“Iredale wants me to ride over to Owl Hoot to-day,” he said slowly. “We’re going to have an afternoon’s ‘chicken shoot.’ He says the prairie-chicken round his place are as thick as mosquitoes. He’s a lucky beggar. He seems to have the best of everything. I’ve scoured our farm all over and there’s not so much as a solitary grey owl to get a pot at. I hate the place.”
Prudence ceased working and faced him. She scornfully looked him up and down. At that moment she looked very picturesque with her black skirt turned up from the bottom and pinned about her waist, displaying an expanse of light-blue petticoat. Her blouse was a simple thing in spotless white cotton, with a black ribbon tied about her neck.
“I think you are very ungrateful, Hervey,” she said quietly. “I’ve only been home for a few months, and not a day has passed but what I’ve heard you grumble about something in connection with your home. If it isn’t the dulness it’s the work; if it isn’t the work it’s your position of dependence, or the distance from town, or the people around us. Now you grumble because of the shooting. What do you want? We’ve got a section and a half, nearly a thousand acres, under wheat; we’ve got everything that money can buy in the way of improvements in machinery; we’ve got a home that might fill many a town-bred man with envy, and a mother who denies us nothing; and yet you aren’t satisfied. What do you want? If things aren’t what you like, for goodness’ sake go back to the wilds again, where, according to your own account, you 139 were happy. Your incessant grumbling makes me sick.”
“A new departure, sister, eh?” Hervey retorted, smiling unpleasantly. “I always thought it was everybody’s privilege to grumble a bit. Still, I don’t think it’s for you to start lecturing me if even it isn’t. Mother’s treated me pretty well––in a way. But don’t forget she’s only hired me the same as she’s hired Andy, or any of the rest of the hands. Why, I haven’t even the same position as you have. I am paid so many dollars a month, for which I have to do certain work. Let me tell you this, my girl: if I had stayed on this farm until father died my position would have been very different. It would all have been mine now.”
“Well, since you didn’t do so, the farm is mother’s.” Prudence’s pale cheeks had become flushed with anger. “And I think, all things considered, she has treated you particularly well.”
And she turned back to her work.
The girl was very angry, and justifiably so. Hervey was lazy. The work which was his was rarely done unless it happened to fall in with his plans for the moment. He was thoroughly bearish to both his mother and herself, and he had already overdrawn the allowance the former had made him. All this had become very evident to the girl since her return to the farm, and it cut her to the quick that the peace of her home should have been so rudely broken. Even Prudence’s personal troubles were quite secondary to the steady grind of Hervey’s ill-manners.
Curiously enough, after the first passing of the 140 shock of Grey’s death she found herself less stricken than she would have deemed it possible. There could be no doubt that she had loved the man in her girlish, adoring fashion.
She had thought that never again could she return to the place which had such dread memories for her. Thoughts of the long summer days, and the dreary, interminable winter, when the distractions of labour are denied the farmer, had been revolting to her. To live within a few miles of where that dreadful tragedy had occurred; to live amongst the surroundings which must ever be reminding her of her dead lover; these things had made her shrink from the thought of the time when she would again turn westward to her home.
But when she had once more taken her place in the daily life at the farm, it was, at first with a certain feeling of self-disgust, and later with thankfulness, that she learned that she could face her old life with perfect equanimity. The childish passion for her dead lover had died; the shock which had suddenly brought about her own translation from girlhood to womanhood had also dispelled the illusions of her girlish first love.