CHAPTER IV

THE TRODDEN WAY

There came the indeterminate year when Ruhannah finished school and there was no money available to send her elsewhere for further embellishment, no farther horizon than the sky over the Gayfield hills, no other perspective than the main street of Gayfield with the knitting mill at the end of it.

So into Gayfield Mill the girl walked, and found a place immediately among the unskilled. And her career appeared to be predetermined now, and her destiny a simple one--to work, to share the toil and the gaieties of Gayfield with the majority of the other girls she knew; to marry, ultimately, some boy, some clerk in one of the Gayfield stores, some farmer lad, perhaps, possibly a school teacher or a local lawyer or physician, or possibly the head of some department in the mill, or maybe a minister--she was sufficiently well bred and educated for any one of these.

The winter of her seventeenth year found her still very much a child at heart, physically backward, a late adolescent, a little shy, inclined to silences, romantic, sensitive to all beauty, and pa.s.sionately expressing herself only when curled up by the stove with her pencil and the red light of the coals falling athwart the slim hand that guided it.

She went sometimes to village parties, learned very easily to dance, had no preferences among the youths of Gayfield, no romances. For that matter, while she was liked and even furtively admired, her slight shyness, reticence, and a vague, indefinite something about her seemed to discourage familiar rustic gallantry. Also, she was as thin and awkward as an overgrown lad, not thought to be pretty, known to be poor. But for all that more than one young man was vaguely haunted at intervals by some memory of her grey eyes and the peculiar sweetness of her mouth, forgetting for the moment several freckles on the delicate bridge of her nose and several more on her sun-tanned cheeks.

She had an agreeable time that winter, enchanted to learn dancing, happy at "showers" and parties, at sleigh rides and "chicken suppers,"

and the various species of village gaiety which ranged from moving pictures every Thursday and Sat.u.r.day nights to church entertainments, amateur theatricals at the town hall, and lectures under the auspices of the aristocratic D. O. F.--Daughters of the Old Frontier.

But she never saw any boy she preferred to any other, never was conscious of being preferred, excepting once--and she was not quite certain about that.

It was old d.i.c.k Neeland's son, Jim--vaguely understood to have been for several years in Paris studying art--and who now turned up in Gayfield during Christmas week.

Ruhannah remembered seeing him on several occasions when she was a little child. He was usually tramping across country with his st.u.r.dy father, d.i.c.k Neeland of Neeland's Mills--an odd, picturesque pair with their setter dogs and burnished guns, and old d.i.c.k's face as red as a wrinkled winter apple, and his hair snow-white.

There was six years' difference between their ages, Jim Neeland's and hers, and she had always considered him a grown and formidable man in those days. But that winter, when somebody at the movies pointed him out to her, she was surprised to find him no older than the other youths she skated with and danced with.

Afterward, at a noisy village party, she saw him dancing with every girl in town, and the drop of Irish blood in this handsome, careless young fellow established him at once as a fascinating favourite.

Rue became quite tremulous over the prospect of dancing with him.

Presently her turn came; she rose with a sudden odd loss of self-possession as he was presented, stood dumb, shy, unresponsive, suffered him to lead her out, became slowly conscious that he danced rather badly. But awe of him persisted even when he trod on her slender foot.

He brought her an ice afterward, and seated himself beside her.

"I'm a clumsy dancer," he said. "How many times did I spike you?"

She flushed and would have found a pleasant word to rea.s.sure him, but discovered nothing to say, it being perfectly patent to them both that she had retired from the floor with a slight limp.

"I'm a steam roller," he repeated carelessly. "But you dance very well, don't you?"

"I have only learned to dance this winter."

"I thought you an expert. Do you live here?"

"Yes.... I mean I live at Brookhollow."

"Funny. I don't remember you. Besides, I don't know your name--people mumble so when they introduce a man."

"I'm Ruhannah Carew."

"Carew," he repeated, while a crease came between his eyebrows. "Of Brookhollow---- Oh, I know! Your father is the retired missionary--red house facing the bridge."

"Yes."

"Certainly," he said, taking another look at her; "you're the little girl daddy and I used to see across the fields when we were shooting woodc.o.c.k in the willows."

"I remember you," she said.

"I remember _you_!"

She coloured gratefully.

"Because," he added, "dad and I were always afraid you'd wander into range and we'd pepper you from the bushes. You've grown a lot, haven't you?" He had a nice, direct smile though his speech and manners were a trifle breezy, confident, and _sans facon_. But he was at that age--which succeeds the age of b.u.mptiousness--with life and career before him, attainment, realisation, success, everything the mystery of life holds for a young man who has just flung open the gates and who takes the magic road to the future with a stride instead of his accustomed pace.

He was already a man with a profession, and meant that she should become aware of it.

Later in the evening somebody told her what a _personage_ he had become, and she became even more deeply thrilled, impressed, and tremulously desirous that he should seek her out again, not venturing to seek him, not dreaming of encouraging him to notice her by glance or att.i.tude--not even knowing, as yet, how to do such things. She thought he had already forgotten her existence.

But that this thin, freckled young thing with grey eyes ought to learn how much of a man he was remained somewhere in the back of Neeland's head; and when he heard his hostess say that somebody would have to see Rue Carew home, he offered to do it. And presently went over and asked the girl if he might--not too patronisingly.

In the cutter, under fur, with the moonlight electrically brilliant and the world buried in white, she ventured to speak of his art, timidly, as in the presence of the very great.

"Oh, yes," he said. "I studied in Paris. Wish I were back there. But I've got to draw for magazines and ill.u.s.trated papers; got to make a living, you see. I teach at the Art League, too."

"How happy you must be in your career!" she said, devoutly meaning it, knowing no better than to say it.

"It's a business," he corrected her, kindly.

"But--yes--but it is art, too."

"Oh, art!" he laughed. It was the fashion that year to shrug when art was mentioned--reaction from too much gabble.

"We don't busy ourselves with art; we busy ourselves with business.

When they use my stuff I feel I'm getting on. You see," he admitted with reluctant honesty, "I'm young at it yet--I haven't had very much of my stuff in magazines yet."

After a silence, cursed by an instinctive truthfulness which always spoiled any little plan to swagger:

"I've had several--well, about a dozen pictures reproduced."

One picture accepted by any magazine would have awed her sufficiently.

The mere fact that he was an artist had been enough to impress her.

"Do you care for that sort of thing--drawing, painting, I mean?" he inquired kindly.

She drew a quick breath, steadied her voice, and said she did.