Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells
Page 899
“That’s what I always been tellin’ him, but he don’t seem to take any notice.”
Ann refused to be stayed by this impression. “Mr. Powell and all his brothers are good men; they don’t want to do anything but good here, and it’s abominable for any one to say anything else even when they’ve been at the jug.”
“Well, that’s what I told him at the time,” Mrs. Overdale agreed, as she rocked comfortably to and from her visitor. “I told him your man could have the law of him.”
“We don’t want the law,” Ann retorted, “but I shall certainly have my husband find out what Mr. Overdale means.” She said much more to the same purpose; she could not recur to the smooth generalities of a ceremonious call; and then she rose and made her way to the door.
She was fairly out of it before the miller’s wife remembered to rise and follow her for leave-taking. “Well, call ag’in,” she drawled.
Ann was still angry, but she answered, “I hope you will come to see me, Mrs. Overdale.”
“Well, I will, the first chance I git. But don’t you wait.”
VIII
AFTER the children left the dinner-table that day, and Powell had taken his hat to go out, Ann asked him, “Are you going to the grist-mill?”
“I’m going to the sawmill to help Bellam. He’s rather weak-handed still with that thumb of his.”
“Well, don’t saw your thumb off, Owen,” she said; and Powell laughed at the wild notion. “And another thing, I don’t want you to go near Overdale again till we’ve had a talk.”
“I don’t know that I follow you, exactly, Ann, but it’s easy for me not to go near Overdale. What is it?” She went to the cabin door and looked out. The children were playing Indians on the hillside well out of hearing across the road. She turned back to her husband. “I thought I could tell you to-night when they were all in bed, but I’d better do it now; I don’t want you to run any risks. Owen, that worthless drunkard has been saying dreadful things. I don’t feel as if your life was safe with him.”
Owen put down his hat, and at this sign of concern for her, if not for himself, she hurried to tell him what the miller’s wife had said.
He took her anxiety with seriousness instead of the teasing lightness which he so often tried her patience with. “Well, my dear, I don’t wonder you’re a little uncomfortable. But you mustn’t be troubled. There isn’t the least danger in the world, not the least,” he said, and his spirits mounted with the courage of a man who had never believed himself in any sort of peril. “But I promise you I won’t go to the gristmill till I’ve seen you again. I will talk with Bellam about the matter.”
“That poor lout?” Ann despaired “Really, Owen, you are enough to provoke a saint.”
“Yes, but we’re neither of us saints, Ann,” he answered, and she laughed helplessly. “Bellam has the making of a philosopher in him — that is, he believes I’m a much greater man than I am.”
Ann’s mind went off at a tangent “Has that old wretch been after him lately?”
“If you mean Elder Griswell, no; I believe not since last week. The elder is as much afraid of Overdale as you are, my dear. I understand that now, as he can’t get Bellam to go back to him and work out his debt, and can’t collect the money of him, he’s going to sue Overdale. He regards him as harboring his fugitive slave, but he doesn’t like coming in reach of him. Bellam wasn’t his slave exactly, either; only his peon.”
Ann sighed “If you get the right word for a thing, you feel almost as good as if you had righted it, Owen.”
“But peon is so uncommonly right. It’s about the only good thing we’ve ever got out of that rascally war.” Owen never spoke less violently of the Mexican War; but he valued the service which the volunteers had done in bringing back the name of a system of labor among the Mexicans so exactly fitting the case of Bellam and Elder Griswell.
The saw-miller had worked on the Elder’s farm for years as his insolvent debtor, and at the end of each year was no nearer industrial freedom than at the beginning; the Elder’s advances were always a little greater than Bellam’s wages, as they might easily be. But one day when Bellam came to the mill with his grist, he opened his heart to Overdale, and asked him what he would do in his place.
“Hell!” the miller said. “Walk off.”
The idea worked in Bellam’s intelligence, and he walked off between two days, or on a Sunday when the Elder had gone to church. He reported to Overdale with his wife and children, and his poor belongings on the cart drawn by the rangy colt which he had somehow kept his own in spite of the Elder. Overdale could not be bothered at the time by the implications of the case; but he felt bound by the counsel he had given, and he told Bellam to drive over to the empty cabin on the island and put up there till he could think.
“But if the Elder comes after me,” the escaped peon entreated.
“When he hears tell where you are I reckon he won’t come,” the miller said; and after he had time to hear from the Larrabees Bellam was put to work in the sawmill.
The picturesqueness of the incident had charmed Powell from his first knowledge of it. When he subjected it to examination in the light of the Doctrines, he had found it a singularly beautiful proof of those Remains of Good in a perverse soul like the miller’s, by which his chances in another life might be hopefully regarded. His action might be merely an effect of Natural Good, and was to be esteemed only as such, or it might be an Influx from the Spiritual World moving him to a right course in contravention of temperament. Powell had often recurred to it in talk with his wife, and always with a softening toward the miller and a trust to the Remains in him which she could not share.
“You needn’t be troubled, my dear,” he ended one of their talks. “I won’t take any chances with Overdale, or, for the matter of that, with Bellam, either — that is, I won’t be ruled by anything he says; I’ll only be ruled by what you say.”
He laughed again, and his wife sadly with him, and she watched him anxiously from the back door of the cabin as he made his way among the logs lying round the sawmill, like a herd of saurians crept up from the waters and sleeping on the muddy shore. The tramway, which from time to time carried one of them up into the mill, passed over the gate, letting the water in on the wheel, and Powell now mounted the track and disappeared within. He came out with Bellam and stood talking with him in the wide low doorway, while the yellow heads of Overdale’s children bobbed about in play along the banks of the head-race. Then a cry came from the children, and they ran toward the miller’s house, where their mother stood idly watching them. At the same time Ann saw her husband break from Bellam’s side and jump from the mill door to the bank and stoop over the race close to the head-gate. He rose with a child in his arms, and started with it toward the miller’s house. She began running to him, but before she reached him, stumbling over the rough ground in her heedless dismay, Owen was coming back to her laughing and flapping the water from his clothes.
“I haven’t been in the head-race myself,” he called, gaily, “but it was almost as wet work getting that little scamp home after I got him out. A moment more and he would have been in on the sawmill wheel, and then—”
She would not let him stop more than to explain that one of the miller’s boys had tumbled into the race; but as she hurried him to change his clothes she understood how he had saved the child’s life.
“And his mother — what did his mother say when you took him to her?” she required, after she gave Owen a dry coat and hung his wet one over a chair before the fire.
Owen laughed again. “She didn’t say anything; she spanked him.”
“But you — you; I meant you.”
“Well, she didn’t say anything to me, either.”
Ann Powell made “Tchk!” and did not speak; but he knew that at the back of her mind she was disappointed; he knew she had hoped that somehow this event would have been the promise of bringing about a better feeling between him and the savage whom she feared for h
im. He would not make her own it: he only suggested, “Well, perhaps Overdale will say something.”
IX
THE winter was wearing away without change in the lives of the Powells toward immediate fulfilment of the hopes which had brought them to New Leaf Mills. Ann thought her husband lapsing, with his amiable acceptance of the order of Providence, more and more into a country drudge. He worked like a laborer at anything he could find to do about the mills, and she fancied that with his growing content in the actual situation the discontent of the neighbors was growing; she suspected irony in the tones of the women’s greetings when she met them; she felt mocking in the slouch of the men’s hats and shoulders as they bestrode their grists to and from the mill, and turned their glowering or sneering faces toward her cabin windows. Perhaps the tones were not sarcastic or the faces derisive; but if they seemed so it was enough, and Powell could not persuade her against it with all his cheerfulness. Once, in the darkest hours of January, a New Church minister came, and stayed over a Sunday; and the familiar talk of the Doctrines went on in the old way, with the wonted jokes and stories in kindly satire of the Old Church superstitions. For the time she could almost believe herself back in Tuskingum, but she could hardly share Owen’s regret that there had not been time to notify the neighbors and have them gather in the mill for a New Church sermon; he had long given up his scheme of a Sunday-school there, which he once had.
The roads, with the changes of snow and rain and the freezing and thawing, were now so bad that Felix could not drive out to see his brother, as he had done every fortnight in better weather. He came only once during the month, and his wife did not come with him. Owen was as gay as at the other visits; and that night, after the older boys had gone to bed and the younger children had fallen asleep on the stone hearth, he tuned his harp and drowned the discords he extorted from it in his songs of “Roy’s Wife” and “Flow gently, Sweet Afton” and “Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon.” But as he was rolling out:
“Then merrily we’ll sing
As the storm rattles o’er us,
Till the dear shieling ring
With the light, lilting chorus—”
his wife called to him:
“Owen, Owen, for goodness’ sake stop!”
He stopped, with his hands on the harp-strings. “Why, I won’t wake them.”
“No, but you’ll drive me crazy. I don’t know how you can bear to sing. How can you bear to live on in this hovel, with no prospect of anything else?”
“No prospect?” he returned.
“No! We are doomed to live and die here, with that wicked wretch hating you over there in the mill that will never be anything but a grist-mill. Didn’t you notice how Felix avoided the subject when you mentioned putting in the paper machinery?”
“I didn’t notice it. But I’m sure you’re mistaken if you think he isn’t going forward with the enterprise; and as for our living on in the cabin, you know that I’ve got out all the shingles for the new house, with most of the weather-boarding. We are beginning on the oak flooring now, and I will have that kiln-dried if we’re late with it. But we won’t be. As soon as the frost is out of the ground we will put in the foundations, and the carpenters will have the timbers ready for the raising in June. You mustn’t be downhearted about it; everything is going finely. But I know! You are run down. It’s been a hard time for you. Ann, you must have a girl. I wonder if Felix or his wife couldn’t get on the track of Rosy Hefmyer?”
“Oh, a girl!” Ann retorted. “Do you think a girl could take the real burden off of me?”
“Yes, the real burden; but you must bear the unreal burden yourself. I wish I could bear it for you.” Ann began to cry softly. Owen said, “Oh, my poor girl, my poor girl!” and between her crying and his coaxing she comforted herself.
“Oh, I can get along, Owen. You needn’t worry about me. But you must let me give way now and then. I only want to know that you haven’t forgotten what we came for.”
“Oh, my dear, don’t you suppose I think of it all the time?”
“Besides, I don’t believe they could find Rosy. With that old wretch of a mother of hers, there’s no telling what’s become of her by this time. She always said she would come back if I wanted her.”
It would have been natural in Owen to allow the affair to go with that, but Ann’s listless resignation remained after her rebellious outburst, and he saw that something must really be done for her. There came with February one of those interludes of soft weather which the midwinter knows in that region. The birds returned as if it were spring, bluebirds and robins; the frost came out of the ground, and the roads dried up. “Now, Ann,” Powell said one morning, “you had better take advantage of this open weather and go away for a while.”
He could see that the thought had been in her mind, too, for all she said: “Where can I go? And leave you and the children here?”
“Not all of them. Take Dick and the buggy and go down to Middleville, and see father and Jim’s family. You can hurry Jim up about coming here, and they will all be glad to see you.”
Ann’s despair lost its blackness in the notion of a family visit. “I might do that,” she consented, “if I could only believe that Jim was ever going to come.”
“Well, ask. It will do him good to be stirred up. He ought to have sold out by this time. Only don’t put too bright a face on things here.”
Ann laughed forlornly, but his teasing saved her further regret. “I believe in my heart I can really do something,” she said, defiantly; and in the morning she started with her son on the forty-mile drive to Middleville.
She was aware only of the impossibility of staying any longer at New Leaf Mills without going mad. She did not forecast the future so far as to imagine how she should keep sane after she came back. She was at that point of homesickness when she was willing to forsake every one dear to her for a glimpse of the life from which she had been parted: simple as it was, in contrast with the social squalor she had fallen into, it was rich and fine and beautiful. She longed to escape from her household back to the town which seemed to her full of the things, the cane-seat-chair things, that made living worth while. Tuskingum had become her dream, her poetry, and the day that she now passed with Felix and his wife was the realization of all that she had imagined of it. She sat up late with them in the pretty parlor, with its Venetian blinds and lace curtains, and they played, Felix on the flute and Jessamy on the piano, and she listened in her corner of the rosewood sofa. In the morning she went to a store with Jessamy, and Jessamy bought her a shawl, so that she could keep warm if she and Dick were driving in the cool of the evening or the weather turned; and after the midday dinner, which the hired girl had cooked without the least help from Jessamy, Ann started gaily on her journey again.
Jessamy was so much younger that she could daughter Ann, and the boy beside her on the buggy seat was so old that Ann could almost sister him. She talked gravely and confidentially to Dick of the state of things at New Leaf Mills, and how little his father, with his hopefulness and his trusting goodness, was fitted to cope with the rude conditions, and with the brutal men who could not understand him or value him. She criticized Owen in her mind, but tenderly, being at a distance from him; and she said: “He is the best man in the world; I know that well enough; the willingest to help others. He hasn’t a selfish thought or a mean one. But oh, if he would only be a little more afraid! I wish he could have some of my fear. But he is so contented, and so sure it will all come out right. If only he would lose heart a little I could have some.”
Richard tried to comfort her, but her spirits sank when they got beyond the outskirts of Tuskingum among the high woods and the lonely fields again, and she had to recover herself through tears. Then she was cheerfuler, and as they drove along over the good turnpike road she began to wonder what Jim’s wife would say when she saw them stopping at her door in Middleville.
“Well, she won’t see us till to-morrow, mother,” the boy said.
It did not need the surprise they gave their kindred to win their welcome. The old people were not visibly moved, the grandfather from his gravity or the grandmother from her placidity; they were not only old, but they had the quiet of the Old World in their greeting; Jim’s wife was noisily glad to see them, and romped around Ann in claiming half their visit. She wanted to hear all about the mills; she was just crazy, she said, to have Jim sell out and go there at once; she was sick of Middleville.
She almost made Ann believe that she was a fortunate woman in getting there so soon, and she talked as if the new house was almost finished. When Jim came from his store he grinned at her excitement. He said he didn’t believe he could ever sell out. “Then you give your old business away,” his wife said; “I’m going to New Leaf Mills. Ann’ll take me back with her, I know.”
“How is it, Ann?” Jim asked. “Do they admit any but Bobolitionists yet? Let down the bars to the world’s people?”
He was anti-slavery, like all the Powells, but he liked to say Bobolitionist for Abolitionist; the sound pleased him, and he enjoyed the shock it gave his father by its irreverence.
Ann and Richard stayed three days, and she enjoyed every moment of it. Sally made a company tea for her, and asked a dozen other ladies, old and young. She let Ann help get the tea: stewed chicken, cold ham, shortened biscuit, boiled potatoes, sweet tomato pickles, pound-cake, cold slaw, and coffee. Throughout the feast she stormed down the praises of her guests with apologies for everything.
Ann noticed that the dishes, which were nicer than hers, were some of them cracked; the spout of the coffeepot was nicked, and Sally had no cane-seat chairs in her parlor; only yellow-painted Windsor chairs. When Ann started home Jim put a canvased ham in the back of the buggy. Grandmother Powell gave them a lunch of her nice bread and butter, with sugar-cakes for Dick and the children at home.