Part 5 (2/2)

”I'm going to let Joe help you around the house a good deal, Ollie,”

said he. ”He'll make it a lot easier for you this summer. He'll carry the swill down to the hogs, and water 'em, and take care of the calves.

That'll save you a good many steps in the course of the day.”

Ollie maintained her ungrateful silence. She had heard promises before, and she had come to that point of hopelessness where she no longer seemed to care. Isom was accustomed to her silences, also; it appeared to make little difference to him whether she spoke or held her peace.

He sat there reflectively a little while; then got up, stretching his arms, yawning with a noise like a dog.

”Guess I'll go to bed,” said he.

He looked for a splinter on a stick of stove-wood, which he lit at the stove and carried to his lamp. At the door he paused, turned, and looked at Ollie, his hand, hovering like a grub curved beside the chimney, shading the light from his eyes.

”So he brought a Bible, did he?”

”Yes.”

”Well, he's welcome to it,” said Isom. ”I don't care what anybody that works for me reads--just so long as he _works_!”

Isom's jubilation over his bondboy set his young wife's curiosity astir. She had not noted any romantic or n.o.ble parts about the youth in the casual, uninterested view which she had given him that day. To her then he had appeared only a sprangling, long-bodied, long-legged, bony-shouldered, unformed lad whose hollow frame indicated a great capacity for food. Her only thought in connection with him had been that it meant another mouth to dole Isom's slender allowance out to, more scheming on her part to make the rations go round. It meant another one to wash for, another bed to make.

She had thought of those things wearily that morning when she heard the new voice at the kitchen door, and she had gone there for a moment to look him over; for strange faces, even those of loutish farm-hands, were refres.h.i.+ng in her isolated life. She had not heard what the lad was saying to Isom, for the kitchen was large and the stove far away from the door, but she had the pa.s.sing thought that there was a good deal of earnestness or pa.s.sion in the harangue for a farm-hand to be laying on his early morning talk.

When she found the Bible lying there on top of Joe's hickory s.h.i.+rt, she had concluded that he had been talking religion. She hoped that he would not preach at his meals. The only religion that Ollie knew anything of, and not much of that, was a glum and melancholy kind, with frenzied shoutings of the preacher in it, and portentous shaking of the beard in the shudderful pictures of the anguish of unrepentant death. So she hoped that he would not preach at his meals, for the house was sad enough, and terrible and gloomily hopeless enough, without the kind of religion that made the night deeper and the day longer in its dread.

Now Isom's talk about the lad's blood, and his expression of high confidence in his fealty, gave her a pleasant topic of speculation. Did good blood make men different from those who came of mongrel strain, in other points than that of endurance alone? Did it give men n.o.bility and sympathy and loftiness, or was it something prized by those who hired them, as Isom seemed to value it in Joe, because it lent strength to the arms?

Ollie sat on the kitchen steps and turned all this over in her thoughts after Isom had gone to bed.

Perhaps in the new bondboy, who had come there to serve with her, she would find one with whom she might talk and sometimes ease her heart.

She hoped that it might be so, for she needed chatter and laughter and the common sympathies of youth, as a caged bird requires the seed of its wild life. There was hope in the new farm-hand which swept into her heart like a refres.h.i.+ng breeze. She would look him over and sound him when he worked, choring between kitchen and barn.

Ollie had been a poor man's child. Isom had chosen her as he would have selected a breeding-cow, because nature, in addition to giving her a form of singular grace and beauty, had combined therein the utilitarian indications of ability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Isom wanted her because she was alert and quick of foot, and strong to bear the burdens of motherhood; for even in the shadow of his decline he still held to the hope of his youth--that he might leave a son behind him to guard his acres and bring down his name.

Ollie was no deeper than her opportunities of life had made her. She had no qualities of self-development, and while she had graduated from a high school and still had the ornate diploma among her simple treasures, learning had pa.s.sed through her pretty ears like water through a funnel.

It had swirled and choked there a little while, just long enough for her to make her ”points” required for pa.s.sing, then it had sped on and left her unenc.u.mbered and free.

Her mother had always held Ollie's beauty a greater a.s.set than mental graces, and this early apprais.e.m.e.nt of it at its trading value had made Ollie a bit vain and ambitious to mate above her family. Isom Chase had held out to her all the allurements of which she had dreamed, and she had married him for his money. She had as well taken a stone to her soft bosom in the hope of warming it into yielding a flower.

Isom was up at four o'clock next morning. A few minutes after him Ollie stumbled down the stairs, heavy with the pain of broken sleep. Joe was snoring above-stairs; the sound penetrated to the kitchen down the doorless cas.e.m.e.nt.

”Listen to that feller sawin' gourds!” said Isom crabbedly.

The gloom of night was still in the kitchen; in the corner where the stove stood it was so dark that Ollie had to grope her way, yawning heavily, feeling that she would willingly trade the last year of her life for one more hour of sleep that moist spring morning.

Isom mounted the kitchen stairs and roused Joe, lumbering down again straightway and stringing the milk-pails on his arms without waiting to see the result of his summons.

”Send him on down to the barn when he's ready,” directed Isom, jangling away in the pale light of early day.

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