Vandemark's Folly

by Herbert Quick

4

And then Rowena came into my view as she passed the house. I hastily dried my eyes, and went to meet her, astonished, for she was alone. She was riding one of Gowdy's horses, and had that badge of distinction in those days, a side-saddle and a riding habit. She looked very distinguished, as she rode slowly toward me, her long skirt hanging below her feet, one knee crooked about the saddle horn, the other in the stirrup. I had not seen a woman riding thus since the time I had watched them sweeping along in all their style in Albany or Buffalo. She came up to me and stopped, looking at me without a word.

"Why of all things!" I said. "Rowena, is this you!"

"What's left of me," said she.

I stood looking at her for a minute, thinking of what her father and mother had said, and finally trying to figure out what seemed to be a great change in her. There was something new in her voice, and her manner of looking at me as she spoke; and something strange in the way she looked out of her eyes. Her face was a little paler than it used to be, as if she had been indoors more; but there was a pink flush in her cheeks that made her look prettier than I had ever seen her. Her eyes were bright as if with tears just trembling to fall, rather than with the old glint of defiance or high spirits; but she smiled and laughed more than ever I had seen her do. She acted as if she was in high spirits, as I have seen even very quiet girls in the height of the fun and frolic of a dance or sleigh-ride. When she was silent for a moment, though, her mouth drooped as if in some sort of misery; and it was not until our eyes met that the laughing expression came over her face, as if she was gay only when she knew she was watched. She seemed older--much older.

Somehow, all at once there came into my mind the memory of the woman away back there in Buffalo, who had taken me, a sleepy, lonely, neglected little boy, to her room, put me to bed, and been driven from the fearful place in which she lived, because of it. I have finally thought of the word to describe what I felt in both these cases--desperation; desperation, and the feeling of pursuit and flight. I did not even feel all this as I stood looking at Rowena, sitting on her horse so prettily that summer day at my farm; I only felt puzzled and a little pitiful for her--all the more, I guess, because of her nice clothes and her side-saddle.

"Well, Mr. Vandemark," said she, finally, "I don't hear the perprietor of the estate say anything about lighting and stayin' a while.' Help me down, Jake!"

I swung her from the saddle and tied her horse. I stopped to put a halter on him, unsaddle him, and give him hay. I wanted time to think; but I do not remember that I had done much if any thinking when I got back to the house, and found that she had taken off her long skirt and was sitting on the little stoop in front of my door. She wore the old apron, and as I came up to her, she spread it out with her hands to call my attention to it.

"You see, Jake, I've come to work. Show me the morning's dishes, an' I'll wash 'em. Or maybe you want bread baked? It wouldn't be breakin' the Sabbath to mix up a bakin' for a poor ol' bach like you, would it? I'm huntin' work. Show it to me."

I showed her how clean everything was, taking pride in my housekeeping; and when she seemed not over-pleased with this, I had in all honesty to tell her how much I was indebted to Mrs. Thorndyke for it.

"The preacher's wife?" she asked sharply. "An' that adopted daughter o' theirn, Buck Gowdy's sister-in-law, eh?"

I wished I could have admitted this; but I had to explain that Virginia had not been there. For some reason she seemed in better spirits when she learned this. When it came time for dinner, which on Sunday was at one o'clock, she insisted on getting the meal; and seemed to be terribly anxious for fear everything might not be good. It was a delicious meal, and to see her preparing it, and then clearing up the table and washing the dishes gave me quite a thrill. It was so much like what I had seen in my visions--and so different.

"Now," said she, coming and sitting down by me, and laying her hand on mine, "ain't this more like it? Don't that beat doing everything yourself? If you'd only try havin' me here a week, nobody could hire you to go back to bachin' it ag'in. Think how nice it would be jest to go out an' do your chores in the morning, an' when you come in with the milk, find a nice breakfast all ready to set down to. Wouldn't that be more like livin'?"

"Yes," I said, "it--it would."

"That come hard," said she, squeezing my hand, "like makin' a little boy own up he likes a girl. I guess I won't ask you the next thing."

"What was the next thing, Rowena?"

"W'y, if it wouldn't be kind o' nice to have some one around, even if she wa'n't very pretty, and was ignorant, if she was willin' to learn, an' would always be good to you, to have things kind o' cheerful at night--your supper ready; a light lit; dry boots warmed by the stove; your bed made up nice, and maybe warmed when it was cold: even if she happened to be wearin' an old apern like this--if you knowed she was thinkin' in her thankful heart of the bashful boy that give it to her back along the road when she was ragged and ashamed of herself every time a stranger looked at her!"

Dumbhead as I was I sat mute, and looked as blank as an idiot. In all this description of hers I was struck by the resemblance between her vision and mine; but I was dreaming of some one else. She looked at me a moment, and took her hand away. She seemed hurt, and I thought I saw her wiping her eyes. I could not believe that she was almost asking me to marry her, it seemed so beyond belief--and I was joked so much about the girls, and about getting me a wife that it seemed this must be just banter, too. And yet, there was something a little pitiful in it, especially when she spoke again about my little gift to her so long ago.

"I never looked your place over," said she at last. "That's what I come over fur. Show it to me, Jacob?"

This delighted me. We looked first at the wheat, and the corn, and some of my cattle were near enough so that we went and looked at them, too. I told her where I had got every one of them. We looked at the chickens and the ducks; and the first brood of young turkeys I ever had. I showed her all my elms, maples, basswoods, and other forest trees which I had brought from the timber, and even the two pines I had made live, then not over a foot high.

I just now came in from looking at them, and find them forty feet high as I write this, with their branches resting on the ground in a great brown ring carpeted with needles as they are in the pineries.

We sat down on the blue-grass under what is now the big cottonwood in front of the house. I had stuck this in the sod a little twig not two feet long, and now it was ten or twelve feet high, and made a very little shade, to be sure, but wasn't I proud of my own shade trees! Oh, you can't understand it; for you can not realize the beauty of shade on that great sun-bathed prairie, or the promise in the changing shadows under that little tree!

Rowena leaned back against the gray-green trunk, and patted the turf beside her for me to be seated.

Every circumstance of this strange day comes back to me as I think of it, and of what followed. I remember just how the poor girl looked as she sat leaning against the tree, her cheeks flushed by the heat of the summer afternoon, that look of distress in her eyes as she looked around so brightly and with so gay an air over my little kingdom. As she sat there she loosened her belt and took a long breath as if relieved in her weariness at the long ramble we had taken.

"I never have had a home," she said. "I never had no idee how folk that have got things lived--till I went over--over to that--that hell-hole there!" And she waved her hand over toward Blue-grass Manor. I was startled at her fierce manner and words.

"Your folks come along here the other day," I said, to turn the subject, I guess.

"Did they?" she asked, with a little gasp. "What did they say?"

"They said they were headed for Pike's Peak."

"The old story," she said. "Huntin' f'r the place where the hawgs run around ready baked, with knives an' forks stuck in 'em. I wish to God I was with 'em!"

Here she stopped for a while and sat with her hands twisted together in her lap. Finally, "Did they say anything about me, Jacob?"

"I thought," said I, "that they talked as if you'd had a fuss."

"Yes," she said. "They're all I've got. They hain't much, I reckon, but they're as good as I be, I s'pose. Yes, a lot better. They're my father an' my mother, an' my brothers. In their way--in our way--they was always as good to me as they knowed how. I remember when ma used to kiss me, and pa held me on his lap. Do you remember he's got one finger off? I used to play with his fingers, an' try to build 'em up into a house, while he set an' told about new places he was goin' to to git rich. I wonder if the time'll ever come ag'in when I can set on any one's lap an' be kissed without any harm in it!"

There was no false gaiety in her face now, as she sat and looked off over the marsh from the brow of the hill-slope. A feeling of coming evil swept over me as I looked at her, like that which goes through the nerves of the cattle when a tornado is coming. I remembered now the silence of her brothers when her father and mother had said that she was no longer a member of their family, and was not going with them to "the Speak."

The comical threat of the old man that he would will his property away from her did not sound so funny now; for there must have been something more than an ordinary family disagreement to have made them feel thus. I recalled the pained look in Ma Fewkes's face, as she sat with her shoulder-blades drawn together and cast Rowena out from the strange family circle. What could it be? I turned my back to her as I sat on the ground; and she took me by the shoulders, pulled me down so that my head was lying in her lap, and began smoothing my hair back from my forehead with a very caressing touch.

"Well," said she, "we wun't spoil our day by talkin' of my troubles. This place here is heaven, to me, so quiet, so clean, so good! Le's not spoil it."

And before I knew what she meant to do, she stooped down and kissed me on the lips--kissed me several times. I can not claim that I was offended, she was so pretty, so rosy, so young and attractive; but at the same time, I was a little scared. I wanted to end this situation; so, pretty soon, I proposed that we go down to see where I kept my milk. I felt like calling her attention to the fact that it was getting well along in the afternoon, and that she would be late home if she did not start soon; but that would not be very friendly, and I did not want to hurt her feelings. So we went down to the spring at the foot of the hill, where the secret lay of my nice, firm, sweet butter. She did not seem very much interested, even when I showed her the tank in which the pans of milk stood in the cool water. She soon went over to a big granite boulder left there by the glaciers ages ago when the hill was made by the melting ice dropping its earth and gravel, and sat down as if to rest. So I went and sat beside her.

"Jacob," said she, with a sort of gasp, "you wonder why I kissed you up there, don't you?"

I should not have confessed this when I was young, for it is not the man's part I played; but I blushed, and turned my face away.

"I love you, Jacob!" she took my hand as she said this, and with her other hand turned my face toward her. "I want you to marry me. Will you, Jacob? I--I--I need you. I'll be good to you, Jake. Don't say no! Don't say no, for God's sake!"

Then the tragic truth seemed to dawn on me, or rather it came like a flash; and I turned and looked at her as I had not done before. I am slow, or I should have known when her father and mother had spoken as they did; but now I could see. I could see why she needed me. As an unsophisticated boy, I had been blind in my failure to see something new and unexpected to me in human relations; but once it came to me, it was plain. I was a stockman, as well as a boy; and my life was closely related to the mysterious processes by which the world is filled with successive generations of living beings. I was like a family physician to my animals; and wise in their days and generations. Rowena was explained to me in a flash of lightning by my every-day experiences; she was swept within the current of my knowledge.

"Rowena," said I, "you are in trouble."

She knew what I meant.

I hope never again to see any one in such agony. Her face flamed, and then turned as white as a sheet. She looked at me with that distressful expression in her eyes, rose as if to go away, and then came back and sitting down again on the stone, she buried her head on my breast and wept so terribly that I was afraid. I tried to dry her tears, but they burst out afresh whenever I looked in her face. The poor thing was ashamed to look in my eyes; but she clung to me, sobbing, and crying out, and then drawing long quivering breaths which seemed to be worse than sobs. When she spoke, it was in short, broken sentences, sometimes unfinished, as her agony returned upon her and would not let her go on.

I could not feel any scorn or contempt for her; I could as soon have looked down on a martyr burning at the stake for an act in which I did not believe. She was like a dumb beast tied in a burning stall, only able to moan and cry out and endure.

I have often thought that to any one who had not seen and heard it, the first thing she said might seem comic.

"Jacob," she said, with her face buried in my breast, "they've got it worked around so--I'm goin' to have a baby!"

But when you think of the circumstances; the poor, pretty, inexperienced girl; of that poor slack-twisted family; of her defenselessness in that great house; of the experienced and practised and conscienceless seducer into whose hands she had fallen--when you think of all this, I do not see how you can fail to see how the words were wrung from her as a statement of the truth. "They" meant all the forces which had been too strong for her, not the least, her own weakness--for weakness is one of the most powerful forces in our affairs. "They had got it worked around"--as if the very stars in their courses had conspired to destroy her. I had no impulse to laugh at her strange way of stating it, as if she had had nothing to do with it herself: instead, I felt the tears of sympathy roll down my face upon her hair of rich brown.

"That's why my folks have throwed me off," she went on. "But I ain't bad, Jacob. I ain't bad. Take me, and save me! I'll always be good to you, Jake; I'll wash your feet with my hair! I'll kiss them! I'll eat the crusts from the table an' be glad, for I love you, Jacob. I've loved you ever since I saw you. If I have been untrue to you, it was because I was overcome, and you never looked twice at me, and I thought I was to be a great lady. Now I'll be mud, trod on by every beast that walks, an' rooted over by the hawgs, unless you save me. I'll work my fingers to the bone f'r you, Jacob, to the bone. You're my only hope. For Christ's sake let me hope a little longer!"

The thought that she was coming to me to save her from the results of her own sin never came into my mind. I only saw her as a lost woman, cast off even by her miserable family, whose only claim to respectability was their having kept themselves from the one depth into which she had fallen. I thought again of that wretch who had been kind to me in Buffalo, and of poor Rowena, in poverty and want, stripped of every defense against wrongs piled on wrongs, rooted over, as she said, by the very swine, until she should come to some end so dreadful that I could not imagine it; and not of her alone. There would be another life to be thought of. I knew that Buckner Gowdy, for she had told me of his blame in the matter, of her appeal to him, of his light-hearted cruelty to her, of how now at last, after months of losing rivalry between her and that other of his victims, the wife of Mobley the overseer, she had come to me in desperation--I knew there was nothing in that cold heart to which Rowena could make any appeal that had not been made unsuccessfully by others in the same desperate case.

I had no feeling that she should have told me all in the first place, instead of trying to win me in my ignorance: for I felt that she was driven by a thousand whips to things which might not be honest, but were as free from blame as the doublings of a hunted deer. I felt no blame for her then, and I have never felt any. I passed that by, and tried to look in the face what I should have to give up if I took this girl for my wife. That sacrifice rolled over me like a black cloud, as clear as if I had had a month in which to realize it.

I pushed her hands from my shoulders, and rose to my feet; and she knelt down and clasped her arms around my knees.

"I must think!" I said. "Let me be! Let me think!"

I took a step backward, and as I turned I saw her kneeling there, her hair all about her face, with her hands stretched out to me: and then I walked blindly away into the long grass of the marsh.

I finally found myself running as if to get away from the whole thing, with the tall grass tangling about my feet. All my plans for my life with Virginia came back to me: I lived over again every one of those beautiful days I had spent with her. I remembered how she had come back to bid me good-by when I left her at Waterloo, and turned her over again to Grandma Thorndyke; but especially, I lived over again our days in the grove. I remembered that for months, now, she had seemed lost to me, and that all the hope I had had appeared to be that of living alone and dreaming of her. I was not asked by poor Rowena to give up much; and yet how much it was to me! But how little for me to lose to save her from the fate in store for her!

I can not hope to make clear to any one the tearing and rending in my breast as these things passed through my mind while I went on and on, through water and mud, blindly stumbling, dazed by the sufferings I endured. I caught my feet in the long grass, fell--and it did not seem worth while to rise again.

The sun went down, and the dusk came on as I lay there with my hands twisted in the grass which drooped over me. Then I thought of Rowena, and I got upon my feet and started in search of her, but soon forgot her in my thoughts of the life I should live if I did what she wanted of me. I was in such a daze that I went within a rod of her as she sat on the stone, without seeing her, though the summer twilight was still a filtered radiance, when suddenly all went dark before my eyes, and I fell again. Rowena saw me fall, and came to me.

"Jacob," she cried, as she helped me to my feet, "Jacob, what's the matter!"

"Rowena," said I, trying to stand alone, "I've made up my mind. I had other plans--but I'll do what you want me to!"

---

CHAPTER XVIII

ROWENA'S WAY OUT--THE PRAIRIE FIRE

The collapse of mind and body which I underwent in deciding the question of marrying Rowena Fewkes or of keeping unstained and pure the great love of my life, refusing her pitiful plea and passing by on the other side, leaving her desolate and fordone, is a thing to which I hate to confess; for it was a weakness. Yet, it was the directing fact of that turning-point not only in my own life, but in the lives of many others--of the life of Vandemark Township, of Monterey County, and of the State of Iowa, to some extent. The excuse for it lies, as I have said, in the way I am organized; in the bovine dumbness of my life, bursting forth in a few crises in storms of the deepest bodily and spiritual tempest. I could not and can not help it. I was weak as a child, as she clasped me in her arms in gratitude when I told her I would do as she wanted me to; and would have fallen again if she had not held me up.

"What's the matter, Jacob?" she said, in sudden fright at my strange behavior.

"I don't know," I gasped. "I wish I could lay down."

She was mystified. She helped me up the hill, telling me all the time how she meant to live so as to repay me for all I had promised to do for her. She was stronger than I, then, and helped me into the house, which was dark, now, and lighted the lamp; but when she came to me, lying on the bed, she gave a great scream.

"Jake, Jake!" she cried. "What's the matter! Are you dying, my darling?"

"Who, me dying?" I said, not quite understanding her. "No--I'm all right--I'll be all right, Rowena!"

She was holding her hands up in the light. They were stained crimson where she had pressed them to my bosom.

"What's the matter of your hands?" I asked, though I was getting drowsy, as if I had been long broken of my sleep.

"It's blood, Jacob! You've hurt yourself!"

I drew my hand across my mouth, and it came away stained red. She gave a cry of horror; but did not lose her presence of mind. She sponged the blood from my clothes, wiping my mouth every little while, until there was no more blood coming from it. Presently I dropped off to sleep with my hand in hers. She awoke me after a while and gave me some warm milk. As I was drowsing off again, she spoke very gently to me.

"Can you understand what I'm saying?" she asked; and I nodded a yes. "Do you love her like that?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "I love her like that."

Presently she lifted my hand to her lips and kissed it. She was quite calm, now, as if new light had come to her in her darkness; and I thought that it was my consent which had quieted her spirits: but I did not understand her.

"I can't let you do it, Jacob," said she, finally. "It's too much to ask.... I've thought of another way, my dear.... Don't think of me or my troubles any more.... I'll be all right.... You go on loving her, an' bein' true to her ... and if God is good as they say, He'll make you happy with her sometime. Do you understand, Jacob?"

"Yes," I said, "but what will you...."

"Never mind about me," said she soothingly. "I've thought of another way out. You go to sleep, now, and don't think of me or my troubles any more."

I lay looking at her for a while, and wondering how she could suddenly be so quiet after her agitation of the day; and after a while, the scene swam before my eyes, and I went off into the refreshing sleep of a tired boy.

The sun was up when I awoke. Rowena was gone. I went out and found that she had saddled her horse and left sometime in the night; afterward I found out that it was in the gray of the morning. She had watched by my bedside all night, and left only after it was plain that I was breathing naturally and that my spasm had passed. She had come into my life that day like a tornado, but had left it much as it had been before, except that I wondered what was to become of her. I was comforted by the thought that she had "thought of another way." And it was a long time before the nobility of her action was plain to me; but when I realized it, I never forgot it. I had offered her all I had when she begged for it, she had taken it, and then restored it, as the dying soldier gave the draught of water to his comrade, saying, "Thy necessity is greater than mine."

Once or twice I made an effort to tell Magnus Thorkelson about this, as we worked at our after-harvest haying together that week; but it was a hard thing to do. Perhaps it would not be a secret much longer; but as yet it was Rowena's secret, not mine. I knew, too, that Magnus had been haunting Rowena for two years; that he had been making visits to Blue-grass Manor often when she was there, without taking me into his confidence; that his excuse that he went to help Surajah Fewkes with his inventions was not the real reason for his going. I remembered, too, that Rowena had always spoken well of Magnus, and seemed to see what most of us did not, that Magnus was better educated in the way foreigners are taught than the rest of us; and she did not look down on him the way we did then on folks from other countries. I had no way of knowing how they stood toward each other, though Magnus had looked sad and stopped talking lately whenever I had mentioned her. I knew it would be a shock to him to learn of her present and coming trouble; and, strange as it may seem, I began to put it back into the dark places in my brain as if it had not happened; and when it came to mind clearly as it kept doing, I tried to comfort myself with the thought that Rowena had said that she had thought of another way out.

We had frost early that year--a hard white frost sometime about the tenth of September. Neither Magnus nor I had any sound corn, though our wheat, oats and barley were heavy and fine; and we had oceans of hay. The frost killed the grass early, and early in October we had a heavy rain followed by another freeze, and then a long, calm, warm Indian summer. The prairie was covered with a dense mat of dry grass which rustled in the wind but furnished no feed for our stock. It was a splendid fall for plowing, and I began to feel hope return to me as I followed my plow around and around the lands I laid off, and watched the black ribbon of new plowing widen and widen as the day advanced toward night.

Nothing is so good a soil for hope as new plowing. The act of making it is inspired by hope. The emblem of hope should be the plow; not the plow of the Great Seal, but a plow buried to the top of the mold-board in the soil, with the black furrow-slice falling away from it--and for heaven's sake, let it fall to the right, as it does where they do real farming, and not to the left as most artists depict it! I know some plows are so made that the nigh horse walks in the furrow, but I have mighty little respect for such plows or the farms on which they are used.

My cattle strayed off in the latter part of October; being tolled off in this time between hay and grass by the green spears that grew up in the wet places in the marsh and along the creek. I got uneasy about them on the twentieth, and went hunting them on one of Magnus Thorkelson's horses. Magnus was away from home working, and had left his team with me. I made up my mind that I would scout along on my own side of the marsh until I could cross below it, and then work west, looking from every high place until I found the cattle, coming in away off toward the Gowdy tract, and crossing the creek above the marsh on my way home. This would take me east and west nearly twice across Vandemark Township as it was finally established.

I expected to get back before night, but when I struck the trail of the stock it took me away back into the region in the north part of the township back of Vandemark's Folly, as we used to say, where it was not settled, on account of the slew and the distance from town, until in the 'seventies. Foster Blake had it to himself all this time, and ran a herd of the neighbors' stock there until about 1877, when the Germans came in and hemmed him in with their improvements, making the second great impulse in the settlement of the township.

---