A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties Part 17

"Sure," answered Billy, "that would amount to--how many have you of your own?"

"Four," answered Dic.

"Then you'll want to buy sixteen--four hundred dollars. Here is the money," and he handed him a canvas shot-bag containing the gold.

"Now, Billy Little," said Dic, "I want to give you my note for this money, bearing the highest rate of interest."

"All right," responded our backwoods usurer, "I'll charge you twelve per cent. I do love a good interest. There is no Antonio about me. I'll lend no money gratis and bring down the rate of usance. Not I."

The note signed, Dic looked upon himself as an important factor in the commercial world, and felt his obligation less because of the high rate of interest he was paying.

The young man at once began looking for horses, and within three days had purchased sixteen "beauties," as Billy Little called them, which, with his own, made up the number he was to take. His adventurous New York trip raised him greatly in the estimation of Mrs. Bays. It brought her to realize that he was a man, and it won, in a degree, her reluctant respect. The ride over the mountains through rain and mud and countless dangers was an adventure worthy to inspire respect. The return would be easier than the eastward journey. Dic would return from New York to Pittsburg by ca.n.a.l boat and stage. From Pittsburg, if the river should be open, he would go to Madison by the Ohio boats. From Madison he would come north to Columbus on the mail stage, and at Columbus he would be within twenty-five miles of home.

As I have told you, Mrs. Bays grew to respect Dic; and being willing to surrender, save for the shame of defeat, she honestly kept the terms of her armistice. Thus Rita and Dic enjoyed the sycamore divan by the river's edge without interference.

On the night before his departure he gave Rita the ring, saying, "This time it is for keeps."

"I hope so," returned the girl, with a touch of doubt in her hesitating words.

He spoke buoyantly of his trip and of the great things that were sure to come out of it, and again Rita softly hoped so; but intimated in a gentle, complaining tone of voice that something told her trouble would come from the expedition. She felt that she was being treated badly, though, being such a weak, selfish, unworthy person,--so she had been taught by her mother to believe,--she deserved nothing better. Dic laughed at her fears, and told her she was the one altogether perfect human being. Although by insistence he brought her to admit that he was right in both propositions, he failed to convince her in either, and she spoke little, save in eloquent sighs, during the remainder of the evening.

After the eventful night of Scott's social, Rita's surrender of self had grown in its sweetness hour by hour; and although Dic's love had also deepened, as his confidence grew apace he a.s.sumed an air of patronage toward the girl which she noticed, but which she considered quite the proper thing in all respects.

There was no abatement of his affection this last evening together, but she was sorry to see him so joyful at leaving her. Their situation was simply a repet.i.tion of the world-wide condition: the man with many motives and ambitions, the woman with one--love.

After Dic had, for the twentieth time, said he must be going, the girl whispered:--

"I fear you will carry away with you the memory of a dull evening, but I could not talk, I could not. Oh, Dic--" Thereupon she began to weep, and Dic, though pained, found a certain selfish joy in comforting her, compared to which the conversation of Madame de Stael herself would have been poor and commonplace. Then came the gate, a sweet face wet with tears, and good-by and good-by and good-by.

Dic went home joyful. Rita went to her room weeping. It pained him to leave her, but it grieved her far more deeply, and she began then to pay the penalty of her great crime in being a woman.

Do not from the foregoing remark conclude that Dic was selfish in his lack of pain at parting from Rita. He also lacked her fears. Did the fear exist in her and not in him because her love was greater or because she was more timid? Had her abject surrender made him over-confident?

When a woman gives as Rita did she should know her man, else she is in danger. If he happens to be a great, n.o.ble soul, she makes her heaven and his then and there. If he is a selfish brute, she will find another place of which we all stand in wholesome dread.

A CHRISTMAS HEARTH LOG

CHAPTER VIII

A CHRISTMAS HEARTH LOG

On the morning of Dic's departure, Billy Little advised him to invest the proceeds of his expedition in goods at New York, and to s.h.i.+p them to Madison.

"You see," said Billy, "you will make your profit going and coming, and you will have a nice lump of gold when you return. Gold means Rita, and Rita means happiness and ploughing."

"Not ploughing, Billy Little," interrupted Dic.

"We'll see what we will see," replied Billy. "Here is a list of goods I advise you to buy, and the name of a man who will sell them to you at proper prices. You can trust him. He wouldn't cheat even a friend.

Good-by, Dic. Write to me. Of course you will write to Rita?"

"Indeed I shall," replied Dic in a tone expressive of the fact that he was a fine, true fellow, and would perform that pleasant duty with satisfaction to himself and great happiness to the girl. You see, Dic's great New York journey had caused him to feel his importance a bit.

"I wish you would go up to see her very often," continued our confident young friend; "if I do say it myself, she will miss me greatly. When I return, she shall go home with me. Mrs. Bays has almost given her consent. You will go often, won't you, Billy Little? Next to me, I believe she loves you best of all the world."

Billy watched Dic ride eastward on the Michigan road, and muttered to himself:--

"'Next to me'; there is no next, you young fool." Then he went in to his piano and caressed the keys till they yielded their ineffable sweetness in the half-sad tones of Handel's "Messiah"; afterward, to lift his spirits, they gave him a glittering sonata from Mozart. But it is better to feel than to think. It is sweeter to weep than to laugh. So when he was tired of the cla.s.sics, he played over and over again, in weird, minor, improvised variations, his love of loves, "Annie Laurie," and tears came to his eyes because he was both happy and sad. The keys seemed to whisper to him, so gently did he touch them, and their tones fell, not upon his ears, but upon his heart, with a soothing pathos like the sough of an old song or a sweet, forgotten odor of a day that is past.

Billy did his best to console Rita, though it was a hopeless task and full of peril for him. There was but one topic of interest to her. Rome and Greece were dull. What cared she about the Romans? Dic was not a Roman. Conversation upon books wearied her, and subjects that a few months ago held her rapt attention, now threw her into revery. I am sorry to say she was a silly, love-lorn young woman, and not in the least ent.i.tled to the respect of strong-minded persons. I would not advise you, my dear young girl, to a.s.sume Rita's faults; but if you should do so, many a good, though misguided man will mistake them for virtues and will fall at your feet. You will not deceive your sisters; but you won't care much for their opinion.

Soon after Dic's departure, Jim Fisher, Mrs. Bays's brother, renewed his offer to take Mr. Bays as a partner in the Indianapolis store. The offer was a good one and was honestly made. Fisher needed more capital, and to that extent his motive was selfish; but the business was prosperous, and he could easily have found a partner.

One Sat.u.r.day evening he came up to talk over the matter with his brother-in-law. He took with him to Blue no less a person than Roger Williams--not the original, redoubtable Roger who discovered Rhode Island, but a descendant of his family. Williams was a man of twenty-five. Boston was his home, and he was the son of a father Williams who manufactured ploughs, spades, wagons, and other agricultural implements. The young man was his father's western representative, and Fisher sold his goods in the Indianapolis district.

He dressed well and was affable with his homespun friends. In truth, he was a gentleman. He made himself at home in the cabin; but he had brains enough to respect and not to patronize the good people who dwelt therein.

Of course it will be useless for me to pretend that this young fellow did not fall in love with Rita. If I had been responsible for his going to Blue, you would be justified in saying that I brought him there for the purpose of furnis.h.i.+ng a rival to Dic; but I had nothing to do with his going or loving, and take this opportunity to proclaim my innocence of all such responsibility. He came, he stayed till Tuesday, and was conquered. He came again two weeks later, and again, and still again. He saw, but did he conquer? That is the great question this history is to answer. Meantime Dic was leading a drove of untamed horses all day long, and was sleeping sometimes at a wretched inn, sometimes in the pitiless storm, and sometimes he was chasing stampeded horses for forty-eight hours at a stretch without sleeping or eating. But when awake he thought of Rita, and when he slept he dreamed of her, though in his dreams there was no handsome city man, possessed of a fine house, servants, and carriages, sitting by her side. Had that fact been revealed to him in a dream, the horses might have stampeded to Jericho for all he would have cared, and he would have stampeded home to look after more important interests.

But to return to Fisher's visits. After supper, Sat.u.r.day evening, the question of the new store came up.

Fisher said: "If you can raise three thousand dollars, Tom, you may have a half-interest in the business. I have three thousand dollars now invested, and have credit for an additional three thousand with Mr.

Williams. If we had six thousand dollars, we may have credit for six thousand more, twelve thousand in all, and we can easily turn our stock twice a year. Tom, it's the chance of your life. Don't you think it is, Margarita?"

"It looks that way, Jim," said Mrs. Bays; "but we haven't the three thousand dollars, and we must think it over carefully and prayerfully."

"Can't you sell the farm or mortgage it?" suggested Fisher. Tom, Jr., gazed intently into the tree-tops, and, in so doing, led the others to ask what he was seeking. There was nothing unusual to be seen among the trees, and Mrs. Bays inquired:--

"What on earth are you looking for, Tom?"

"I was looking to see if there was anybody roosting up there, waiting to buy this half-cleared old stump field."

"Tom's right," said his father. "I fear a purchaser will be hard to find, and I don't know any one who would loan me three thousand dollars.

If we can find the money, we'll try it. What do you say, Margarita?"

Mrs. Bays was still inclined to be careful and prayerful.

Since Rita had expressed to Billy Little her desire to remove to Indianapolis (on the day she bought the writing paper, which, by the way, she had never paid for) so vast a change had taken place within herself that she had changed her way of seeing nearly everything outside. Especially had she changed the point of view from which she saw the Indianapolis project, and she was now quite content to grow up "a ragweed or a mullein stalk," if she could grow in Dic's fields, and be cared for by his hand. I believe that when a woman loves a strong man and contemplates marriage with him, as she is apt to do, a comforting sense of his protecting care is no small part of her emotions. She may not consider the matter of her daily bread and raiment, but she feels that in the harbor of his love she will be safe from the manifold storms and harms that would otherwise beset her.

Owing to Rita's great change the conversation on the porch was fraught with a terrible interest. While the others talked, she, as in duty bound,--girls were to be seen and not heard in those days,--remained silent. Fortunately the fact that she was a girl did not preclude thinking. That she did plenteously, and all lines of thought led to the same question, "How will it affect Dic?" She could come to no conclusion. Many times she longed to speak, but dared not; so she shut her lips and her mind and determined to postpone discussing the question with herself till she should be in bed where she could think quietly.

Meanwhile Williams seated himself beside her on the edge of the porch and rejoiced over this beautiful rose he had found in the wilderness.

She being a simple country flower, he hoped to enjoy her fragrance for a time without much trouble in the plucking, and it looked as though his task would be an easy one. At first the girl was somewhat frightened at his grandeur; but his easy, chatty conversation soon dispelled her shyness, and she found him entertaining. He at first sight was charmed by her beauty. He quickly discovered that her nose, chin, lips, forehead, and complexion were faultless, and as for those wonderful eyes, he could hardly draw his own away from them, even for a moment.

But after he had talked with her he was still more surprised to find her not only bright, but educated, in a rambling way, to a degree little expected in a frontier girl.

Williams was a Harvard man, and when he discovered that the girl by his side could talk on subjects other than bucolic, and that she could furthermore listen to him intelligently, he branched into literature, art, travel, and kindred topics. She enjoyed hearing him talk, and delighted him now and then with an apt reply. So much did her voice charm him that he soon preferred it even to his own, and he found himself concluding that this was not a wild forest rose at all, but a beautiful domestic flower, worthy of care in the plucking. They had several little tilts in the best of humor that confirmed Williams in the growing opinion that the girl's beauty and strength were not all physical. He talked much about Boston and its culture, and spoke patronizingly of that unfortunate portion of the world's people who did not enjoy the advantage of living within the sacred walls. Although Rita knew that his boast was not all vain, and that his city deserved its reputation, she laughed softly and said in apparent seriousness:--

"It is almost an education even to meet a person from Boston."