Wayside Courtships Part 10

The rest laughed in musical uproar, but Arthur flushed hotly. It was the manner in which English people, in plays and stories, addressed their butler or coachman.

He helped her down, however, in sullen silence, for his rebellious heart seemed to fill his throat.

The party moved ahead in a cloud of laughter. The ladies were dainty as spring flowers in their light, outdoor dresses, and they seemed to light up the whole barnyard.

One of them made the most powerful impression upon Arthur. She was so dainty and so birdlike. Her dress was quaint, with puffed sleeves, and bands and edges of light green, like an April flower. Her narrow face was as swift as light in its volatile changes, and her little chin dipped occasionally into the fluff of her ruffled bodice like a swallow into the water. Every movement she made was strange and sweet to see.

She cried out in admiration of everything, and clapped her slender hands like a wondering child. Her elders laughed every time they looked at her, she was so entirely carried away by the wonders of the farm.

She admired the cows and the colts very much, but s.h.i.+vered prettily when the bull thrust his yellow and black muzzle through the little window of his cell.

"The horrid thing! Isn't he savage?"

"Not at all. He wants some meal, that's all," said the Major, as they moved on.

The young girl skipped and danced and shook her perfumed dress as a swallow her wings, without appearing vain--it was natural in her to do graceful things.

Arthur looked at her with deep admiration and delight, even while Mrs.

Saulisbury was talking to him.

He liked Mrs. Saulisbury at once, though naturally prejudiced against her. She had evidently been a very handsome woman, but some concealed pain had made her face thin and drawn, and one corner of her mouth was set in a slight fold as if by a touch of paralysis. Her profile was still very beautiful, and her voice was that of a highly cultivated American.

She seemed to be interested in Arthur, and asked him a great many questions, and all her questions were intelligent.

Saulisbury amused himself by joking the dainty girl, whom he called Edith.

"This is the cow that gives the cream, ye know; and this one is the b.u.t.termilk cow," he said, as they stood looking in at the barn door.

Edith tipped her eager little face up at him:

"Really?"

The rest laughed again.

"Which is the ice-cream cow?" the young girl asked, to let them know that she was not to be fooled with.

Saulisbury appealed to the Major.

"Majah, what have you done with our ice-cream cow?"

"She went dry during the winter," said the Major; "no demand on her.

'Supply regulated by the demand,' you know."

They drifted on into the horse barn.

"We're in Ramsey's domain now," said the Major, looking at Arthur, who stood with his hand on the hip of one of the big gray horses.

Edith turned and perceived Arthur for the first time. A slight shock went through her sensitive nature, as if some faint prophecy of great storms came to her in the widening gaze of his dark eyes.

"Oh, do you drive the horses?" she asked quickly.

"Yes, for the present; I am the plowman," he said, in the wish to let her know he was not a common hand. "I hope to be promoted."

Her eyes rested a moment longer on his st.u.r.dy figure and his beautifully bronzed skin, then she turned to her companions.

After they had driven away, Arthur finished his work in silence; he could hardly bring himself to speak to the people at the supper table, his mind was in such tumult.

He went up into his little room, drew a chair to the window facing the glorious mountains, and sat there until the ingulfing gloom of rising night climbed to the glittering crown of white soaring a mile above the lights of the city; but he did not really see the mountains; his eyes only turned toward them as a cat faces the light of a hearth. It helped him to think, somehow.

He was naturally keen, sensitive, and impressionable; his mind worked quickly, for he had read a great deal and held his reading at command.

His thought concerned itself first of all with the att.i.tude these people a.s.sumed toward him. It was perfectly evident that they regarded him as a creature of inferior sort. He was their servant.

It made him turn hot to think how terribly this contrasted with the flamboyant phraseology of his graduating oration. If the boys knew that he was a common hand on a ranch, and treated like a butler!

He came back for relief to the face of the girl, the girl who looked at him differently somehow.

The impression she made on him was one of daintiness and light; her eager face and her sweet voice, almost childish in its thin quality, appealed to him with singular force.

She was strange to him, in accent and life; she was good and sweet, he felt sure of that, but she seemed so far away in her manner of thought.

He wished he had been dressed a little better; his old hat troubled him especially.

The girls he had known, even the daintiest of them, could drive horses and were not afraid of cows. Their way of talking was generally direct and candid, or had those familiar inflections which were comprehensible to him. She was alien.

Was she a girl? Sometimes she seemed a woman--when her face sobered a moment--then again she seemed a child. It was this change of expression that bewildered and fascinated him.

Then her lips were so scarlet and her level brown eyebrows wavered about so beautifully! Sometimes one had arched while the other remained quiet; this gave a winsome look of brightness and roguishness to her face.

He came at last to the strangest thing of all: she had looked at him, every time he spoke, as if she were surprised at finding herself able to understand his way of speech.

He worked it all out at last. They all looked upon him as belonging to the American peasantry; he belonged to a lower world--a world of service. He was brick, they were china.

Saulisbury and Mrs. Thayer were perfectly frank about it; they spoke from the English standpoint. The Major and Mrs. Saulisbury had been touched by the Western spirit and were trying to be just to him, with more or less unconscious patronization.

As his thoughts ran on, his fury came back, and he hammered and groaned and cursed as he tossed to and fro on his bed, determined to go back where the American ideas still held--back to the democracy of Lodi and Cresco.

III.

These spring days were days of growth to the young man. He grew older and more thoughtful, and seldom joked with the other men.

There came to the surface moods which he had not known before. There came times when his teeth set together like the clutch of a wolf, as some elemental pa.s.sion rose from the depths of his inherited self.

His father had been a rather morose man, jealous of his rights, quick to anger, but just in his impulses. Arthur had inherited these stronger traits, but they had been covered and concealed thus far by the smiling exterior of youth.

Edith came up nearly every day with the Major in order to enjoy the air and beauty of the suns.h.i.+ne, and when she did not come near enough to nod to Arthur, life was a weary treadmill for the rest of the day, and the mountains became mere gloomy stacks of _debris_.

Sometimes she sat on the porch with the children, while Mrs. Richards, the foreman's wife, a hearty, talkative woman, plied her with milk and cookies.