CHAPTER VII.

With the unfolding of the willow-buds at the edge of the marshes, and the high, warm sun piercing the March winds, came a change to the Swamp Farm. When every growing thing was stirring into life, happy in its blindness to the rigors of seed-time and harvest and the burdens incident to its later family life, Mary found that her battle was nearing the end. The world was very dear to her too; the oldest and most enduring of human hopes, the possibilities of her children, was beginning to promise the things she had dreamed of--and she wanted to live. But one day she crumpled up like a wilted leaf over a dress she was making for Jean's commencement, and Billy put her to bed and 'phoned the specialist.

"There's nothing I can do," was the hopeless response.

"There must be. I'll meet you," came back over the wires in a voice sharp and hard. And the specialist came.

It was Billy's first experience of coming up against a situation where he was absolutely powerless. He blamed himself that he had been too blind to see it coming, that he had ever left her to take alone the hardships and worries that made such a large part of the life of the desolate place. He unburdened these confessions to the specialist with shame and bitterness.

"It wouldn't have made any difference," the doctor said, "and there's nothing you can do now, except to make the waiting easier. I'm just as helpless as you are. It was too late to do anything even when she came to me first. To have saved her I should have been here years ago, when her last child was born."

Billy went back to the day whose details would always haunt him, when his angry little soul had cried out against it all--but there was no room for the bitterness in his heart now--only a cold, gripping dread, a dread for her, for the suffering and the heart-break of the leave-taking. The thought of going out was something that, in his own young, physical courage, he could not take philosophically.

"Will she suffer?" he asked.

"The worst of her suffering is over. Kept it hidden pretty bravely, hasn't she?"

"Does she know?"

"She knew when she left my office that it couldn't be very long. She hasn't let it shake her grip of herself yet, and she won't. After all, there comes a time when none of us can hold life for a minute; the one thing we can do, is to make it as good as we can for the people we live with while we have them."

And then the old troublesome hate came back savagely. Billy knew that as long as he lived he would have hard memories to fight. When he was alone he waited miserably outside the room wondering how he could go to her, but as usual she understood and called him.

"I just wondered," she said, "if you would take Jean's dress to the dressmaker, so she can have it finished in time. I think I'd better not try to sew for a while, and I wouldn't like her to be disappointed."

So the days went on without a word of what was to come. Auntie Brown took up her residence in the house. Dan accepted the situation with stoical resignation while he was at home. He couldn't feel that it was as serious as the rest supposed, but he made an unprecedented attempt at kindness. In spite of his a.s.sumed optimism, he had a sinking feeling that something which had contributed indispensably to the background of his life was going to be taken away, and the whole picture would be thrown out of balance. He kept away from home a little more than usual, explaining to his friends in pathetic lapses of despondency that he had to get away to get his mind off things.

But Billy stayed at home constantly. He could always be found within call of the house, and notwithstanding his young terror of the inevitable, managed to maintain the kindest sort of cheerfulness in his mother's presence.

Her own fort.i.tude puzzled him. Here and there she dropped many little suggestions for the years to come, but she never spoke of leaving them. Then one day she gave him her philosophy, pointing it out to him on the worn page of a Bible--"_If thou hast run with the footmen and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses?

And if in the land of peace wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?_"

Billy had never heard the quotation. It struck him as pretty strong thinking, a real man's philosophy for every day living--something he wouldn't have expected to find in the Bible. He handed the book back soberly, but without a word; he didn't know what to say. He was not sufficiently sure of the theories so popular with students making their elementary dip into the sciences, to be irreverent, but the Bible opened for discussion on week days embarra.s.sed him.

His mother watched him anxiously, then taking courage said:

"You won't think I'm preaching to you? I know I can't understand how a young man looks at things, and I'm not questioning how you feel--but I just hope you'll think about it. You've had a lot of hard things already; there may be more ahead, and I'm afraid for you--not that I think you'd fail where any other man wouldn't. I feel very safe about you in things that most mothers have to worry about--but it's too hard for any one to hold out alone. You'll think about it?"

Billy turned down the leaf by way of a.s.surance. It was the best he had to offer.

A few days later she left them. The turn came suddenly. A nurse was brought down from the city, and with this professional help in charge Dan said good-bye awkwardly each morning and drove off; the strain of things at home made him nervous. It was Billy who stayed day and night within hearing of the room, whose awkward boyish care astonished the nurse with its gentleness and forethought, and it was Billy who steadied the spent, trembling soul in its last great weariness.

All day he had watched the tired eyes closing wearily, only to return with troubled anxiety to Jean, and he had always a.s.sured her that he would not forget her plans for the little sister. Then, as the mists began to come over, she looked up again, with an effort, searching for something.

"What is it?" he whispered.

"Where--is your father?"

It was the old, human cry of loneliness, and Billy realized as he had never done before what she had been starving for through all the years. Whatever Dan might be to anyone else, to her he was the person she had lived for first; she wanted him now and no one knew where to find him. Unless by chance he returned in the next few minutes it would be too late. Even now, when he had not considered the hours precious enough to wait with her, she was antic.i.p.ating his need of her, thinking ahead for him, with the pure maternal love that rises above personal considerations. Painfully she left her last request with Billy.

"You'll try to forget ... to think of him as I do?"

And Billy promised. He would have promised anything, and having made a promise he knew he would keep it, whether it seemed impossible now or not.

Then the frail little form settled down close against him, and with the weariness of a hard day ended, the last light flickered and went out.

Three days later, when it was all over, and they had come back to the empty house, when Jean had cried herself to sleep and Billy could go out alone to think, Ruth Macdonald came. She had seen the announcement and had come at once, but when she reached the churchyard everyone had gone, so she came to the house and found Billy alone behind the mat of vines screening the little wooden porch. There was a hardness in his set face, the traces of a fierce battle going on inside. He was still trying to overcome the hate that possessed him.

"It isn't that she had to go," he said, bitterly; "it's the kind of life she had."

Ruth didn't say anything. She looked away for a while, then she looked back, and there was a compa.s.sion in her misty eyes that Billy had never hoped to receive again, since his mother had gone. And somehow the hardness toward his father and life in general began to melt. He leaned against the wooden rail with his face covered, and Ruth listened silently to the dryest, hardest sobs she had ever heard, listened until it wasn't in her nature to wait any longer. For the hour he was only a broken-hearted boy and the mother instinct was strong in her. She bent over him as she would to comfort a suffering child, and ran her slim, supple hand through his hair. And because Billy couldn't speak just then he covered the hand with his own and held it there to show his grat.i.tude. Beyond that he was unmoved, but the girl was startled by a quick, hot rush through her young body.

She wormed her hand loose and looked over the fields for a minute away from his stare of bewilderment. After that she was herself again. But long after Billy was asleep that night she lay awake, trying to smother in her pillow a torrent of hard, racking little sounds that would not be kept back.

CHAPTER VIII.

"_We are so often ashamed of the earth--the soil of it, the sweat of it, the good common coa.r.s.eness. To us in our fine raiment and soft manners it seems indelicate. Bring out your social remedies! They will fail, they will fail every one until each man has his feet somewhere upon the soil._"--_David Grayson._

How pitifully the compa.s.s of our lives is played with by the most wanton little winds. When Billy finished college he did not have to grope through the indecision of finding his work; he knew he was a farmer. The conviction was verified one day when, rounding a bend in a drive through a pine-woods country, he felt his pulses bound at the sudden picture of a beautiful stretch of tilled land. It was in the first intoxicating days of spring when the promise of the year is likely to play tricks with our optimism, but the spring never elated him any more. With the breath of the first white thorn blossoms came the memory of another year when their perfume had blown in through the open window of the little Swamp Farm house where his mother waited; and a wonderful quiet possessed him; the old hardness had almost gone. On the day when he had fought his first hard battle with himself, and sobbed out the agony at last, the breaking up had started, and when his father turned to the road after selling the farm and nailing up the empty house Billy felt a genuine pity for him. Jean had been sent back to school and would soon be ready to teach, but he regretted seriously the loss of a home for her. This was another pressing argument for getting a farm of his own.

It was a beautiful stretch of land at the end of a timbered road, a lonely place, generally considered, but Billy went over it acre by acre with glowing antic.i.p.ation. Here he would start a permanent pasture for the long dreamed of Aberdeen-Angus herd. Down where the broad creek took such a precipitous leap in its course, he would build a dam and drive the water to the buildings--perhaps install a dynamo later on. The glinting blue stones from the rough little rise back of the barn would make the foundation and fireplace and chimneys for a low Swiss chalet among the trees. He could already see its light blinking down on the highway like a beacon, the welcome to a shelter and resting place where he could dream and hope, blessed with the happy content of having paid his debt to existence through the day.

Billy confided to a cla.s.smate, the Jimmy Wood who had piloted him to the brink of his first college social adventure, his plan to buy the place and work it, and Jimmy was disappointed.

"Have you stopped to think what you're letting yourself in for?" he asked. "You've done farm work at home, and I'll warrant you've hated it, but after four years away from it you'll find it a sight worse--the dirt and the drudgery and the eternal monotony. Of course, you'd get used to it. At the end of a year I dare say you'd be content to wear overalls and a six days' beard from Sunday to Sunday.

I know we've all said we wanted to farm eventually, but not the grubbing, driving, sc.r.a.ping kind of a job that goes with paying for a place. Better make your money at something else and end up with farming as a hobby, when you can afford to be merely business manager yourself. If you start in now with nothing ahead, and have to save every cent, you'll get so absorbed in yourself, so haunted by the bogey of your mortgage, that by the time you should be some force in the community philanthropically, you'll be sealed like a clam in the money-getting idea."

"You mean, then, that the only public-spirited agriculturist is the man who makes his money some easier, faster way, and comes back to donate it here and there for rural uplift, who cultivates a hobby of making speeches on the calamity of rural depopulation?"

"Oh, I know my view of it seems sordid enough," Jimmy admitted, "but you're an idealist. And I can tell you there's no way you'll lose your vision more surely than in a mill with poverty. Besides, if I'm not uncommonly dense you've set your heart on that place because you want to build a home on it; you know as well as I do, that a farm's the lonesomest place on earth to go to alone. A man can navigate fairly easily on a single craft anywhere else; he can stop to think whether he can afford a wife and a home or not, and he can wait until he can afford them, but a wife and a home are almost an absolute necessity for a man who owns and works a farm, poor or not. Being an idealist you don't want anything but the best, and I've observed that the best is generally expensive."

Billy still seemed absorbed in the skyline and his adviser feared that he might have gone too far. He knew that if Billy's decision had been made, it had no doubt stood arguments quite as enduring as any he could advance, and it wasn't likely to help things, to remind him of the disadvantages.

"Of course," Jimmy continued. "I haven't any fear that you'd make a mess of things, and I know there are compensations, but suppose you do go back and bury yourself there now, you cut yourself off from everything social at least, and I'm afraid you'll just wall yourself in alone for the rest of your life. On the other hand, you have your choice of two of the best counties in the province for Rep. work. The job has a few allurements apart from the salary, and that reminds me----"

From a collection of letters of various post marks and hand-writing, and sundry photographs, Jimmy produced a snapshot and handed it to Billy. It gave him a wicked satisfaction to see the dull red slowly cover the sober face, for the picture showed nothing more disturbing than Marjorie Evison perched nymph-like on the limb of a blossoming apple-tree. Billy looked for a long time with the same unconscious worship that had followed the airy little figure through the college dance; then he handed the picture back.

"You can have that," Jimmy offered magnanimously.

Billy stared in amazement. "Don't you want it?" he asked.

"Not specially."

"Where did you get it?"