And, as was often the case, Manly’s words came out like 136 guiding and warning flashes. The future could only be made safe by the present; the past––well! Northrup would not dwell upon that. He would keep the compact with himself.
He went boldly to the yellow house when the mood seized him. His first encounters with Mary-Clare, after that night at the inn when he had watched her sleeping, had reassured him.
“She was not awake!” he concluded. The belief made it possible for him to act with assurance.
Peter and Polly preserved a discreet silence concerning affairs in the Forest. “You never can tell when a favouring wind will right things again,” Polly remarked. She cared more for Mary-Clare than anything else.
“Or upset ’em,” Peter added. He had his mind fixed upon Maclin.
“Well, brother, sailing safe, or struggling in the water, it won’t help matters to stir up the mud.”
“No; and just having Brace hanging around like a threat is something. I allas did hold to them referendum and recall notions. Once a feller knows he ain’t the only shirt in the laundry, he keeps decenter. So long as Maclin scents Brace, he keeps to his holdings. Did yer hear how he’s cleaning up the Cosey Bar? He thinks maybe he’s going to be attacked from that quarter. Then, again, he’s been offering work to the men around here––and he’s letting out that he never understood our side of things rightly and that he’s listening to Larry––get that, Polly?––listening to Larry and letting him make the folks on the Point get on to the fact that he’s their friend. Gosh! Maclin their friend.”
And Mary-Clare all this time mystified her friends and her foes. She had foes. Men, and women, too, who looked askance at her. The less they knew, the more they had to invent. The proprieties of the Forest were being outraged. The women who envied Mary-Clare her daring fell upon her first. From their own misery and disillusionment, they sought to defend their position; create an atmosphere of 137 virtue around their barren lives, by attacking the woman who refused to be a martyr.
“You can’t tell me,” said a downtrodden wife of one of Maclin’s men, “that she turned her husband out of doors after wheedling him out of all he should have had from his father, unless she meant to leave the door open for another! A woman only acts as she has for some man.”
The women, the happy ones, drove down upon Mary-Clare from another quarter. The happy women are always first to lay down the laws for the unhappy ones. Not knowing, they are irresponsible. The men of the Forest did some laughing and side talking, but on the whole they denounced Mary-Clare because she was a menace to the Established Code.