Chapter II (1)

The autumn rains set in early, and the winter was unusually severe. Arnold had a purpose which kept him hard at work and very happy in those days.

During the long December nights he was shut up in his office, plodding over his maps and papers, or smoking in dreamy comfort by the fire. He was seldom interrupted, for he had earned the character of a social ingrate and hardened recluse in the camp. He had earned it quite unconsciously, and was as little troubled by the fact as by its consequences. On the evening of New Year's Day he crossed the street to the Dyers' and asked for Miss Newell. She presently greeted him in the parlor, where she looked, Arnold thought, more than ever out of place, among the bead baskets, and splint frames inclosing photographs of deceased members of the Dyer family, and the pallid walls, weak-legged chairs, and crude imaginings in worsted work. Her apparent unconsciousness of these abominations was another source of irritation. It is always irritating to a man to see a charming woman in an unhappy and false position, where he is powerless to help her. Arnold had not expected that it would be a very exhilarating occasion,--he remembered the Dyer parlor,--but it was even less pleasant than he had expected. He sat down, carefully, in a glued chair whose joints had opened with the dry season and refused to close again; he did not know where the transfer of his person might end. Captain Dyer was present, and told a great many stories in a loud, tiring voice. Miss Frances sat by with some soft white knitting in her hands, and her attitude of patient attention made Arnold long to attack her with some savage pleasantries on the subject of Christmas in a mining camp; it seemed to him that patience was a virtue that could be carried too far, even in woman. Then Mrs. Dyer came in, and manoeuvred her husband out into the passage; after some loudly suggestive whispering there, she succeeded in getting him into the kitchen, and shut the door. Arnold got up soon after that, and said good-evening.

Miss Newell remained in the parlor for some time, after he had gone, moving softly about. She had gathered her knitting closely into her clasped hands; the ball trailed after her, among the legs of the chairs, and when in her silent promenade she had spun a grievous tangle of wool she sat down, and dropped the work out of her hands with a helpless gesture. Her head drooped, and tears trickled slowly between the slender white fingers which covered her face. Presently the fingers descended to her throat and clasped it close, as if to still an intolerable throbbing ache which her half-suppressed tears had left.

At length she rose, picked up her work, and patiently followed the tangled clue until she had recovered her ball; then she wound it all up neatly, wrapped the knitting in a thin white handkerchief, and went to her room.

With the fine March weather--fine in spite of the light rains--the engineer was laying out a road to the new shaft; it wound along the hillside where Miss Newell had first seen the green trees, by the spring. The engineer's orders included the building of a flume, carrying the water down from the Chilano's plantation into a tank, built on the ruins of the rock which had guarded the sylvan spring. The discordant voices of a gang of Chinamen profaned the stillness which had framed Miss Frances' girlish laughter; the blasting of the rock had loosened, to their fall, the clustering trees above, and the brook below was a mass of trampled mud.

The engineer's visits to the spring gave him no pleasure, in those days. He felt that he was the inevitable instrument of its desecration; but over the hill, just in sight from the spring, carpenters were putting a new piazza round a cottage that stood remote from the camp, where a spur of the hills descended steeply towards the valley. Arnold took a great interest in this cottage. He was frequently to be seen there in the evening, tramping up and down the new piazza, and offering to the moon, that looked in through the boughs of a live-oak at the end of the gallery, the incense of his lonely cigar. Sometimes he would take the key of the front door from his pocket, enter the silent house, and wander from one room to another, like a restless but not unhappy ghost; the moonlight, touching his face, showed it strangely stirred and softened. His was no melancholy madness.

Arnold was leaning on the gate of this cottage, one afternoon, when the schoolmistress came down the trail from the camp. She did not appear to see him, but turned off from the trail at a little distance from the cottage, and took her way across the hill behind it. Arnold watched her a few minutes, and then followed, overtaking her on the hills above the new road, where she had sat with Nicky Dyer nearly a year ago.

“I don't like to see you wandering about here, alone,” he said. “The men on the road are a scratch gang, picked up anyhow, not like the regular miners. I hope you are not going to the spring!”

“Why?” said she. “Did you not drink to our return?”

“But you would not drink with me, so the spell did not work; and now the spring is gone,--all its beauty, I mean. The water is there, in a tank, where the Chinamen fill their buckets night and morning, and the teamsters water their horses. We'll go over there, if you would like to see the march of modern improvements.”

“No,” she said; “I had rather remember it as it was; still, I don't believe in being sentimental about such things. Let us sit down a while.”

A vague depression, which Arnold had been aware of in her manner when they met, became suddenly manifest in her paleness and in a look of dull pain in her eyes.

“But you are hurt about it,” he said. “I wish I hadn't told you in that brutal way. I'm afraid I'm not many degrees removed from the primeval savage, after all.”

“Oh, you needn't mind,” she said, after a moment. “That was the only place I cared for, here, so now there will be nothing to regret when I go away.”

“Are you going away, then? I'm very sorry to hear it; but of course I'm not surprised. You couldn't be expected to stand it another year; those children must have been something fearful.”

“Oh, it wasn't the children.”

“Well, I'm sorry. I had hoped”--

“Yes,” said she, with a modest interrogation, as he hesitated, “what is it you had hoped?”

“That I might indirectly be the means of making your life less lonely here. You remember that 'experiment' we talked about at the spring?”

“That _you_ talked about, you mean.”

“I am going to try it myself. Not because you were so encouraging,--but--it's a risk anyway, you know, and I'm not sure the circumstances make so much difference. I've known people to be wretched with all the modern conveniences. I am going East for her in about two weeks. How sorry she will be to find you gone! I wrote to her about you. You might have helped each other; couldn't you stand it, Miss Newell, don't you think, if you had another girl?”

“I'm afraid not,” she said very gently. “I _must_ go home. You may be sure she will not need me; you must see to it that she doesn't need--any one.”

They were walking back and forth on the hill.

“I was just looking for the cottonwood-trees; are they gone too?” she asked.

“Oh yes; there isn't a tree left in the cañon. Don't you envy me my work?”

“I suppose everything we do seems like desecration to somebody. Here am I making history very rapidly for this colony of ants.” She looked down with a rueful smile as she spoke.

“I wish you had the history of the entire species under your foot, and could finish it at once.”

“I'm not sure that I would; I'm not so fond of extermination as you pretend to be.”

“Well, keep the ants if you like them, but I am firm on the subject of the camp children. There _are_ blessings that brighten as they take their flight. I pay my monthly assessment for the doctor with the greatest cheerfulness; if it wasn't for him, in this climate, they would crowd us off the hill.”

“Please don't!” she said wearily. “Even _I_ don't like to hear you talk like that; I am sure _she_ will not.”

He laughed softly. “You have often reminded me of her in little ways: that was what upset me at the spring. I was very near telling you all about her that day.”

“I wish that you had!” she said. They were walking towards home now. “I suppose you know it is talked of in the camp,” she said, after a pause. “Mr. Dyer told me, and showed me the house, a week ago. And now I must tell you about my violets. I had them in a box in my room all winter. I should like to leave them as a little welcome to her. Last night Nicky Dyer and I planted them on the bank by the piazza under the climbing-rose; it was a secret between Nicky and me, and Nicky promised to water them until she came; but of course I meant to tell you. Will you look at them to-night, please, and see if Nicky has been faithful?”

“I will, indeed,” said Arnold. “That is just the kind of thing she will delight in. If you are going East, Miss Newell, shall we not be fellow-travelers? I should be so glad to be of any service.”

“No, thank you. I am to spend a month in Santa Barbara, and escort an invalid friend home. I shall have to say good-by, now. Don't go any farther with me, please.”

That night Arnold mused late, leaning over the railing of the new piazza in the moonlight. He fancied that a faint perfume of violets came from the damp earth below; but it could have been only fancy, for when he searched the bank for them they were not there. The new sod was trampled, and a few leaves and slight, uptorn roots lay scattered about, with some broken twigs from the climbing-rose. He had found the gate open when he came, and the Dyer cow had passed him, meandering peacefully up the trail.

* * * * *

The crescent moon had waxed and waned since the night when it lighted the engineer's musings through the wind-parted live-oak boughs, and another slender bow gleamed in the pale, tinted haze of twilight. The month had gone, like a feverish dream, to the young schoolmistress, as she lay in her small, upper chamber, unconscious of all save alternate light and darkness, and rest following pain. When, at last, she crept down the short staircase to breathe the evening coolness, clinging to the stair-rail and holding her soft white draperies close around her, she saw the pink light lingering on the mountains, and heard the chorus to the “Sweet By and By” from the miners' chapel on the hill. It was Sunday evening, and the house was piously “emptied of its folk.” She took her old seat by the parlor window, and looked across to the engineer's office; its windows and doors were shut, and the dogs of the camp were chasing each other over the loose boards of the piazza floor. She laughed a weak, convulsive laugh, thinking of the engineer's sallies of old upon that band of Ishmaelites, and of the scrambling, yelping rush that followed. He must have gone East, else the dogs had not been so bold. She looked down the valley where the mountains parted seaward, the only break in the continuous barrier of land that cut off her retreat and closed in about the atom of her own identity. The thought of that immensity of distance made her faint.

There were steps on the porch,--not Captain Dyer's, for he and his good wife were lending their voices to swell the stentorian chorus that was shaking the church on the hill; the footsteps paused at the door, and Arnold himself opened it. He had not, evidently, expected to see her.

“I was looking for some one to ask about you,” he said. “Are you sure you are able to be down?”

“Oh yes. I've been sitting up for several days. I wanted to see the mountains again.”

He was looking at her intently, while she flushed with weakness, and drew the fringes of her shawl over her tremulous hands.

“How ill you have been! I have wished myself a woman, that I might do something for you! I suppose Mrs. Dyer nursed you like a horse.”

“Oh no; she was very good; but I don't remember much about the worst of it. I thought you had gone home.”

“Home! Where do you mean? I didn't know that I had ever boasted of any reserved rights of that kind. I have no mortgage, in fact or sentiment, on any part of the earth's surface, that I'm acquainted with!”

He spoke with a hard carelessness in his manner which make her shrink.

“I mean the East. I am homeless, too, but all the East seems like home to me.”

“You had better get rid of those sentimental, backward fancies as soon as possible. The East concerns itself very little about us, I can tell you! It can spare us.”

She thrilled with pain at his words. “I should think you would be the last one to say so,--you, who have so much treasure there.”

“Will you please to understand,” he said, turning upon her a face of bitter calmness, “that I claim no treasure anywhere,--not even in heaven!”

She sat perfectly still, conscious that by some fatality of helpless incomprehension every word that she said goaded him, and she feared to speak again.

“Now I have hurt you,” he said in his gentlest voice. “I am always hurting you. I oughtn't to come near you with my rough edges! I'll go away now, if you will tell me that you forgive me!”

She smiled at him without speaking, while her fair throat trembled with a pulse of pain.

“Will you let me take your hand a moment? It is so long since I have touched a woman's hand! God! how lonely I am! Don't look at me in that way; don't pity me, or I shall lose what little manhood I have left!”

“What is it?” she said, leaning towards him. “There is something strange in your face. If you are in trouble, tell me; it will help me to hear it. I am not so very happy myself.”

“Why should I add my load to yours? I seem always to impose myself upon you, first my hopes, and now my--no, it isn't despair; it is only a kind of brutal numbness. You must have the fatal gift of sympathy, or you would never have seen my little hurt.”

Miss Frances was not strong enough to bear the look in his eyes as he turned them upon her, with a dreary smile. She covered her face with one hand, while she whispered,--

“Is it--you have not lost her?”

“Yes! Or, rather, I never had her. I've been dreaming like a boy all these years,--'In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter.'”

“It is not death, then?”

“No, she is not dead. She is not even false; that is, not very false. How can I tell you how little it is, and yet how much! She is only a trifle selfish. Why shouldn't she be? Why should we men claim the exclusive right to choose the best for ourselves? It was selfish of me to ask her to share such a life as mine; and she has gently and reasonably reminded me that I'm not worth the sacrifice. It's quite true. I always knew I wasn't. She put it very delicately and sweetly;--she's the sweetest girl you ever saw. She'd marry me to-morrow if I could add myself, such as I am,--she doesn't overrate me,--to what she has already; but an exchange she wasn't prepared for. In all my life I never was so clearly estimated, body and soul. I don't blame her, you understand. When I left her, three years ago, I saw my way easily enough to a reputation, and an income, and a home in the East; she never thought of anything else; I never taught her to look for anything else. I dare say she rather enjoyed having a lover working for her in the unknown West; she enjoyed the pretty letters she wrote me; but when it came to the bare bones of existence in a mining camp, with a husband not very rich or very distinguished, she had nothing to clothe them with. You said once that to be happy here a woman must not have too much imagination; she hadn't quite enough. I had to be dead honest with her when I asked her to come. I told her there was nothing here but the mountains and the sunsets, and a few items of picturesqueness which count with some people. Of course I had to tell her I was but little better off than when I left. A man's experience is something he cannot set forth at its value to himself; she passed it over as a word of no practical meaning. There her imagination failed her again. She took me frankly at my own estimate; and in justice to her I must say I put myself at the lowest figures. I made a very poor show on paper.”

“You wrote to her!” exclaimed Miss Frances. “You did not go on? Oh, you have made a great mistake! Do go: it cannot be too late. Letters are the most untrusty things!”

“Wait,” he said. “There is something else. She has a head for business; she proposed that I should come East, and accept a superintendentship from a cousin of hers, the owner of a gun-factory in one of those shady New England towns women are so fond of. She intimated that he was in politics, this cousin, and of course would expect his employees to become part of his constituency. It's a very pretty little bribe, you see; when you add the--the girl, it's enough to shake a man--who wants that girl. I'm not worth much to myself, or to anybody else, apparently, but by Heaven I'll not sell out as cheap as that!

“It all amounts to nothing except one more illusion gone. If there is a woman on this earth that can love a man without knowing for what, and take the chances of life with him without counting the cost, I have never known her. I asked you once if a woman could do that. You hadn't the courage to tell me the truth. I wouldn't have been satisfied if you had; but I'm satisfied now.”

“I believed she would be happy; I believe she would be, now, if only you would go to her and persuade her to try.”

“I persuade her! I would never try to persuade a woman to be my wife were I dying for love of her! I don't think myself invented by nature to promote the happiness of woman, in the aggregate or singly. I know there are men who do: let them urge their claims. I thought that she loved me; that was another illusion. She will probably marry the cousin, and become the most loyal of his constituents. He is welcome to her; but there's a ghostly blank somewhere. How I have tired you! You'll be in bed another week for this selfishness of mine.” He stopped, while a sudden thought brought a change to his face. “But when are you going home?”

“I cannot go,” she said. Her weakness came over her like a cloud, darkening the room and pressing upon her heavily. “Will you give me your arm?”

At the stairs she stopped, and leaning against the wall looked at him with wide, hopeless eyes.

“We are cut off from everything. My friend does not need me now; she has gone home,--alone. She is dead!”

Arnold took a long walk upon the hills that night, and smoked a great many cigars in gloomy meditation. He was thinking of two girls, as young men who smoke a great many cigars without counting them often are; he was also thinking of Arizona. He had fully made up his mind to resign, and depart for that problematic region as soon as his place was filled; but an alternative had presented itself to him with a pensive attractiveness,--an alternative unmistakably associated with the fact that the schoolmistress was to remain in her present isolated circumstances. It even had occurred to him that there might be some question of duty involved in his “standing by her,” as he phrased it to himself, “till she got her color back.” There was an unconscious appeal in the last words he had heard her speak which constrained him to do so. He was not in the habit of pitying himself, but had there been another soul to follow this mental readjustment of himself to his mutilated life, it would surely have pitied the eagerness with which he clung to this one shadow of a duty to a fellow-creature. It was the measure of his loneliness.

It was late in November. The rains had begun again with sound and fury; with ranks of clouds forming along the mountain sides, and driven before the sea-winds upward through the gulches; with days of breeze and sunshine, when the fog veil was lightly lifted and blown apart, showing the valley always greener; with days of lowering stillness, when the veil descended and left the mountains alone, like islands of shadow rising from a sea of misty whiteness.

On such a lowering day, Miss Frances stood at the junction of three trails, in front of the door of the blacksmith's shop. She was wrapped in a dark blue cloak, with the hood drawn over her head; the cool dampness had given to her cheeks a clear, pure glow, and her brown eyes looked out with a cheerful light. She was watching the parting of the mist in the valley below; for a wind had sprung up, and now the rift widened, as the windows of heaven might have opened, giving a glimpse of the world to the “Blessed Damozel.” All was dark above and around her; only a single shaft of sunlight pierced the fog, and startled into life a hundred tints of brightness in the valley. She caught the sparkle on the roofs and windows of the town ten miles away; the fields of sunburnt stubble glowed a deep Indian red; the young crops were tenderest emerald; and the line of the distant bay, a steel-blue thread against the horizon.

Arnold was plodding up the lower trail on his gray mare, fetlock deep in mud. He dismounted at the door of the shop, and called to him a small Mexican lad with a cheek of the tint of ripe corn.

“Here, Pedro Segundo! Take this mare up to the camp! Can you catch?” He tossed him a coin. “Bueno!”

“Mucho bueno!” said Pedro the First, looking on approvingly from the door of his shop.

Arnold turned to the schoolmistress, who was smiling from her perch on a pile of wet logs.

“I'm perfectly happy!” she said. “This east wind takes me home. I hear the bluebirds, and smell the salt-marshes and the wood-mosses. I'm not sure but that when the fog lifts we shall see white caps in the valley.”

“I dare say there are some very good people down there,” said Arnold, with deliberation, “but all the same I should welcome an inundation. Think what a climate this would be, if we could have the sea below us, knocking against the rocks on still nights, and thundering at us in a storm!”

“Don't speak of it! It makes me long for a miracle, or a judgment, or something that's not likely to happen.”

“Meantime, I want you to come down the trail, and pass judgment on my bachelor quarters. I can't stand the boarding-house any longer! By Jove, I'm like the British footman in 'Punch,'--'what with them legs o' mutton and legs o' pork, I'm a'most wore out! I want a new hanimal inwented!' I've found an old girl down in the valley who consents to look after me and vary the monotony of my dinners at the highest market price. She isn't here yet, but the cabin is about ready. I want you to come down and look it over. I'm a perfect barbarian about color! You can't put it on too thick and strong to suit me. I dare say I need toning down.”

They were slipping and sliding down the muddy trail, brushing the raindrops from the live-oak scrub as they passed. A subtle underlying content had lulled them both, of late, into an easier companionship than they had ever found possible before, and they were gay with that enjoyment of wet weather which is like an intoxication after seven months of drought.

“Now I suppose you like soft, harmonious tints and neutral effects. You're a bit of a conservative in everything, I fear.”

“I think I should like plenty of color here, or else positive white; the monotony of the landscape and its own deep, low tones demand it. A neutral house would fade into an ash heap under this sun.”

“Good! Then you'll like my dark little den, with its barbaric reds and blues.”

They were at the gate of the little cottage, overlooking the valley. The gleam of sunlight had faded and the fog curtain rolled back. The house did indeed seem very dark as they entered. It was only a little after four o'clock, but the cloudy twilight of a short November day was suddenly descending upon them. The schoolmistress looked shyly around, while Arnold tramped about the rooms and sprung the shades up as high as they would go.

They were in a small, irregular parlor, wainscoted and floored in redwood, and lightly furnished with bamboo. This room communicated by a low arch with the dining-room beyond.

“I have some flags and spurs and old trophies to hang up there,” he said, pointing to the arch; “and perhaps I can get you to sew the rings on the curtain that's to hang underneath. I don't want too much of the society of my angel from the valley, you know; besides, I want to shield her from the vulgar gaze, as they do the picture of the Madonna.”

“It will serve you right if she never comes at all!”

“Oh, she's pining to come. She's dying to sacrifice herself for twenty-five dollars a month. Did I tell you, by the way, that I've had a rise in my salary? There is a rise in the work, too, which rather overbalances the increase of pay, but that's understood; for a good many years it will be more work than wage, but at the other end I hope it will be more wage than work. You don't seem to be very much interested in my affairs; if you knew how seldom I speak of them to any one but yourself, you might perhaps deign to listen.”

“I am listening; but I'm thinking, too, that it's getting very late.”

“See, here is my curtain!” he said, dragging out a breadth of heavy stuff. He took it to the window, and threw it over a Chinese lounge that stood beneath. “It's an old serape I picked up at Guadalajara five years ago: the beauty of having a house is that all the old rubbish you have bored yourself with for years immediately becomes respectable and useful. I expect to become so myself. You don't say that you like my curtain!”

“I think it is very pagan looking, and rather--dirty.”

“Well, I shan't make a point of the dirt. I dare say the thing would look just as well if it was clean. Won't you try my lounge?” he said, as she looked restlessly towards the door. “It was invented by a race that can loaf more naturally than we do: it takes an American back some time to relax enough to appreciate it.”

Miss Frances half reluctantly drew her cloak about her, and yielded her Northern slenderness to the long Oriental undulations of the couch. Her head was thrown back, showing her fair throat and the sweet upward curves of her lips and brows.

Arnold gazed at her with too evident delight.

“Why won't you sit still? You cannot deny that you have never been so comfortable in your life before.”

“It's a very good place to 'loaf and invite one's soul,'” she said, rising to a sitting position; “but that isn't my occupation at present. I must go home. It is almost dark.”

“There is no hurry. I'm going with you. I want you to see how the little room lights up. I've never seen it by firelight, and I'll have my house-warming to-night!”

“Oh no, indeed! I must go back. There's the five o'clock whistle, now!”

“Well, we've an hour yet. You must get warm before you go.”

He went out, and quickly returned with an armful of wood and shavings, which he crammed into the cold fireplace.

“What a litter you have made! Do you think your mature angel from the valley will stand that sort of thing?”

As she spoke, the rain descended in violence, sweeping across the piazza, and obliterating the fast-fading landscape. They could scarcely see each other in the darkness, and the trampling on the roof overhead made speech a useless effort. Almost as suddenly as it had opened upon them the tumult ceased, and in the silence that followed they listened to the heavy raindrops spattering from the eaves.

Arnold crossed to the window, where Miss Frances stood shivering and silent, with her hands clasped before her.

“I want you to light my fire,” he said, with a certain concentration in his voice.

“Why do you not light it yourself?” She drew away from his outstretched hand. “It seems to me you are a bit of a tyrant in your own house.”

He drew a match across his knee and held it towards her: by its gleam she saw his pale, unsmiling face, and again that darkening of the eyes which she remembered.

“Do you refuse me such a little thing,--my first guest? I ask it as a most especial grace!”

She took the match, and knelt with it in her hands; but it only flickered a moment, and went out. “It will not go for me. You must light it yourself.”

He knelt beside her and struck another match. “We will try together,” he said, placing it in her fingers and closing his hand about them. He held the trembling fingers and the little spark they guarded steadily against the shaving. It kindled; the flame breathed and brightened and curled upward among the crooked manzanita stumps, illuminating the two entranced young faces bending before it. Miss Frances rose to her feet, and Arnold, rising too, looked at her with a growing dread and longing in his eyes.

“You said to-day that you were happy, because in fancy you were at home. Is that the only happiness possible to you here?”

“I am quite contented here,” she said. “I am getting acclimated.”

“Oh, don't be content: I am not; I am horribly otherwise. I want something--so much that I dare not ask for it. You know what it is,--Frances!”

“You said once that I reminded you--of her: is that the reason you--Am I consoling you?”

“Good God! I don't want consolation! _That_ thing never existed; but here is the reality; I cannot part with it. I wish you had as little as I have, outside of this room where we two stand together!”

“I don't know that I have anything,” she said under her breath.

“Then,” said he, taking her in his arms, “I don't see but that we are ready to enter the kingdom of heaven. It seems very near to me.”

They are still in exile: they have joined the band of lotus-eaters who inhabit that region of the West which is pervaded by a subtle breath from the Orient, blowing across the seas between. Mrs. Arnold has not yet made that first visit East which is said by her Californian friends to be so disillusioning, and the old home still hovers, like a beautiful mirage, on the receding horizon.

FRIEND BARTON'S “CONCERN.”

It had been “borne in” upon him, more or less, during the long winter; it had not relaxed when the frosts unlocked their hold and the streams were set free from their long winter's silence, among the hills. He grew restless and abstracted under “the turnings of the Lord's hand upon him,” and his speech unconsciously shaped itself into the Biblical cadences which came to him in his moments of spiritual exercise.

The bedrabbled snows of March shrank away before the keen, quickening sunbeams; the hills emerged, brown and sodden, like the chrysalis of the new year; the streams woke in a tumult, and all day and night their voices called from the hills back of the mill: the waste-weir was a foaming torrent, and spread itself in muddy shallows across the meadow, beyond the old garden where the robins and bluebirds were house-hunting. Friend Barton's trouble stirred with the life-blood of the year, and pressed upon him sorely; but as yet he gave it no words. He plodded about, among his lean kine, tempering the winds of March to his untimely lambs, and reconciling unnatural ewes to their maternal duties.

Friend Barton had never heard of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, though it was the spring of 1812, and England and America were investigating the subject on the seas, while the nations of Europe were practically illustrating it. The “hospital tent,” as the boys called an old corn-basket, covered with carpet, which stood beside the kitchen chimney, was seldom without an occupant,--a brood of chilled chickens, a weakly lamb, or a wee pig (with too much blue in its pinkness), that had been left behind by its stouter brethren in the race for existence. The old mill hummed away through the day, and often late into the evening if time pressed, upon the grists which added a thin, intermittent stream of tribute to the family income. Whenever work was “slack,” Friend Barton was sawing or chopping in the woodshed adjoining the kitchen; every moment he could seize or make he was there, stooping over the rapidly growing pile.

“Seems to me, father, thee's in a great hurry with the wood this spring. I don't know when we've had such a pile ahead.”

“'T won't burn up any faster for being chopped,” Friend Barton said; and then his wife Rachel knew that if he had a reason for being “forehanded” with the wood, he was not ready to give it.

One rainy April afternoon, when the smoky gray distances began to take a tinge of green, and through the drip and rustle of the rain the call of the robins sounded, Friend Barton sat in the door of the barn, oiling the road-harness. The old chaise had been wheeled out and greased, and its cushions beaten and dusted.

An ox-team with a load of grain creaked up the hill and stopped at the mill door. The driver, seeing Friend Barton's broad-brimmed drab felt hat against the dark interior of the barn, came down the short lane leading from the mill, past the house and farm-buildings.

“Fixin' up for travelin', Uncle Tommy?”

Vain compliments, such as worldly titles of Mr. and Mrs., were unacceptable to Thomas Barton, and he was generally known and addressed as “Uncle Tommy” by the world's people of a younger generation.

“It is not in man that walketh to direct his own steps, neighbor Jordan. I am getting myself in readiness to obey the Lord, whichever way He shall call me.”

Farmer Jordan cast a shrewd eye over the premises. They wore that patient, sad, exhumed look which old farm-buildings are apt to have in early spring. The roofs were black with rain, and brightened with patches of green moss. Farmer Jordan instinctively calculated how many “bunches o' shingle” would be required to rescue them from the decline into which they had fallen, indicated by these hectic green spots.

“Wal, the Lord calls most of us to stay at home and look after things, such weather as this. Good plantin' weather; good weather for breakin' ground; fust-rate weather for millin'! This is a reg'lar miller's rain, Uncle Tommy. You'd ought to be takin' advantage of it. I've got a grist back here; wish ye could manage to let me have it when I come back from store.”

The grist was ground and delivered before Friend Barton went in to his supper that night. Dorothy Barton had been mixing bread, and was wiping her white arms and hands on the roller towel by the kitchen door, as her father stamped and scraped his feet on the stones outside.

“There! I do believe I forgot to toll neighbor Jordan's rye,” he said, as he gave a final rub on the broom Dorothy handed out to him. “It's wonderful how careless I get!”

“Well, father, I don't suppose thee'd ever forget, and toll a grist twice!”

“I believe I've been mostly preserved from mistakes of that kind,” said Friend Barton gently. “Well, well! To be sure,” he continued musingly. “It may be the Lord who stays my hand from gathering profit unto myself while his lambs go unfed.”

Dorothy put her hands on her father's shoulders: she was almost as tall as he, and could look into his patient, troubled eyes.

“Father, I know what thee is thinking of, but do think long. It will be a hard year; the boys ought to go to school; and mother is so feeble!”

Friend Barton's “concern” kept him awake that night. His wife watched by his side, giving no sign, lest her wakeful presence should disturb his silent wrestlings. The tall, cherry-wood clock in the entry measured the hours, as they passed, with its slow, dispassionate tick.

At two o'clock Rachel Barton was awakened from her first sleep of weariness by her husband's voice, whispering heavily in the darkness.

“My way is hedged up! I see no way to go forward. Lord, strengthen my patience, that I murmur not, after all I have seen of thy goodness. I find daily bread is very desirable; want and necessity are painful to nature; but shall I follow Thee for the sake of the loaves, or will it do to forsake Thee in times of emptiness and abasement?”

There was silence again, and restless tossings and sighings continued the struggle.

“Thomas,” the wife's voice spoke tremulously in the darkness, “my dear husband, I know whither thy thoughts are tending. If the Spirit is with thee, do not deny it for our sakes, I pray thee. The Lord did not give thee thy wife and children to hang as a millstone round thy neck. I am thy helpmeet, to strengthen thee in his service. I am thankful that I have my health this spring better than usual, and Dorothy is a wonderful help. Her spirit was sent to sustain me in thy long absences. Go, dear, and serve our Master, who has called thee in these bitter strivings! Dorothy and I will keep things together as well as we can. The way will open--never fear!” She put out her hand and touched his face in the darkness; there were tears on the furrowed cheeks. “Try to sleep, dear, and let thy spirit have rest. There is but one answer to this call.”

With the first drowsy twitterings of the birds, when the crescent-shaped openings in the board shutters began to define themselves clearly in the shadowy room, they arose and went about their morning tasks in silence. Friend Barton's step was a little heavier than usual, and the hollows round his wife's pale brown eyes were a little deeper. As he sat on the splint-bottomed chair by the kitchen fireplace, drawing on his boots, she placed her hands on his shoulders, and touched with her cheek the worn spot on the top of his head.

“Thee will lay this concern before meeting to-morrow, father?”

“I had it on my mind to do so,--if my light be not quenched before then.”

Friend Barton's light was not quenched. Words came to him, without seeking,--a sure sign that the Spirit was with him,--in which to “open the concern” that had ripened in his mind, of a religious visit to the meeting constituting the yearly meetings of Philadelphia and Baltimore. A “minute” was given him, encouraging him in the name, and with the full concurrence, of the monthly meetings of Nine Partners and Stony Valley, to go wherever the Truth might lead him.

While Friend Barton was thus freshly anointed, and “abundantly encouraged,” his wife, Rachel, was talking with Dorothy, in the low upper chamber known as the “wheel-room.”

Dorothy was spinning wool on the big wheel, dressed in her light calico short gown and brown quilted petticoat; her arms were bare, and her hair was gathered away from her flushed cheeks and knotted behind her ears. The roof sloped down on one side, and the light came from a long, low window under the eaves. There was another window (shaped like a half-moon, high up in the peak), but it sent down only one long beam of sunlight, which glimmered across the dust and fell upon Dorothy's white neck.

The wheel was humming a quick measure and Dorothy trod lightly back and forth, the wheel-pin in one hand, the other holding the tense, lengthening thread, which the spindle devoured again.

“Dorothy, thee looks warm: can't thee sit down a moment, while I talk to thee?”

“Is it anything important, mother? I want to get my twenty knots before dinner.” She paused as she joined a long tress of wool at the spindle. “Is it anything about father?”

“Yes, it's about father, and all of us.”

“I know,” said Dorothy, with a sigh. “He's going away again!”

“Yes, dear. He feels that he is called. It is a time of trouble and contention everywhere: 'the harvest,' truly, 'is plenteous, but the laborers are few.'”

“There are not so many 'laborers' here, mother, though to be sure, the harvest”--

“Dorothy, my daughter, don't let a spirit of levity creep into thy speech. Thy father has striven and wrestled with his urgings. I've seen it working on him all winter. He feels, now, it is the Lord's will.”

“I don't see how he can be so sure,” said Dorothy, swaying gloomily to and fro against the wheel. “I don't care for myself, I'm not afraid of work, but thee's not able to do what thee does now, mother. If I have outside things to look after, how can I help thee as I should? And the boys are about as much dependence as a flock of barn swallows!”

“Don't thee fret about me, dear; the way will open. Thy father has thought and planned for us. Have patience while I tell thee. Thee knows that Walter Evesham's pond is small and his mill is doing a thriving business?”

“Yes, indeed, I know it!” Dorothy exclaimed. “He has his own share, and ours too, most of it!”

“Wait, dear, wait! Thy father has rented him the ponds, to use when his own gives out. He is to have the control of the water, and it will give us a little income, even though the old mill does stand idle.”

“He may as well take the mill, too. If father is away all summer it will be useless ever to start it again. Thee'll see, mother, how it will end, if Walter Evesham has the custom and the water all summer. I think it's miserable for a young man to be so keen about money.”

“Dorothy, seems to me thee's hasty in thy judgments. I never heard that said of Walter Evesham. His father left him with capital to improve his mill. It does better work than ours; we can't complain of that. Thy father was never one to study much after ways of making money. He felt he had no right to more than an honest livelihood. I don't say that Walter Evesham's in the wrong. We know that Joseph took advantage of his opportunities, though I can't say that I ever felt much unity with some of his transactions. What would thee have, my dear? Thee's discouraged with thy father for choosing the thorny way, which we tread with him; but thee seems no better satisfied with one who considers the flesh and its wants.”

“I don't know, mother, what I want for myself; that doesn't matter; but for thee I would have rest from all these cruel worries thee has borne so long.”

She buried her face in her mother's lap and put her strong young arms about the frail, toil-bent form.

“There, there, dear. Try to rule thy spirit, Dorothy. Thee's too much worked up about this. They are not worries to me. I am thankful we have nothing to decide one way or the other, only to do our best with what is given us. Thee's not thyself, dear. Go downstairs and fetch in the clothes, and don't hurry; stay out till thee gets more composed.”

Dorothy did not succeed in bringing herself into unity with her father's call, but she came to a fuller realization of his struggle. When he bade them good-by his face showed what it had cost him; but Rachel was calm and cheerful. The pain of parting is keenest to those who go, but it stays longer with those that are left behind.

“Dorothy, take good care of thy mother!” Friend Barton said, taking his daughter's face between his hands and gravely kissing her brow between the low-parted ripples of her hair.

“Yes, father,” she said, looking into his eyes; “Thee knows I'm thy eldest son.”

They watched the old chaise swing round the corner of the lane, then the pollard willows shut it from sight.

“Come, mother,” said Dorothy, hurrying her in at the gate. “I'm going to make a great pot of mush, and have it hot for supper, and fried for breakfast, and warmed up with molasses for dinner, and there'll be some cold with milk for supper, and we shan't have any cooking to do at all!”

They went around by the kitchen door. Rachel stopped in the woodshed, and the tears rushed to her eyes.

“Dear father! How he has worked over that wood, early and late, to spare us!”

We will not revive Dorothy's struggles with the farm-work, and with the boys. They were an isolated family at the mill-house; their peculiar faith isolated them still more, and they were twelve miles from meeting and the settlement of Friends at Stony Valley. Dorothy's pride kept her silent about her needs, lest they might bring reproach upon her father among the neighbors, who would not be likely to feel the urgency of his spiritual summons.

The summer heats came on apace and the nights grew shorter. It seemed to Dorothy that she had hardly stretched out her tired young body and forgotten her cares, in the low, attic bedroom, before the east was streaked with light and the birds were singing in the apple-trees, whose falling blossoms drifted in at the window.

One day in early June, Friend Barton's flock of sheep (consisting of nine experienced ewes, six yearlings, and a sprinkling of close-curled lambs whose legs had not yet come into mature relations with their bodies) was gathered in a wattled inclosure, beside the stream that flowed into the mill-head. It was supplied by the waste from the pond, and, when the gate was shut, rambled easily over the gray slate pebbles, with here and there a fall just forcible enough to serve as a douche-bath for a well-grown sheep. The victims were panting in their heavy fleeces, and mingling their hoarse, plaintive tremolo with the ripple of the water and the sound of young voices in a frolic. Dorothy had divided her forces for the washing to the best advantage. The two elder boys stood in midstream to receive the sheep, which she, with the help of little Jimmy, caught and dragged to the bank.

The boys were at work now upon an elderly ewe, while Dorothy stood on the brink of the stream braced against an ash sapling, dragging forward by the fleece a beautiful but reluctant yearling. Her bare feet were incased in a pair of moccasins that laced around the ankle; her petticoats were kilted, and her broad hat bound down with a ribbon; one sleeve was rolled up, the other had been sacrificed in a scuffle in the sheep-pen. The new candidate for immersion stood bleating and trembling with her forefeet planted against the slippery bank, pushing back with all her strength while Jimmy propelled from the rear.

“Boys!” Dorothy's clear voice called across the stream. “_Do_ hurry! She's been in long enough, now! Keep her head up, can't you, and squeeze the wool _hard_! You're not _half_ washing! Oh, Reuby! thee'll drown her! Keep her _head_ up!”

Another unlucky douse and another half-smothered bleat,--Dorothy released the yearling and plunged to the rescue. “Go after that lamb, Reuby!” she cried with exasperation in her voice. Reuby followed the yearling, that had disappeared over the orchard slope, upsetting an obstacle in its path, which happened to be Jimmy. He was wailing now on the bank, while Dorothy, with the ewe's nose tucked comfortably in the bend of her arm, was parting and squeezing the fleece, with the water swirling round her. Her stout arms ached, and her ears were stunned with the incessant bleatings; she counted with dismay the sheep still waiting in the pen. “Oh, Jimmy! Do stop crying, or else go to the house!”

“He'd better go after Reuby,” said Sheppard Barton, who was now Dorothy's sole dependence.

“Oh yes, do, Jimmy, that's a good boy. Tell him to let the yearling go and come back quick.”

The water had run low that morning in Evesham's pond. He shut down the mill, and strode up the hills, across lots, to raise the gate of the lower Barton pond, which had been heading up for his use. He passed the cornfield where, a month before, he had seen pretty Dorothy Barton dropping corn with her brothers. It made him ache to think of Dorothy with her feeble mother, the boys as wild as preachers' sons proverbially are, and the old farm running down on her hands; the fences all needed mending, and there went Reuben Barton, now, careering over the fields in chase of a stray yearling. His mother's house was big, and lonely, and empty; and he flushed as he thought of the “one ewe-lamb” he coveted out of Friend Barton's rugged pastures.

As Evesham raised the gate, and leaned to watch the water swirl and gurgle through the “trunk,” sucking the long weeds with it, and thickening with its tumult the clear current of the stream, the sound of voices and the bleating of sheep came up from below. He had not the farming instincts in his blood; the distant bleating, the hot June sunshine and cloudless sky did not suggest to him sheep-washing; but now came a boy's voice shouting and a cry of distress, and he remembered with a thrill that Friend Barton used the stream for that peaceful purpose. He shut down the gate and tore along through the ferns and tangled grass till he came to the sheep-pen, where the bank was muddy and trampled. The prisoners were bleating drearily and looking with longing eyes across to the other side, where those who had suffered were now straying and cropping the short turf through the lights and shadows of the orchard.

There was no other sign of life, except a broad hat with a brown ribbon buffeted about in an eddy among the stones. The stream dipped now below the hill, and the current, still racing fast with the impetus he had given it, shot away amongst the hazel thickets that crowded close to the brink. He was obliged to make a détour by the orchard and to come out below at the “mill-head,” a black, deep pool with an ugly ripple setting across it to the head-gate. He saw something white clinging there, and ran round the brink. It was the sodden fleece of the old ewe, which had been drifted against the head-gate and held there to her death. Evesham, with a sickening contraction of the heart, threw off his jacket for a plunge, when Dorothy's voice called rather faintly from the willows on the opposite bank.

“Don't jump! I'm here,” she said. Evesham searched the willows and found her seated in the sun, just beyond, half buried in a bed of ferns.