“What a place to exist in!” he remarked to Rittenfeldt. “Shall I see if they have any milk to sell us?”
And, at the same moment, a woman came out of the house and motioned them to stop. She was thin, colourless, grey-haired, but erect; her limp dress and the cheap shawl over her head and shoulders were faded, but clean.
As Kemper stopped his horses she came out into the road and gazed at the two men very earnestly.
“Have you any milk to sell us?” asked Kemper.
“No. Our cow is dead.”
“Too bad,” said the young man sympathetically.
“Are you a-going as far as Lynx Peak?” she asked in a voice as colourless and faded as her own features. But there was nothing nasal in it, no whine, no unpleasant local accent. And her face was cast in dignified mould “Yes,” said Kemper politely. “Do you wish us to give you a lift, madam?”
“Not me. It’s my daughter. Could you take her as far as Wild Plum Brook?”
“Where is that?” inquired Kemper, smiling his ignorance of the metropolis she mentioned “It’s Jim Billet’s she wants to go to.”
“And who is Jim Billet?” he asked, touching Rittenfeldt with his elbow.
The woman looked at him rather blankly.
“Jim Billet,” she repeated: “my daughter is going over to marry him. He lives in the Bram Chace house just by Wild Plum Brook.”
“All right,” nodded Kemper; “tell your daughter to hurry: we’ll take her along.”
“She’s all ready. She was fixing to go a-foot. She’s a mite scared o’ strangers,” explained the woman. And lifting up her thin, unsteady voice: “Mazie! Mazie Glenn! You Mazie!” she called.
Both men turned and looked back toward the house, from which presently emerged a bashful girl clad in the dreadful finery of years back — faded and made-over finery from awful remnants of her mother’s youth.
The scarlet, aniline-dyed plumes towered from a hat of black straw; a scarlet jacket with black leg-o’-mutton sleeves covered a billowy, many-flounced gown of black organdie; new patent leather slippers and very trim ankles peeped from a skirt too short in front, too long behind; cotton gloves gripped a parasol, a paper suit-case, and a can of kerosene oil.
Slowly Mazie came across the strip of grass and out to the road. And Kemper looked down and saw under the hat and nodding plumes two dark blue eyes regarding him intently. Which made him smile involuntarily; and then the dark blue eyes sparkled and the fresh, young lips parted in the sweetest of smiles. Rittenfeldt whispered:
“She iss of a colour like dot tanager fire-bird — all scarlet und black. Yess?”
Kemper handed the reins to Rittenfeldt, climbed out, placed Mazie’s paper suit-case and the can of kerosene under the rear seat, placed Mazie herself upon the rear seat, then hesitated:
“Do you want to drive for a while?” he asked Rittenfeldt.
“Yell — I can drive, too,” shrugged the entomologist. So Kemper seated himself on the rear seat with Mazie. Her mother said:
“Tell Jim Billet if ‘twan’t for my rheumatism I’d go and visit with you a spell. But you and he will have to come to me, I guess.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“When’ll you be over?”
“Oh, next week, I guess.”
“Well, come over if you can. Come the next week anyway.”
“All right, Mama.”
“You ain’t afraid, are you, Mazie?”
“Who? Me? No!”
“Very well. Don’t get lonesome. If you feel too lonesome, come back and stay at home a spell.”
Her daughter smiled at her, the pink of excitement tinting the girl’s smooth, oval face. Then mother and daughter exchanged a labial salute; Rittenfeldt grunted at his horses; the waggon creaked forward under the brilliant sun of a perfect day.
Mazie settled herself, patted her skirts into an effect symmetrically suitable; repinned the hat with its towering scarlet plumes; hunted for a perfume saturated handkerchief, found it, dried two tears with it, crossed her new shoes, and, glancing sideways at Kemper, found him looking at her.
They both smiled: he thought he had never in all his life seen such hideous embellishment as this youthful, creamy-skinned, blue-eyed, and physically superb young creature wore. It was horrible — like covering the loveliness of some full-throated Venus of tinted marble with the bedizened garments of an Irish cook. “So this is your wedding trip?” he said, still smiling. “Yes. I’m glad I didn’t have to walk.”
“Walk! Thirty miles?”
“That’s what I expected to do,” she said calmly, “until we heard a waggon coming.”
Kemper laughed.
“You must be very desperately in love with him.”
“With Jim Billet?”
“Yes. Aren’t you?”
“Who? Me?”
The girl laughed deliciously, pretty nose tilted toward heaven.
“I’m not in love” she said scornfully; “I’m just marrying him.”
“Oh. Is there a difference?”
She hesitated, glanced around at him, then lighthearted laughter parted her pretty lips again.
“How foolish! To marry is one thing — and I don’t know anything about — the other.”
“About love?”
“Whatever you call it:”
“What do you call it?”
“I don’t call it anything,” she retorted, laughing outright. “It’s story-talk — this love!”
“Oh, is it!”
“I suppose so.... Why are you going to Lynx Peak?”
“To plant trees,” explained Kemper solemnly.
“To — what?”
“To plant one hundred thousand little white-pine trees — no bigger than that” — and he measured the height of them for her eye.
“Pine bushes? Why, they grow everywhere in the fields!”
“Until somebody burns the fields.”
“What harm does that do?” she asked innocently. “It does good; it clears out the brush and makes the grass grow.”
Kemper seemed interested:
“By the way,” he said carelessly, “tell me about Jim Billet. What is he — a farmer?”
“No.”
“Lumberman?”
“No, I guess not.”
“What does he do?”
“Why, I don’t know,” she said “He just hunts, I guess.”
“But what does he do when the hunting season is over?”
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely; “he just fusses around, I suppose.”
“Is that all you know about the man you are going to marry?” laughed Kemper.
“Who? Me? I don’t know him very well.”
“Then why on earth are you going to marry him?”
“Well,” she said vaguely, “he courted me... And there isn’t enough for Mama and me to live on at home.”
“What is your name?” he asked, looking at her intently.
“Mazie Glenn.”
“Glenn,” he repeated thoughtfully, trying to recollect where he had heard her name associated with the region. Then he remembered, glanced at her keenly:
“Was Dick Glenn your father?”
“Yes.”
Then he knew who she was — the daughter of Dick Glenn of Silver Pond, a forest lawbreaker who had abandoned his wife and child and established himself at Silver Pond defying warden and revenue officer.
Through him ran the sinister underground route from Canada to Wildrick’s Dump. And when Wildrick fled, he sat tight, the more dangerous because he was an educated renegade full of the resources of perverted intelligence. And finally a warden had “mistaken” him for a deer.
And now he vaguely remembered Jim Billet being described to him as the young runner passing between Silver Pond and Wildrick’s Dump — another forest vagabond — a shiftless, sullen type, expert in scraping a living out of whatever did not belong to him. There had been a rumpus over a pack of deer hides discovered somewhere and destined for a
Lynxville glove shop — that sort of thing — and the “bagging” of one or two brooks. Also, fire wardens were beginning to look at him askance, so promptly did he volunteer, so omnipresent was this heavy, sullen-eyed young fellow whenever the dark ensign of destruction towered high in the blue above the summer forests.
With his heel, gingerly, Kemper touched the can of kerosene under the seat. It was full.
“I suppose,” he said to Mazie, “that the parson will be at the house when you arrive.”
“Jim said he’s fix that.”
“Oh. He said he’d attend to that?”
The girl nodded; and her towering scarlet plumes nodded with her.
“Are you comfortable, Mazie?” he asked.
She turned her head, surprised apparently that anybody should inquire concerning her comfort. Then she blushed, and an adorable smile curved her fresh, sweet lips.
“This is fine,” she said. “I expected to walk, you know.”
“Carrying that suit-case and can of kerosene?”
“Yes.”
“But why the kerosene, Mazie?”
“Oh, Jim wanted I should bring him a can. There’s no store there since Wildrick’s closed.”
“And so he asked you, a young girl, to walk thirty miles lugging your suit-case and a heavy can of kerosene?”
“How else was he to get it?” she asked simply. “Couldn’t he come himself?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t seem to want to. I guess he’s too busy fishing.”
Kemper relapsed against the padded back of the seat and said nothing more for a long while. The waggon creaked through the sand; Rittenfeldt, half dozing, kept one sleepy eye on duty for any drifting coleoptera; Mazie, for a while, continued to sit bolt upright in her gorgeous headgear and gown, feet crossed, clear, childish eyes ever on the alert for anything interesting. But there was little to see — a butterfly flitting ahead of the plodding horses; a glimpse of some quick, furry creature scuttling out of the road into the bushes, the undulating flight of a woodpecker from one dead tree to another — and little else.
The June sun, the warm perfume of new leaves and blossoms, the faint breeze from fragrant woodlands, the delicate freshness of shady hollows where little brooks crossed the road — these made Mazie drowsy. And after a while she leaned back.
Kemper’s arm, extended along the padded seat-rail, received the full pressure of her shoulders. She may have noticed, for she half turned her head, letting her languid, blue eyes rest on his for one expressionless moment.
He did not remove his arm.
“This marrying of yours,” he said in a low voice which sounded almost drowsy, “seems to be rather a casual matter with you.”
“Casual?” But she had heard the word at high school and recollected “I have to do something — or go to Lynxville and work in the glove shop.”
“Why not do that?”
“It’s too far to walk twice a day. We have no horse.”
“Why not move to Lynxville?”
“We haven’t anything to move there except ourselves.”
“Are you as poor as that?”
“Poor? I guess so.”
“I suppose,” he said in a low voice, “that you find the winters hard.”
“Yes. Last winter we lived on potatoes.”
“You had something else, of course?”
“No.”
“Nothing? No meat — milk—”
“No.”
“That’s terrible,” he said.
“What frightened us was the fear that they might try to send us to the county house.”
“What?”
“The poorhouse,” she explained, flushing.
He was silent for a while, then he let his eyes rest on the fresh skin, the delicate curve of the cheeks, the white, slender neck.
“Starvation seems to agree with you,” he said, forcing a smile.
“I thrive somehow,” she nodded.
“Mazie, is your hair brown? Or is it red?”
She smilingly took off her plumed hat for him to see; and the dainty revelation left him silent.
She pinned her hat to her knee, remarking that the sun was good for her hair. A faint fragrance came from it, delicate as sun-warmed sweet fern.
And, as for the next few minutes he remained silent, Mazie’s eyes grew drowsy again. Once or twice they opened on him, blue and languidly inviting, then the white lids drooped.
His arm had become cramped; he stretched it, dropped it along the back of the seat again. And presently it lay around her shoulder, the slightest pressure causing her to open her eyes.
But after a moment they closed, and her pliant form insensibly obeyed the pressure, so that her firm young shoulder lay against his. There was a slight smile on her lips.
For a mile or two her head nodded at intervals on the edge of slumber. And finally he drew it down against his shoulder.
She made no resistance; she lay there awake, however, because he could feel her long lashes brush his cheek as she opened or closed her lids.
On Kemper the effect of the contact was curious. What he had done — merely to see whether he could do it — had been done idly, mischievously — a lazy idea of amusing himself on a dull journey with a fresh and pretty girl.
And now that he had done it, something in the soft yielding of the girl had subdued the smile in his rather reckless eyes. And, to his annoyance and slight consternation the smooth little head, the pliant body sheltered by his arm, seemed strange and almost awesome, like the cuddled loveliness of a baby experienced for the first time by a man unaccustomed to children.
It was odd and disturbing to Kemper — a young man of rather varied experiences. Never had his arm encircled anything so soft and fragrant, so helpless and innocent, so yielding, so silent, so apparently dependent upon his own and idle will.
To kiss a pretty girl in town or country was no very novel matter; but suddenly he realized that he could no more kiss this girl than he could a baby. And of the latter he stood in too deep awe and admiration and embarrassment to kiss.
Also, to his surprise and annoyance, his heart was making an absurd thumping noise, so vigorous that he flushed hotly, certain that Mazie must be aware of it.
For an hour, perhaps, she lay there against his shoulder, never stirring; and whether or not she slept at intervals he did not know.
At last she lifted her head and sat up, giving him a shy, almost breathless smile.
“Did you sleep, Mazie?”
“Yes — almost. Did you?”
He said, carelessly, that he had not slept. Her cotton-gloved hand remained in his, resting on the seat between them. She turned and looked toward the east. “There is Lynx Peak,” she said.
“Yes. We ought to be at Wild Plum Brook in a few minutes.”
She nodded, looking down.
“And there,” continued Kemper, “you will be married in a few hours.”
She nodded still looking down.
“I hope you will be happy.”
She said nothing.
“You expect to be, don’t you?”
“I had not thought about it.”
“What? Marry and not hope for a life of happiness?”
“Is life happy? Will it be if I marry Jim Billet?”
“Don’t you expect to be happy?”
“There is not enough for Mama and me at home. I must do something.”
He understood. What eke was there for her to do in that wilderness?
Rittenfeldt, hunched up over his horses, straightened his broad back and pointed with his whip stock. And in another minute the horses forded Wild Plum Brook and stood hock-deep in the cool current, drinking, while Kemper sprang out behind and lifted Mazie clear of the tailboard At the door of a log house stood a tall, shambling, sullen-faced young fellow; and, as Kemper and Mazie walked up to him, he greeted her, paying no attention to Kemper.
“Waal,” he remarked, “so ye made up your mind to come, eh?”
; “Yes, I made up my mind, Jim.... I brought your kerosene, too.”
A dull flush mantled the youth’s sunburned visage, and he cast a slow glance at Kemper. Then he slouched down to the waggon which Rittenfeldt had driven up out of the stream, took Mazie’s suit-case and the kerosene can, and returned, carrying them in his powerful and rather dirty fists.
“Come in an’ set,” he said briefly.
This cordial invitation did not include Kemper. Mazie turned to him, her plumed hat in one hand:
“Good-bye,” she said.
“Good-bye.”
He held her hand a moment. Suddenly two tears flashed in her eyes. She turned, gazing at the waggon.
“Wait a moment,” he said in a very still and curious voice — a voice so altered that she could not have known it for his.
Then Kemper walked up to the log-house and rapped; and Billet came out.
“How soon do you expect the parson?” asked Kemper.
“Hey?”
“I asked you how soon you expected the parson.”
“What’s that to you?”
“Never mind what it is to me,” retorted Kemper quietly; “answer my question.”
Billet’s weather-roughened visage burned red.
“Say,” he growled, “what you shovin’ your nose into my business fur?”
“Well, TO tell you. The mother of that girl put her in my charge. And until she’s married she remains in my charge.”
“And who the hell be you?” sneered Billet.
“I represent her mother. That’s all you need to know.”
“Is it? Wall, you’ll find out that I’ll have to know a damn sight more about ye than that!” returned Billet, the low, bullying growl vibrating through the calmer tones of his voice.
The girl watching them had unconsciously moved up nearer.
“Mazie,” blustered Billet, “come in and set and rest and make yourself a cup o’ tea.”
She moved forward, looked up blankly at Kemper as she passed him, but entered the doorway. Then Billet stepped back and slammed and bolted the door leaving Kemper facing it.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 1181