Chapter IV: A Year Later

Susan had quite formed a habit, of late, of taking the precaution, at the end of her day's work in her school-room, to peep from the window to see whether the coast were clear so that she could go forth without danger of being joined on the way home by her objectionable suitor, Joe Houghton, who lived and worked just across the road from her new school, at his uncle's famous old homestead, White Oak Farm; or by some adoring pupil who might be lingering about to walk to the trolley station with her, as some among the older boys and girls were apt to do. The sentimental girls were even more trying than the big, blushing, silent boys. There had been a time, ages and ages ago, when she had loved all her pupils quite maternally and had been so humbly grateful for their devotion to her! But now, she only wanted to be let alone; to keep to herself. It was almost the only desire she had left; for all capacity for feeling anything, except weariness and listlessness, seemed to have died within her.

She had shrunk from the return of the spring, the anniversary of her great tragedy, lest its old exhilarating effect upon her might bring back her power to feel, to suffer. But it did not stir a drop of her blood; her heart remained like lead in her breast; as though some tension had snapped, leaving her soul a dead weight.

The new school position which she had secured this year was at White Oak Station, a hamlet eight miles from her home, in a neighbourhood in which she had been quite unacquainted.

To-day when she peeped from the school-room window to reconnoitre, there was not, as far as she could see, a single boy, girl, or man in sight.

Joe Houghton, however, could not be depended upon to give her fair warning by exposing himself to view; her constant efforts to elude him had only made him cunning in his pursuit of her. So, in letting herself out of the school-house door, she moved cautiously, without noise, and instead of taking the public road, crept like a burglar around to the back of the little building, intending to cross a field to another road which would add a half mile to her walk to the trolley station. She knew that by doing this she ran the risk of missing her trolley car home and of being obliged to wait an hour for the next one. That, however, would not be so wearisome as Joe Houghton's company on the long mile to the station.

She reached the back of the school-house unobserved, she was sure, and as, with a sigh of relief at her escape, she turned toward the adjoining field, there in front of her, scowling at her, stood Joe Houghton!

He was not quite forty years of age, but from over-work his tall, bony frame was stooped like an old man's. His gaunt face was tanned and his hands red and rough. His countenance, though not evil, was usually sulky when not actually scowling. The most objectionable thing about him in Susan's eyes was the way his false teeth wriggled about, "as though," she thought, "they didn't want to stay on the job!"

As a concession to the fact that he was come a-courting, he wore his best (and only) suit: of cheap material and bad cut; and a brilliant lavender necktie that he had bought at Woolworth's.

Joe Houghton was reputed to have amassed a very comfortable bank account; but money to him was not what the dictionary proclaims it, "a medium of exchange"; he never exchanged it for anything if he could help it. The one great dissipation of his whole life was the accumulation and hoarding of wealth.

"That's the time I caught you; ain't?" he said, pointing an accusing finger at Susan as she stopped short at sight of him. His words were playful, but his tone and look were sullen.

Without answering, she turned and walked back to the front of the school-house to take the main road.

Joe, however, kept at her side.

"What the hell makes you ac' so menschenshy*, anyhow, Miss Susie?" he demanded.

* Bashful with men.

She walked rapidly, without replying.

"Say, Miss Susan, I got somepin awful particular to tell you this after!" he pleaded.

"But you've had my answer so often," she said, wearily. Though her voice had lost none of its sweetness and drawling softness, it was lifeless.

"No, I ain't had your answer a'ready!" growled Joe. "You ain't said Yes yet; and Yes is a-goin' to be your answer! You make up your mind to that!"

"You seem to have made up your mind so firmly," she said, sweetly, "that my mind doesn't seem to matter."

"Well, anyhow, it ain't that question I want to bother you with this after. It's somepin else I got reference to."

Susan manifested no curiosity.

"Somepin awful important to me and you," he added.

"That doesn't seem possible," said Susan, mildly.

"You mean," said Joe, frowning with the mental effort to which this retort challenged him, "that me and you ain't got no interests in common?"

"I've not noticed any."

"Well, you'll notice 'em some day, you bet you! It's about my Uncle George's will I want to tell you. I went to Middleburg yistiddy to tend the reading of the will. That's some important to you, ain't it?"

"Why should it be?"

"Because some day what's mine will be yourn."

"But if you were mine, I should certainly wish, for your immortal soul's sake, that your Uncle George had died a bankrupt!"

Joe, to whom money was a holy thing, his only religion, felt cold at such blasphemy.

"It's temptin' Providence to say sich things!" he frowned.

"Can 'Providence' be tempted? What a funny expression it is, by the way--'tempting Providence!' Religion sometimes seems to me the most humorous thing in all the world!"

"Och, don't talk so outlandish!" he brusquely admonished her. Joe, like Mark Antony, was "no orator," but "a plain, blunt man," who did not stand on ceremony. "Don't you want fur me to tell you about Uncle George's will?"

"Why should I?"

"Say, what makes you ac' so ugly to me? Don't I treat you right?"

"As right as you know how, Mr. Houghton."

"Well, I can't do better'n that, can I?"

"No--that's the trouble."

"You mean," he demanded with puckered brow, "that I don't know how to treat a lady right?"

"You're so bright, Mr. Houghton, in seeing through my remarks!"

"Yes," said Joe, complacently, "I always was wery smart that way. But I guess you mean," he added, suspiciously, "that I ain't tony enough to suit you."

"You don't have to suit me."

"But you got to suit _me_! And you got to take interest in Uncle George's will. Uncle George done awful mean by me! What do you think he up and done yet, Miss Susan? He's inherited to my half-brother, Sidney, this here farm here, that I've worked on like a dog for five years, improvin' the land so much that I've near doubled the crops! And now the whole place of twelve hundred waluable acres, with house and all, goes to Sid and I got to get _out_!-- and lose all the profits of my own work! Yes, anyhow! The will says Sid's got to come here and make White Oak Farm his home and keep up the place, because seven generations of Houghtons has lived here. Sid he's to be sich a gentleman farmer, the will says. Now what do you think of that? Ain't it dirty mean that I got to get off my farm?"

Susan could almost have found it in her heart to pity the man at her side for the tragic suffering she knew this fact meant to him.

"I'm sorry!" she said, sympathetically.

"The will inherits to Sid (besides White Oak Farm) two thirds of the _es_tate worth near a million, and to me only one third," complained Joe. "To be sure," he admitted, "it ain't as if I hadn't of expected Sid to get the big share; but I did think Uncle George would give the _farm_ to me that I've worked on so hard! But my folks always did have it in fur me! None of 'em ever did think I was good enough fur 'em to 'sociate with!--though it's them that always kep' me down. My father left me run wild when I was little and never bothered about me; and then when he married again, my step-mother she had so ashamed of me, she was all the time pokin' me out of sight whenever she had comp'ny. She'd make me eat in the kitchen with the hired help and she wouldn't never speak to me. Her and Sid and Uncle George, all of 'em, had always ashamed of me. And my father _he_ didn't care!"

Joe spoke with exceeding bitterness, and for the first time in her acquaintance with him, Susan found herself feeling some sympathy for him.

"One thing in that there will," he continued, "ain't so bad fur me, fur all. If Sid's son dies----"

"He has a son?"

"Yes," answered Joe on a deep tragic note that made Susan vaguely wonder. "And if his kid dies, White Oak Farm goes to _my_ son, so's the family name'll be kep' on at the ol' homestead."

Susan whimsically reflected that Joe was quite incapable of plotting the heir's murder for the sake of his own son's inheritance. "It must take rather heroic courage to commit some kinds of crime!" she thought. "And only debased cowardice for the kind Sidney committed!"

"Now my half-brother, Sidney, he's altogether different to what I am yet," Joe went on. "He's a elegant swell, Sid is," he sneered. "From a little kid a'ready, he was always awful genteel. You'd never take him fur my brother, Miss Susan, if you ever met up with him; which you're likely to do soon, fur he's comin' here right aways to White Oak to live at the ol' homestead."

Susan's detached self, which seemed, in these days, always to be looking on, with a dull surprise, at her dead other self, noticed, just now, how strangely unmoved this news found her. Joe might have been speaking (as he supposed he was) of someone she had never seen!

"Sid, he kep' on the right side of Uncle George by marryin' awful good; a wery tony swell with money of her own. A perfec' lady, so they say. I never seen her. She must be, though, if she satisfied Uncle George's elegant tastes! Gosh, but Sid'll be ashamed to have to interdooce her to _me_!"

Susan made no comment as they walked side by side over the country highroad in the warm, bright April afternoon, past woods and fields just beginning to show a down of tender green.

"Well, ain't it a dirty, mean shame, me havin' to get off my farm fur my stuck-up half-brother to move in, that never done a stroke of work on the place; nor nowheres else did he never do no work of no kind!"

"I wonder," the young school teacher found her brain speculating, "whether he _could_ get any more negatives into that sentence!"

"Sid _he_ can't make good on the farm; he don't know nothin' about farmin'. He don't know nothin' about nothin', except the rules of society and stylish clo'es and how to squander money and such like. He even fell down on that there dead easy cinch Uncle George got him--diplomacy--in Europe. Got all balled up tryin' to work it! His wife didn't hit it off good with a dukess or a czaress or whatever. Anyhow, the two of 'em (Mrs. Sid and the dukess or what) had words and Sid he had to cut out and come home."

Susan laughed--a little low ripple of quite mirthless laughter.

"What's so funny?" asked Joe, puzzled. "Sid's mom and Uncle George took it awful serious. Me, too, fur if he'd stayed over there on his job, I might of stayed on the farm. _Don't_ you think they done me dirt?"

"It's not right," Susan answered, perfunctorily. "It's not right (in fact, it's quite grotesque) that a man, after he's dead, should control twelve hundred acres of the earth's surface, decreeing to whom it shall belong for two generations. It's not right that your step-brother, who does not work, should reap where others sow. It's not right that a third of a million dollars that you never worked for should fall into your hands, while my valuable services in this township are paid for at fifty dollars a month! I'm afraid, Mr. Houghton, I can't get warmed up over your wrongs. Are you going to move away?" she asked, hopefully.

"Not if I can help it--don't you worry!"

"I'll try not to."

"I'm in hopes Sid'll hire me fur his tenant-farmer and leave me live in the tenant-farmer's cottage on the place and keep on workin' the farm on shares fur him, like what I done fur Uncle George. I don't believe he will, though. He'd hate so to have a brother like me," Joe growled, "livin' close by, so's he'd have to interdooce me, still, if I chanced along, to his grand friends!"

Susan noted, without any great interest in the phenomenon, the strange psychology of the born miser who, with ample means to go where he would, preferred to work slavishly for a brother who looked down upon him, rather than lose the few thousand dollars, the fruits of his own labour which, in the transfer of the property, would accrue to his brother instead of to him.

"Sid'll soon find out that a good, honest farmer ain't so easy found," said Joe. "So mebby he'll _have_ to leave me stay on."

It was not, Susan knew, that Joe was without pride or sensitiveness, of a kind. But these sentiments were overborne by his avarice.

His next words, however, made her doubt whether avarice was the only or the strongest motive he had for wishing to remain where he was not wanted.

"I want to be Johnny-on-the-spot to watch Sid 'waste his substance in riotous living,'" he chuckled, maliciously. "Till ten years a'ready _he_ won't have no money left of all his big fortune. I know him. He'll blow it in! I tell you," he said, wickedly gloating, "you'll see the day when my swell brother comes to me beggin' fur the price of a meal ticket. Then watch what _I'll_ do! And say! it won't go so long, neither, till I get him in my power!"

"In your power!" smiled Susan, skeptically. It sounded so melodramatic.

"You needn't to grin! I got my little plans all right, all right!"

Susan was silent.

"One good thing, Miss Susan, you won't have near the housework to do, us livin' in the tenant's cottage, as what you'd of had if White Oak Farm had of been willed to me and I'd of stayed on in the big house. My housekeeper she's always growlin' about how much work it makes in such a big house, even though we do close off all but just the couple rooms we use. Yes, me, I'll be awful glad when I got a wife oncet and don't have to fuss with no hired help no more."

"Won't it be worse to have to fuss with a wife? You can't discharge your wife as you can your hired housekeeper."

"But my first wife, she never bothered me any about the housework bein' too heavy. And a man's wife can't up and leave like hired help's always doin'."

"Oh, yes, she can, in these days. A few do."

"Not the kind of a woman _I'll_ marry," said Joe, confidently. "I wouldn't tie up with no sich loose-moralled person."

"See that you don't!"

"_You_ don't hold no sich loose views, do you? Don't you think marriage is awful sakerd?"

"Sacred to become a man's permanent housekeeper who can't throw up her job if she doesn't like it? Sacred? Ha!" Susan laughed--almost with amusement.

"A wife's a man's partner," argued Joe.

"His equal partner? With some rights over their earnings and property?"

"Well, to be sure, the husband's the head of the wife. The _Bible_ says so. You believe the Bible, don't you?"

"I don't believe nonsense."

"Oh, hell, Miss Susan, ain't you afraid somepin'll happen you, sayin' sich blasphemous things?"

Susan thought to herself, "Afraid?--of something happening to me?--when everything has happened that can ever matter!"

But when Joe Houghton had left her at the station and she was alone, during her long hour's ride home to Reifsville, she found that his announcement of his brother's immediately coming to live in the neighbourhood of her school did seem to matter to her. She had suffered so horribly; her present insensibility was such a blessed respite; she dreaded so unspeakably any possible thing which might revive her pain! Could she remain as callous at sight of Sidney Houghton as everything else had found her since the birth of her dead baby?

It was just one year ago to-day that she had gone to her lover's rooms to plead with him for their coming child. And three days after that futile visit to him she had read the newspaper announcement of his sudden marriage to Miss Laura Beresford.

Then for two days and nights she had suffered the prolonged torture of a tedious and terribly difficult premature child-birth.

She had never seen her dead baby. She had been unconscious at its birth; and for many weeks afterward she had lain at death's door in the delirium of child-bed fever.

When, after long, dreary, hopeless weeks of illness and suffering, she had become strong enough to ask questions about the baby, the answers of her shocked and stricken family had seemed to her strange, evasive. Her sister Addie had told her it was a girl; her mother, tearfully, but with a note of heart-broken pride, that it was "a fine boy"; Lizzie that it was "a seven months' blue baby and couldn't have lived anyhow." That enigmatical "anyhow" had vaguely troubled her through all her convalescence.

"Just to think," Addie would mourn as she waited upon her, "that a man with such nice manners at him as what Sidney always had, would go and ac' like this here! Don't it beat all? I wouldn't of thought it of him! How he must have ashamed of hisself now!"

"_Him_ ashamed!" Lizzie would sniff. "Nothing doing! He ain't the pertikkler _kind_!"

Susan's deepest bitterness against her "betrayer" lay in the fact that she must be thankful that her baby was dead; that she, whose longing for a child had been a passion, had been cheated of its fulfilment; that the ecstasy which her child would have been to her had been turned into a frenzy of horror lest her coming baby should be alive!--born "out of wedlock"; an outcast; her innocent child made to suffer all its life long because of its parents' selfishness and weakness! That her motherhood had been thus perverted and distorted--for this she knew that never while she breathed could she forgive Sidney Houghton.

It did not seem very strange to her that Miss Beresford, in spite of that encounter with her at Sidney's rooms, had, after all, married him.

"It isn't very much worse than what I did for love of him! And of course he lied to her about me."

Strangely enough, the Schrekengusts' desperate efforts to conceal their darling's "disgrace" had been successful. A doctor had been "fetched" from another town and they themselves had been her only nurses. The very length and severity of her illness had precluded any suspicion in Reifsville as to its true cause, especially as no least rumour of scandal had been previously aroused.

The consternation produced in the family by Susan's inquiry, as soon as she was able to walk out of doors, for the grave of her baby, had revealed to her poignantly how deeply her family felt her "ruin."

"But we didn't give you away to folks by makin' a grave yet to show!" her father had explained to her. "Nobody knows nothing! Nor they _ain't_ to, neither!"

"Didn't you have an undertaker?"

"Och, no," her mother had sadly told her. "Pop he tended to all hisself."

"But where did you bury her? I want at least to go to the spot where she lies!" Susan had pleaded (the consensus of opinion seeming to favour the assumption, in lieu of any positive statement, that the baby had been a girl).

"I couldn't say just the spot," her father had replied, "but--well, it's anyhow in the orchard over."

She knew she was morbid to regret so much that she could not have even the doubtful solace of visiting her child's grave.

Six months had passed before she had been able to take up teaching again. Her position at Reifsville had been filled, and she had secured the country school at White Oak Station.

Joe Houghton being one of the school directors who had elected her, and White Oak Farm being so conveniently just across the road from her school-house, the young widower, with a year-old baby on his hands, had, from the first hour of their acquaintance, pursued her assiduously with his unwelcome attentions.

Susan realized, with an utter indifference to the fact, that she had come out from her illness much better looking than she had ever been; her abundant hair, all lost through her terrible fever, had come in again in thick gold-brown curls; her wasted flesh seemed to have been renewed in a clearer, softer texture; all the angles of her slender frame were now softly rounded; she bloomed and glowed with health and youth.

But her soul remained heavy and dead.

She had not taken up again, after her recovery, any of the old threads of her life. The few choice, intimate, and very precious friendships she had made at school had been dropped; forever, she believed. Her friends' letters, persistent, anxious, importunate, remained unanswered. She had ceased to feel any interest in them. They belonged so absolutely to that other life, now dead, in which she had met and known and loved Sidney Houghton; a life so different from that of her own home; in which she had found colour, joy, music, culture, and had made them her own. That was all over now. Sidney had robbed her of everything of worth that she had attained through hard work, against adverse circumstances. She seemed to have lost all power to feel, to care for any one, for anything.

She had found Joe Houghton to be all that Sidney had once told her he was--crude, miserly, "grouchy." He was of a very jealous disposition and given to fits of sullenness which made Susan feel that his young wife must have found a blessed escape in death. He was, of course, his own worst enemy, an unhappy creature, his only joy and comfort in life being his passion for hoarding money. He loved his baby boy and was proud of him, but the child caused him more suffering than happiness; for while he had quarrelled with one housekeeper after another for neglecting the boy, he was morbidly jealous of any one for whom the child manifested more fondness than he showed for his father.

Over against these trying characteristics could be named a few uninteresting virtues. He was scrupulously honest and truthful; much as he loved gain, there was no stake high enough to lure him from the strictest integrity. And although a highly sexed individual, he was quite puritanically virtuous.

Susan thought, during her homeward drive, what an ideal setting for a man of Sidney Houghton's tastes White Oak Farm would be and what delight he would take in that beautiful old home which had been so religiously preserved in all its primitive quaintness of architecture and furniture, by so many generations of his family. He had once told her how the Houghtons had always prided themselves in being the only family of English extraction in all the Pennsylvania Dutch township of White Oak. Their social life had of course (he had explained) been confined exclusively to that of the near-by city of Middleburg. Their immediate neighbourhood knew them only by sight.

Joe had one day persuaded her to come over to the farm to see his baby (little dreaming of the bitterness in her soul as she had held the pretty child on her breast!) and he had shown her all over the truly lovely house, unlocking the closed-off rooms with their old woven rugs brought over to America in colonial days, their carved four-posted beds, pier tables, davenports, and old portraits of colonial dignitaries. As she reflected that all these rare things were now the possession of Sidney Houghton she thought of that one pathetic little suit of furniture which she and Sidney had chosen together for their future home and which he had afterward pawned in order to carry on his courtship with Miss Laura Beresford--even while she, Susan, was still paying for it out of her hard-earned little salary.

"Did he know at the time," she dully wondered, "that we would never use it in a home of ours? Did he get me to buy it just for his own use in his college rooms?"

He had not kept the promise he had made to her about the furniture--that day she had gone to him to plead with him for their child's sake----

"I shall pay you back every dollar of it!" he had said. "It may take me a long time, but I shan't let you lose what you paid for it, Susan."

When, during her illness, several letters had come to her, dunning her for the sum still unpaid on the furniture, her father had given Sidney Houghton's address to the creditor and told him to collect the amount from him. But the creditor had returned the information that Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Houghton were in Denmark and that Mr. Houghton's mother repudiated the bill.

The furniture had been bought in Susan's name. So, when she was recovered from her long illness, she sold her parlour furniture to be able to meet this debt and her large doctor's bill.

When this afternoon she got off the trolley car and walked listlessly through Reifsville toward her home, she was still wondering whether a possible, and probably unavoidable, encounter with the new occupant of White Oak Farm would shock her back into sensibility.