PART II

WE PREPARE FOR HIM

“So many hours must I take my rest; So many hours must I contemplate; So many hours must I sport myself.”

“Ah, what a life were this! how sweet--how lovely! Gives not the hawthorn bush a sweeter shade To shepherds looking on their silly sheep Than doth a rich embroidered canopy To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?”

“For trust not him that once hath broken faith.”

_King Henry VI._

“Against ill chances men are ever merry; But heaviness foreruns the good event.”

_King Henry VI._

It took several weeks for us to get quite comfortably settled at the little farm. We lazily decorated our residence, or suspended labor upon it, just as we pleased. Then the delicious June days trod upon each other’s heels. It seemed as if I had scarcely risen and found the breakfast Lena always kept for me--of toast and jelly and chocolate--before the evening star trembled in the west, and I was following her and Fritz to the barnyard to take my cup of new milk with the foam on. Even Midsummer Day, the longest and loveliest day in the year, was gone while we talked about it.

At first our friends came down from the city, but as the heat increased they took longer journeys. Julian painted zealously. He said after T’férgore came he would be hindered a great deal. I lay in a hammock and watched him, sometimes wondering at my new languor. I thought a great deal about T’férgore, without talking of him to Julian. Julian licensed me to be silly to a certain extent: beyond that limit I kept my silliness to myself. It was nothing for me to twist Mr. Fergus Dering’s name into T’férgore, because I had a talent for rechristening people and objects. But how impatient Julian would have been with all my speculations about T’férgore! I could not make an image of him in my mind, yet he was always haunting me. I wondered if he would stay with us always; sometimes his ideal head, with impalpable garments below it, changing from expression to expression, laughed at me from the clouds. What an individuality he must have to seize upon me so before his coming! He was a gifted creature, according to Julian; and his silent approach was weaving me in a network of fascination that I never thought at first of resisting.

When I was roused to activity, we made haste to finish our arrangements about the house and get T’férgore’s room ready. Julian himself hung some draping stuff from the studio there. We spent money on a bath, and a curious water jug and basin, and I could not feel contented without giving the chamber a more delicate look with muslin and blue silesia. We used to stand looking around this apartment with admiration. Julian hung one of his flower pictures there, though he said T’férgore would probably do nothing but make a face at it. And I never went into the woods for a handful of wild flowers, without filling T’férgore’s vase of Dresden china, when I got back.

Then Julian said we must have a horse and vehicle, for if he knew anything about T’férgore that young gentleman would want to take the air on wheels. We had, however, very little cash to spend on such a turnout.

“We can dispense with style,” said Julian, “if a kind, serviceable rig is to be bought cheap.”

So he kept a liveryman in town on the lookout for him, and one afternoon he received a message and went to drive home our bargain.

Lena followed me to the gate to see the flourish Julian described there before alighting.

“What made you get a cart?” I inquired.

“This,” said Julian, “is a sort of a dog-cart. The rage is all for dog-carts just now, and we couldn’t have a phaeton, you know.”

“But they aren’t painted red.”

“This one is,” said Julian.

“And there is no place behind for the dogs,” I further objected.

“Oh, well, T’férgore won’t want to carry a dog,” said Julian. “It’s a bargain on two wheels!”

Whatever is mine acquires peculiar merits in my eyes. A halo of possession arches it, making it a little better than the same thing owned by anybody else. I accepted the red cart and followed Julian into the stable-yard, where, after Fritz helped him unhitch, he showed me the points of the horse.

“Women always notice the ornamental part of a turnout first,” said Julian. “Before you looked at the cart you ought to have taken in Leander.”

“Is his name Leander?” I inquired.

“So I have been informed,” replied Julian.

“What makes him look as if he were crying?”

“His eyes need sponging,” said Julian. “This warm weather is severe on a horse’s eyes.”

“I hope he has not parted with any near and dear friend.” “He looks as if he could hardly stand up under some affliction.”

“Horses are dear now,” observed Julian with severity, “and you can’t expect to get a thoroughbred for forty dollars. The liveryman said he shipped a car-load to Louisville last week, some of them so weak they had to lean against the sides of the car. This one is sound, and only needs a little good care to bring him out.”

“Yes, his bones all look nice,” I assented. My heart began to warm toward Leander.

“It’s a fine thing to own a noble animal like a horse, isn’t it, Julian?--and to see him grazing around one’s homestead.”

Julian said he believed he would take Leander into the yard and let him clip off some of the grass, before stabling him.

Fritz put the red cart under a shed, and helped Lena milk, while we walked enamored after our purchase from one part of the lawn to another.

“What makes his hams look so sad, Julian?” I inquired with concern.

“Flanks, you mean,” said Julian.

“Yes. But aren’t horses usually cushiony there?”

“Pigs and prize cattle are,” said Julian contemptuously.

“But his hind legs run up so tall that when he lifts one he seems to be coming in two, like Baron Munchausen’s horse when it got caught in the city gates.”

“Sorry you don’t like him,” observed Julian, scratching a match on his heel and lighting a cigar.

“I do like him, Julian. It would be strange if I didn’t like our own horse! The way he is standing now doesn’t show his ribs so. Couldn’t we induce him to keep that position generally?”

But Leander now drew all his feet nearer to a focus, and frightened me by a convulsion.

“He’s just going to lie down,” explained Julian. “He wants to roll in the grass. They say a horse that rolls clear over is worth fifty dollars, anyhow. Watch him, now.”

We watched him in breathless suspense, Julian holding the lighted cigar away from his lips. Leander, after several half revolutions, brandished his heels triumphantly in the air and rolled clear over.

Julian and I shook hands.

“Gained ten dollars in value since I brought him home,” said Julian.

Whatever doubts I had harbored about an artist’s knowledge of horses certainly vanished. And Leander, after standing up to shake himself, lay down to try it again. But this time he brandished ineffectual heels and contented himself with only a half turn.

“Do you suppose he has gone off any in his value, Julian?” I inquired anxiously.

“Not at all,” said Julian, throwing out clouds of smoke. “You mustn’t expect too much of a horse on a couple of mouthfuls of grass.”

We drove Leander a great deal during the July weather. The cart had very easy springs, and I liked billowing along on them, though the motion was a little jerky. Leander was a kind creature. He never kicked, though he sometimes got his legs tangled in his tackling, fighting flies; and notwithstanding his countenance continued watery, he took a widow-like interest in us. I fed him lumps of sugar and bunches of very sweet grass, which he swallowed in a resigned way. Julian, with sleeves rolled up, zealously mixed chopped feed for him, and Leander smeared this from sunken temple to sunken jaw, so that often when I entered the stable I thought he was undergoing a poulticing.

Leander objected to railway trains, so we knew he had spirit.

“There’s considerable go in him,” said Julian as we trotted between fence-rows where elderberries were spreading and ripening. “Wait till I get him fat once! You’ll be astonished to see how he comes out.”

“Do you think his eyes will quit weeping as his condition improves, Julian?” I inquired.

“Naturally. We can get him glasses if they don’t,” said Julian. “What an absurd baby you are in your demands! Beauty and muscle never go together in a horse. Some of the best goers on the turf are a mere mass of wires when you look at them from an æsthetic standpoint.”

It was really enough to have any kind of power, except our own, trundling us along the pleasant roads. I grew to feel no solicitude whatever about Leander’s ribs while he stood cooling them in the creek, and Julian and I in the high cart watched the sunlight come down the woods’ aisles, and long festoons of grapevine dipping and reflecting their leaves in water. When we met anybody I tried complacently to imagine we were an English farm-couple very well-to-do and what they call smart in our turnout; or that we were Italian peasants, basking in the sun as we jogged royally to some festa. But Julian became very critical on the proportions of horses and vehicles to each other. He ridiculed a combination of tall horse and low phaeton, the top of which barely reached up to the horse’s back; or of pony and double-seated carriage, looking like a tug drawing a steamer. In short, we were satisfied with our own goods and chattels: and when Julian graciously lent Lena the turnout to go to town in, and she filled the cart bed with ripe tomatoes and the seat with her blue person and Fritz, its perfect adaptation to her uses convinced me what a versatile and valuable bargain ours was.

The time came for me to meet and bring home Jennie Purdy from the Avenue station. She had been one of my special chums at school. I always loved women; there seems to me something unwholesome and unsound in the woman who proclaims that she hates and distrusts all of her own sex. At school I was Jennie Purdy’s easily-moulded slave: she dictated what I should wear and how I should conduct myself. I denied myself many a game of croquet, when that pastime was fresh, to sit and fan her while she slept off some slight indisposition. And in return she petted and instructed me in all the niceties of etiquette. She was half a dozen years my senior, and at that time enjoying a small fortune of her own; but this was afterward lost, and she had many a struggle before deciding upon and mastering the profession of medicine.

Jennie Purdy was one of the most fastidious creatures alive, an epicure, and unsparing of herself as a student. Years did not age, but rather ground her down to finer delicacy. I felt considerable pride in her, and counted on having her at hand when T’férgore came. She did not lack the eccentricities which always cluster around any woman living outside of intimate family life. She professed to dislike men; but I, knowing her warm heart, knew also her self-deception. All isolated women fall into one of two errors about the opposite sex: they count mankind a vast monster, to be avoided and suspected, or a vast angel to be worshiped in secrecy and silence; whereas, men are only good, comfortable souls, very much like ourselves, but made a little stouter so they can hold us and spread out their shoulders for irrigation when we want to cry.

Though Jennie Purdy held dark views of mankind, I suspected that under the surface she was one of the worshiping ones. Still, I was not prepared to have her tell me, an hour after our arrival at home, that she was on the point of marriage.

We sat down in T’férgore’s room, where I had been showing her the appointments, and I pulled a hassock to her side, eager for particulars. She should be married from the little farm instead of a boarding-house, if she could be content with such a wedding as we could give. But I upbraided her for keeping her secret from me, almost as seriously as she once upbraided me for daring to marry at all.

“You won’t want me to be married here,” said Jennie, with a snap. “You’ll have too many prejudices.”

“But I always thought you were the person with prejudices, dear,” I remonstrated, “and that Julian and I were too unconventional for you.”

“I am going to marry a divorced man,” disclosed Jennie.

I caught my breath and said “Oh!”

“There--I knew it!” observed Jennie.

“I didn’t say anything but ‘Oh.’ What made him get divorced?”

“You don’t know him,” said Jennie, “and so you can’t judge of the circumstances.”

“But you might try me,” I pleaded. “Has he been divorced a long time?”

“About a month,” owned my old, fastidious chum, turning into another woman before my very eyes. She never was pretty, but a certain noble pride had given her a carriage I enthusiastically admired. Now she sat before me a dupe of her own absurd fancies, half defiant and half apologetic. The woman who had taught me that only most serious incompatibility should separate a married pair was going to wed a man who had been divorced one month!

“His wife was never a fit companion for him.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“An ignorant, miserable creature, who entrapped him when he was a boy and has kept him down in the world ever since.”

“It’s always the wife’s fault,” I said.

“People were continually asking him how he came to marry such a woman.”

“And he let the question pass without knocking down the questioner?”

“There never was anything fit to eat in the house, and his clothes were never fit to wear.”

“Poor dear!” I observed. “Had his income anything to do with it?”

“She kept him from getting on,” expostulated my old chum.

“And he brought all his grievances to you for redress?”

“I expected to meet nothing but prejudiced opposition in you,” said Jennie. “But of course I was bound to tell you. You cannot say anything to alter my determination.”

My head whirled with this spectacle of a sane woman suddenly gone mad over a worthless man. Shakespeare never touched the weakness of womankind so closely as when he made Titania’s infatuation. The greater the ass, the more Titania adores him.

“I hate such an irregular marriage!” I said, breathing quickly.

“Yes, I know you do,” retorted Jennie. “You’re the slave of society. You wouldn’t have the courage to go against one of society’s whims.”

“I don’t want that kind of courage which tramples on decent marriage customs. And you were the first to teach me the value of an irreproachable standing before the world.”

“It’s easy for women like you, who know nothing of the miseries of an unequal marriage, to take a high moral stand,” said my old chum, turning whiter always as our talk sunk lower. I was afraid Julian would hear us and come down from the painting-room overhead. He never liked Jennie as heartily as I thought it his duty to like her. And he laughed at the little barnacles of whims which an isolated life fastened on her.

All the time I was talking to her the fancied image of T’férgore was before my eyes.

“How much more faithful will this man be to you,” I went on, “than he was to the woman he left one month ago? He has somehow cast a glamour over you. I know just how he looks--a great, whimpering, Falstaffian baby of a thing, coarse to his last fibre!”

“Go on,” said Jennie.

“If he were not coarse would he ever allow a woman standing related to him as wife to be slurred to his face? Would he be so ready to attach his mildewed life to yours without a blemish?”

“I can’t hear you talk so,” said Jennie. “You’d better let me go away. I cannot stay in the house.”

“You cannot go away,” I declared fiercely. “I understand now why parents have locked their daughters up.”

“You are interfering with what does not concern you at all,” said Jennie, trembling, “and not in the least altering my determination. You cannot choose my fate for me. I have lived a lonely life year after year. Nobody considered me. Why am I to stand on nice points considering everybody? He thinks I can make him happy. I believe he will treat me kindly.”

“You have every warrant for believing that,” I exclaimed, struggling to calm myself in the fear that I was going to make a scene.

“I have,” said Jennie, with a kind of pride strange in her; “for he provided for the family to the full extent of his means, before separating from them.”

“So he had children? And deserted them?”

“Five,” replied Jennie in embarrassment.

“Five children! And he provided for them by taking their father from them when they needed a father most!”

“They are all boys but the youngest,” said Jennie.

I knew now that I was going to make a scene, struggle against it as I might.

“And is the smallest a little child yet?”

“Not an exceedingly little child,” said Jennie, picking at her dress and not seeming to see the fingers at which she stared. “Two years old, I believe.”

“Don’t you understand about family life? Don’t you see what a callous wretch is the man who can abandon his own flesh and blood? How will you ever close your eyes in sleep again if you help him in wronging that little child--that little child!”

I stood up from my seat and groped toward her. The moment of my own weakness and terror was coming.

Jennie took hold of me as she used to do at school.

“I have spoken out to you,” I said, hanging to her neck; “and now you must take care of me.”

She saw that T’férgore was approaching the house; and her face filled with tender solicitude is the last thing I can recall as I fainted.