Hannah, what gave you the notion that there's anything wrong about complainin'?" he demanded shortly, and Mary knew that she had acquired a champion.
"Complainin' against God's will is a sin. Every person knows that." Aunt Hannah spoke with the aggrieved uncertainty of one unexpectedly called upon to defend an axiom. "An' for a girl to fret about her looks is worldly."
"Oh, I see," the boy nodded slowly, but his voice was insurgent. "I guess you think Almighty God wants the creatures He made to sit around and sing about there bein' work to do. I wonder you don't feel afraid to eat buckwheat cakes that He doesn't send down to you by an angel with His compliments. My idea is that He wants folks to do things for themselves and not to sing about it. As for being discontented, that's the one thing that drives the world around. I think God made discontent just for that."
Aunt Hannah moistened her lips. For decades she had been the member of a God-fearing, toiling family whose righteousness was the righteousness of stagnation. Now she stood face to face with radical heresy.
"But," she argued with some dumb feeling that she was defending Divinity, "the Scriptures teach contentment an' it's worldly to be vain."
"Why not be worldly?" flared the boy with a new and indomitable light in his eyes. "As for me I'm sick of this life in a place that's dry-rotting. What I want is the world—the whole of it, good an' bad. I want what you can win out of fighting. Mary wants to be pretty. Why shouldn't she? What does any woman get out of life except what men give her—and what man gives much to the ugly ones?"
"It ain't what men give that's to be counted a prize," came the pious rejoinder. "It's what heaven gives."
"Heaven gave you a dust-rag and rheumatism. If they suit you, all well and good. I'm going to see that the world gives Mary what she wants. If a girl can be made pretty Mary's going to be pretty. It's what a woman's got a right to want and I'm going to get it for her."
With a violent gesture the boy flung himself from the room and slammed the door behind him.
Because it was Saturday and there was no school that day, Ham left the house and turned into the woods. He tramped with his brow drawn and a hundred insurgent thoughts swirling in his brain.
He passed across hills holding to their final flare of color, where leaves were drifting down from trees of yellow and crimson. He threaded alder thickets and passed through groves of silver birches that shivered fastidiously in the breeze. Wild apple trees raised gnarled branches under which the "punches" of hooves told of deer that had been feeding. At last, he came to a clearing where fire had eaten its way and charred the ruins of the forest. There a large buck lifted its antlered head among the berry bushes and stood for a moment at startled gaze. But Ham made no movement to raise the rifle that swung at his side, and as the red-brown shape disappeared with a soft clatter, the boy did not even throw a glance after it. He was saying to himself: "William the Conqueror was a baker's son; Napoleon was the friend of a washer-woman; Cecil Rhodes was a poor boy—but they didn't stay tied down too long."
Now and again, a rabbit scuttled off to cover, and often with the whir of drumming wings a grouse rose noisily and lumbered away with spread tail into the painted foliage. But all the beauty of it was a beauty of wildness and of nature's victory over man. For such beauty Ham felt no answer of pulse or heart.
Of the cabins he passed, most were empty and those quiet vandals, Weather and Decay, were noiselessly at work wrecking them. Here a door swung askew; there a chimney teetered. Every such tenantless lodging was an outpost surrendered on a field scarred with human defeat; a place where a family had fought poverty and been put to flight. Once he paused and looked down a long slope to a habitation by the roadside. The miserable battle was just ending there, and, though he stood a quarter of a mile away, he stopped to watch the final act. The family that had dwelt there for two generations was leaving behind everything that it had known. John Marrow was at that moment nailing a padlock to the front door, a lock at which the quiet vandals would laugh silently.
In a farm wagon was heaped the litter of household effects. These people were whipped, starved out, beaten. Ham Burton turned on his heel and trudged away. His father's farm was little more productive than this one, but his father had that uncompromising iron in his blood that comes from Pilgrim forebears. He would hold on to the end—but to what end and how long?
That Saturday afternoon, Mary was walking along the sandy road that led to the village. She had no purpose, except to be alone, and she carried an old fashion paper which she meant to con. This newly discovered necessity of beauty was a very serious affair, and since she meant to devote herself to its study she conceived that these pages should give tidings from the fountain head.
She did not expect to meet anyone, and she was quite content to spend that Indian-summer afternoon with her companions of the printed page. These were beautiful ladies, appareled in the splendid vogues of Paris and Vienna. There were delightful bits of information concerning some mysterious thing called the haute monde and likewise pictures that instructed one how to dress one's hair and adorn the coiffure with circlets of pearls. Mary's sheer delight in such mysteries was not marred by any suspicion that the text she devoured told of fashions long extinct and supplanted by newer edicts.
On the great rock which jutted out from the wooded tangle into the margin of Lake Forsaken, with lesser sentinel rocks about it, she sat cross-legged until she glanced up at last to see that the west was kindling, and that she must start back to the duller realities of home. She had been interrupted by no break in the silence except the little forest twitter of birds and now and then the cool splash where a bass leaped in the lake.
But as she made her way along the twisting road she heard the rattle of wheels on the rocks and turned to see a vehicle driven by a man who obviously had no kinship with stony farms or lumber camps. She paused, and the buggy came up. Its driver drew his horse down, and in a singularly pleasing and friendly voice inquired:
"Can you tell me, little sister, how I can get to Middle Fork?"
Middle Fork was the village at the end of the six-mile mountain descent, and Mary, who knew every trail and woodland path, told him, not only of the road, but of a passable short-cut.
The girl had come to judge human faces through the eyes of her own circumstance, and those of the men and women about her wore for the most part the resignation of surrender and hardship, but this man's face was different. He was a man to her eleven years, though a more experienced eye would have seen that he was hardly more than a prematurely old boy. Lines traced a network around his eyes, but they were whimsical lines such as come from persistent laughter—the sort of laughter that insists on expressing itself even in the face of misfortune. His open mackinaw collar revealed a carelessly knotted scarf decorated with a large black pearl, and as he drew off a glove she noticed that his brown hand was slender and that one finger wore a heavily carved ring, from whose quaint setting glowed the cool, bright light of an emerald. Her frank curiosity showed so plainly in her face that the fine wrinkles about the young man's eyes became little radiants of amusement centering around gray pupils and his lips parted in a smile over very even teeth.
There are a few men in the world whom we feel that we have always known, when once we have seen them, and upon whom we find ourselves bestowing confidences as soon as we have said, "Good-day." Perhaps they are the isolated survivors of knight-errant days, whose business it is to listen to the troubles of others.
It was only the matter of minutes before Mary was chatting artlessly with this traveler of the mountain road, and since she was a child she was talking of herself, while he nodded gravely and listened with a deference of attention that was to her new and disarmingly charming.
He,
