Passers-by looked with scorn upon young David Windom and his flaxen-haired wife as they played at the silly game before supper every evening. And they went frequently to the "opera house" at the county seat, ten miles up the river; they did not wait for summer to come with its circus, as all the other farmers were content to do; whenever there was a good "show" at the theatre in town they sent up for reserved seats and drove in for supper at the principal hotel. Altogether, young Mrs. Windom was simply "raising Cain" with the conventions.
Strange to say, David did not "go to smash." To the intense chagrin of the wiseacres he prospered despite an unprecedented disregard for the teachings of his father and his grandfather before him. The wolf stayed a long way off from his door, the prophetic mortgage failed to lay its blight upon his lands, his crops were bountiful, his acreage spread as the years went by—and so his uncles, his cousins and his aunts were never so happy as when wishing for the good old days when his father was alive and running the farm as it should be run! If David had married some good, sensible, thrifty, hard-working farmer's daughter—Well, it might not have meant an improvement in the crops but it certainly would have spared him the expense of a tennis court, and theatre-going, and absolutely unnecessary trips to Chicago or Indianapolis whenever SHE took it into her head to go. Besides, it wasn't natural that they should deliberately put off having children. It wasn't what God and the country expected. After a year had passed and there were no symptoms of approaching motherhood, certain narrow-minded relatives began to blame Great Britain for the outrage and talked a great deal about a worn-out, deteriorating race.
Then, after two years, when a girl baby was born to David and his wife, they couldn't, for the life of them, understand how it came to pass that it wasn't a boy. There had been nothing but boys in the Windom family for years and years. It appeared to be a Windom custom. And here was this fair-haired outsider from across the sea breaking in with a girl! They could not believe it possible. David—a great, strong, perfect specimen of a Windom—the father of a girl! Why, they emphasized, he was over six feet tall, strong as an ox, broad-shouldered—as fine a figure as you would see in a lifetime. There was something wrong—radically wrong.
The district suffered another shock when a nurse maid was added to David's household—a girl from the city who had nothing whatever to do, except to take care of the baby while the unnatural mother tinkered with the flower-beds, took long walks about the farm, rode horseback, and played tennis with David and a silly crowd of young people who had fallen into evil ways.
She died when her daughter was ten years old. Those who had misunderstood her and criticized her in the beginning, mourned her deeply, sincerely, earnestly in the end, for she had triumphed over prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and a certain form of malice. The whole district was the better for her once hateful innovations, and there was no one left who scoffed at David Windom for the choice he had made of a wife.
Her death wrought a remarkable, enduring change in Windom. He became a silent, brooding man who rarely smiled and whose heart lay up in the little graveyard on the ridge. The gay, larksome light fled from his eyes, his face grew stern and sometimes forbidding. She had taken with her the one great thing she had brought into his life: ineffable buoyancy. He no longer played, for there was no one with whom he would play; he no longer sang, for the music had gone out of his soul; he no longer whistled the merry tunes, for his lips were stiff and unyielding. Only when he looked upon his little daughter did the soft light of love well up into his eyes and the rigid mouth grow tender.
She was like her mother. She was joyous, brave and fair to look upon. She had the same heart of sunshine, the same heart of iron, and the blue in her eyes was like the blue of the darkening skies. She adored the grim, silent man who was her father, and she was the breath of life to him.
And then, when she was nineteen, she broke the heart of David Windom. For two years she had been a student in the University situated but half a score of miles from the place where she was born, a co-educational institution of considerable size and importance. Windom did not believe in women's colleges. He believed in the free school with its broadening influence, its commingling of the sexes in the search for learning, and in the divine right of woman to develop her mind through the channels that lead ultimately and inevitably to superiority of man. He believed that the girl trained and educated in schools devoted exclusively to the finer sex fails to achieve understanding as well as education. The only way to give a girl a practical education—and he believed that every woman should have one—was to start her off even with the boy who was training to become her master in all respects.
During her second year at the University she met Edward Crown, a senior. He was the son of a blacksmith in the city, and he was working his way through college with small assistance from his parent, who held to the conviction that a man was far better off if he developed his muscles by hard work and allowed the brain to take care of itself. Young Crown was a good-looking fellow of twenty-three, clean-minded, ambitious, dogged in work and dogged in play. He had "made" the football team in his sophomore year. Customary snobbishness had kept him out of the fraternities and college societies. He may have been a good fellow, a fine student, and a cracking end on the eleven, and all that, but he was not acceptable material for any one of the half dozen fraternities.
When he left college with his hard-earned degree it was to accept a position with a big engineering company, a job which called him out to the far Northwest. Alix Windom was his promised wife. They were deeply, madly in love with each other. Separation seemed unendurable. She was willing to go into the wilderness with him, willing to endure the hardships and the discomforts of life in a construction camp up in the mountains of Montana. She would share his poverty and his trials as she would later share his triumphs. But when they went to David Windom with their beautiful dream, the world fell about their ears.
David Windom, recovering from the shock of surprise, ordered Edward from the house. He would sooner see his child dead than the wife of Nick Crown's son—Nick Crown, a drunken rascal who had been known to beat his wife—Nick Crown who was not even fit to lick the feet of the horses he shod!
One dark, rainy night in late June, Alix stole out of the old farmhouse on the ridge and met her lover at the abandoned tollgate half a mile up the road. He waited there with a buggy and a fast team of horses. Out of a ramshackle cupboard built in the wall of the toll-house, they withdrew the bundles surreptitiously placed there by Alix in anticipation of this great and daring event, and made off toward the city at a break-neck, reckless speed. They were married before midnight, and the next day saw them on their way to the Far West. But not before Alix had despatched a messenger to her father, telling him of her act and asking his forgiveness for the sake of the love she bore him. The same courier carried back to the city a brief response from David Windom. In a shaken, sprawling hand he informed her that if she ever decided to return to her home ALONE, he would receive her and forgive her for the sake of the love he bore her, but if she came with the coward who stole her away from him, he would kill him before her eyes.
II—The summer and fall and part of the winter passed, and in early March Alix came home.
David Windom, then a man of fifty, gaunt and grey and powerful, seldom had left the farm in all these months. He rode about his far-spread estate, grim and silent, his eyes clouded, his voice almost metallic, his manner cold and repellent. His tenants, his labourers, his neighbours, fearing him, rarely broke in upon his reserve. Only his animals loved him and were glad to see him—his dogs, his horses, even his cattle. He loved them, for they were staunch and faithful. Never had he uttered his daughter's name in all these months, nor was there a soul in the community possessed of the hardihood to inquire about her or to sympathize with him.
It was a fierce, cruel night in March that saw the return of Alix. A fine, biting snow blew across the wide, open farmlands; the beasts of the field were snugly under cover; no man stirred abroad unless driven by necessity; the cold, wind-swept roads were deserted. So no one witnessed the return of Alix Crown and her husband. They came out of the bleak, unfriendly night and knocked at David Windom's door.
