CHAPTER VI.
The Iron Will.
“Good is a man’s death which destroys the evils of life.”—Publilius Synus.
Bard delayed two years before he began horse-breeding in earnest. By that time the war had become a fixture, with more promise of an endless continuance than an early peace, and as it was impossible to hire help for farm work, he grew weary of carrying on his arduous agricultural labor with only his two sons to assist him. Consequently he determined to put less soil under seed and to confine his attentions to horses, since the army would afford an apparently inexhaustible market for their purchase. The news of his new determination was received with gladness by William, who had begun to tire of his strenuous labors, and with indifference by Mauney, who, since his rejection at Lockwood, had remained at home, mechanically submitting to his fate, and caring little what turn events might take.
A month previously the casualty lists had contained the name of Snowball, who had been killed in action in France.
“Don’t seem natural,” Bard had admitted simply, “Poor old Snowball. If he hadn’t been such a fool he’d be right here to-day, same as the rest of us.”
But Mauney questioned whether the fate of their former servant was not indeed preferable to his own. In quiet moments—too quiet and too numerous for his liking—he secretly envied Snowball, for it seemed that a few months of death-rewarded struggle in France were infinitely easier than the drab years of Lantern Marsh promising no release. Long since he had forgotten his reception on returning from Lockwood—the jeers, the confident “I told you so” of his father, the stern promise of sterner treatment if he repeated the nonsense. The cause of his rejection by the army seemed unbelievably trivial, but on later consulting a civil oculist in Lockwood some kind of eye-trouble was discovered, with the result that Mauney adopted glasses. Even with this correction he was advised that he would not be able to qualify for general service abroad, and the prospect of entering home service in some dismal camp dissuaded him from further efforts to be accepted. By this time a few of the younger set in Beulah had enlisted, thereby establishing among their relatives a local cult of patriots who were never backward in snobbishly cutting others who had not gone. William was too thick-skinned to feel this, while Mauney was proud enough never to explain his very sufficient reason for remaining at home.
Then came rumors of conscription, the first feature of the war that promised to affect the Bard household. Bard himself was furious for he saw plainly that his elder son fell into the first group of unmarried men who would be called up. Mauney took a silent delight in the discomfiture of both. As the date approached for the new law to go into force he kept picturing the cataclysm of feelings that would be aroused, the unwilling departure of his husky brother and his father’s unavailing expostulation. It was the latter which really delighted Mauney, since he had come to regard his father’s will as the one stupendously efficient thing in life, never to be crossed or defeated. A great eagerness possessed him to see the law in force and to behold, just for once, with his own eyes, the spectacle of his father’s spiritual collapse. The time approached with much rebellious comment from within his own home and that of other farmers who had until now had few reminders of war except higher prices for all their products. At last the evening arrived, the last evening of freedom for all potential conscripts, and Mauney sat in the kitchen with his father, awaiting the return of his brother who had gone to Beulah apparently to make a closer survey of the impending situation. At a late hour, William returned.
“Well?” said Bard, eagerly rising as his son entered the kitchen, “What about it?”
“It’s all right,” William replied with a sly smile. “They won’t get me, Dad.”
He had married Evelyn Boyce.