What he was intending to do would keep continually rising before his mind; not as it had done overnight in the comfortable after-phases, when My Lord Benedict should have entered on his domestic felicity, with slippers toasting inside the fender against his return from the field, pipes filled, and tobacco fetched, without his needing to leave the lounge where he reposed, but in the onerous stage of how to do it. What should he say? and how would she take it? Should he take her hand before beginning? It would be establishing a sort of hold upon her attention. But if she objected to that by an unauthorized individual?--yet the very objection would give the opening to explain, which he desired. Only--how about getting hold of the hand? It might be holding up her parasol. To snatch at it would bring down the article with a flap, which would frighten the horse! Weil, he did not mind that. He could quiet him well enough with a cut of the whip. But how about the lady? How to quiet her? The whip would not do there, yet a while; though later, he had been credibly informed that Blackstone authorizes such doings on the part of husbands, provided the stick be no thicker than their thumbs. But the lady might refuse to be reassured; she might insist on being let down, or worse, she might actually say. No. No! The word whistled through his mind like a gust of icy wind, it was so new and so unexpected an idea. He must feel tremulous, no doubt, till he should be answered "yes," but he could not bring himself to contemplate the opposite. It would be so utter a quencher to--well, if not to love for her, which was an eventuality he could contemplate with some tranquillity, at least to his self-love, which was too near his heart to be thought of without dismay. He would be, like a railway guard standing on the roof of a carriage, and sweeping through space at forty miles an hour, when unexpectedly there comes a bridge which he has not looked for, or bowed his head to in time, it catches him between the eyes with a blow irresistible and swift, which snuffs him out of existence, and casts him away, and leaves him a lifeless wreck upon the track.
Altogether Joe had not a happy or an edifying service of it that day in church. A man's own fancies can fret and worry him worse than the words of others, they hit all the raw places so much more surely. He hastened from the sacred fane with the very earliest to go, and stood and watched and waited till Betsey should appear among the other dispersing worshippers, she was long of appearing, and by-and-by he began to think, with a very distinct sense of relief, that she was not there and he must defer the task he had set himself to another day, when, behold! the very last to come out, she appeared; and, seizing himself by the collar, as it were, he marched himself into her presence, and solicited the honour of a drive. Betsey was gracious and compliant, and did not take long to mount into the buggy; he sprang in after, and away they went.
The pace was good; Joe kept fast cattle, and knew how to drive them; but the conversation flagged. How can a man with a purpose--so deadly to himself, at least--be at his ease, and alive to the trifles which lead up to untrammelled talk? How can he be otherwise than distraught? There is a purpose at his breast hanging heavy as lead, and he feels, poor creature, as though cold water were running down his neck. "Had it been a dance," he thought, "to which he was leading the girl out, it would have been different." The music and the rhythm and the motion of a waltz bring on a gentle enthusiasm, and the sense of support and protection conduce to the tenderness which a man should feel at such a moment; but this was only a buggy-ride; the two were perched up together behind a horse in heat and dust, and for the life of him he could not make up his mind what he ought to say. He had heard of fellows proposing in a buggy, but now when he tried it, it was not the place it was cracked up to be; and he sat in perturbed silence.
Betsey was at her ease, however; she suspected nothing, and she was elated at being borne off in a cloud of dust before the eyes of the women who had slighted and ignored her five minutes before. Some people it seemed--men people, too--thought her worthy of notice. She felt exultant, and she prattled. She wriggled, too, just a very little, which is scarcely dignified, perhaps, but comes natural to some people in moments of exuberance. She talked of the weather till some other subject should arise, like the rest of us who are born to speak English, but he answered nothing; and then she asked him if a shower would not do good to his turnips.
He answered "yes," to that, which is not an easy rejoinder to build the next observation upon; but then he was busy with his horse at the moment, for he hit him a cross cut with the whip, and twitched his nose and eyebrows impatiently. And then there was a lull, and silence disturbed only by the steady pounding of the horse's feet, and the rasping of a wheel against an occasional stone.
"We were so sorry to hear," Betsey said at last, after the silence had lasted some time, and was beginning to grow oppressive; "so very sorry to hear that you have lost money by those Herkimers. Do you remember, I told you the very last time we met what I thought of them, and that it was not much? But that warning came too late to benefit you, I suppose. Is it not absurd the way that young Gerald goes fooling around Muriel up the way? It is just what might be expected from a girl like her, who don't belong to anybody, for all her airs; but I confess I am sorry to see his infatuation, though perhaps it only serves the Herkimers right--the stuck-up lot. I always saw through them--insincere, and all show; though of course I would not have said it, on account of their relationship to Aunt Judy; but now, really, it seems downright wrong to hold one's tongue, and looks like countenancing their on-goins," and Betsey stopped to take breath.
Joe availed himself of the stoppage to take up his parable. "Yes, Miss Betsey," he said, "it is quite true. I have lost the savings of ten years, and all the ready money my father left. Quite true."
"Ah!" sighed Betsey very softly.
"But I'm to the fore still; and you just wait and see if I don't make some more--and more than I have been euchred out of."
"I like to hear a man speak like that! It sounds so strong and capable."