Chapter VI: Part III: The Ambrosial Youth (1)

“His flesh is angel’s flesh, all alive.”

“Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship,
so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the
universe, the soul worships truth and love, honor and courtesy flow
into all deeds.”
EMERSON.

September weather was over the world before I felt able to be carried out-of-doors. I had been very ill, but at my worst I remember having Jennie on my mind, and hanging to her hand while I pleaded over and over the cause of the little child.

Now, though weak, I had reached a state of rapturous convalescence, and reached it quite suddenly. Julian lifted me out to the shaded lawn, where Jennie had wadded a rocking-chair with pillows. The leaves were turning, but none had fallen. Lena’s birds hanging in a row along the eaves of the porch kept it up at a great rate, the canary seeming to recognize me and give me the name he had long since invented for me: turning his head and calling through the bars, “Maë, Maë!”

Lena and Fritz came around the corner of the house and grinned. Lena had saved the biggest pear on the dwarf tree for me, and Fritz brought a nosegay of marigolds, strong enough to stifle many invalids. “It’s quite like a Harvest Home,” said Julian. “We ought to strap a corn-shock on Leander’s back and lead him in the procession.”

Then Jennie went into the house to bring out T’férgore. Jennie was not only my doctor, but she had turned up her sleeves and showed Lena how to cook the dishes I could eat. She had discharged two nurses, one after the other, and relied on herself and Lena’s help, and Julian’s solicitude.

“You never know what a woman is until you try her in a family crisis,” said Julian, sitting down near me. “I wasn’t enamored of your Dr. Purdy before, but I’ll say this of her now: she has the coolest head, the readiest hand, and the largest fund of domestic skill of any woman I ever saw.”

“I always told you that,” said I in a superior tone.

“She’s stayed by us to the neglect of her city practice, I’m afraid,” said Julian.

“She is just getting into practice,” I assured him, “and before coming out here announced her intention of leaving town for a change. It has been a severe change, though.”

“But a man has been here importuning her about something.”

I took hold of the arms of my chair. “What kind of a man, Julian?”

“Oh, an ordinary person. Nothing striking about him. I thought he looked very sulky the last time he went away.”

“Jennie was short with him, was she?”

“She saw him only a few minutes each time, after the first, and I thought she was rather peremptory. There’s Doctor Theophilus again, and he’s footed it from the Avenue station. The Reverend never was so devoted to us as he has been since T’férgore’s arrival,” said Julian, smiling drolly.

I had a nervous dread of Julian’s uncle; he was the most respectable man who ever had the right to add Doctor of Divinity to his name. Large, broad, and ponderous, his mere presence seemed to reprehend the playful antics of life. I was afraid of his long upper lip, which shut as close as a snuff-box lid. His white neckties awed me, and the solidity of his choice words reproached me. Behind his back, and in spite of Julian’s laughing remonstrance, I had rechristened Uncle Doctor Theophilus, whose surname was Marvin, The Old Daguerreotype. It is true he had not his case on, though the snap with which it formerly shut had probably passed into his lips. I could even fancy that when you got a side-light on him he retained the glare of the old daguerreotype, and effaced himself in a sheet of glitter. His expression seemed unalterably made up; and though he looked more ancient than other men of his age, I knew he thought himself well taken, and all his tints neat without being gaudy. He oppressed me so that I frequently wanted to rub him out. I always trod on a stone and turned my foot, or ran against a chair, when the Old Daguerreotype was by. Or he threw me into a nervous trance, and I sat with parted lips, glaring eyes, and aching neck, fancying that my own daguerreotype was being taken. Aunt Doctor Theophilus used to be a worthy companion picture to him, but death years ago effaced her lineaments and snapped her case shut, to be opened no more.

I felt that I could hardly stand the Old Daguerreotype just at this time, but said to Julian it was kind of him, taken in such a precise attitude as he was, to dust himself walking out from the Avenue, on our account.

“Oh, it isn’t the first time he has done it,” said Julian. “Something about our rural domicile has seized upon Uncle Doctor. He didn’t go out of town this year, and he’s taking whiffs of the country between sermons.”

“Between poses,” I suggested softly. “I hope Jennie isn’t bothered by his coming. She takes strong antipathies, and he does make one’s backbone ache.”

“Oh, she stands it,” said Julian laughing, “affably, as if she were the artist who had taken him.”

I turned around towards Jennie as Julian went to the gate to meet his uncle. She was bringing T’férgore across the porch and smoothing down the angel robes. She herself looked like a Madonna picture, pale and somewhat saddened, but most womanly, most touching.

“Jennie,” I said, as she put T’férgore on my lap, standing before me to do so, “you have taken care of me as only a woman can, and pulled me through to paradise.”

“Well,” she replied quickly, “you took care of me first. I think I must have been out of my senses. But having this little monster to handle made things appear very different.”

T’férgore blinked lazily, and struck out with ineffectual fists. The cherub-wings were perhaps hidden in folds of mull, but gazing on this wonderful creature’s allurements, I was seized with a Saturn-like desire to bite and devour every flower-tinted atom. I forgot that the Old Daguerreotype was at the gate, and worried my prey, breaking into a rhapsody of baby Romany.

In the midst of my Bess’ums and S’eetums, and Old Dol’ums, Uncle Doctor appeared before me, and bent himself at T’férgore’s shrine, with an expression nearly as idiotic as my own. He clucked, whistled, and snapped his fingers, and for one moment I thought he was going to dance. But his legs were taken too stiffly for that, and he only limbered his entire length and cracked the glass in a way which damaged him forever as my Old Daguerreotype.

Then he straightened himself up apologetically and shook hands with Jennie, saying in his most ministerial tones, “And how are you to-day, Dr. Jane?”

I must say that everything Uncle Doctor did on this occasion astonished me. It was the first time I had been permitted to see a visitor, and they should have prepared me for the unusual side-lights I should now catch upon the Old Daguerreotype. He held professional women in disdain, and I had heard him utter homilies against wives who tacked all their maiden or acquired names before their husband’s cognomen. Yet here he was parading Dr. Jane’s title, and almost capering before her in his exuberant desire to win favor.

They sat down around me, and I noticed how unembarrassed Jennie was by the Daguerreotype’s white tie and the clip of his lips and fearful respectability.

“A little daughter in the house,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, indicating with pomp the human atom in my lap, “is indeed a well-spring of pleasure.”

“We counted on her brother Trotwood Copperfield, instead of his sister Betsey Trotwood,” said Julian.

“It was a mere fancy,” I insisted, “and girls are just as good as boys any day.”

“Better,” granted Julian.

“I’m quite as glad that T’férgore is a girl.”

“But it disarranges the name,” said Julian. “His name was Fergus Dering, but I think we shall have to call her Ferguson.”

“Not at all,” I dissented indignantly.

“T’férgore!” mused Uncle Doctor Theophilus. “What kind of un-Christian appellation have you stumbled upon there?”

“The name being Fergus,” explained Julian, “we call her--as Lena would put it--T’férgore in short.”

We sat in silences of several minutes at a time, hearing an apple drop in the orchard, the call of the katydids, or the restless stepping of Leander in his stable. Already the smoky light of autumn was mellowing distances.

“How remote this little spot appears to be from the centres of traffic,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, with a pulpit gesture.

“It’s a good place for fever patients,” said Dr. Jane in a tone of authority. “There’s health in the air of the house.”

“Yes, I should apprehend as much,” asserted Uncle Doctor Theophilus.

“You mean the intellectual atmosphere, of course,” said Julian, as a whiff of the sauerkraut Lena did love came around the house. “Oh yes, we are remote, but we have had great company here. Emerson has uttered wisdom from your chair, Uncle Doctor, and near him sat Hawthorne, and against that tree leaned Thoreau. We have even had what some fantastic literary fellow calls the tone poets all around us, and no end of painters and sketchers.”

“It’s nothing but a play of ours,” I explained. “Whenever I wished we had such people for visitors, Julian piled chairs full of their books, or their music, or stood up copies of their pictures. Then we talked to them, and Julian read from them in reply, or I ran over the musical score, or he hung a picture where it could speak for itself. In that way he thinks we enjoyed just as close communion with them as their nearest friends ever had; because their elusive souls would speak to us more directly and coherently than if they were sitting opposite us in the flesh.”

The Old Daguerreotype shook his head indulgently over such pastime. On deliberation, however, he said the next time we had such a gathering he would like to join it.

After supper, and while Uncle Doctor Theophilus and Julian were trailing their feet through the grass, carrying their hands behind them, and all but chewing the bovine cud in their ruminative gazing on the bee-hives, the orchard, the stable, and meadow, Jennie put on her hat and gloves to drive our relative back to the Avenue station. I knew the drive would be good for her.

“You can come home the long way, through the creek--the water is always low--after you have left him at his train,” I hinted.

“I guess I shall go the long way,” said Jennie. “It will be pleasanter having someone to talk with.”

T’férgore and I exchanged a long stare; that is, I exchanged a long stare with T’férgore for a series of self-absorbed blinks.

“I am so glad,” I then remarked to Jennie, “that you aren’t put out by the old Dag--Doctor; when I say old, I mean, of course, reverend; for he isn’t really elderly, you know.”

“He doesn’t put me out a bit,” answered Jennie. “He is very quieting to me. I believe he is a sound man.”

“There is no man sounder,” I declared. “And he was just as good as he could be to his wife. I think she actually died because there was nothing more she could ask of life. I never saw such a self-satisfied expression as she had--outside of a miniature. His position is excellent and influential, too. A woman can’t help looking at that sort of thing when she is once married.”

Jennie turned about to face me, smiling. “Now, don’t, my dear, don’t,” she objected. “Let us not give our talk any such bias.”

“Oh, I won’t,” I exclaimed apprehensively. “I’m not throwing anybody at you at all. I was just going to say that though he is such an excellent man, and near to Julian and all that, he ossifies the working of my joints: I feel in such awe of him.”

“I don’t,” said Jennie.

“Yes; I’ve noticed that.”

“I think his society is wholesome for me.”

“Yes; it seems to be mutual,” I could not help suggesting. “Either you or T’férgore is limbering him up until I do believe in the course of time his presence will become wholesome for _me_.”

Leander, drawing Jennie and the Old Daguerreotype in our red cart, went briskly down the road, and Julian and T’férgore and I sat watching them.

“They will loiter through the woods,” mused I, “and watch the festoons of grapevine, and get a sniff of sycamore leaves and pennyroyal mixed with loam.”

“Yes,” said Julian. “Next week I shall take you and Ferguson off through the woodsiest drive of them all.”

“Julian,” I remonstrated, “her name isn’t and it never will be Ferguson.”

“Oh, well,” said Julian, “the bill is laid on the table then. Another motion will be in order.”

“And they’ll see bunches of goldenrod in a thicket,” I continued, returning to Leander’s load, “and the Old Daguerreotype will jump out to get it for her, footing it lightsomely among the burrs.”

“You make quite a beau of our uncle,” said Julian, turning his cigar over.

“Well, I should think anybody could see that’s what he wants to be considered.”

“He has my consent,” said Julian.

“Mine, too,” said I, taking high grounds; “but I’m not so sure about Jennie. She’s a woman who has been hard to suit. Nothing else stood in the way of her marrying long ago.”

I looked keenly at Julian, but he evidently knew naught about the one month divorced man with a wife and five children--the youngest two years old. It was the only secret I had ever kept from him, and it burned guiltily at the roots of my tongue. But the woman who reveals to her lord and master some unlovely weakness of her own sex helps him to a judgment-seat too dangerously lofty.

“She’s what you may really call superior,” admitted Julian, “but far enough into the woods to be afraid of the crooked stick. And Uncle Theoph. isn’t so bad.”

“No,” I granted generously: “he doesn’t make me half as miserable as he used to. And I know he won’t mind getting bugs down his neck and stumbling over old logs for yellow and chocolate colored pawpaw leaves and branches of fire-red maple, if Jennie wants him to.”

“I wonder,” Julian ruminated, “if Aunt Marvin ever made him dance around when they were young together and she had a ribbon headdress on her hair, and he choked himself with a stock.”

“No,” said I, “she was his first wife.”

Julian reached over, at the risk of waking T’férgore, and laid his arm across my shoulder.

“Besides, she never cried,” I added. “And a good husband is just like a growing crop: he needs to be rained on.”

Julian uttered a little grunt of contempt, but it was the kind of contempt which magnified the importance of his own sex and therefore did no real harm to ours.

“Uncle Doctor Theophilus is lonely,” said Julian, “having once lived the life of a family man.”

“And Jennie is lonely, too,” I admitted, “having never lived the life of a family woman. Think how hard it is to stand outside of--say the little farm--and see T’férgore come home, and our comfort and satisfaction.”

“Man: his wife: his child:” ruminated Julian. “The family; the little spot of our own ground. That’s the primitive and true life.”

We heard the creek frogs lifting up their voices.

“Next summer when T’férgore is big enough to be carried across the field,” said I, “I will make a Kate Greenaway dress with a yoke, and flare a hat of muslin for her, or better still, pucker her face into a frilly cap, and set her down in the midst of the clover where there aren’t any bees.”

“And put a crook in her hand,” said Julian. “For now we are her sheep. We can’t stray across blue water until the shepherdess permits.”

ILLINOIS

BEETRUS

TIME, 1881

“Beetrus Jenkins!” called the owner of the name, sending her high clear voice through the boxed space which served as post-office window.

“Yes, ’m,” responded the postmaster, with that joking freedom which adds so much spice to the life of a general-storekeeper at a South Illinois railroad station. “Three letters this time. He’s writing nearly every day.”

“It wears on you to keep track of my correspondence, don’t it?” affirmed the girl, taking her letters and rending them open with impatient forefinger. They were all addressed, in the same mercantile hand, to Miss Beatrice Jenkins, Wabash Station, Illinois. She compared the dates of the postmarks, and opened the earliest, standing by the door to read.

The smoke-dimmed interior of the store was hung with baskets, dry-goods, bacon, ready-made clothing, and boots and shoes. A skeleton flight of steps ascended across a background of wall to the proprietor’s residence, and up this flight of steps went a neighbor’s barefooted child with a coffee-pot to borrow some household necessity, while Beetrus read her mail.

She was a spot of mellow color betwixt brilliant autumn tints outside and the dim inclosure. The slim, long-fingered hands holding her letters were nicely gloved. Her white hat was covered with plumes just owning the salmon-pink tint of her small woolen shawl. Her dress was neutral and unobtrusive. Not so, however, were her black eyes and glowing cheeks, or the dark hair clustering to her ears. She was a very pretty girl, and this the station-master always mentally admitted. He came out of his post-office cubby with the mail-bag in his hand.

“So you’re going to clear out to-day, Bee?”

She glanced up, perceptibly starting and coloring.

“Goin’ by rail or by river?”

“Oh!” said Beetrus. “Yes, we’re going up the river. Our things are packed on the White Dove. We’d have to go so far around and pay so much freight the other way. But I don’t like to go on a freight boat, and neither does ma, though the men are just as kind and clever as they can be. We have to sit upon deck all night, too, among the machinery and grease.”

“Yes, you will. It’s a twelve hours’ run betwixt this and New Harmony against the current. The White Dove starts about three o’clock. Will you be down any during the winter?”

“I guess not. Our man and his wife can tend to everything on the farm. We never do run back and forth any after cold weather sets in.”

“And I suppose you’ll put the time in dancin’ and takin’ music lessons?”

“It isn’t so very lively in Harmony; but I’m going on with my music--That isn’t the train?”

“Yes, it is,” responded the station-master, swinging the mail-bag as he walked forth to keep appointment with the black and hissing locomotive sliding to its brief pause.

Beetrus flew through the store, ran down the back steps, and sheltered herself in woods which stretched away toward the Wabash. Swift as her exit was, she scarcely escaped the eye of a young man who swung himself off the train, sample case in hand. His face twinkled humorously, which it could very well do, being a pleasant mustached face in spite of the marks of dissipation it bore. His trim dress and brisk air bespoke the prosperous commercial traveler.

He went indoors and swept a business-like glance around before the train steamed away; therefore by the time the station-master had put up the mail and served one or two customers, he had a satisfactory order written out, and professed himself ready to mount the next train, for which he would have to wait quite two hours.

“Oh, you know how to put the time in,” said the station-master, “as long as we have any pretty girls left in the neighborhood.”

The drummer smiled out of the back door at a huddle of two or three cabins and board huts, as if the capacity of such a place for producing pretty girls was too contemptible a joke for him to meddle with. He said he guessed he would go down to the landing and see if he couldn’t get a skiff a while.

“Bee Jenkins will be down that way,” suggested the station-master. “She was in here a minute ago.”

“Ran from me,” noted the drummer.

“I’d kind of advise her to, if she hadn’t,” said the station-keeper.

“What’s the objection to me?” laughed the drummer; “I’m only a good gray sinner. They’ll have to dip me several times more before I’m as black as you South Illinois Egyptians.”

“Old lady Jenkins will have a crow to pick with you, though, if she happens to drop onto all these letters and walks.”

“You undertake too much,” said the drummer, shaking his head with gentle persuasiveness. “The store and post-office and station and the neighborhood will accumulate, and be too many for you.”

Beetrus saw him sauntering on her track. The blood was buzzing in her head, and she hid herself upon a pile of steep high rocks, obeying some wild impulse of which she felt ashamed. To follow him with her eyes and be herself invisible was an impersonal rapture in which she could indulge without giving it too great advantage. Yet, when he disappeared near the river, she felt a stinging check in her heart, and a sense of having inflicted loss and robbery upon herself.

To Beetrus he was the walking essence of the world, representing not only its mighty business, but its advantages of culture and travel. She never had been from home except to Evansville and New Harmony; and he never stayed two nights in a place, and spoke with fatigue of his exciting life. What operas he had seen!--for in Beetrus’s chaotic imagination all theatrical performance was opera, and operas were the distinct possessions of the worldly.

She resented with a mixture of awe and daring the greatness of his relatives. He was a nephew of the head of his commercial house, and his grandfather had been a congressman; while her background was the pioneer’s cabin, the pecan woods, and Wabash rocks and hills.

Beetrus was the child of a shrewd though romance-soaked mother, who had dowered her with something more than a mispronounced fine name and biased imagination. It is strange to think how large a human mass, moving this instant in grooves of practical action, is protesting with secret scorn against all its conditions. Beetrus was full of a girl’s unrests and eccentric impulses. She thought she knew exactly what she wanted for her happiness.

She pressed her cheek against the rock lichens, taking a half-inverted view of the autumn tangle, and glad in spite of herself for the pleasant breath of life. It was worth while to be a part of such woods and river vistas, and to smell all the ground’s odors. Some little living thing ran along a log not far from her; and she could hear a squirrel bark, a whish and a whisper of loosened leaves as they were sent adrift, and then the dropping of a nut. Strong as the sunlight was, she shivered upon the rocks, and then felt all her blood burn, beat, and tremble.

The commercial traveler was walking back with a brisk step from the river, and scanning every opening among the trees, as if on an eager search. He saw Beetrus rising and tightening her pink shawl on her shoulders, and halted with a jerk.

“Where have you been?” was his unceremonious exclamation.

“Up here, reading my letters and viewing the country.”

“You saw me go past, then, didn’t you?”

“Was it you?” said she, fitting her foot deftly to the steep descent.

“Let me lift you down. How pretty you look this morning!”

“Oh! don’t talk about pretty, Mr. Poundstone,” said Beetrus, dyed in color, after he had stood her upon the moss, dazed as she always was by his prevailing presence.

“You oughtn’t to have hid; I want to talk up a scheme with you right off. It popped into my head since I got off the train.”

“What scheme?” said Beetrus, hugging her shawl and looking over her shoulder to simulate complete indifference.

“You know well enough, or can guess. We mustn’t be parted, my dear girl; I can’t run up to New Harmony every time I make a trip down this way. Think of the long winter. Don’t you want to see me this winter?”

“Oh--yes,” she admitted, with a gasp.

“I want to see you. I want to have you entirely to myself, to look forward to every time I come in off the road. Let’s get married.”

Beetrus visibly expanded and contracted with a great breath.

“Get on the train and go over to Evansville with me, and we’ll have the minister tie the knot there. Then home. And a nice little private set of rooms, all quiet and to ourselves, and no relations to bother us.”

“But ma’s fixed things to go up to New Harmony for the winter,” whispered Beetrus, struggling with this vision. “And she wouldn’t change her mind so suddenly--’specially as she doesn’t know you real well.”

“It isn’t ma I want to marry,” argued Poundstone, using his winning smile. “I’ll drop my relations, and you can surely do the same.”

“Drop ma!”

The girl was stung by a covert insult.

“Leave her a little while. Let her go up to New Harmony, you know.”

“And what do you mean about dropping your relations?” demanded Beetrus, growing straighter and more self-assured, and burning more vividly in the cheeks. “That they wouldn’t want to be acquainted with ma and me? No, sir; I ain’t going to let her go up to New Harmony alone; and I never would seriously have you unless she knew all about it and was willing. She might have read your letters if she wanted to; she knows about them. I never did anything in my life that ma told me not to do.”

“I thought five minutes’ talk on this subject would bring you to reason,” remonstrated Poundstone.

“Then you didn’t calculate right.”

“So it seems.”

“I’m not the girl you took me for.”

“Do you want to break off with me entirely?” he exclaimed, with heat.

“Yes--come to that--I do!” cried Beetrus, flinging his letters at him, two fluttering uncertain, but one moulded by the grip of her hand and darting like a missile. “I believed in you, and see how you’ve treated me!”

“My darling girl!”

“Don’t you come around in my sight any more. And go marry somebody that won’t cause any _dropping_. I can stand it.”

“I believe you can,” he sneered.

“Yes, indeed; I can stand it. So good-by to you.”

Saying which, Beetrus turned and scudded off, through Spanish needles and boggy spots, until his first half-uttered remonstrance had been for some time changed into language of another sort.

It seemed long before Beetrus found a log on which she could draw herself, face downward, with her arms stretched beyond her head.

The White Dove moved off from Wabash Landing two hours behind her appointed time. She was a dirty little boat, carrying a miscellaneous freight, but among the barrels on the after-deck some hard-favored and much-whittled chairs had been placed for Beetrus and her mother.

The young girl herself stood by the rope which served for railing, and saw her own heartache color all those fair distances. Downy swells of remote banks and bold juts of rock were copied in the river, so ruffleless did it seem to lie even when the strong current was moving. A blue heron stood at the water edge meditating, with one foot planted on sand and the other tucked up. It slightly spread its mighty wings, shook them, and folded them again to place, without appearing to break the trance of its downward stare.

While the White Dove churned along, shadows stretched upon the Wabash. Now it was very late afternoon, and now it threatened to be evening, with a hint that by and by it would be night, when you might expect the woods to make deep black borders along the river, and the canopy of stars to look smeared by the little steamer’s smokestack.

When Beetrus was pale and tired, she turned and leaned against her mother--an ample, indulgent woman, who nevertheless had one bristling mole upon the right side of her face. She broke the tacit silence in which they had begun their journey by declaring, “Ma, I love you.”

“You don’t often put a body out telling them that,” responded Mrs. Jenkins, uttering a gratified laugh.

“I keep up a dreadful loving, though,” said Beetrus, casting sidewise at the river black eyes which swam in waters of their own.

“You’re my baby,” cooed her mother, patting the slim hand fondling her neck. “There’s plenty of pretty young men in the world, but there’s only one old mother.”

“I don’t care anything about the young men,” said Beetrus, with strong scorn. “I was thinking a good while in the woods to-day, coming from the post-office, and I’ve made up my mind never to get married.”

“You’ll turn around often enough before the time comes.”

“I never will,” emphasized Beetrus. “We’ll be two nice old ladies together, ma, and neither of us will get married.”

“I won’t, for a sure thing,” laughed her mother. “But you’ll only be middle-aged when I’m ready to totter.”

“Yes, that’s so,” said Beetrus sadly. “And then if one would die and leave the other”--

“Now, now, don’t you fret, lovey. I’ve had consider’ble trouble and experience, and if I don’t sigh round, you needn’t. Who’s that nice-looking man that keeps looking back this way?”

Beetrus had been facing down river, with her mind completely closed to any moving figures on deck. She glanced back over her shoulder.

“Why, it’s”--she exclaimed, swallowing her breath with a gasp--“it’s Mr. Poundstone.”

“That correspondent of yours?” said Mrs. Jenkins, nodding her head, and inspecting him sincerely with such thoroughness as intervening barrels permitted.

Beetrus’s ears rang. She had, however, that instinctive western courage which sometimes takes the place of disciplined self-control; so by no other clue than the deepening fire of her cheeks and eyes did she give Mr. Poundstone any knowledge of the disturbance he brought her when he climbed a passage over impediments and placed himself in the party.

His manner was subdued, even becomingly humble and conciliatory.

“Ma, this is Mr. Poundstone,” said Beetrus, secretly triumphant in being free from the subservience which yesterday would have made her say, “Mr. Poundstone, this is my mother.”

She did not add to her unconsidered formula now, but allowed him to lift his hat and bow over her mother’s hand.

“I’m glad to meet you, Mrs. Jenkins,” said he. “I want to make friends with you, and get you to convince your daughter I’m not such a bad fellow as I look.”

“You don’t look like a bad fellow,” she responded heartily.

“I didn’t know you were going up on the boat,” said Beetrus, regarding with gentle indifference the brim of his hat, after he replaced it.

“You know I couldn’t go off on the train and leave matters in the shape they are. I never sold a bill of goods in New Harmony in my life, but I’m going to try to make a satisfactory trade for myself now, if the house turns me off for it.”

Beetrus parted her lips smiling, and this time met him in the eyes. Without formulating the fact, she knew there was sterling man under the crust of acquired coarseness. The brutal plan he had formed concerning her, and which he was now scarcely willing to acknowledge to himself, began to withdraw from betwixt them like the mist which already wavered on the hills.

“I believe it will be a clear day to-morrow,” the girl said, falling back upon good commonplace.

“Do you believe it will be a clear day to-morrow, Mrs. Jenkins?” inquired Poundstone.

“Well, it seems like it might be pretty,” responded the widow, turning up her face to see the pinkness reflected from the west.

“Then I believe it will too,” said the commercial traveler, with a devout air, which was unmoved by Beetrus’s laughing out,--

“A great deal prettier and clearer than to-day has been.”

THE BRIDE OF ARNE SANDSTROM

TIME, 1885

“Big Swede wedding over there this evening,” said one passer to another by his side. “Peter Lund’s daughter.”

“Is she marrying a Swede?” inquired the second.

“Yes; fellow by the name of Arne Sandstrom.”

“I should think old Peter, well off as he is, would have looked higher for a son-in-law--you or me, for instance,” observed the second youth, with a laugh.

“The girl’s pretty as a pink, and has had every advantage. It is a pity to see her thrown away; but old Peter has a lot of younger ones coming on.”

“That makes it less an object. I thought she was his only. The Swedes are clannish.”

“Peter Lund’s is headquarters for them, too. Here’s one now, hunting up the wedding. I’ll bet she’s just arrived from the old country.”

So near the truth was this surmise that Elsa had been off the train only twenty minutes, and in that time had repeated the name of Arne Sandstrom interrogatively to every person she met. She was dazed by long riding and partial fasting, and the dumb terror of finding no one to receive her at the end of her great journey. The letter created with much brain-work to announce her coming ought to have been in his hands weeks ago. The innocent and friendless soul did not know she had omitted all dates and exactness in her general care for spelling and inky loops. So stepping off the train into the American town at dusk, she saw stretches of summer prairie to the westward, perky architecture, crossing railroad tracks, hurrying citizens, and lazy loungers--even the new electric light on its spider-work iron tower beginning to make a ghastly powerful star far above her head. She saw baggage and piles of express matter, hotel runners, and other women, starting toward their assured homes, tucked laughing and chatting under their husbands’ arms; but she saw not one face or one kind hand ready to bid her welcome, who had ventured thousands of miles alone--across ocean, across continent--to marry her betrothed lover, Arne Sandstrom.

Hearing his name spoken, she stood still upon the sidewalk, shrinking and timid, but directly in front of the young men, and inquired, using hands and eyes as well as anxious inflection of voice, “Arne Sandstrom?”

“She wants to know where Arne Sandstrom is. Right over there--that big house, which you see lighted up. She doesn’t understand. Arne Sandstrom over there. Getting married! Yes, yes. Arne Sandstrom. Here, Jack, you trot out a little Swedish, can’t you? You’ve been among them more than I have.”

“Arne Sandstrom _derover_,” exclaimed the other, pointing to Peter Lund’s house, with a fine assumption of handling the language well. “Arne Sandstrom _jifta_ to-night, you know.”

“Yifta!” said Elsa, shrinking down in stature.

“She’s got hold of it. That’s all right. You’ll be in time for the wedding.”

“She didn’t understand; she thought we were making fun of her,” said one of the lads as they sauntered on.

“She did understand, and there she goes straight across the street. Brush up in the languages, young man, and make yourself as useful to the public as I am.”

When Elsa had entered the Lund premises, however, she did not ring the bell, but wavered around the house, looking up at lighted windows, and shifting her little bundle from one arm to the other. She had other baggage at the station, but it seemed no longer worth while. There was a western veranda, on the lowest step of which she sat down in quiet stupor to collect herself for some determined movement.

Anguish and disappointment must be the natural lot in this world, only she had not lived enough years to find it out before. Though summer darkness had come, the after-glow was still so bright in the west that it half quarreled with abundant lamplight. Elsa could hear the front gate, the crunch of coming footsteps, and frequent peals of the door-bell, as she sat drawn together, and the eternal minutes traveled on.

Peter Lund’s house was full of joyful stir. China and silver tinkled in the open dining-room, where several women were putting last touches to the tables. Girls flew up and down the back stairway, calling to one another in Swedish.

“One thing is sure, Yennie Yonsen,” called a voice in the home tongue, “there will not be enough married women to take the bride from us girls in the wedding dance; so now what will Arne Sandstrom do?”

Three of them conspired together by the western dining-room door, bobbing their flaxen heads, all laughing and talking at once in their light happiness, far above the unseen stranger on the step.

“Who told me Arne Sandstrom left a betrothed girl in Svadia?” said one, lowering her voice to graver colloquy.

“Oh, well, she married, herself, of course,” replied another; “and any man who could get Lena Lund would take her.”

“Lena’s so pretty.”

“Lena’s rich.”

“Lena can sing and play better than some Amerikanskä.”

“Lena has ten new dresses. Arne will not have to put his hand in his pocket for many a day.”

“She is not spoiled therewith. I always liked her.”

“Ah, my mother said if this wedding was going to be in Svadia this St. John’s Eve, what a night we would make of it!”

They ran away, while Elsa repeated to herself that this was the Eve of St. John--night of arbors and rejoicing at home, night when the sun scarcely went down, and everybody feasted and visited under green-leaf tents. Of what use was St. John’s Eve, or any other portion of time, to a girl put to shame and despair as she was? Why had Arne Sandstrom sent her money to come over with if he meant to jilt her on her arrival? Or had he picked another betrothed for her as well as himself? She would not believe her Arne could be so evil; she would knock and ask for him. He was so kind! he loved her. Yet not only the Amerikanns, but those laughing girls, had said plainly this was Arne Sandstrom’s wedding; any man would take Lena Lund who could get her; Lena was so pretty; Lena was rich; Lena could sing and play better than some Amerikanskä; Lena had ten new dresses, and she was not spoiled.

Elsa bruised her cheek against the edge of the second step above her. She did not know where to go, and her money was all spent except the little she had saved by going without food during part of her railway journey, and she had saved that to buy some little ornament for her new home with Arne. She might try to hire herself out, but how could she ever write back home where such happy news was expected from her, or how could she put unendurable anxiety upon those best friends by not writing at all? Svadia was so pleasant, especially in the long nightless summers. Good and kind they were to strangers there: her mother always baked waffles and carried them with coffee to the morning bedside of a guest. She could see her native meadows stretching away in the blue northern air, and the iron whip, as her mother called the scythe, beating up an appetite in those who wielded it, while she herself, a careless little maid, came bearing the second breakfast to the mowers.

A quavering but hearty voice, which might have come from the mouth of her own grandmother if it had not belonged to Peter Lund’s mother, sung out a Lapp-Finn nurse song by an upper window, and Elsa knew just what syllables the dancing baby was made to emphasize.

“Donsa lupon,
Hopsom tup an,
Lanti lira,
Hopsom stira:
Sprönti lupon, lupon,
Hopsom tup an, tup an,
Lanti lira, lira,
Hopsom stira, stira.”

Dance and jump,
Hop like a rooster,
Hop like the skatan.

Perhaps this very instant--for Elsa made no calculations in longitude and time--vader’s mütter danced the baby under her home roof; and none of her people knew how faint, how outcast, how bewildered the eldest child felt sitting on steps in a strange Amerikanski town.

In Elsa’s box of clothing was the finest sheepskin blanket her mother ever made, so white in fleece, and cured by buttering and scraping until the skin yielded soft like chamois leather. It was lined with scarlet flannel. She could see the storeroom of her father’s farmhouse hung thickly with such fleeces, and hear her mother say she wished Elsa could take more, since they had so little money to send with her. But Arne Sandstrom had sent the money to pay her way, because he loved her so. They were children together, and he was held as dear as a son in her own family. Elsa’s mother never distrusted him. How could it therefore be possible that Arne Sandstrom, after sending for his betrothed, could be marrying a Swede Amerikanskä fleka the very evening of her arrival?

In her intensely quiet fashion the poor girl was wiping away tears as fast as they dripped down her cheeks, and now she lifted her head from the step, coming to a decision.

She walked up on the veranda, her feet sounding heavy and uncertain, and stood at the door ready to knock. Her piteous great eyes moved from wall to wall of the ample dining-room, recognizing Svensk wooden spoons and beautifully painted and polished Russian bowls in various sizes on the side-board. Hard-baked Svensk bread, so loved by the white and firm Scandinavian teeth, and all known home luxuries, with unheard-of Amerikanski things, smiled at her from the glittering tables. This Lena Lund would be called a mamzelle in Svadia; she was very much above a poor yungfrau like Elsa. Any man might be glad to marry her. Still Elsa would not believe Arne Sandstrom had forgotten his betrothed.

She could see him from where she stood, in an inner room with a background of fine furniture. How beautiful he looked, all in Amerikann clothes, and with soft dark gloves on his hands, like a very rich man! His cheek was ruddy, his forehead white, and the very round of his ear--how well Elsa remembered it! Arne Sandstrom was happy, and laughing aloud with other people. She heard his voice while she stood just without, so wretched her whole soul seemed numb.

In perfect silence she waited, and still saw him laugh and extend his hand to have it shaken by one and another, until a figure came out of the room where he was, to pass through the dining-room, and she knew in an instant Otto Jutberg, who came to America with Arne. Elsa put her foot across the threshold and said, to call his attention, “Otto.”

Otto approached the door and looked curiously at her. One rope of her flaxen hair hung down on her breast, and she looked travel-worn.

“Otto Jutberg, I want to see Arne Sandstrom.”

“Arne is going to be married in a few minutes,” said Otto.

“I know he is. But I want to see Arne Sandstrom. Tell him to come here.”

“Who is it?” pressed Otto, coming nearer to her, and knitting his brows inquiringly.

“Don’t you know me, Otto, when you have been to my father’s nearly every St. John’s Eve of our lives?”

Elsa felt that she needed only one more drop to her cup, and that for some voice to raise the derisive song with which her countrymen mocked Scowneys, or inhabitants of a region the butt of all Svadia.

“A Scowen, a Scowen”--

one bar was enough to rouse sudden rage in any Svensk.

But instead of “A Scowen, a Scowen,” rising around Elsa’s ears this enchanted night, such a din of outcries was made by Otto Jutberg that people ran to look into the dining-room, and then to swarm around her.

Arne Sandstrom leaped two chairs and seriously jarred one table, to receive Elsa in his arms, when he kissed her openly.

“Bring me one of the chairs I kicked over,” he exclaimed, “and let me set the tired darling in it. I have been looking for the letter which would tell me when you intended to start. Yes, this is my Elsa,” he announced, displaying her; “and how did she find her way in here alone? Mrs. Lund, Elsa has come!”

“Yes, and she has been crying,” said the plump wife of Peter Lund, pressing her hand. “It was enough to break any child’s heart to reach such a journey’s end homesick and unwelcomed.”

At this Elsa leaned against the matron’s side, and shook with sudden sobs, feeling her forehead and hair petted by a good mother’s palms.

Elsa was taken upstairs by both Mrs. Lund and Arne, who talked rapidly across her. She was put into a beautiful room, and young girls came to get acquainted with her. Arne asked her for that piece of metal which would redeem her baggage, and he handed it over to Otto at the door. Before she understood her position, or was quite able to lift her eyes and look at all who wanted to talk to her, the box which had borne her company from Svadia was brought in, and Arne told her the other wedding would be put off half an hour while she got ready. Then he drove the merry company out of the room, and stood with his back to the door to keep at bay that moment all volunteering bride attendants.

“Can you be ready in half an hour, after your long journey, my darling?” said he.

“I can soon wash off the dust and change my dress,” said Elsa. “But, Arne, I do not know anything. Who is going to marry Lena Lund?”

“Arne Sandstrom. And you will be married at the same time.”

“I thought that was what you and Mrs. Lund said. But who is going to marry me?”

“_Who!_ I am--Arne Sandstrom.”

“I will not do it,” said Elsa. “They never have two wives in Svadia.”

Arne Sandstrom gazed silently at her, puffed and exploded his cheeks, and bent over, striking his knees with those delicately gloved hands Elsa had first noted with such awe. He roared in the fervor of his laughter. This American country had in no way abated Arne Sandstrom as a Norseman.

“Oh, Elsa, my snowbird, if I should tell this on thee they would laugh at thee from one end of town to the other. Lena Lund’s bridegroom is my cousin Arne, that came over with Otto Jutberg and me.”

“That was Arne Peterssen,” affirmed Elsa.

“But there are so many Peterssens and Yonsens who take their names from their fathers’ Christian names that Arne changed his to Sandstrom. It is a very common thing to do here.”

Elsa laughed also. It was so simple and clear and Swedish she wondered that news of Arne Sandstrom’s wedding had caused her even a misgiving. She left her chair to swing Arne’s hands while they both finished laughing.

“But you ought to be ready,” he cried, “and not keep the others waiting. I got the papers for the wedding when Arne got his papers, so there would be no mistake of names on the record, and so I could marry you as soon as you came.”

Within the hour, therefore, Elsa was the bride of Arne Sandstrom, arrayed in her dark blue wedding dress of wool, and not shaming by her statue-like proportions and fairness the lighter prettiness and silken raiment of Arne Sandstrom’s American Swedish bride. Happiness and love were, after all, the natural lot in this world, thought Elsa, sitting by her husband in her place of honor at the wedding supper, and tasting the first course of such a feast--the Swedish soup of rice, prunes, raisins, and molasses.

THE BABE JEROME

TIME, 1892

The civil engineer sat at breakfast with his sister. Their table was a stationary one, on stakes driven into the ground, and they drank their coffee from tin camp cups with hooked handles. But the cook served them with broiled fish and game stew, brown pancakes and honey.

The tree overhead was still wet with dew. Lilian had a scarlet shawl around her. She was a girl whose dark eyes and distinct eyebrows you noticed at once, adding afterwards to her personality hair inclined to cluster about the face, and a general elegance of figure which her camp dress suggested instead of outlined.

“As I was bringing my birds in,” said the civil engineer, “I saw Jerome and his gander sitting on the top rail of a fence, side by side. Jerome had his neck stretched up, whispering to the sky, and the gander had its neck stretched up, hissing its meditations. They were a divine pair!”

“As divine as Minerva and her owl, I should think,” said Miss Brooks. “He seems to me a tragic figure. How can you laugh at him?”

“How can you help laughing at him? But I do pity the old father.”

“And the blind aunt. Eric, I’m going across the river to see her. I told Mr. Marsh I would, the next time he came to camp.”

“He’s coming now. There’s his boat on the river.”

Lilian watched the boat and the Wabash. The expanse of limpid water was so shallow in places that its pebbles glittered in the sun, or a sand-bar showed under the surface, while the current in its channel ran deep and strong. Woods clothed its banks, and a gauze of blue hung over its southern bend. Northward a bridge stood on mighty legs of masonry, screening the work of the engineer among rapids beyond. A flat-boat ferry was being poled diagonally across from the east shore to the west, having for passengers a farmer and his horse.

The approaching skiff grounded also, and Jerome’s father stepped slowly out and came across a stretch of gravel and sward to the camp. Quantities of gray hair and beard, a stoop in his shoulders, and a staff in his hand made him venerable, yet his arms were strong and his eyes black and piercing. He was the richest man in his county, and the man most indifferent to externals. Over his jeans garments he wore a blue woolen cape edged with ancient gimp, evidently taken at random from women’s clothing.

He saw with approval the camp appointments: the civil engineer’s men breakfasting at their long table; the cook moving in and out of a canvas kitchen; and the young lady’s tent, revealing a pink net-screened bed, rugs, and stout book-shelves.

“You’re right well fixed over here,” he called out before the campers could wish him good-morning.

The engineer said he always tried to make his camp comfortable.

“And this is as pretty a stretch,” continued the visitor, drawing nearer, “as you’ll find between New Harmony and the Ohio. But ain’t it lonesome for sis here by herself all day when you and the men’s out?”

“Our cook stays in camp,” said Lilian. “He has lived in our family since I was a child. So I feel secure. The friend who was to have been my companion here was detained at the last minute. But I made my brother bring me, anyhow. Will you have some breakfast, Mr. Marsh?”

“No, I’m obliged: I’ve e’t. I come across to look after the Babe. He forgits to have his breakfast sometimes. Seen him on this side--the Babe Jerome?”

“He’s in the woods with his white gander,” said the engineer.

Mr. Marsh rested against the tree and braced himself with his staff.

“Billy’s never far off from Jerome. The Babe gets lonesome on the river, like sis here, and that gander’s great company for him. But the Babe likes to be lonesome. We still call him the Babe,” apologized the old man, “though he’s twenty-five year old; scarlet fever done it. He was the smartest boy on the river. I ’lowed to settle in Shawnytown, and send him to college. His mother was a scholar. Now there’s nothing to do but let him play his music. He’s a good babe. He never gives me no uneasiness except forgittin’ his breakfast.”

“Do you think he would breakfast with us?” inquired Lilian.

“Call him,” suggested her brother. “As for me, I must be excused. There’s a big day’s work to be done on that bar--time the men were in the boats.”

Captain Eric caught up his broad hat, and flourished it in adieu. The cook ran after him with a list of needed supplies. Lilian watched him sitting with folded arms on his camp-chair in the stern of his boat, until the rise and fall of oars and the song of the men drew off to remoteness. She turned to speak to her visitor, and found Jerome standing with him.

“Want to go back over?” his father inquired tenderly.