In this principle William had the full paternal support and Mauney once more witnessed the complete success of his father’s will. The plans had been made out carefully, beforehand. It was not many days until the bride was established with her husband on the McBratney farm and only three were left at the old homestead. Mrs. William Bard was a brainless, pretty girl of small physique, with a novel love of chickens, and of a screeching gramophone whose music could be heard each evening, when the wind was in the east. Occasionally she accompanied her husband on short evening visits to her father-in-law’s, and quite won Bard’s affections by sitting on his knee and lighting matches for him on the sole of her shoe. Toward her brother-in-law she adopted a surprising attitude of coquetry, that displeased her husband, and caused Mauney a degree of nausea. It was soon evident that she was not born to be the wife of William Bard. Beneath her empty hilarity there was to be gradually discerned a growing girlish discontent with things. Her attentions to her father-in-law grew less spontaneous and her flirting manner with Mauney came to have suggestions of pathetic appeal. Mauney felt that he could read beneath the surface the awakening to consciousness of one, who, having been bought for a purpose, would insist on demanding her price, for, vapid though her mind was, she possessed a sharp sense of justice in matters affecting herself. In the following summer William purchased a motor-car under pressure, and began taking his wife for evening drives, much to the elder Bard’s outspoken disapproval.
“There’s too much gadding about, Bill,” he said one day as they talked matters over. “You’ve got to cut out this here flyin’ all over the country.”
“What am I goin’ to do?” demanded William, impatiently. “You know I didn’t want to marry her, but you advised me to. So now, you can put up with what I got, see!”
Life offered no solution for Mauney’s inner troubles. If there had been one cheerful event to annul the interminable gloom of these years of war, or one friend to brighten the unlifting fogs that settled down upon him like the vapors of Lantern Marsh itself, he might have borne his discontent with greater patience. But the raw wound in his nature, made by no sudden sword-gash, but worn there by the attrition of dreary seasons, grew more unbearable. Every hope that had dared to rise had been forced down as by a vigilant, hateful fate. Every finer instinct had met its counterpart of external opposition. Every aspiration that trembled gently upward had been tramped by heavy feet, as violets in the path of horses. He had lived with his newspaper. He had watched the verdure of the springtimes fade beneath the dry suns of autumn, the green apples of his orchard redden and fall to earth, the birds of the swamp wing away to their southern homes, when ice bound the Lantern Marsh in its grip and biting winds hurled the snow in deep banks about the home. And as unchanging as the seasons he had watched his father’s character deepen to its fixed qualities of greed and selfishness.
But an end was in sight.
Through the hot summer of endless labor in the fields, and of endless mind gropings, came vague breezes that touched his cheeks with promise of liberty. They breathed a new hope that he scarcely dared to heed, for these mysterious breezes, as if they were the breath of fearless gentle angels, brought indistinguishable whisperings, to which he more and more bent his ear. Pausing in the field to lean momentarily on the handle of his hay-fork his eye turned quickly as if to catch an elusive presence that he felt nearby. But there was no one. He was quite alone save for his father and the others casting up great cocks of hay upon the wagon. But as he sat of an evening on the front steps of the farmhouse this haunting presence would come again, eluding his gaze that sought it among the orchard trees, heavy with their apple harvest. In his room at night he felt it directly behind him, and came to realize at length that it was the man he wanted to be, the prefigurement of a new Mauney Bard.
And the wisps of angel breath, with their sybilline intonations, began to be articulate, telling of a world of promise for the valiant, of knowledge, of friends, of hope.
He had waited for life to help him, but it offered no help. With spirits partially crushed by the mundane atmosphere and the endlessly sordid philosophy of his detested home he had waited in dejection. But, in the summer of 1916, recognizing at length that no power existed to help him but himself, he openly rebelled. One day he went to his father after dinner, as the latter smoked idly in the kitchen, chatting with the hired woman. Mauney was finally beside himself.
“Look here,” he said without introduction, “I’m just about through with you and Lantern Marsh. Here I’ve been cooped up for years, just simply staying because there was nothing else to do. I want an education and, by heavens, I’m going to have it. I think you ought to give me enough to go to college. But if you won’t, I’m going anyway.”