CHAPTER VIII
Two Years Later
TWO years had passed since the calamity at the Marton homestead. Molly’s eyes were smiling again, and all signs of her grief had been swept out of them, driven headlong by the spirit of youth, and the merciful healing which time brings to the aid of all human grief. Her cheeks had lost none of their bloom, her eyes none of their brightness. The life that was hers once more claimed her to the full.
It had not been so for long weeks after the tragic discovery in the woodland belt. The process of recovery had been slow. But gradually the sun of her life had emerged from behind the clouds, and, when once reaction had set in, the speed of the girl’s transformation had been something almost magical.
Now the labours of the seasons had again assumed their due importance, and were no longer useless, burdensome tasks, without real significance, and only calculated to further depress the spirit. Now the air that came down from the eternal snows imparted to nerves and mind, and the springs of human emotion that sense of well-being that gilds all youthful yearning, and sets old age desperately clinging to the ebb-tide of life.
But the change, the recovery, had been subtle. Molly herself had known nothing of it. Even when the time came when she found it natural to turn her thoughts back to the dead man in deep, abiding, but calm regret, she was left unaware of the metamorphosis. Nevertheless, she found it possible to feel gratitude to Fate, and draw real consolation, that her dead father had been spared all suffering of mind and body. Death she knew had been instantaneous. And she was glad that he had gone to his rest without a moment of anxiety for the daughter he had left behind.
But Lightning Rogers had no such thought or feeling for the man he had served. This lean, grey-whiskered remains of an unsavoury past was wholly a product of the hard life he had lived. He was desperately human, and his service for George Marton had been solely for wages. He had been wholly uninterested in the man.
But his attitude towards Molly was different. In her case his service was something no wages could have bought. It was the manhood in him—the primitive. Molly had proved an anchorage for all the affection that was parental in him. She was of the other sex, and her eyes were bright and smiling, and her femininity was something that carried memory back to those far-off moments when his pulses had quickened more easily. To him Molly was the beginning and end of his vision of his remaining years. When her father had been struck down horror had leapt upon him. But it was not for the fact of the girl’s disaster. It was for the possibility which the disaster might have for him. He feared lest, as a result, Molly herself might pass out of his life.
He had bethought him heavily on that drive home from the woods. And decision had come on the instant. He spoke no word of comfort to the departing girl, feeling that such an attitude would be the best expression of consummate delicacy. Besides, he had no idea of what might be the suitable thing to say. But, once back at the homestead, he lost not a moment in taking charge of the situation.
He took the already frozen body of the dead man and laid it out in the parlour in such state as seemed to him befitting. Then he returned to the kitchen, where the stewing supper was as Molly had originally left it. Without a word to the girl, sitting huddled in her grief over the stove, he prepared a meal for her. Then, with an assumption of grave authority, he stood over her with the firm intention of seeing that she ate it. His philosophy taught him that the surest, the only support at a time of grief was a good, round feed of beans and sow-belly.
The girl had looked up at his bidding. It was only one momentary glance, but the old man beheld in it such a look of repulsion for the food that he edged hastily away to the table, and sought to restore his suddenly lost confidence by devouring it himself.