Part 35 (2/2)

I have been astonished at her. I did not think that she would care for me more when her house I left, but she does. She is a good woman. Oh, you remember the Miss Swartz who was with her. Well, she wanted to keep company with a fiddler in a variety show, and Mrs. Goodwin objected, and that was not the end of it. The girl went out at night late and married the fiddler, and Mrs. Goodwin has seen her no more.”

There was a lament for the swift flight of the sunny days, by the woman on the bicycle and the man casting his line into the lake, but to Milford the time was slow. He remembered having seen a lame cow limping down the road, with the sluggish hours dragging at her feet, and he told the hired man that she had come back again to vex him. But time was never so slow that it did not pa.s.s, and one evening the sun went down beyond the fading edge of September. Milford waited two days longer and then went to the city; and just out of the fields, how confusing was the noise and the sight of scattering crowds that were never scattered! But his sense of the world soon came back to him. He had been moneyless in many a town, hanging about the gambler's table, feeding upon the chip tossed by the exultant winner. The woods, the cattle, the green and purple pictures, musings with his head in the gra.s.s, had taken the gamester's wild leap out of his blood, but he knew that he dared not go near the vice. He found the Norwegian's cottage, in the western part of town, and he stood at the door listening before he rang the bell. A little girl came out with a tin pail, the gripman's dinner. As she opened the door he saw Gunhild. She dropped a boy's jacket, which she had evidently been mending, and came bounding to meet him, with her welcome bursting out in a laugh. Her hands were warm, and her eyes full of happiness. There was no put-on and no disguises in their meeting. It was two destinies touching again, destinies that were to become as one.

She led him into the neat little parlor, gave him a rocking-chair, and talked of her gladness at his coming, standing for a moment in front of a gla.s.s to put back into place a wayward wisp of hair. Their meeting had not been cool. She drew up a chair beside him and they talked about the country, of the haunted house, and the tree that had hoisted a vine like an umbrella. He told her that he had come through the fields to the station, and had stood in the ditch among the wild sunflowers. He had plucked some for her, but they were dead and had fallen to pieces.

They went out into the park, not far away, and sat amid the scenes of a changing season, the leaves falling about them. It was an odd courts.h.i.+p, an indefinite engagement. There was no attempt at sentiment, no time when either one felt that something tender must be said, but between them there was a wholesome understanding of the heart. They were not living a love story. She was not clothed in the glamour-raiment of love's ethereal fancy, not sigh-fanned by the breath of reverential melancholy. Her hand did not feel like the velvet paw of a kitten; it was a hand that had toiled; and though easier days may come, the mark of labor can never be erased from the palm.

She left him on the rustic seat, and hastened across the sward to pluck a bloom that had been sheltered from the early frost, and he looked at her, a gladness tingling in his nerves. How trim she was in her dark gown! She looked back at him, pointed at a policeman standing off among the trees, and imitated the walk of a sneak-thief. She returned laughing, and pinning the flower on his coat, stood to gaze upon him as if he were in bloom, and said in an accent that always reminded him of a banjo's lower tones, ”See, the frost has not killed you.” Simple, playful, loving, strong, were the words to express an estimate of her--the healthy refinement of an honest heart, and modest because she had seen immodesty. She possessed a knowledge that was a better safeguard than mere innocence, and her pa.s.sion illumined her virtue.

They strolled among the trees, society's forest; they listened co the ducks and the geese, the city's barnyard.

”Would you rather live in the country?” he asked.

”I would not rather teach art there,” she laughed.

”It must be very hard.”

”It is very stupid.”

”I don't suppose the farmers take to it any too kindly.”

”No, they often ask me why I do not draw comic as they see in the newspapers.”

”They must like to see themselves buying gold bricks.”

She did not understand him, and he explained that the honest farmer believing that a fortune was coming down the road to meet him, was the prey of sharp swindlers who prowled about through the country. Steve Hardy, one of the shrewdest men in the community, once had bought an express package filled with worthless paper. It was a case of ”honesty”

trying to beat the three-sh.e.l.l man at his own game. Ignorance always credits itself with shrewdness. Industry is no sure sign of honesty.

”Worked like a thief” has become a saying. Smiling at his philosophy, she said that he never could have learned it in a school.

”No,” he replied. ”In the school we are taught to believe in the true, the beautiful, and the good; but in life we find that the true as we learned it is often false, the beautiful painted, and the good bad.”

”I would not have you think that,” she said. ”The beautiful is not always painted.” She stooped and picked up a maple leaf, blushed with the rudeness of the frost. ”This is not painted, and it is beautiful. It was the cold that brought out its color. You must not be a--what would you call it?”

”Cynic?”

”Yes. You must not be that. It is an acknowledgment of failure.”

He took her hand, and they walked on among the trees. ”You talk like a virtue translated from a foreign tongue,” he said. He called her a heathen grace. She protested. She was a Christian, so devout that she would have hung her head in the potato field had she heard the ringing of the angelus. They saw a woman on a wheel, and he dropped her hand.

The woman waved at them, jumped off and came to meet them, smiling. It was Mrs. Blakemore. ”Oh, I am so surprised and delighted,” she said, shaking hands. ”Why, how unexpected! You must come home with me. I don't live far from here. Bobbie will be delighted to see you. He refuses to go to school, and we won't force him, he is so delicate. How well you look, Gunhild! And you too, Mr. Milford.” The man would have yielded against his will; the woman saw this and declined the invitation. She said that they had an engagement to dine. Milford looked at her in surprise. He thought of the frost-tinted leaf. Mrs. Blakemore was sorry--she said. It would be such a disappointment to Bobbie. George was out of town. She bade them an effusive good-bye, mounted her wheel, pulling at her short skirts, and glided away.

”Engagement to dine?” said Milford, as they turned from watching Mrs.

Blakemore.

”Yes, at the little bakery over by the edge of the park.”

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