At the Crossroads Part 27

"I ain't making them notice me," she mumbled, "but yer just can't take a joke."

Noreen and Jan-an, in those warm autumn days--and what an autumn it was!--often came to the little chapel where Northrup wrote.

They knew this was forbidden; they knew that the mornings were to be undisturbed, but what could a man who loved children say to the two patient creatures crouching at the foot of the stone steps leading up to the church?

Northrup could hear them whisper--it blended with the twittering of the birds--he heard Noreen's chuckle and Jan-an's warning.

Occasionally a flaming maple branch would fall through the window on to his table; once Ginger was propelled through the door with a note, badly printed by Noreen, tied to his collar.

"We're here," the strangely scrawled words informed him; "me and Jan-an. We've got something for you."

But Northrup held rigidly to his working hours and finally made an offer to his most persistent foes.

"See here, you little beggars," he said, including the gaunt Jan-an in this, "if you keep to the other side of the bridge, I'll tell you a story, once a day."

This had been the beginning of romance to Jan-an.

The story-telling, thus agreed upon, opened a new opportunity for meeting Mary-Clare. Quite naturally she shared with Noreen and Jan-an the hours of the late afternoon walks in the woods or, occasionally, by the fireside of her own home when the chilly gloaming fell early.

Often Northrup, casting a hurried thought to his past, and then forward to the time when all this pleasure must end, looked thoughtful. How circ.u.mscribed those old days had been; how uneventful at the best! How strange the old ways would seem by and by, touched by the glamour of what he was pa.s.sing through now!

And, as was often the case, Manly's words came out like guiding and warning flashes. The future could only be made safe by the present; the past--well! Northrup would not dwell upon that. He would keep the compact with himself.

He went boldly to the yellow house when the mood seized him. His first encounters with Mary-Clare, after that night at the inn when he had watched her sleeping, had rea.s.sured him.

"She was not awake!" he concluded. The belief made it possible for him to act with a.s.surance.

Peter and Polly preserved a discreet silence concerning affairs in the Forest. "You never can tell when a favouring wind will right things again," Polly remarked. She cared more for Mary-Clare than anything else.

"Or upset 'em," Peter added. He had his mind fixed upon Maclin.

"Well, brother, sailing safe, or struggling in the water, it won't help matters to stir up the mud."

"No; and just having Brace hanging around like a threat is something.

I allas did hold to them referendum and recall notions. Once a feller knows he ain't the only s.h.i.+rt in the laundry, he keeps decenter. So long as Maclin scents Brace, he keeps to his holdings. Did yer hear how he's cleaning up the Cosey Bar? He thinks maybe he's going to be attacked from that quarter. Then, again, he's been offering work to the men around here--and he's letting out that he never understood our side of things rightly and that he's listening to Larry--get that, Polly?--listening to Larry and letting _him_ make the folks on the Point get on to the fact that he's their friend. Gos.h.!.+ Maclin their friend."

And Mary-Clare all this time mystified her friends and her foes. She had foes. Men, and women, too, who looked askance at her. The less they knew, the more they had to invent. The proprieties of the Forest were being outraged. The women who envied Mary-Clare her daring fell upon her first. From their own misery and disillusionment, they sought to defend their position; create an atmosphere of virtue around their barren lives, by attacking the woman who refused to be a martyr.

"You can't tell me," said a downtrodden wife of one of Maclin's men, "that she turned her husband out of doors after wheedling him out of all he should have had from his father, unless she meant to leave the door open for another! A woman only acts as she has for some man."

The women, the happy ones, drove down upon Mary-Clare from another quarter. The happy women are always first to lay down the laws for the unhappy ones. Not knowing, they are irresponsible. The men of the Forest did some laughing and side talking, but on the whole they denounced Mary-Clare because she was a menace to the Established Code.

"G.o.d!" said the speaker of the Cosey Bar, "what's coming to the world, anyhow? There ain't any rest and peace nowheres, and when it comes to women taking to naming terms, I say it's time for us to stand for our rights fierce."

Maclin had delicately and indirectly set forth Mary-Clare's "terms"

and the Forest was staggered.

But Mary-Clare either did not hear, or the turmoil was so insistent that she had become used to it. She suddenly displayed an energy that made her former activities seem tame.

She brought from the attic an old loom and got Aunt Polly to teach her to weave; she presently designed quaint patterns and delighted in her work. She invited several children, neglected little souls, to come to the yellow house and she taught them with Noreen. She resorted largely to the method the old doctor had used with her. Adapting, as she saw possible, her knowledge to her little group, she gave generously but held her peace.

Northrup often had a hearty laugh after attending one of the "school"

sessions.

"It's like tossing all kinds of feed to a flock of birds," he told Aunt Polly, "and letting the little devils pick as they can."

"I reckon they pick only as much as their little stomachs can hold,"

Aunt Polly replied, "and it makes _me_ smile to notice how folks as ain't above saying lies about Mary-Clare can trust their children to her teaching."

"Oh! well, lies are soon killed," Northrup returned, but his smile vanished.

Mary-Clare was often troubled by Larry's persistence at the Point. She could not account for it, but she did not alter her own way of life.

She went, occasionally, to the desolate Point; she rarely saw Larry, but if she did, she greeted him pleasantly. It was amazing to find how naturally she could do this. Indeed the whole situation was at the snapping point.

"I do say," Twombley confided to Peneluna, "it don't seem nater for a woman not to grieve and fuss at such goings on."

Peneluna tossed her head and sneezed.

"I ain't ever understood," she broke in, "why a woman should fuss and break herself on account of a man doing what he oughtn't ter do. Let _him_ do the fussing and breaking."

"She might try and save him." Twombley, like all the male Forest, was stirred at what he could not understand.

"Women have got their hands full of other things"--Peneluna sneezed again as if the dust of ages was stifling her--"and I do say that after a woman does save a man, she's often too worn out to enjoy her savings."

And Larry, carefully dressed, living alone and to all appearances brave and steady, simply, according to Maclin's ordering, "let out more sheet rope" in order that Mary-Clare might sail on to the rocks and smash herself to atoms before the eyes of her fellow creatures.

Surely the Forest had much to cogitate upon.

"There is just one ledge of rocks for her kind," said Maclin. "You keep yourself clear and safe, Rivers, and watch the wreck."

Maclin could be most impressive at times and his conversation had a nautical twist that was quite effective.

Northrup at this time would have been shocked beyond measure had any one suggested that his own att.i.tude of mind resembled in the slightest degree that of Maclin, Twombley, and Rivers. He was too sane and decent a man to consider for a moment that Mary-Clare's actions were based in the slightest degree upon his presence in the Forest. He knew that he had had nothing to do with the matter, but that was no reason for thinking that he might not have. Suggestion was enmes.h.i.+ng him in the disturbance.

He felt that Larry was a brute. That he had the outer covering of respectability counted against him. Larry always kept his best manners for public exhibition; his inheritance of refinement could be tapped at any convenient hour. Northrup knew his type. He had not recalled his father in years as he did now! A man legally sustained by his interpretation of marriage could make a h.e.l.l or a heaven of any woman's life. This truism took on new significance in the primitive Forest.

But in that Mary-Clare had had courage to escape from h.e.l.l--and Northrup had pictured it all from memories of his boyhood--roused him to admiration.

She was of the mettle of his mother. She might be bent but never broken. She was treading a path that none of her little world had ever trod before. Alone in the Forest she had taken a stand that she could not hope would be understood, and how superbly she was holding it!

Knowing what he did, Northrup compared Mary-Clare with the women of his acquaintance; what one of them could defy their conventions as she was doing, instinctively, courageously?

"But she ought not to be permitted to think all men are like Rivers!"

This thought grew upon Northrup, and it was the first step, generously taken, to establish higher ideals for his s.e.x. With the knowledge he had, he was in a position of safety. Not to be seen with Mary-Clare while the silly gossip muttered or whispered would be to acknowledge a reason for not meeting her--so he flung caution to the winds.

There were nutting parties for the children--innocent enough, heaven knew! There were thrilling camping suppers on the flat ridge of the hills in order to watch the miracle of sunset and moonrise.

No wonder Jan-an cast her lot in with those headed, so the whisper ran, for perdition. She had never been so nearly happy in her life; neither had Mary-Clare nor Noreen nor--though he did not own it--Northrup, himself.