5
And then there was a tap on the door. Rowena started, turned toward the door, made as if to get up to open it, and then sat down again, her face first flushed and then pale. Her mother opened the door, and there stood Buckner Gowdy. He came in, with his easy politeness and sat down among us like an old friend.
"I didn't know you had company," said he; "but I now remember that Mr. Vandemark is an old friend."
He always called me Mr. Vandemark, because, I guess, I owned seven hundred and twenty acres of land, and was not all mortgaged up. Virginia told me afterward, that where they came from people who owned so much land were the quality, and were treated more respectfully than the poor whites.
"Yes, sir," said Old Man Fewkes, "Jake is the onliest real old friend we got hereabouts."
Gowdy took me into the conversation, but he sat where he could look at Rowena. He seemed to be carrying on a silent conversation with her with his eyes, while he talked to me, looking into my eyes a good deal too, and stooping toward me in that intimate, confidential way of his. When I told him that I thought he was not getting as much done as he ought to with all the hands he had, he said nobody knew it better than he; but could I suggest any remedy? Now on the canal, we had to organize our work, and I had seen a lot of public labor done between Albany and Buffalo; so I had my ideas as to people's getting in one another's way. I told him that his men were working in too large gangs, as I looked at it. Where he had twenty breaking-teams following one another, if one broke his plow, or ran on a boulder and had to file it, the whole gang had to stop for him, or run around him and make a balk in the work. I thought it would be better to have not more than two or three breaking on the same "land," and then they would not be so much in one another's way, and wouldn't have so good an excuse for stopping and having jumping matches and boxing bouts and story-tellings. Then their work could be compared, they could be made to work against one another in a kind of competition, and the bad ones could be weeded out. It would be the same with corn-plowing, and some other work.
"There's sense in that, sir," he said, after thinking it over. "You see, Mr. Vandemark, my days of honest industry are of very recent date. Thank you for the suggestion, sir."
I got up to leave. Rowena's father was pulling off his boots, which with us then, was the signal that he was going to bed. If I stayed after that alone with Rowena, it was a sign that we were to "sit up"--and that was courtship. I was slowly getting it through my wool that it looked as if Buckner Gowdy and Rowena were going to sit up, when I heard her giving me back my good evening, and at the same time, behind his back, motioning me to my chair, and shaking her head. And while I was backing and filling, the door' opened and a woman appeared on the step.
"Ah, Mrs. Mobley," said Buck, "anything for me?"
She was very nicely dressed for a woman busy about her own home, but the thing that I remembered was her pallor. Her hair was light brown and curled about her forehead, and her eyes were very blue, like china. And there was a quiver in her like that which you see in the little quaking-asps in the slews--something pitiful, and sort of forsaken. Her face was not so fresh as it had been a few years before, and on her cheeks were little red spots, like those you see in the cheeks of people with consumption--or a pot of face-paint. She was tall and strong-looking, and somewhat portly, and quite masterful in her ways as a general rule; but that night she seemed to be in a sort of pleading mood, not a bit like herself when dealing with ordinary people. She was not ordinary, as could be sensed by even an ignorant bumpkin like me. She had more education than most, and had been taught better manners and brought up with more style.
"Mr. Mobley requested me to say," she said, her voice low and quivery, bowing to all of us in a very polite and elegant way, "that he has something of importance to say to you, Mr. Buckner."
"I'm greatly obliged to you, Miss Flora," said he. "Let me go to him with you. Good evening, Rowena. Good evening, Mr. Vandemark. I shall certainly think over what you have been so kind as to suggest."
He bowed to Rowena, nodded to me, and we all three left together. As we separated I heard him talking to her in what in any other man I should have called a loving tone; but there was a sort of warm note in the way he spoke to me, too; and still more of that vital vibration I have mentioned before, when he spoke to Rowena. But he did not take my arm, as he did that of the imposing "Miss Flora" as he called Mrs. Mobley, to whom he was "Mr. Buckner." I could see them walking very, very close together, even in the darkness.