both sides.

Little Bel tossed her head. "Age is not everything that goes to the makkin o' a teacher," she retorted. "There's Grizzy McLeod; she's teachin' at the Cove these eight years, an' I'd shame her myself any day she likes wi' spellin' an' the lines; an' if there's ever a boy in a school o' mine that'll gie me a floutin' answer such's I've heard her take by the dozen, I'll warrant ye he'll get a birchin'; an' the trustees think there's no teacher like Grizzy. I'm not afraid."

"Grizzy never had any great schoolin' herself," replied her mother, piously. "There's no girl in all the farms that's had what ye've had, Bel."

"It isn't the schoolin', mother," retorted little Bel. "The schoolin' 's got nothin' to do with it. I'd teach a school better than Grizzy McLeod if I'd never had a day's schoolin'."

"An' now if that's not the talk of a silly," retorted the quickly angered parent. "Will ye be tellin' me perhaps, then, that them that can't read theirselves is to be set to teach letters?"

Little Bel was too loyal at heart to her illiterate mother to wound her further by reiterating her point. Throwing her arms around her neck, and kissing her warmly, she exclaimed: "Eh, my mother, it's not a silly that ye could ever have for a child, wi' that clear head, and the wise things always said to us from the time we're in our cradles. Ye've never a child that's so clever as ye are yerself. I didn't mean just what I said, ye must know, surely; only that the schoolin' part is the smallest part o' the keepin' a school."

"An' I'll never give in to such nonsense as that, either," said the mother, only half mollified. "Ye can ask yer father, if ye like, if it stands not to reason that the more a teacher knows, the more he can teach. He'll take the conceit out o' ye better than I can." And good Isabella McDonald turned angrily away, and drummed on the window-pane with her knitting-needles to relieve her nervous discomfort at this slight pa.s.sage at arms with her best-beloved daughter.

Little Bel's face flushed, and with compressed lips she turned silently to the little oaken-framed looking-gla.s.s that hung so high on the wall she could but just see her chin in it. As she slowly tied her pink bonnet strings she grew happier. In truth, she would have been a maiden hard to console if the face that looked back at her from the quaint oak leaf and acorn wreath had not comforted her inmost soul, and made her again at peace with herself. And as the mother looked on she too was comforted; and in five minutes more, when Little Bel was ready to say good-by, they flung their arms around each other, and embraced and kissed, and the daughter said, "Good-by t' ye now, mother. Wish me well, an' ye'll see that I get it,--supplement an' all," she added slyly. And the mother said, "Good luck t' ye, child; an' it's luck to them that gets ye." That was the way quarrels always ended between Isabella McDonald and her oldest daughter.

The oldest daughter, and yet only just turned of twenty; and there were eight children younger than she, and one older. This is the way among the Scotch farming-folk in Prince Edward Island. Children come tumbling into the world like rabbits in a pen, and have to scramble for a living almost as soon and as hard as the rabbits. It is a narrow life they lead, and full of hards.h.i.+ps and deprivations, but it has its compensations. St.u.r.dy virtues in st.u.r.dy bodies come of it,--the sort of virtue made by the straitest Calvinism, and the sort of body made out of oatmeal and milk. One might do much worse than inherit both.

It seemed but a few years ago that John McDonald had wooed and won Isabella McIntosh,--wooed her with difficulty in the bosom of her family of six brothers and five sisters, and won her triumphantly in spite of the open and contemptuous opposition of one of the five sisters. For John himself was one of seven in his father's home, and whoever married John must go there to live, to be only a daughter in a mother-in-law's house, and take a daughter's share of the brunt of everything. "And nothing to be got except a living, and it was a poor living the McDonald farm gave beside the McIntosh," the McIntosh sisters said. And, moreover: "The saint did not live that could get on with John McDonald's mother. That was what had made him the silent fellow he was, always being told by his mother to hold his tongue and have done speaking; and a fine pepper-pot there'd be when Isabella's hasty tongue and temper were flung into that batch!"

There was no gainsaying all this. Nevertheless, Isabella married John, went home with him into his father's house, put her shoulder against her spoke in the family wheel, and did her best. And when, ten years later, as reward of her affectionate trust and patience, she found herself sole mistress of the McDonald farm, she did not feel herself ill paid. The old father and mother were dead, two sisters had died and two had married, and the two sons had gone to the States to seek better fortunes than were to be made on Prince Edward Island. John, as eldest son, had, according to the custom of the island, inherited the farm; and Mrs.

Isabella, confronting her three still unmarried sisters, was able at last triumphantly to refute their still resentfully remembered objections to her choice of a husband.

"An' did ye suppose I did not all the time know that it was to this it was sure to come, soon or late?" she said, with justifiable complacency.

"It's a good thing to have a house o' one's own an' an estate. An' the linen that's in the house! I've no need to turn a hand to the flax-wheel for ten years if I've no mind. An' ye can all bide your times, an' see what John'll make o' the farm, now he's got where he can have things his own way. His father was always set against anything that was new, an'

the place is run down shameful; but John'll bring it up, an' I'm not an old woman yet."

This last was the unkindest phrase Mrs. John McDonald permitted herself to use. There was a rebound in it which told on the Mclntosh sisters; for they, many years older than she, were already living on tolerance in their father's house, where their oldest brother and his wife ruled things with an iron hand. All hopes of a husband and a home of their own had quite died out of their spinster bosoms, and they would not have been human had they not secretly and grievously envied the comely, blooming Isabella her husband, children, and home.