But these, after all, were moods, and there had been other and real cause of discontent. First, the railway gods had again broken faith with the settlers; and every cent that Carter could raise or borrow had been required to meet rents on his timber concessions. Though not in actual want, they had had to trim expenses, reduce their living to the settler scale. Having all of a pretty woman's natural love of finery, Helen could see no way of restoring her depleted wardrobe. Moreover, there was the choring, washing, milking of cows, feeding of calves, inseparable from pioneer settler life—a burden that was not a whit the less toilsome because self-assumed.
Carter would have spared her all that—was, indeed, angry when, coming in late one night, he caught her toiling at the milking. "I didn't know it was so hard," she pleaded, holding up her swollen wrists. "But I couldn't bear to see you come in, tired, at dark, then go on with the chores while I sat in the house."
He had made her promise not to do it again. But she did, and his protests, vigorous at first, slackened, until, finally, the choring had come to be regarded as hers as a matter of course.
Even the climate was against her, conspiring against her peace of body if not of mind. The previous winter had been the bitterest in a score of years, temperatures ranging from forty below zero, with a yard of snow on the level, fifty-foot drifts in the bluffs, and hundred-mile winds to drive cold and snow through the thickest of log walls. For days she had sat in her furs by the red-hot stove, while the blizzard roared about the cabin, walling it in fleecy snows—sat listening to the agonized shout of wind-blown trees, the squeal of poplar brake, the smash of rent branches, the thunderous storm voice that was spaced only by distant crashes as the lords of the forest went down to stiff ends. North, south, east, west had veered these terrible winds, freighting always their inexhaustible snows. The trails were blown from earth's face; solitary blotch, their cabin rose like a reef from an ocean of whiteness; and they, castaways, were practically divorced for days, and sometimes weeks, from all communication with their kind. Hardly less terrible had been the calms, the vast frozen silences as of interplanetary space that followed the blizzard, ruling the snowy steppes. They filled her with a terrifying sense of the illimitable, those silences, vivid as though she, a lonely soul, were travelling through vast voids of time and space. She shrank under them, afraid.
Followed a mosquito year in a mosquito country. Fattened by the heavy snows, stagnant sloughs held water till late in the summer and so bred the pests by myriads of myriads. Of nights the tortured air whined of them. By day their cattle hung about the corrals, cropping the grass down to the dust, or if they did wander farther afield, came galloping madly back to the smudges. For two months any kind of travel had been impossible; clouds of the pests would settle on hands, face, neck quicker than one could wipe them off. Milking and choring had to be done under cover of a thick reek to an accompaniment of lashing tails, with frequent and irritating catastrophes in the way of overturned pails. The acrid odor of smoke clung to everything—hair, clothing, flesh; the cabin was little better than a smoke-house until the heat had mitigated the pests while adding its own discomforts.
It was a dull life enough for men whose tasks were broken by periodical trips to market; it was martyrdom for housefast women. Always around the shanty mourned the eternal winds of the plains. Wind! Wind! Wind in varying quantity, from a breeze to a blizzard, but always wind. Its melancholy dirge left a haunting in the eyes of men. Its ceaseless moan prepared many a plainswoman for the madhouse.
With bright hope at heart to gild the future, she might have endured both discomfort and drudgery, but the postponement of construction work on the branch line had killed immediate hope. With dismay she realized a certain coarsening of body and mind, a thickening of finger-joints, roughness of skin, an attenuation where milking had turned the plump flesh of her arms into gaunt muscle. And to her the thought of that far-off summer day recurred with increasing frequency—would this equilibration with environment end by leaving her peer to the scrawny, flat-chested women of the settlements? She who had excelled in the small arts—music, painting, modelling in wax and clay? Her past, in such seasons of depression, seemed now as that of some other girl—a girl who had worn pretty dresses and been admired and petted by father, brother, and friends. Of all her gifts, her voice, a sweet contralto, was only left her; and of late it had naturally attuned itself to her sadder moods. So she had felt her life shrink and grow narrow, until looking down the vista of frozen winters, baking summers, they seemed, those weary years, to draw to a dull, hard point, the wind-swept acre with its solitary grave. Conditions had certainly combined to produce in her a subconscious discontent that might develop into open revolt against her lot at the touch of obscure and apparently insignificant cause; they reinforced and made dangerous the irritation caused by his little gaucheries.
As aforesaid, her dark moods alternated with spasms of remorse—fits of melting tenderness in which she condemned herself for her secret criticism of him. Peeping through their bedroom window only the preceding night, the moon had caught her bending over his sleep. The tender light absorbed his tan, softened the strong features without taking from their mobility; deeply shading the hollows, it gave his whole face an air of clear-cut refinement. Its wonderful alchemy foreshadowed the possibilities of this life, lying so quiescent beneath her eyes. For a long hour she held the vigil, while thought threw flitting shadows athwart her face; then, stooping, she softly kissed him under cover of her clouding hair.
It was a momentous caress, registering as it did her acceptance of a lowered ideal, marking her realization of the friction which follows all marriages and is inevitable to such as hers. Yet it had not removed the cause; that remained. It is easier far to overlook a great sin than a daily gaucherie, to rise to vast calamity than to brook the petty irritations which mar and make life ugly. The cause remained, surely! To see her quiet and pensive at table this day, who would have dreamed that the morrow would see the thin edge of the wedge driven in between them?
"There's to be a picnic in the grove by Flynn's lake to-morrow, Nell," he said, as he rose from dinner. "Let's take a day off?"