The Desert and The Sown

M >> Mary Hallock Foote >> The Desert and The Sown

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

Paul, it may be supposed, had never liked to think of his mother's
elopement. It had been the one hard point to get over in his conception of
his father, but he could never have explained it by such a scene as this.
It would have hampered him terribly in his tale had he dreamed of it. He
passed over the unfortunate incident with a romancer's touch, and dwelt
upon his grandfather's bitter resentment which he resented as the son of
his mother's choice. The Van Eltens and Brodericks all fared hardly at the
hands of their legatee.

It was not only in the person of a hireling who had abused his trust that
Abraham had felt himself outraged. There were old neighborhood spites and
feuds going back, dividing blood from blood--even brothers of the same
blood. There was trouble between him and his brother Jacob, of New York,
dating from the settlement of their father's, Broderick Van Elten's,
estate; and no one knows what besides that was private and personal may
have entered into it. It was years since they had met, but Jacob kept well
abreast of his brother's misfortunes. A bachelor himself, with no children
to lose or to quarrel with, it was not displeasing to him to hear of the
breaks in his brother's household.

"What, what, what! The last one left him,--run off with one of his men!
What a fool the man must be. Can't he look after his women folks better
than that? Better have lost her with the others. Two boys, and Chrissy,
and the girl--and now the last girl gone off with his hired man. Poor
Chrissy! Guess she had about enough of it. Things have come out pretty
much even, after all! There was more love and lickin's wasted on Abe.
Father was proudest of him, but he couldn't break him. Hi! but I've
crawled under the woodshed to hear him yell, and father would tan him with
a raw-hide, but he couldn't break him; couldn't get a sound out of him.
Big, and hard, and tough--Chrissy thought she knew a man; she thought she
took the best one."

With slow, cold spite Jacob had tracked his brother's path in life through
its failures. Jacob had no failures, and no life.

V

DISINHERITED

Proud little Emmy, heiress no longer, had put her spirit into her
farm-hand and incited him to the first rebellion of his life. They crossed
the river at night, poling through floating ice, and climbed aboard one of
those great through trains whose rushing thunder had made the girlish
heart so often beat. This was long before the West Shore Line was built.
Neither of them had ever seen the inside of a Pullman sleeper. Emmy could
count the purchased meals she had eaten in her life; she had never slept
in a hotel or hired lodging till after her marriage. Hardly any one could
be so provincial in these days.

Adam Bogardus was a plodder in the West as he had been in the East. He was
an honest man, and he was wise enough not to try to be a shrewd one. He
tried none of the short-cuts to a fortune. Hard work suited him best, and
no work was too hard for his iron strength and patient resolution. But it
broke the spirit of a man in him to see his young wife's despair. Poverty
frightened and quelled her. The deep-rooted security of her old home was
something she missed every day of her makeshift existence. It was
degradation to live in "rooms," or a room; to move for want of means to
pay the rent. She pined for the good food she had been used to. Her health
suffered through anxiety and hard work. She was too proud to complain, but
the sight of her dumb unacceptance of what had come to her through him
undoubtedly added the last straw to her husband's mental strain.

* * * * *

"It is hard for me to realize it as I once did," said Paul, as the story
paused. "You make tragedy a dream. But there is a deep vein of tragedy in
our blood. And my theory is that it always crops out in families where
it's the keynote, as it were."

"Never mind, you old care-taker! We Middletons carry sail enough to need a
ton or two of lead in our keel."

"But, you understand?"--

"I understand the distinction between what I call your good blood, and the
sort of blood I thought you had. It explains a certain funny way you have
with arms--weapons. Do you mind?"

"Not at all," said Paul coldly. "I hate a weapon. I am always ashamed of
myself when I get one in my hand."

"You act that way, dear!"

"God made tools and the Devil made weapons."

"You are civil to my father's profession."

"Your father is what he is aside from his profession."

"You are quite mistaken, Paul. My father and his profession are one. His
sword is a symbol of healing. The army is the great surgeon of the nation
when the time comes for a capital operation."

"It grows harder to tell my story," said Paul gloomily;--"the short and
simple annals of the poor."

"Now come! Have I been a snob about my father's profession?"

"No; but you love it, naturally. You have grown up with its pomp and
circumstance around you. You are the history makers when history is most
exciting."

"Go on with your story, you proud little Dutchman! When I despise you for
your farming relatives, you can taunt me with my history making."

Paul was about two years old when his parents broke up in the Wood River
country and came south by wagon on the old stage-road to Felton. Whenever
he saw a "string-bean freighter's" outfit moving into Bisuka, if there was
a woman on the driver's seat, he wanted to take off his hat to her. For so
his mother sat beside his father and held him in her arms two hundred
miles across the Snake River desert. The stages have been laid off since
the Oregon Short Line went through, but there were stations then all along
the road.

One night they made camp at a lonely place between Soul's Rest and
Mountain Home. Oneman Station it was called; afterwards Deadman Station,
when the keeper's body was found one morning stiff and cold in his bunk.
He died in the night alone. Emily Bogardus had cause to hate the man when
he was living, and his dreary end was long a shuddering remembrance to
her, like the answer to an unforgiving prayer.

The station was in a hollow with bare hills around, rising to the highest
point of that rolling plain country. The mountains sink below the plain,
only their white tops showing. It was October. All the wild grass had been
eaten close for miles on both sides of the road, but over a gap in the
Western divide was the Bruneau Valley, where the bell-mare of the team had
been raised. In the night she broke her hopples and struck out across the
summit with the four mules at her heels. Towards morning a light snow fell
and covered their tracks. Adam was compelled to hunt his stock on foot;
the keeper refusing him a horse, saying he had got himself into trouble
before through being friendly with the company's horses. He started out
across the hills, expecting that the same night would see him back, and
his wife was left in the wagon camp alone.

* * * * *

"I know this story very well," said Paul, "and yet I never heard it but
once, when mother decided I was old enough to know all. But every word was
bitten into me--especially this ugly part I am coming to. I wish it need
not be told, yet all the rest depends on it; and that such an experience
could come to a woman like my mother shows what exposure and humiliation
lie in the straightest path if there is no money to smooth the way. You
hear it said that in the West the toughest men will be chivalrous to a
woman if she is the right sort of a woman. I'm afraid that is a romantic
theory of the Western man.

"That night, before his team stampeded, as he sat by the keeper's fire,
father had made up his mind that the less they had to do with that man the
better. He may have warned mother; and she, left alone with the brute, did
not know the wisdom of hiding her fear and loathing of him. He may have
meant no more than a low kind of teasing, but her suffering was the same.

"Father did not come. She dared not leave the camp. She knew no place to
go to, and in his haste, believing he would soon be with her again, he had
taken all their little stock of funds. But he had left her his gun, and
with this within reach of her hand in the shelter of the wagon hood,
without fire and without cooked food, she kept a sleepless watch.

"The stages came and went; help was within sound of her voice, but she
dared make no sign. The passengers were few at that season, always men, on
the best of terms with the keeper. He had threatened--well, no
matter--such a threat as a more sophisticated woman would have smiled at.
She was simple, but she was not weak. It was a moral battle between them.
There were hours when she held him by the power of her eye alone; she
conquered, but it nearly killed her.

"One morning a man jumped down from the stage whose face she knew. He had
recognized my father's outfit and he came to speak to her, amazed to find
her in that place alone. There was no need to put her worst fear into
words; he knew the keeper. He made the best he could of father's
detention, but he assured her, as she knew too well, that she could not
wait for him there. He was on his way East, and he took us with him as far
as Mountain Home. To this day she believes that if Bud Granger had led the
search, my father would have been found; but he went East to sell his
cattle, the snows set in, and the search party came straggling home. The
man, Granger, had left a letter of explanation, inclosing one from mother
to father, with the keeper. He bribed and frightened him, but for years
she used to agonize over a fear that father had come back and the keeper
had withheld the letter and belied her to him with some devilish story
that maddened him and drove him from her. Such a fancy might have come out
of her mental state at that time. I believe that Granger left the letter
simply to satisfy her. He must have believed my father was dead. He could
not have conceived of a man's being lost in that broad country at that
season; but my father was a man of hills and farms, all small, compact.
The plains were another planet to him.

"The letter was found in the keeper's clothing after his death; no one
ever came to claim it of his successor. Somewhere in this great wilderness
a tired man found rest. What would we not give if we knew where!

"And she worked in a hotel in Mountain Home. Can you imagine it! Then
Christine was born and the multiplied strain overcame her. Strangers took
care of her children while she lay between life and death. She had been
silent about herself and her past, but they found a letter from one of her
old schoolmates asking about teachers' salaries in the West, and they
wrote to her begging her to make known my mother's condition to her
relatives if any were living. At length came a letter from
grandfather--characteristic to the last. The old home was there, for her
and for her children, but no home for the traitor, as he called father.
She must give him up even to his name. No Bogardus could inherit of a Van
Elten.

"She had not then lost all hope of father's return, and she never forgave
her father for trying to buy her back for the price of what she considered
her birthright. She settled down miserably to earn bread for her children.
Then, when hope and pride were crushed in her, and faith had nothing left
to cling to, there came a letter from Uncle Jacob, the bachelor, who had
bided his time. Out of the division in his brother's house he proposed to
build up his own; just as he would step in and buy depreciated bonds to
hold them for a rise. He offered her a home and maintenance during his
lifetime, and his estate for herself and her children when he was through.
There were no conditions referring to our father, but it was understood
that she should give up her own. This, mainly, to spite his brother, yet
under all there was an old man's plea. She felt she could make the
obligation good, though there might not be much love on either side.
Perhaps it came later; but I remember enough of that time to believe that
her children's future was dearly paid for. Grandfather died alone, in the
old rat-ridden house up the Hudson. He left no will, to every one's
surprise. It might have been his negative way of owning his debt to nature
at the last.

"That is how we came to be rich; and no one detects in us now the crime of
those early struggles. But my father was a hired man; and my mother has
done every menial thing with those soft hands of hers." A softer one was
folded in his own. Its answering clasp was loyal and strong.

"Is _this_ the story you had not the courage to tell me?"

"This is the story I had the courage to tell you--not any too soon,
perhaps you think?"

"And do you think it needed courage?"

"The question is what you think. What are we to do with Uncle Jacob's
money? Go off by ourselves and have a good time with it?"

"We will not decide to-night," said Moya, tenderly subdued. But, though
the story had interested and touched her, as accounting for her lover's
saddened, conscience-ridden youth, it was no argument against teaching him
what youth meant in her philosophy. The differences were explained, but
not abolished.

"It was spite money, remember, not love money," he continued, reverting to
his story. "It purchased my mother's compliance to one who hated her
father, who forced her to listen, year after year, to bitter, unnatural
words against him. I am not sure but it kept her from him at the last; for
if Uncle Jacob had not stepped in and made her his, I can't help thinking
she would have found somehow a way to the soft place in his heart.
Something good ought to be done with that money to redeem its history."

"You must not be morbid, Paul."

"That sounds like mother," said Paul, smiling. "She is always jealous for
our happiness; because she lost her own, I think, and paid so heavily for
ours. She prizes pleasure and success, even worldly success, for us."

"I don't blame her!" cried Moya.

"No; of course not. But you mustn't both be against me, and Chrissy, too.
She is so, unconsciously; she does not know the pull there is on me,
through knowing things she doesn't dream of, and that I can never forget."

"No," said Moya. "I am sure she is perfectly unconscious. We exchanged
biographies at school, and there was nothing at all like this in hers. Why
was she never told?"

"She has always been too strained, too excitable. Every least incident is
an emotion with her. When she laughs, her laugh is like a cry. Haven't you
noticed that? Startle her, and her eyes are the very eyes of fear. Mother
was wise, I think, not to pour those old sorrows into her little fragile
cup."

"So she emptied them all into yours!"

"That was my right, of the elder and stronger. I wouldn't have missed the
knowledge of our beginnings for the world. What a prosperous fool and ass
I might have made of myself!"

"Morbid again," said Moya. "You belong to your own day and generation. You
might as well wear country shoes and clothes because your father wore
them."

"Still, if we have such a thing in this country as class, then you and I
do not belong to the same class except by virtue of Uncle Jacob's money.
Confess you are glad I am a Bevier and a Broderick and a Van Elten, as
well as a Bogardus."

"I shall confess nothing of the kind. Now you do talk like a _nouveau_
Paul, dear," said Moya, with her caressing eyes on his--they had paused
under the lamp at the top of the steps--"I think your father must have
been a very good man."

"All our fathers were," Paul averred, smiling at her earnestness.

"Yes, but yours in particular; because _you_ are an angel; and your mother
is quite human, is she not?--almost as human as I am? That carriage of the
head,--if that does not mean the world!"--

"She has needed all her pride."

"I don't object to pride, myself," said the girl, "but you dwell so upon
her humiliations. I see no such record in her face."

"She has had much to hide, you must remember."

"Well, she can hide things; but one's self must escape sometimes. What has
become of little Emily Van Elten who ran away with her father's hired man?
What has become of the freighter's wife?"

"She is all mother now. She brought us back to the world, and for our
sakes she has learned to take her place in it. Herself she has buried."

"Yes; but which is--was herself?"

"And you cannot see her story in her face?"

"Not that story."

"Not the crushing reserve, the long suspense, the silence of a sorrow that
even her children could not share?"

"I know her silence. Your mother is a most reticent woman. But is she now
the woman of that story?"

"I don't understand you quite," said Paul. "How much are we ourselves
after we have passed through fires of grief, and been recast under the
pressure of circumstances! She was that woman once."

"The saddest part of the story to me is, that your father, who loved her
so, and worked so hard for his family, should have served you all the
better by his death."

"Oh, don't say that, dear! Who knows what is best? But one thing we do
know. The sorrow that cut my mother's life in two brought you and me
together. It rent the stratum on which I was born and raised it to the
level of yours, my lady!"

"I shall not forget," whispered Moya with blissful irony, "that you are
the Poor Man's son!"

VI

AN APPEAL TO NATURE

The autumn days were shortening imperceptibly and the sunsets had gained
an almost articulate splendor: cloud calling unto cloud, the west horizon
signaling to the east, and answering again, while the mute dark circle of
hills sat like a council of chiefs with their blankets drawn over their
heads. Soon those blankets would be white with snow.

Behind the Post where the hills climb toward the Cottonwood Creek divide,
there is a little canon which at sunset is especially inviting. It hastens
twilight by at least an hour during midsummer, and in autumn it leads up a
stairway of shadow to the great spectacle of the day--the day's departure
from the hills.

The canon has its companion rivulet always coming down to meet the
stage-road going up. As this road is the only outlet hillward for all the
life of the plain, and as the tendency of every valley population is to
climb, one thinks of it as a way out rather than a way in. Higher up, the
stage-road becomes a pass cut through a wall of splintered cliffs; and
here it leads its companion, the brook, a wild dance over boulders, and
under culverts of fallen rock. At last it emerges on what is called The
Summit; and between are green, deep valleys where the little ranches,
fields and fences and houses, seem to have slid down to the bottom and lie
there at rest.

A party of young riders from the post had gone up this road one evening,
and two had come down, laughing and talking; but the other two remained in
the circle of light that rested on the summit. Prom where they sat in the
dry grass they could hear a hollow sound of moving feet as the cattle
wandered down through folds of the hills, seeking the willow copses by the
water. On the breast of her habit Moya wore the blossoms of the wild
evening primrose, which in this region flowers till the coming of frost.
They had been gathered for her on the way up, and as she had waited for
them, sitting her horse in silence, the brown owls gurgled and hooted
overhead from nest to nest in the crannies of the rocks.

"You need not hold the horses," she commanded, in her fresh voice. "Throw
my bridle over your saddle pommel and yours over mine.--There!" she said,
watching the horses as they shuffled about interlinked. "That is like half
the marriages in this world. They don't separate and they don't go astray,
but they don't _get_ anywhere!"

"I have been thinking of those 'two in the Garden,'" mused Paul, resting
his dark, abstracted eyes on her. "Whether or no your humble servant has a
claim to unchallenged bliss in this world, there's no doubt about your
claim. If my plans interfere, I must take myself out of the way."

"Oh, you funny old croaker!" laughed the girl. "Take yourself out of the
way, indeed! Haven't you chosen me to show you the way?"

"Moya, Moya!" said Paul in a smothered voice.

"I know what you are thinking. But stop it!" she held one of her crushed
blossoms to his lips. "What was this made for? Why hasn't it some work to
do? Isn't it a skulker--blooming here for only a night?"

"'Ripen, fall, and cease!'" Paul murmured.

"How much more am I--are you, then? The sum of us may amount to something,
if we mind our own business and keep step with each other, and finish one
thing before we begin the next. I will not be in a hurry about being good.
Goodness can take care of itself. What you need is to be happy! And it's
my first duty to make you so."

"God knows what bliss it would be."

"Don't say 'would be.'"

"God knows it is!"

"Then hush and be thankful!" There was a long hush. They heard the far,
faint notes of a bugle sounding from the Post.

"Lights out," said Moya. "We must go."

"You haven't told me yet where our Garden is to be," he said.

"I will tell you on the way home."

When they had come down into the neighborhood of ranches, and Bisuka's
lights were twinkling below them, she asked: "Who lives now in the
grandfather's house on the Hudson?"

"The farmer, Chauncey Dunlop."

"Is there any other house on the place?"

"Yes. Mother built a new one on the Ridge some years ago."

"What sort of a house is it?"

"It was called a good house once; but now it's rather everything it
shouldn't be. It was one of the few rash things mother ever did; build a
house for her children while they were children. Now she will not change
it. She says we shall build for ourselves, how and where we please. Stone
Ridge is her shop. Of course, if Chrissy liked it--But Chrissy considers
it a 'hole.' Mother goes up there and indulges in secret orgies of
economy; one man in the stable, one in the garden--'Economy has its
pleasures for all healthy minds.'"

"Economy is as delicious as bread and butter after too much candy. I
should love to go up to Stone Ridge and wear out my old clothes. Did any
one tell me that place would some day be yours?"

"It will be my wife's on the day we are married."

"That is where your wife, sir, would like to live."

"It is a stony Garden, dear! The summer people have their places nearer
the river. Our land lies back, with no view but hills. For one who has the
world before her where to choose, it strikes me she has picked out a very
humble Paradise."

"Did you think my idea was to travel--a poor army girl who spends her life
in trunks? Do we ever buy a book or frame a picture without thinking of
our next move? As for houses, who am I that I should be particular? In the
Army's House are many mansions, but none that we can call our own. Oh, I'm
very primitive; I have the savage instinct to gather sticks and stones,
and get a roof over my head before winter sets in."

To such a speech as this there was but one obvious answer, as she rode at
his side, her appealing slenderness within reach of his arm. It did not
matter what thousands he proposed to spend upon the roof that should cover
her; it was the same as if they were planning a hut of tules or a burrow
in the snow.

"It is a poor man's country," he said; "stony hillsides, stony roads lined
with stone fences. The chief crop of the country is ice and stone. In one
of my grandfather's fields there is a great cairn which Adam Bogardus,
they say, picked up, stone by stone, with his bare hands, and carted there
when he was fourteen years old. We will build them into the walls of our
new house for a blessing."

"No," said Moya. "We will let sleeping stones lie!"

VII

MARKING TIME

There was impatience at the garrison for news that the hunters had
started. Every day's delay at Challis meant an abridgment of the
bridegroom's leave, and the wedding was now but a fortnight away. It began
to seem preposterous that he should go at all, and the colonel was annoyed
with himself for his enthusiasm over the plan in the first place. Mrs.
Bogardus's watchfulness of dates told the story of her thoughts, but she
said nothing.

"Mamsie is restless," said Christine, putting an arm around her mother's
solid waist and giving her a tight little hug apropos of nothing. "I
believe it's another case of 'mail-time fever.' The colonel says it comes
on with Moya every afternoon about First Sergeant's call. But Moya is
cunning. She goes off and pretends she isn't listening for the bugle."

"'First Sergeant or Second,' it's all one to me," said Mrs. Bogardus. "I
never know one call from another, except when the gun goes off."

"Mamsie! 'When the gun goes off!' What a civilian way of talking. You are
not getting on at all with your military training. Now let me give you
some useful information. In two seconds the bugle will call the first
sergeant--of each company--to the adjutant's office, and there he'll get
the mail for his men. The orderly trumpeter will bring it to the houses on
the line, and the colonel's orderly--beautiful creature! There he goes!
How I wish we could take him home with us and have him in our front hall.
Fancy the feelings of the maids! And the rage on the noble brow of
Parkins--awful Parkins. I should like to give his pride a bump."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14