III
It was a bitterly cold winter; the wind swept fiercely through the cut between Sunset and Rocky hills, rushing down the main street at Glen Village, separating the neighbours on either side more effectively than drifts of snow could have done. However deep, there is something cheerful and exhilarating about snow. Children think that it is sent for their special amusement; the shy young man, who drives his sweetheart over to the “Social” in the next village, needs no excuse for putting his arm around her, for light sleighs have been known to upset suddenly without the slightest warning. The old folks are cheerful in their reminiscences of just such episodes, and compare each storm with some long-remembered one in the thirties, noting always the frail and inferior wearing quality of modern snow.
But Wintry Wind is the most exasperating and prying of nature’s messengers, whose mission is the uncovering of weaknesses in all things animate and inanimate. It soon discovers if your eyes are sensitive, your hat a size too small, that you are subject to rheumatism, that your breath is short when you walk uphill, and that your knees bend as you go down, and so turns your cloak over your head like an extinguisher. It knows precisely which shingle lacks a nail, and will lay bare spots calculated to make obstinate leaks. It also spies out the blind whose catch is loose, the gate with one hinge, the elm that is split in the crotch, and the particular chimney flue that leads to the room where your most important relation (who suffers from bronchitis) is being entertained at tea, and it gauges accurately which article on the clothes-line you value the most.
It was this sort of weather, combined with his daughter Margaret’s delicate health, that made Ezra Tolford, living at the Glen Mill, for which the village was named, resolve to have a hired man.
Now Ezra Tolford had many titles to local distinction. He was Deacon of the First Church, and his parents had been zealous before him, his grandfather having had the hardihood to fly to the woods with the church plate on the approach of the British in 1779, thereby risking his life via wild beasts, Hessians, and exposure,—a fact that is brought up in every local historical discourse to this day. Incidentally it might be mentioned that the plucky ancestor (owing to fright and darkness) was never able afterwards to locate the marshy spot where the precious metal was buried; this fact, however, is usually omitted.
Ezra was also Judge of Probate, thanks to a fragmentary law course taken in days when a fond mother had pinched and saved that her only boy might “make his mark.” Thirdly, he was the owner of the best mill on the Pequotuck. A mill that, in spite of the sale of flour and meal at the village store, kept its wheel going five days out of seven during nine months of the year, sawing wood when no one wished flour, and turning out middlings for the cattle when the stacks grew low. So swift was the river that ice very seldom silenced the song the old wheel hummed as it worked.
Lastly, by wise drainage the deacon had turned a dozen acres of protected meadow-land, heretofore regarded as next to useless, into one of the thriftiest fruit farms in southern New England.
All these things made Ezra’s daughter Margaret of special importance in many eyes besides his own, and it was for her sake that he resolved to have a man to hook up the team for her, when he was busy in the mill or away in the village, and do a thousand and one little errands that the sturdier daughters of his neighbours accomplished for themselves.
The Mill House, as it was called, stood on a hill between the Pequotuck and a little brook that, curving, joined the river below the dam. It was a placid-looking white house of a style of architecture that might be called New England Restored. It had been Colonial, but a modern bay-window, a piazza, and a lean-to in the rear had hybridized it; yet it still possessed a dignity never seen in the rural interpretations of the Queen Anne villa.
This particular house had a very attractive outlook. Raised well above them, it was bounded on the western side by the river and the mill-pond that always held the sunset reflections until the twilight absorbed them, while the old red mill with its moss-mottled roof focussed the view. Toward the north and east the meadows ran slantwise up a hillside, where, dotted here and there like grazing sheep, you could see the stones of the burying-ground, where the inhabitants of the glen took their final rest, as if their friends had left them as near heaven as possible, and safe from the floods that used once to sweep the valley. To the south the road ran tolerably straight for three miles down to Glen Village itself.
The interior of the house differed but slightly from others of its class, and that difference consisted in the greater genuineness of its fittings. Evidently the woman who presided over it appreciated relative values, for the sitting-room had glowing crimson curtains and a fire of logs in place of the usual “air-tight,” while in one corner, in the location usually chosen for the inevitable asthmatic parlour organ, stood an upright piano. On the table was a comfortable litter of books and papers.
By the window, looking down the road, stood Margaret Tolford. At the first glance there was nothing striking about her personality. Medium in height and colouring, her slight frame was wrapped in a soft white shawl that gave her a fragile air. At a second glance the deep gray eyes, that looked from under a brow narrowed by a quantity of smooth, coal-black hair, were magnetic in their intelligent wonder. Her eyes said, “There is much that I would understand, but I cannot;” whereas a shallower nature would have thought, “I am misunderstood!”
The wind whistled in the chimney, and the pud, pud, of a heavy flatiron came from the kitchen, with snatches of inharmonious song, as the thick-lipped Polack who was the “help” pummelled the towels and folded them at angles that would have distracted a mathematician. In fact, this very Polack was one of Margaret’s lesser problems, a sort of necessary evil who, in summer, bareheaded and barefooted, pervaded the premises, but having with her gay neckerchief a certain sort of picturesque fitness, which, when brought nearer, booted and confined to the winter kitchen, became an eyesore. Other farmers’ daughters did the cooking and the lighter work, and only had a woman to help with the washing.
Margaret had never done manual labour; her mother, dead now two years, had stood between this only child and all hardship, and coaxed the Deacon to send her to a collegiate school when her playdays were over. In the summer holidays she was petted and caressed and kept from soiling her hands, and when at eighteen she was coming home for good to mingle as an equal with her parents and learn her part in life, her mother died, and her father closed the one tender spot in his stern heart around his daughter. So she lived shut up within herself, craving a more intellectual companionship than the neighbourhood furnished, and starving unconsciously for demonstrative affection.
Tolford was a silent sort of man, who had been so thoroughly understood by his wife that she seemed to know his unvoiced wishes. Because he showed so few signs of an affection that would have won a hearty response from Margaret, he failed to comprehend the difference between a deeply reserved nature and physical weakness, to which cause he laid her abstraction. His love for her, therefore, took the schooltime form of shielding her from work. He liked to hear her play hymns on Sunday evenings, and was very proud to have her train the children of the Sunday School in their carols, but it never occurred to him to ask her advice in any of his plans, or expect aid from her. She stood apart, not understanding the love her mother had drawn from the stern, lonely man, and while he excused her reserve, and told the neighbours she was delicate and peaky, her only ailment lay in lack of motive.
It grew dark, and points of light appeared here and there in the landscape; an icy slip of a moon pierced the driving clouds. Margaret drew the curtains and sat down by the fire, its light sending a glow to her usually colourless face. A brisk, though heavy, footstep came along the entry from the kitchen, and Ezra Tolford opened the door, and, stopping a moment to adjust his eyes to the fitful light, went toward the fire, rubbing his hands. Margaret immediately arose and, pushing a rocking-chair towards him, prepared to light the lamp.
“Never mind that now, daughter,” he said; “sit down, I want to talk a bit. You know I said I’d get a hired man to ‘piece out’ with the work? Well, he’s come!”
The Deacon was, in reality, fairly well educated, but since his wife’s death (she had kept him to her standard, for she had been a schoolmistress) his English had relapsed into localisms, and, besides this, at the present moment he seemed ill at ease. Margaret merely understood the announcement as a roundabout question as to whether any accommodations were prepared for the man, and said: “The shed bedroom is just as Hans Schmidt left it last fall; I suppose a bed could be made up now, and Zella can clean the room to-morrow, but it will be very cold unless you give him a stove.”
“Well—er—you see,” said the Deacon, “I don’t suppose that room will do,—em!—hem! You see in the beginning he is to live with me without wages, and—” here the Deacon came to an embarrassed standstill, and Margaret broke in,—“Without wages! If he is as poor as that, he will scarcely object to the shed room without a fire for the night!” She did not say this because she was at all mean or hard-hearted, but from her experience of the servant question, any one who was willing to work for nothing must either be utterly worthless or bereft of reason.
“Not at all, not at all, daughter! You see, the man is not a common workman, but may buy the Hill Farm some day as a home for his sister, and wants me to teach him to grow small fruits, and learn the way of things here while he gets it to rights. I’ve contracted with him for a year—” and as Margaret did not reply, he continued, “You know Peter Svenson, the carpenter, who went home to Denmark last summer to see his folks? Well, he brought this young man back with him. Peter knows all about him, and says he is perfectly honest and speaks good English, but is close-mouthed, and doesn’t like to talk of his affairs, because his family used to be well fixed, but now they are all dead but one sister. He has a few thousand dollars and is going to make a home and bring her over in a year.
“Peter says he can play a fiddle, but isn’t used to hard work, and advised me not to pay him money, but to offer to show him how I work my farm and give him his board for his services.” Then the Deacon continued, giving the account of Gurth that the garrulous carpenter had pieced together to cover his lack of real knowledge. As Margaret still said nothing, he added:—
“Now I think the attic east room might be straightened up,—it won’t take long, and it can be bettered to-morrow.”
Instantly Margaret was divided between extreme wonderment at this strange arrangement on her father’s part, and fierce resentment at the intrusion of a stranger in the house,—a man who was and was not a servant, who must necessarily eat with them, who would not perhaps leave the room when the meal was finished.
If Margaret had a decided eccentricity, it was her positive resentment of male society, and she bore the reputation of being proud, because, when the village swains drove up in their newly washed buggies with bows of ribbon tied to the whip handles, and with self-satisfied glances asked her to take a drive, the usual rural compliment, she invariably declined, and their irate mothers settled that she either must be in a decline, experiencing religion, or else, woful thought, “engaged to some fellow Northampton way,” where she had been to school.
The truth was that she had, through a wide range of reading and no experience, built up a well-nigh impossible ideal, half mediæval heroism, half modern, intellectual refinement, that was irreconcilable with the type of men with whom she came in contact.
Margaret was thoroughly accustomed to her father’s silent mood and considered him by far (as he was) the best-informed man she knew. He was also fond of reading, not only subscribed to a daily paper, but several weeklies and magazines, and always allowed her to buy any book she fancied, so that their winter evenings, when Margaret read aloud, were comfortably sociable, and sympathetic. It was no wonder, therefore, that she resented the presence of a stranger, and it was with rather a lowering brow that she followed her father to the kitchen.
Deacon Tolford went in first, and said abruptly, but in a tone that Margaret knew was meant to be cordial: “Daughter, this is Gurth Waldsen, who is going to help me out this year; we want to make him feel so much at home that he’ll settle in Glen Village. You’d better tell Zella to hurry supper; I guess we are both of us hungry.”
Margaret added some ordinary words of greeting before she looked at the figure who rose from the settle back of the stove and bowed, without offering to shake hands, as a native would have done. Then she raised her eyes and saw the tall, easy figure with the golden-tipped hair and beard, his dreamy gray eyes looking at her with a directness that was not curious, but almost as of pleading for mercy, while the mouse-coloured corduroy suit that Waldsen wore brought out the clearness of his skin in a degree that was almost startling.
“I hope that I put you not to great trouble,” he said in his soft baritone. “If you will tell me where I may place my things, I can arrange all myself.” The English was musical, and doubly so from the slight hesitation and accent.
What passed through Margaret’s brain she never clearly realized, but she heard her voice as from a long distance asking him to follow her upstairs, and found herself lighting a lamp, and leading the way.
It was strange that she had never noticed before how dreary the attic was. She merely indicated the room, saying that he might leave his things there, and to-morrow he could bring up firewood, while to-night she would give him an extra supply of bedding. As she left, Gurth looked after her and at the bare room, and shivered, but the room seemed less cold to him than the woman. There was no reason that he should expect her to be cordial; doubtless she would have preferred a field hand to whom she need not speak.
He realized that his very disappointment grew from the lack of proper comprehension of his present position. “Oh, Andrea! Andrea! for one sight of her sweet, sympathetic face, one touch only!” A harsh, clanging bell from below waked him to the fact that if he wanted water to wash his hands, he must bring it up himself; he looked at them dubiously, smoothed his hair, flipped off his clothes with his handkerchief, and went down.
He hoped that he might be allowed to eat his meals in the kitchen; it would indicate his position more clearly, and he should be less lonely than with constrained companionship. This was not to be. As he passed the dining room door, he saw a table laid for three, at which Ezra Tolford was already sitting, wrapped in a gaily figured dressing-gown, and collarless, as was his habit when either at ease or at work. He was reading a paper which was propped against a pitcher, and he barely raised his eyes as he asked Gurth to be seated.
Margaret came in with a coffee-pot and a plate of biscuits. She had thrown off her shawl, and her crimson cashmere waist accentuated the depth of her eyes. Gurth unconsciously arose and drew out her chair, waited until she was seated, and pushed it in again. It was a very simple and ordinary act of courtesy, and done as a matter of course without the slightest manner of conferring a favour. Margaret coloured at this hitherto unknown civility, but said “Thank you” as if she were quite accustomed to it, while the Deacon did not notice it at all.
The meal began in silence, but the Deacon finished his paper with the first cup of coffee, and began to discuss the affairs of the farm in a businesslike manner. The ice-cutting must begin to-morrow, it was quite clear, for the last snowstorm had been dry and had drifted away from the pond.
Had Waldsen ever cut ice? No! Well, he could superintend the weighing of it, then. Could he milk? No! The hay must be transferred from the left side of the great barn to the right, as the supports were giving way, and Peter Svenson, the carpenter, must come and straighten them, as well as do some tinkering at the mill. Squire Black at the village needed two tons of hay, so that much could be carted in next morning.
Waldsen fortunately was thoroughly familiar with horses, and was a good deal of a carpenter, having always had a fancy for such work, and, when a boy, he had for amusement built an arbour for his mother in the garden of her country-house. He was able to volunteer to repair the barn and mill, if the Deacon had the necessary tools. The Deacon was too keen to show his surprise, but accepted the offer, and said it would come handy to have some patching up done before it came time to clear the land. He could manage the cows and the mill, if Gurth took charge of the horses and the chores.
The Deacon, having finished his meal, shook the crumbs from a fold of the tablecloth of which he made a sort of apron in his lap, and left the table. Margaret followed him, and Waldsen, hesitating a moment, went to the back entry and began to collect his possessions, taking his violin case and a small box first. When he returned for his trunk, the Deacon appeared, and, as a matter of course, helped him carry it upstairs. The trunk was very heavy, being half full of books. Then the two men went out to feed the horses; the sharp, dry snow blew in like powdered flint when they opened the door, and made rainbows about the lantern as they went down the path.
After the table was clear, Margaret took up the paper, read for a few moments, then dropped it suddenly and went into the kitchen. Zella, who was knitting a skirt of scarlet yarn, seemed very sulky and angry when Margaret bade her take some wood to the attic bedroom. “I no carry for hired man,” was her rejoinder. “You will take the wood up to-night,” said Margaret, in the quiet, decided tone that was habitual to her; “to-morrow he will carry it himself.” In a short time a fire was started in the old, open-fronted wood stove, that sent a welcome glow across the long, low room with its deeply recessed dormer windows. The furniture consisted of an old-fashioned four-posted bedstead and some spindle-backed chairs, discarded long ago from the lower rooms, an old chest of drawers and a table, while a row of wooden pegs behind the chimney did duty as a closet.
Going to the adjoining lumber room, Margaret pulled open a long trunk and took a chintz quilt, some curtains that had originally belonged to the old bed, and three or four carpet rugs. These she dragged into the attic, and then brought from a downstairs room a large rocking-chair, covered with Turkey red, and a blue china bowl and pitcher. The last man who had slept in the attic had washed at the pump. In a few minutes the bare room looked quite habitable, and Margaret returned to her newspaper.
In perhaps half an hour her father returned, and she heard Waldsen’s steps going up the creaking back stairs.
“Well, daughter, quite a figure of a man, isn’t he? I know you don’t like to have men folks about, but you see this arrangement will advantage me greatly. If I can sell him the Hill Farm, it will be so much clear gain, besides being a bargain for him, for it’s running down and needs lots of tinkering. And if we get a good neighbour there, it won’t be so lonesome for you when I go over town. I can arrange with him for half-time work in the growing season, so he can get his fruit running. I’ll sell that place for three thousand dollars—and three thousand dollars in hand,—why, Margaret, you might go to Europe next summer with Judge Martin’s folks! He told me yesterday they expected to take a tour, and that if I’d let you go, you’d be good company for Elizabeth. What do you say to that, daughter?”
Going to him and sitting on the arm of his chair, she hid her face on his shoulder, a childish habit of hers, and said: “Dear old dad, I should want you to go with me, and then, besides, it is all so uncertain. This man may not really want to buy a place, or he may have no money, or—or, a great many things may not be true!”
“No, no, child! the man is all right, he wants to have a home of his own by next Christmas. There is some reason why his sister cannot come until then. I like to keep you with me, but my little girl is too lonely; she must see more company, and if she’s too wise and too proud for the folks about home, why, this place isn’t the whole world.”
Meanwhile Waldsen was sitting on his trunk in the attic room in an attitude of dejection. Then, as the fire flickered, he saw the change that had been wrought. Not great in fact, but in the womanly touch, and he was comforted. Taking from his pocket the little case containing Andrea’s portrait, he placed it on the chest of drawers, and, after closing the door, took out his violin.
Margaret and her father were playing their nightly game of backgammon when she started, dropped her checkers with a rattle, and grasped his arm. The Deacon looked up in surprise, and then, as he heard a far-away strain of music that seemed to come from the chimney, said, “Don’t be scared, daughter, it’s only the young man playing his fiddle!” But somehow neither father nor daughter cared to continue their game, and a moment later Margaret opened the door of the sitting-room and one at the foot of the stairs, and stood there listening, in spite of the cold air that swept down. Accustomed at most to the trick playing of travelling concert troupes, who visited the next town, this expressive legato music was a revelation to Margaret, and stirred her silent nature to untested depths. The first theme was pleading and wholly unknown to her, but presently the air changed to the song she had taught the children during the last Christmas season; through it she heard two voices singing,—the violin and the man.
“Brightly shone the moon that night
Though the frost was cruel
When a poor man came in sight
Gathering winter fuel.
“Hither page and stand by me
If thou know’st it telling
Yonder peasant, who is he
Where and what his dwelling?”
“Hymn tunes,” said Deacon Tolford, pursing his mouth in a satisfied way. “I forgot to ask him if he is a church member. Perhaps he might help out at the Endeavour Concert next month.” But Margaret, shaking her head impatiently, stood with her finger on her lips.
The Tolford household was more cheerful after Waldsen’s coming. Not that he intruded upon the Deacon and his daughter, merely talking a few minutes after meals, perhaps, and then going to his attic, but little by little the mutual strangeness wore off. Though Waldsen fulfilled to the letter the work that he had engaged to do, he found that it was impossible to keep up the illusion of being a mere labourer, and reconciled himself from the fact that in other farming families the steady male “help” stands placed on a different footing with the household, from the transient field hands who come and go with the crops and seasons. Farmer Elliott’s “help” was his brother-in-law, and Farmer Bryce’s, his wife’s cousin.
The Deacon looked at the whole matter from a commercial standpoint. Here was a likely young man who, though he was unused to many kinds of manual labour, eked out his lack of knowledge with extreme willingness, and asked no wages other than instruction. At the same time he was a prospective purchaser of a house that had been difficult to sell. That was the beginning and end of the matter. That Waldsen was rarely intelligent, and added to their home life, was also an advantage, but secondary.
Every day Gurth held Margaret’s chair, and placed it at the table; there was no longer any restraint between them. He saw in her a sweet, womanly nature, whose best part was evidently held in check, owing to the peculiarities of the community in which she lived, which he could not fathom in spite of freedom from all prejudice. He admitted the beauty of purpose with which she clung to her ideals, but could not help contrasting her reserve with Andrea’s spontaneous cheerfulness, her love of everything that grew from the ground and every bird that flew, while Margaret seemed but half conscious of the natural beauties that surrounded her.
Waldsen was most contented when employed at the mill. Birds that braved the winter gathered about it for scraps of grain. Nuthatches pried under the mossy shingles, meadow-larks stalked solemnly in the stubbly grass for sweepings, and robins fed upon the berries of many bushes that hedged the pond. Wild geese rested there, and for days at a time flocks of ducks would pass and pause for shelter, and owls roosted nightly in the mill loft, making hearty meals of mice. Many a time he saw the quail coveys far up on the hill running about among the gravestones, and he put a sheaf of rye there for them, and it waved its shadowy pinions above the snow, as if saying to the silent community, “I, too, have slept in the ground; have courage!”
Another sheaf he fastened over the mill door, and, seeing it, the Deacon lectured him upon the folly of gathering a lot of birds that must be shot or scared away in berry season, saying, “It’s all very well now, but if you encourage them, where will the profit be when all the biggest berries are bird marked?”
Gurth felt like answering, “I will let the birds have them all, so long as they come to me.” But then, where would be the bread for Andrea? He felt beauty so keenly that he could not bear to harness Nature and drive her like a cart-horse for his profit. His needs and his desires were almost irreconcilable, and the consciousness of it well-nigh appalled him. He could not change his temperament in the least degree; even his experiment of passing for a labourer was partly frustrated; he might possibly have masqueraded as a wandering musician, but he began to feel his incapacity for material toil.
Margaret all this time lived in a waking dream; unknown to herself, all the pent-up forces of her affection had crystallized about this stranger. His natural courtesy seemed to her a gentle personal tribute; the mystery he allowed to surround him (being wholly unconscious of the version of his story the carpenter had told), and his poetic personality, made him seem like some one she had met in an old romance. Then the music, too, for often now in the evening he brought his violin and accompanied her when she sang or played, giving her new understanding, while he corrected the hardness of her method so tactfully that she did not realize it. Lending her new music, substituting the “Songs without Words” for the hackneyed “Airs with Variations,” and teaching her German and Danish ballads, that lent themselves to her rich contralto voice.
Margaret became a different creature, and rare glints of red touched her cheeks. The Deacon accounted for this arousing in the pleasure she anticipated in going abroad if the Hill Farm was sold. He was so thoroughly convinced of her indifference to men, that he was blind to the awakening of her heart.
Margaret noticed with pleasure the various details and changes in Waldsen’s attic, where she went occasionally to dust, and thought that they betokened contentment. The room was no longer bare, festoons of ground pine hung from the rafters and canopied the windows, a half-dozen home-made cages filled the dormer nearest the stove, and sheltered a collection of wild birds rescued from cold and hunger, which chirped from them merrily, while a little screech-owl blinked sleepily from a perch in the corner. Books lay on the table and filled a rough shelf under the eaves. Writing implements and paper also lay about, and traces of bold, irregular characters were on the big sheets of blotting-paper.
It was Andrea’s picture, however, that interested Margaret more than anything. She looked at it day after day, trying to trace a resemblance to Gurth. One day she kissed the lips, and then, suddenly remembering that he might also do this, fled precipitately to her room, and, locking the door, stayed until dark, when she went down to supper with her face flushed, and a nervous air. So nervous was she that her hand trembled until she almost dropped the cup that she was passing to her father. Gurth grasped it, and thus their hands met for the first time.