He turned, with his hand on the latch, to cast a dubious look back at the girl.
“It ’pears t’ me you ain’t cut out right for the second Mis’ Jarvis,” he said. “She’d ought b’ rights t’ be a big, upstandin’ female, with—with red hair.”
He shut the door hastily behind him.
VI
It is a well-worn, yet none the less true saying that every human life is a chain of causes and effects; each effect a cause, and each cause an effect, stretching back to an unimagined and unimaginable First Cause; and on and on into endless, undreamed of vistas of the future. Yet the realization of this vague, yet tremendous fact comes but seldom even to the thoughtful mind, so busy are we forging link on link of the chain which binds us alike to past and future.
Barbara Preston, stopping aimlessly to read the notice of an auction of farm stock and household furniture advertised to take place in a neighboring township, could not guess that the trivial impulse that stayed her feet by the big chestnut at the roadside linked itself with events already slowly shaping in her future. The notice was printed in bold red letters on a buff background, calculated to seize and hold the eye of the passerby, and set forth the fact that one Thomas Bellows, Auctioneer, would, on the twenty-fifth day of April, sell to the highest bidder, on the premises of the owner, four milch cows, three farm horses, and sixty-four sheep. Also one young carriage horse, well broken, sound, kind, and willing. Other items relating to household gear and poultry followed, set down in due order of their relative importance.
The red letters on the buff ground passed into Barbara’s eyes—as indeed they were purposefully intended—and impressed themselves on her memory. She considered them half angrily as she pursued her way to the post-office, picturing to herself the day when Thomas Bellows or another, would noisily exploit the contents of her own well-loved home. There was little there to bring money, and the mortgage covered stock and furniture as well as the land itself. She had learned this from a curt letter addressed to her by Stephen Jarvis in reply to questions of her own as concisely put.
Apart from her half-dazed recollection of the rainy afternoon a week since, their relations as ruthless creditor and hopeless debtor appeared to be unchanged. During the interval she had gone doggedly about her self-imposed labors, rising in the faint light of dawn to set strawberry and lettuce plants, wintered carefully on the south side of the big barns, with the vague unreasoning hope that somehow or other she might be permitted to reap the fruit of her toil. Between times she was casting about for another home and other modes of livelihood for herself and Jimmy. It would be difficult, if not impossible, she was told, to secure a position to teach. Only normal-school graduates stood any chance of preferment, and there appeared to be no prospect of a vacancy of any kind before fall. To become a dressmaker’s apprentice was possible; but the woman who provided the opportunity offered instruction for the first six months in lieu of wages. And obviously one could not live on information alone, however valuable. Household servants were always in brisk demand, she had been reminded; but pride of race wrestled with the untold humiliation of such a lot. Besides, there was Jimmy. Her heart grew faint at the thought of the loving, carefully-shielded child in the cold shelter of an “asylum” or the bound property of some shrewd farmer, an investment involving a grudging expenditure of coarse food and scanty, insufficient clothing and forced to yield an ever-increasing increment of labor. Oh, life was cruel at its best. Her flesh and her soul cried out at the thought of what its worst might be. If there was a way of escape, why not accept it?