Part 27 (2/2)
March gazed a moment in astonishment. Then Fannie, still drifting away, felt Ravenel at her side and glanced up and around.
”O, you haven't let him go, have you? Why, I wanted to give him this four-leaf clover--as a sort o' pleasant hint. Don't you see?”
”I reckon he'll try what luck there is in odd numbers,” said Ravenel, and they quickened their homeward step.
John went to tea at the Tombses in no mood to do himself credit as a guest. His mother was still reminding him of it next day when they alighted at home. ”I little thought my son would give me so much trouble.”
But his reply struck her dumb. ”I've got lots left, mother, and will always have plenty. I make it myself.”
x.x.x.
ANOTHER ODD NUMBER
Fannie expressed to Barbara one day her annoyance at that kind of men--without implying that she meant any certain one--who will never take no for an answer.
”A lover, Barb, if he's not of the humble sort, is the most self-conceited thing alive. He can no more take in the idea that your objection to him is _he_ than a board can draw a nail into itself.
You've got to hammer it in.”
”With a brickbat,” quoth Barbara, whose notions of carpentry were feminine, and who did not care to discuss the matter. But John March, it seemed, would not take no from fate itself.
”I don't believe yet,” he mused, as he rode about his small farm, ”that Jeff-Jack will get her. She's playing with him. Why not? She's played with a dozen. And yet, naturally, somebody'll get her, and he'll not be worthy of her. There's hope yet! She loves me far more than she realizes right now. That's a woman's way; they'll go along loving for years and find it out by accident--You, Hector! What the devil are you and Israel over in that melon-patch for instead of the corn-field?
”I've been too young for her. No, not too young for her, but too young to show what I can do and be. She waited to see, for years. The intention may not have been conscious, but I believe it was there! And then she got tired of waiting. Why, it began to look as though I would never do anything or be anybody! Great Caesar! You can't expect a girl to marry an egg in hopes o' what it'll hatch. O let me make haste and show what I am! what I can--'Evermind, Israel, I see you. Just wait till we get this crop gathered; if I don't kick you two idle, blundering, wasting, pilfering black renters off this farm--as sh.o.r.e's a gun's iron!
”No, she and Jeff-Jack'll never marry. Even if they do he'll not live long. These political editors, if somebody doesn't kill 'em, they break down, all at once. Our difference in age will count for less and less every year. She's the kind that stays young; four years from now I'll look the older of the two--I'll work myself old!”
A vision came to the dreamer's fancy: Widewood's forests filled with thrifty settlers, mines opened, factories humming by the brooksides, the locomotive's whistle piercing the stony ears of the Sleeping Giant; Suez full of iron-ore, coal, and quarried stone, and Fannie a widow, or possibly still unwed, charmed by his successes, touched by his constancy, and realizing at last the true nature of what she had all along felt as only a friends.h.i.+p.
”That's it! If I give men good reason to court me, I'll get the woman I court!”--But he did not, for many weeks, give men any irresistible good reason to court him.
”Ah me! here's November gone. Talk of minutes slipping through the fingers--the months are as bad as the minutes! Lord! what a difference there is between planning a thing and doing it--or even beginning to do it!”
Yet he did begin. There is a season comes, sooner or later, to all of us, when we must love and love must nest. It may fix its choice irrationally on some sweet ineligible Fannie; but having chosen, there it must nest, spite of all. Now, men may begin life not thus moved; but I never knew a man thus moved who still did not begin life. Love being kindled, purpose is generated, and the wheels in us begin to go round.
They had gone round, even in John's father; but not only were time, place, and circ.u.mstance against the older man, but his love had nested in so narrow a knot-hole that the purposes and activities of his gentle soul died in their prison.
”Yes, that's one thing I've got to look out for,” mused John one day, riding about the northwestern limits of his lands where a foaming brook kept saying, ”Water-power!--good fis.h.i.+ng!--good fis.h.i.+ng!--water-power!”
He dismounted and leaned against his horse by the brook's Widewood side, we may say, although just beyond here lay the odd sixty acres by which Widewood exceeded an even hundred thousand. The stream came down out of a steeply broken region of jagged rocks, where frequent evergreens and russet oaks studded the purple gray maze of trees that like to go naked in winter. But here it shallowed widely and slipped over a long surface of unbroken bed-rock. On its far side a spring gushed from a rocky cleft, leapt down some natural steps, ran a few yards, and slid into the brook. Behind it a red sun shone through the leafless tree-tops. The still air hinted of frost.
Suddenly his horse listened. In a moment he heard voices, and by an obscure road up and across the brook two riders came briskly to the water's edge, splashed into the smooth shallow and let their horses drink. They were a man and a maid, and the maid was Barbara Garnet. She was speaking.
”We can't get so far out of the way if we can keep this”--she saw John March rise into his saddle, caught a breath, and then cried:
”Why, it's Mr. March. Mr. March, we've missed our road!” Her laugh was anxious. ”In fact, we're lost. Oh! Mr. March, Mr. Fair.” The young men shook hands. Fair noted a light rifle and a bunch of squirrels at March's saddle-bow.
<script>