Mason did not like to ask further questions about Barbara's family affairs. He could hardly bear to hear Mely canvass them in this unsympathetic way. But there was one more inquiry that he made about Tom.
"Does he drink?"
"Mighty leetle. I 'xpect he takes a drop ur two now an' then, jest fer company's sake when he's a-cavortin' 'roun' weth the boys. But I 'low he hain't got no rale hankerin' fer the critter, an' he's that fond of Barb'ry 'n' 'is mother, an' they're so sot on 'im, that he would n' noways like to git reg'lar drunk like. But he's always a-gittin' into a bad crowd, an' tryin' some deviltry'r nuther; out uv one scrape an' into t'other, kind-uh keerless like; head up an' never ketchin' sight 'v a stump tell he's fell over it, kerthump, head over heels. His uncle's been a-schoolin' 'im, an' lately he's gone 'n' put 'im weth Squire Blackman to learn to be a lawyer; but now he's up 'n' sent him home fer a bad bargain. Ut's no go't the law, an' he won't never stan' a farm, yeh know. Too high-sperrited."
Possessed of a share of Mely McCord's stock of information about Barbara's troubles, Hiram Mason saw that his resolution against calling on his pupil at her own house would have to go the way of most of his other resolutions on this subject. He set himself to find arguments against keeping this one, but he was perfectly aware, all the time, that his going to the Graysons' would not depend on reasons at all. He reflected, however, that Barbara's trouble was a new and unforeseen condition. Besides, his regulative resolutions had been so far strained already that they were not worth the keeping. It is often thus in our dealings with ourselves; we argue from defection to indulgence.
Mely McCord felt sure of having the master's company after school as far as she had to go on the road leading to the Graysons'. But he went another way to Pearson's, where he was boarding out the proportion due for three pupils. Mrs. Pearson had intermitted the usual diet of corn-dodgers, and had baked a skilletful of hot biscuits, in honor of the master; she was a little piqued that he should absorb them, as he did, in a perfectly heartless way, and she even apologized for them, asserting that they were not so good as usual, in the vain hope that the master would wake up and contradict her. As soon as the early supper was over Hiram left the house, without saying anything of his destination. He took a "short cut" across a small prairie, then through the woods, and across Butt's corn-field, until he came out on the road near the place at which he had several times helped Barbara over the fence. By her path through the meadow he reached the house just as the summer twilight was making the vault of the sky seem deeper and mellowing all the tones in the landscape. In that walk Mason's mind had completely changed front. Why should he try to maintain a fast-and-loose relation with Barbara? She was in need of his present sympathy and help. Impulses in his nature, the strength of which he had never suspected, were beating against the feeble barriers he had raised. Of what use was this battle, which might keep him miserable awhile longer, but which could end in but one way? As he walked through the narrow meadow path, in the middle of which the heavy overhanging heads of timothy grass, now ready for the scythe, touched one another, so that his legs brushed them aside at every step, he cast away the last tatters of his old resolves. The dams were down; the current might flow whither it listed. He would have it out with Barbara this very evening, and end the conflict.
It is by some such only half-rational process that the most important questions of conduct are usually decided—sometimes luckily; in other cases, to the blighting of the whole life. Is it not rather a poor fist of a world after all, this in which we live, where the most critical and irrevocable decisions must be made while the inexperienced youth is tossed with gusts of passion and blinded by traditional prejudices or captivated by specious theories? The selection of wives and vocations, the two capital elements in human happiness and success, is generally guided by nothing higher than the caprice of those whose judgments are in the gristle. Often the whole course of life of the strong, clear-seeing man yet to come is changed forever by a boy's whim. The old allegorists painted the young man as playing chess with the devil; but chess is a game of skill. What the young man plays is often a child's game of pitch and toss, cross or pile, heads or tails, for stakes of fearful magnitude. Luckily for Hiram, as you and I know from our present acquaintance with Barbara, nothing more disastrous than disappointment was likely to happen to him from his inability to keep his mortifying resolves. The abandonment of them had simplified his feelings and brought him present relief. When he knocked on the jamb of the open front door of the Grayson farm-house, and was invited to come in by the mother, there was a wholeness in his feelings and purposes to which he had been a stranger for weeks.
"Barb'ry," said Mrs. Grayson as she entered the kitchen, after giving Hiram a chair, "here's the master come to see you. I 'low he thought you mought be sick ur sumpin'."
Barbara sat perched on the loom-bench, with her back to the web she had been weaving. Just now she was peeling, quartering, and coring summer apples to dry for winter stores. She untied her apron and went from the kitchen into the sitting-room, where Mason was looking about, as was his habit, in a quizzical, half-amused way. He had noted the wide stone fire-place, the blackness of whose interior was hidden by the bushy asparagus tops which filled it, and the wooden clock on the unpainted mantel-piece, which had a print of the death-bed of George Washington impaneled in its door. A stairway winding up in one corner gave picturesqueness to the room; diagonally across from this was a high post bed; there were some shuck-bottom chairs, a splint-bottom rocking-chair, and a bureau with a looking-glass on top. The floor was covered with a new rag-carpet, and the comfortable, home-like sentiment excited in Hiram's mind by the general aspect of the room was enhanced by a hearth cricket, which, in one of the crevices of the uneven flag-stones, was already emitting little vibrant snatches like the black fiddler that he was, tuning up for an evening performance.
The sight of Mason dissipated for the moment the clouds that darkened Barbara's thoughts; she saw blue sky for the first time since Tom's first return. It was a pleased and untroubled face that met his gaze when she extended her hand to him.
"Howdy, Mr. Mason!"