“WAS—WAS MY PAPA HERE THEN?”
Two years of favourable weather and good fortune with her livestock saw the money Elizabeth had invested in hogs doubled and trebled, and later, when the Johnson land was again offered for sale, she was able to buy it for cash and have the place well stocked after it was done. Silas Chamberlain, who watched Elizabeth with the same fatherly interest he had felt when her child was born, and who glowed with secret pride at the way in which she had won her way back into the country society about them, came in often and offered his measure of good-natured praise. He had prophesied the first time she had cooked for harvest hands that she would become a famous cook, but he had not expected to find her a famous farmer. What was still more astonishing to the old man was that she had become noted in quite other ways. The move she had made in going to meeting the first Sunday after John’s departure, and Hepsie’s explanation of it, had worked to her advantage in reestablishing her in the community as one of its factors, and opened to her the opportunity to wield the influence which Luther had pointed out to her the best educated woman in a community should wield. She took a class in the little Sunday school at the schoolhouse, not so much because she was an enthusiastic churchwoman as because it was the place where contact could be had. Elizabeth belonged to no church, but Elizabeth could turn the conversation of the church members, among whom she mingled, from gossip to better things, and there was not a quilting bee nor an aid society meeting in the country around to which she was not invited, and which she did not raise to a higher standard by her presence.
The snubs which the neighbour women were at first anxious to deliver fell flat in the quiet unconsciousness with which they were met. Elizabeth felt that much of the treatment she received was given in righteous indignation, and pursued the policy when possible to do so of not seeing it, and when it must be met to meet it with perfect good humour. She kept her credit good among the men with whom she bartered for young stock, and there began to creep in a better feeling for her within the first six months after she assumed the care of the farm and the problematical position of a “grass widow” in the neighborhood. Doctor Morgan, Hepsie, Jake, and Luther were splendid assets in the race with public feeling, and Silas saw his young neighbour’s affairs straighten out with chuckles of delight. He watched her manœuvre with her business deals and saw the cool-headedness of them with growing enthusiasm. He passed Nathan on his way to the field one spring morning and noticed that Nathan was using a seeder from the Hunter farm. It was bright with a coat of freshly dried paint.
“That’s what she borrowed my brushes for last week,” he exclaimed to Nathan. “Ever see anything like ’er?” he asked admiringly. “Takes care of everything. Did you ever see th’ likes of them hogs? She’s made more money sellin’ that land an’ buyin’ of it back ’n most of us old heads ’ll make in five year. Everything she touches seems t’ have a wad stuck under it somewheres.”
Elizabeth was more than merely successful in money matters; she was a reorganized woman from the standpoint of health also. She was no more the weary, harassed woman who had churned, baked, and cooked for shellers, and had so nearly found an early grave. The satisfaction of working unrestrained, of resting when nature and woman’s constitution demanded, and the whole matter of living without fear, had given her a sound and healthy body and a mind broader and less liable to emotional bias. The principle which she had demanded from her husband in their last conversation she put into practice. Hepsie ruled the house very much as if it were her own. Elizabeth knew from experience the dreariness of housework where all individuality is denied the worker. Hepsie came and went as the exigencies of the work permitted, and there was always a horse provided for her journeys away from the place; in fact, Hepsie was much more free than her mistress had been in her first three years in the same house. Elizabeth demanded good service, but she gave good service also, and from being a good joke to work for the grass widow, it came to be recognized that the Hunter farm was a good place to live, and when the spring came around the men who had worked there the season before always presented themselves for fresh hiring.
Two years more passed, and Master Jack Hunter was seven years old. On his seventh birthday his mother dressed him and herself carefully and rode over to the lonely graveyard. She did not go flower-laden. Rather, she went as was her custom, to spend an hour with the quiet dead in silent thought. Hugh Noland’s sacrifice had not been in vain. The life he had laid down had, whatever its mistakes and weaknesses, been a happy one to himself, and had carried a ray of cheer to all with whom it had come in contact, while his death had pointed toward an ideal of purity, in spite of failures. That brief period during which Elizabeth had been compelled to live a double life for his sake had held many lessons, and had forever weaned her from duplicity of any sort. Those special hours—the hours spent beside Hugh Noland’s grave—were spent in searching self-inquiry, in casting up accounts, in measuring herself against the principles with which she struggled. People had gone out of her wrestlings; principles remained. Here Elizabeth meditated upon the fact that because the neighbourhood sentiment and discussion centred around their home, she and John Hunter had missed a golden opportunity in not having become a force for good during those first years of their marriage.
The hour spent beside Hugh’s grave was her sacrament. There she went to renew her faith in her own powers, which Hugh’s interest and estimates had first taught her to recognize; there she went to renew her vows of higher living, and there to contemplate the freedom which Hugh Noland had given her. But for the land and stock which gave her an independent income she would have been as tearful, worn, and despondent as many of the women about her. Her heart was very tender toward Hugh as she sat beside his grave to-day. She held his letter—the only one he had ever written, her—in her hands. As she read it over, part of its last sentence, “and will, I hope, help toward emancipating you from care,” struck her attention, and her eyes filled with tears.
“What is it, mamma? What hurts?” Jack asked, always quick to respond to his mother’s moods.
“Nothing, dear, but Uncle Hugh’s letter. He wrote it just before he died. He was very kind to me,” she said, patting the face thrust up for a kiss.
“Was—was my papa here then?” the child asked, curious about the life he could not remember, and trying to relate things as he heard of them in their true relation to the father who was a mysterious personage and therefore interesting.