And Billy promised. He would have promised anything, and having made a promise he knew he would keep it, whether it seemed impossible now or not.
Then the frail little form settled down close against him, and with the weariness of a hard day ended, the last light flickered and went out.
Three days later, when it was all over, and they had come back to the empty house, when Jean had cried herself to sleep and Billy could go out alone to think, Ruth Macdonald came. She had seen the announcement and had come at once, but when she reached the churchyard everyone had gone, so she came to the house and found Billy alone behind the mat of vines screening the little wooden porch. There was a hardness in his set face, the traces of a fierce battle going on
inside. He was still trying to overcome the hate that possessed him.
“It isn’t that she had to go,” he said, bitterly; “it’s the kind of life she had.”
Ruth didn’t say anything. She looked away for a while, then she looked back, and there was a compassion in her misty eyes that Billy had never hoped to receive again, since his mother had gone. And somehow the hardness toward his father and life in general began to melt. He leaned against the wooden rail with his face covered, and Ruth listened silently to the dryest, hardest sobs she had ever heard, listened until it wasn’t in her nature to wait any longer. For the hour he was only a broken-hearted boy and the mother instinct was strong in her. She bent over him as she would to comfort a suffering child, and ran her slim, supple hand through his hair. And because Billy couldn’t speak just then he covered the hand with his own and held it there to show his gratitude. Beyond that he was unmoved, but the girl was startled by a quick, hot rush through her young body. She wormed her hand loose and looked over the fields for a minute away from his stare of bewilderment. After that she was herself again. But long after Billy was asleep that night she lay awake, trying to smother in her pillow a torrent of hard, racking little sounds that would not be kept back.
CHAPTER VIII.
“We are so often ashamed of the earth—the soil of it, the sweat of it, the good common coarseness. To us in our fine raiment and soft manners it seems indelicate. Bring out your social remedies! They will fail, they will fail every one until each man has his feet somewhere upon the soil.”—David Grayson.
How pitifully the compass of our lives is played with by the most wanton little winds. When Billy finished college he did not have to grope through the indecision of finding his work; he knew he was a farmer. The conviction was verified one day when, rounding a bend in a drive through a pine-woods country, he felt his pulses bound at the sudden picture of a beautiful stretch of tilled land. It was in the first intoxicating days of spring when the promise of the year is likely to play tricks with our optimism, but the spring never elated him any more. With the breath of the first white thorn blossoms came the memory of another year when their perfume had blown in through the open window of the little Swamp Farm house where his mother waited; and a wonderful quiet possessed him; the old hardness had almost gone. On the day when he had fought his first hard battle with himself, and sobbed out the agony at last, the breaking up had started, and when his father turned to
the road after selling the farm and nailing up the empty house Billy felt a genuine pity for him. Jean had been sent back to school and would soon be ready to teach, but he regretted seriously the loss of a home for her. This was another pressing argument for getting a farm of his own.