Part 11 (1/2)

”Almost any way. What a beautiful night! And I love your bells, Claude. I haven't heard sleighbells since you used to bring me and Gladys home from school in stormy weather. Why don't we stop for her tonight? She has furs now, you know!” Here Enid laughed.

”All the old ladies are so terribly puzzled about them; they can't find out whether your brother really gave them to her for Christmas or not. If they were sure she bought them for herself, I believe they'd hold a public meeting.”

Claude cracked his whip over his eager little blacks. ”Doesn't it make you tired, the way they are always nagging at Gladys?”

”It would, if she minded. But she's just as serene! They must have something to fuss about, and of course poor Mrs. Farmer's back taxes are piling up. I certainly suspect Bayliss of the furs.”

Claude did not feel as eager to stop for Gladys as he had been a few moments before. They were approaching the town now, and lighted windows shone softly across the blue whiteness of the snow. Even in progressive Frankfort, the street lights were turned off on a night so glorious as this. Mrs. Farmer and her daughter had a little white cottage down in the south part of the town, where only people of modest means lived. ”We must stop to see Gladys' mother, if only for a minute,” Enid said as they drew up before the fence. ”She is so fond of company.” Claude tied his team to a tree, and they went up to the narrow, sloping porch, hung with vines that were full of frozen snow.

Mrs. Farmer met them; a large, rosy woman of fifty, with a pleasant Kentucky voice. She took Enid's arm affectionately, and Claude followed them into the long, low sitting-room, which had an uneven floor and a lamp at either end, and was scantily furnished in rickety mahogany. There, close beside the hard-coal burner, sat Bayliss Wheeler. He did not rise when they entered, but said, ”h.e.l.lo, folks,” in a rather sheepish voice. On a little table, beside Mrs. Farmer's workbasket, was the box of candy he had lately taken out of his overcoat pocket, still tied up with its gold cord. A tall lamp stood beside the piano, where Gladys had evidently been practising. Claude wondered whether Bayliss actually pretended to an interest in music! At this moment Gladys was in the kitchen, Mrs. Farmer explained, looking for her mother's gla.s.ses, mislaid when she was copying a recipe for a cheese souffle.

”Are you still getting new recipes, Mrs. Farmer?” Enid asked her.

”I thought you could make every dish in the world already.”

”Oh, not quite!” Mrs. Farmer laughed modestly and showed that she liked compliments. ”Do sit down, Claude,” she besought of the stiff image by the door. ”Daughter will be here directly.”

At that moment Gladys Farmer appeared.

”Why, I didn't know you had company, Mother,” she said, coming in to greet them.

This meant, Claude supposed, that Bayliss was not company. He scarcely glanced at Gladys as he took the hand she held out to him.

One of Gladys' grandfathers had come from Antwerp, and she had the settled composure, the full red lips, brown eyes, and dimpled white hands which occur so often in Flemish portraits of young women. Some people thought her a trifle heavy, too mature and positive to be called pretty, even though they admired her rich, tulip-like complexion. Gladys never seemed aware that her looks and her poverty and her extravagance were the subject of perpetual argument, but went to and from school every day with the air of one whose position is a.s.sured. Her musicians.h.i.+p gave her a kind of authority in Frankfort.

Enid explained the purpose of their call. ”Claude has got out his old sleigh, and we've come to take you for a ride. Perhaps Bayliss will go, too?”

Bayliss said he guessed he would, though Claude knew there was nothing he hated so much as being out in the cold. Gladys ran upstairs to put on a warm dress, and Enid accompanied her, leaving Mrs. Farmer to make agreeable conversation between her two incompatible guests.

”Bayliss was just telling us how you lost your hogs in the storm, Claude. What a pity!” she said sympathetically.

Yes, Claude thought, Bayliss wouldn't be at all reticent about that incident!

”I suppose there was really no way to save them,” Mrs. Farmer went on in her polite way; her voice was low and round, like her daughter's, different from the high, tight Western voice. ”So I hope you don't let yourself worry about it.”

”No, I don't worry about anything as dead as those hogs were.

What's the use?” Claude asked boldly.

”That's right,” murmured Mrs. Farmer, rocking a little in her chair. ”Such things will happen sometimes, and we ought not to take them too hard. It isn't as if a person had been hurt, is it?”

Claude shook himself and tried to respond to her cordiality, and to the shabby comfort of her long parlour, so evidently doing its best to be attractive to her friends. There weren't four steady legs on any of the stuffed chairs or little folding tables she had brought up from the South, and the heavy gold moulding was half broken away from the oil portrait of her father, the judge.

But she carried her poverty lightly, as Southern people did after the Civil War, and she didn't fret half so much about her back taxes as her neighbours did. Claude tried to talk agreeably to her, but he was distracted by the sound of stifled laughter upstairs. Probably Gladys and Enid were joking about Bayliss'

being there. How shameless girls were, anyhow!

People came to their front windows to look out as the sleigh dashed jingling up and down the village streets. When they left town, Bayliss suggested that they drive out past the Trevor place. The girls began to talk about the two young New Englanders, Trevor and Brewster, who had lived there when Frankfort was still a tough little frontier settlement. Every one was talking about them now, for a few days ago word had come that one of the partners, Amos Brewster, had dropped dead in his law office in Hartford. It was thirty years since he and his friend, Bruce Trevor, had tried to be great cattle men in Frankfort county, and had built the house on the round hill east of the town, where they wasted a great deal of money very joyously.

Claude's father always declared that the amount they squandered in carousing was negligible compared to their losses in commendable industrial endeavour. The country, Mr. Wheeler said, had never been the same since those boys left it. He delighted to tell about the time when Trevor and Brewster went into sheep.

They imported a breeding ram from Scotland at a great expense, and when he arrived were so impatient to get the good of him that they turned him in with the ewes as soon as he was out of his crate. Consequently all the lambs were born at the wrong season; came at the beginning of March, in a blinding blizzard, and the mothers died from exposure. The gallant Trevor took horse and spurred all over the county, from one little settlement to another, buying up nursing bottles and nipples to feed the orphan lambs.

The rich bottom land about the Trevor place had been rented out to a truck gardener for years now; the comfortable house with its billiard-room annex--a wonder for that part of the country in its day--remained closed, its windows boarded up. It sat on the top of a round knoll, a fine cottonwood grove behind it. Tonight, as Claude drove toward it, the hill with its tall straight trees looked like a big fur cap put down on the snow.

”Why hasn't some one bought that house long ago and fixed it up?”