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A Modern Instance

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The early winter sunset was beginning to tinge the snow with crimson, when
the party started back to camp, where Kinney was to give them supper; he
had it greatly on his conscience that they should have a good time, and he
promoted it as far as hot mince-pie and newly fried doughnuts would go. He
also opened a few canned goods, as he called some very exclusive sardines
and peaches, and he made an entirely fresh pot of tea, and a pan of
soda-biscuit. Mrs. Macallister made remarks across her plate which were
for Bartley alone; and Kinney, who was seriously waiting upon his guests,
refused to respond to Bartley's joking reference to himself of some
questions and comments of hers.

After supper, when the loggers had withdrawn to the other end of the long
hut, she called out to Kinney, "Oh, _do_ tell them to smoke: we shall not
mind it at all, I assure you. Can't some of them do something? Sing or
dance?"

Kinney unbent a little at this. "There's a first-class clog-dancer among
them; but he's a little stuck up, and I don't know as you could get him to
dance," he said in a low tone.

"What a bloated aristocrat!" cried the lady. "Then the only thing is for us
to dance first. Can they play?"

"One of 'em can whistle like a bird,--he can whistle like a whole band,"
answered Kinney, warming. "And of course the Kanucks can fiddle."

"And what are Kanucks? Is _that_ what you call us Canadians?"

"Well, ma'am, it aint quite the thing to do," said Kinney, penitently.

"It isn't at _all_ the thing to do! Which are the Kanucks?"

She rose, and went forward with Kinney, in her spoiled way, and addressed
a swarthy, gleaming-eyed young logger in French. He answered with a smile
that showed all his white teeth, and turned to one of his comrades; then
the two rose, and got violins out of the bunks, and came forward. Others of
their race joined them, but the Yankees hung gloomily back; they clearly
did not like these liberties, this patronage.

"I shall have your clog-dancer on his feet yet, Mr. Kinney," said Mrs.
Macallister, as she came back to her place.

The Canadians began to play and sing those gay, gay airs of old France
which they have kept unsaddened through all the dark events that have
changed the popular mood of the mother country; they have matched words
to them in celebration of their life on the great rivers and in the vast
forests of the North, and in these blithe barcaroles and hunting-songs
breathes the joyous spirit of a France that knows neither doubt nor
care,--France untouched by Revolution or Napoleonic wars; some of the airs
still keep the very words that came over seas with them two hundred years
ago. The transition to the dance was quick and inevitable; a dozen slim
young fellows were gliding about behind the players, pounding the hard
earthen floor, and singing in time.

"Oh, come, come!" cried the beauty, rising and stamping impatiently with
her little foot, "suppose we dance, too."

She pulled Bartley forward by the hand; her husband followed with the
taller Miss Willett; two of the Canadians, at the instance of Mrs.
Macallister, came forward and politely asked the honor of the other young
ladies' hands in the dance; their temper was infectious, and the cotillon
was in full life before their partners had time to wonder at their consent.
Mrs. Macallister could sing some of the Canadian songs; her voice, clear
and fresh, rang through those of the men, while in at the window, thrown
open for air, came the wild cries of the forest,--the wail of a catamount,
and the solemn hooting of a distant owl.

"Isn't it jolly good fun?" she demanded, when the figure was finished; and
now Kinney went up to the first-class clog-dancer, and prevailed with him
to show his skill. He seemed to comply on condition that the whistler
should furnish the music; he came forward with a bashful hauteur, bridling
stiffly like a girl, and struck into the laborious and monotonous jig which
is, perhaps, our national dance. He was exquisitely shaped, and as he
danced he suppled more and more, while the whistler warbled a wilder and
swifter strain, and kept time with his hands. There was something that
stirred the blood in the fury of the strain and dance. When it was done,
Mrs. Macallister caught off her cap and ran round among the spectators
to make them pay; she excused no one, and she gave the money to Kinney,
telling him to get his loggers something to keep the cold out.

"I should say whiskey, if I were in the Canadian bush," she suggested.

"Well, _I_ guess we sha'n't say anything of that sort in _this_ camp," said
Kinney.

She turned upon Bartley, "I know Mr. Hubbard is dying to do something.
Do something, Mr. Hubbard!" Bartley looked up in surprise at this
interpretation of his tacit wish to distinguish himself before her. "Come,
sing us some of your student songs."

Bartley's vanity had confided the fact of his college training to her,
and he was really thinking just then that he would like to give them a
serio-comic song, for which he had been famous with his class. He borrowed
the violin of a Kanuck, and, sitting down, strummed upon it banjo-wise. The
song was one of those which is partly spoken and acted; he really did it
very well; but the Willett and Witherby ladies did not seem to understand
it quite; and the gentlemen looked as if they thought this very undignified
business for an educated American.

Mrs. Macallister feigned a yawn, and put up her hand to hide it. "_Oh_,
what a styupid song!" she said. She sprang to her feet, and began to put
on her wraps. The others were glad of this signal to go, and followed her
example. "Good by!" she cried, giving her hand to Kinney. "_I_ don't think
your ideas are ridiculous. I think there's no end of good sense in them, I
assure you. I hope you won't leave off that regard for the brain in your
cooking. Good by!" She waved her hand to the Americans, and then to the
Kanucks, as she passed out between their respectfully parted ranks. "Adieu,
messieurs!" She merely nodded to Bartley; the others parted from him
coldly, as he fancied, and it seemed to him that he had been made
responsible for that woman's coquetries, when he was conscious, all the
time, of having forborne even to meet them half-way. But this was not
so much to his credit as he imagined. The flirt can only practise her
audacities safely by grace of those upon whom she uses them, and if men
really met them half-way there could be no such tiling as flirting.




XI.


The loggers pulled off their boots and got into their bunks, where some of
them lay and smoked, while others fell asleep directly.

Bartley made some indirect approaches to Kinney for sympathy in the
snub which he had received, and which rankled in his mind with unabated
keenness.

But Kinney did not respond. "Your bed's ready," he said. "You can turn in
whenever you like."

"What's the matter?" asked Bartley.

"Nothing's the matter, if you say so," answered Kinney, going about some
preparations for the morning's breakfast.

Bartley looked at his resentful back. He saw that he was hurt, and he
surmised that Kinney suspected him of making fun of his eccentricities to
Mrs. Macallister. He _had_ laughed at Kinney, and tried to amuse her with
him; but he could not have made this appear as harmless as it was. He rose
from the bench on which he had been sitting, and shut with a click the
penknife with which he had been cutting a pattern on its edge.

"I shall have to say good night to you, I believe," he said, going to the
peg on which Kinney had hung his hat and overcoat. He had them on, and was
buttoning the coat in an angry tremor before Kinney looked up and realized
what his guest was about.

"Why, what--why, where--you goin'?" he faltered in dismay.

"To Equity," said Bartley, feeling in his coat pockets for his gloves, and
drawing them on, without looking at Kinney, whose great hands were in a pan
of dough.

"Why--why--no, you aint!" he protested, with a revulsion of feeling that
swept away all his resentment, and left him nothing but remorse for his
inhospitality.

"No?" said Bartley, putting up the collar of the first ulster worn by a
native in that region.

"Why, look here!" cried Kinney, pulling his hands out of the dough, and
making a fruitless effort to cleanse them upon each other. "I don't want
you to go, this way."

"Don't you? I'm sorry to disoblige you; but I'm going," said Bartley.

Kinney tried to laugh. "Why, Hubbard,--why, Bartley,--why, Bart!" he
exclaimed. "What's the matter with you? I aint mad!"

"You have an unfortunate manner, then. Good night." He strode out between
the bunks, full of snoring loggers.

Kinney hurried after him, imploring and protesting in a low voice, trying
to get before him, and longing to lay his floury paws upon him and detain
him by main force, but even in his distress respecting Bartley's overcoat
too much to touch it. He followed him out into the freezing air in his
shirt-sleeves, and besought him not to be such a fool. "It makes me feel
like the devil!" he exclaimed, pitifully. "You come back, now, half a
minute, and I'll make it all right with you. I know I can; you're a
gentleman, and you'll understand. _Do_ come back! I shall never get over it
if you don't!"

"I'm sorry," said Bartley, "but I'm not going back. Good night."

"Oh, good Lordy!" lamented Kinney. "What am I goin' to do? Why, man! It's a
good three mile and more to Equity, and the woods is full of catamounts. I
tell ye 't aint safe for ye." He kept following Bartley down the path to
the road.

"I'll risk it," said Bartley.

Kinney had left the door of the camp open, and the yells and curses of the
awakened sleepers recalled him to himself. "Well, well! If you will _go_"
he groaned in despair, "here's that money." He plunged his doughy hand into
his pocket, and pulled out a roll of bills. "Here it is. I haint time to
count it; but it'll be all right, anyhow."

Bartley did not even turn his head to look round at him. "Keep your money!"
he said, as he plunged forward through the snow. "I wouldn't touch a cent
of it to save your life."

"All right," said Kinney, in hapless contrition, and he returned to shut
himself in with the reproaches of the loggers and the upbraiding of his own
heart.

Bartley dashed along the road in a fury that kept him unconscious of the
intense cold; and he passed half the night, when he was once more in his
own room, packing his effects against his departure next day. When all was
done, he went to bed, half wishing that he might never rise from it again.
It was not that he cared for Kinney; that fool's sulking was only the
climax of a long series of injuries of which he was the victim at the hands
of a hypercritical omnipotence.

Despite his conviction that it was useless to struggle longer against such
injustice, he lived through the night, and came down late to breakfast,
which he found stale, and without the compensating advantage of finding
himself alone at the table. Some ladies had lingered there to clear up on
the best authority the distracting rumors concerning him which they had
heard the day before. Was it true that he had intended to spend the rest of
the winter in logging? and _was_ it true that he was going to give up the
Free Press? and was it _true_ that Henry Bird was going to be the editor?
Bartley gave a sarcastic confirmation to all these reports, and went out to
the printing-office to gather up some things of his. He found Henry Bird
there, looking pale and sick, but at work, and seemingly in authority. This
was what Bartley had always intended when he should go out, but he did not
like it, and he resented some small changes that had already been made in
the editor's room, in tacit recognition of his purpose not to occupy it
again.

Bird greeted him stiffly; the printer girls briefly nodded to him,
suppressing some little hysterical titters, and tacitly let him feel that
he was no longer master there. While he was in the composing-room Hannah
Morrison came in, apparently from some errand outside, and, catching sight
of him, stared, and pertly passed him in silence. On his inkstand he found
a letter from Squire Gaylord, briefly auditing his last account, and
enclosing the balance due him. From this the old lawyer, with the careful
smallness of a village business man, had deducted various little sums for
things which Bartley had never expected to pay for. With a like thriftiness
the landlord, when Bartley asked for his bill, had charged certain items
that had not appeared in the bills before. Bartley felt that the charges
were trumped up; but he was powerless to dispute them; besides, he hoped
to sell the landlord his colt and cutter, and he did not care to prejudice
that matter. Some bills from storekeepers, which he thought he had paid,
were handed to him by the landlord, and each of the churches had sent in
a little account for pew-rent for the past eighteen months: he had always
believed himself dead-headed at church. He outlawed the latter by tearing
them to pieces in the landlord's presence, and dropping the fragments into
a spittoon. It seemed to him that every soul in Equity was making a clutch
at the rapidly diminishing sum of money which Squire Gaylord had enclosed
to him, and which was all he had in the world. On the other hand, his
popularity in the village seemed to have vanished over night. He had
sometimes fancied a general and rebellious grief when it should become
known that he was going away; but instead there was an acquiescence
amounting to airiness.

He wondered if anything about his affairs with Henry Bird and Hannah
Morrison had leaked out. But he did not care. He only wished to shake the
snow of Equity off his feet as soon as possible.

After dinner, when the boarders had gone out, and the loafers had not yet
gathered in, he offered the landlord his colt and cutter. Bartley knew that
the landlord wanted the colt; but now the latter said, "I don't know as I
care to buy any horses, right in the winter, this way."

"All right," answered Bartley. "Just have the colt put into the cutter."

Andy Morrison brought it round. The boy looked at Bartley's set face with
a sort of awe-stricken affection; his adoration for the young man survived
all that he had heard said against him at home during the series of family
quarrels that had ensued upon his father's interview with him; he longed to
testify, somehow, his unabated loyalty, but he could not think of anything
to do, much less to say.

Bartley pitched his valise into the cutter, and then, as Andy left the
horse's head to give him a hand with his trunk, offered him a dollar. "I
don't want anything," said the boy, shyly refusing the money out of pure
affection.

But Bartley mistook his motive, and thought it sulky resentment. "Oh, very
well," he said. "Take hold."

The landlord came out. "Hold on a minute," he said. "Where you goin' to
take the cars?"

"At the Junction," answered Bartley. "I know a man there that will buy the
colt. What is it you want?"

The landlord stepped back a few paces, and surveyed the establishment. "I
should like to ride after that hoss," he said, "if you aint in any great of
a hurry."

"Get in," said Bartley, and the landlord took the reins.

From time to time, as he drove, he rose up and looked over the dashboard to
study the gait of the horse. "I've noticed he strikes some, when he first
comes out in the spring."

"Yes," Bartley assented.

"Pulls consid'able."

"He pulls."

The landlord rose again and scrutinized the horse's legs. "I don't know as
I ever noticed 't he'd capped his hock before."

"Didn't you?"

"Done it kickin' nights, I guess."

"I guess so."

The landlord drew the whip lightly across the colt's rear; he shrank
together, and made a little spring forward, but behaved perfectly well.

"I don't know as I should always be sure he wouldn't kick in the daytime."

"No," said Bartley, "you never can be sure of anything."

They drove along in silence. At last the landlord said, "Well, he aint so
fast as I _supposed_."

"He's not so fast a horse as some," answered Bartley.

The landlord leaned over sidewise for an inspection of the colt's action
forward. "Haint never thought he had a splint on that forward off leg?"

"A splint? Perhaps he has a splint."

They returned to the hotel and both alighted.

"Skittish devil," remarked the landlord, as the colt quivered under the
hand he laid upon him.

"He's skittish," said Bartley.

The landlord retired as far back as the door, and regarded the colt
critically. "Well, I s'pose you've always used him too well ever to winded
him, but dumn 'f he don't _blow_ like it."

"Look here, Simpson," said Bartley, very quietly. "You know this horse as
well as I do, and you know there isn't an out about him. You want to buy
him because you always have. Now make me an offer."

"Well," groaned the landlord, "what'll you take for the whole rig, just as
it stands,--colt, cutter, leathers, and robe?"

"Two hundred dollars," promptly replied Bartley.

"I'll give ye seventy-five," returned the landlord with equal promptness.

"Andy, take hold of the end of that trunk, will you?"

The landlord allowed them to put the trunk into the cutter. Bartley got in
too, and, shifting the baggage to one side, folded the robe around him from
his middle down and took his seat. "This colt can road you right along all
day inside of five minutes, and he can trot inside of two-thirty every
time; and you know it as well as I do."

"Well," said the landlord, "make it an even hundred."

Bartley leaned forward and gathered up the reins, "Let go his head, Andy,"
he quietly commanded.

"Make it one and a quarter," cried the landlord, not seeing that his chance
was past. "What do you say?"

What Bartley said, as he touched the colt with the whip, the landlord never
knew. He stood watching the cutter's swift disappearance up the road, in a
sort of stupid expectation of its return. When he realized that Bartley's
departure was final, he said under his breath, "Sold, ye dumned old fool,
and serve ye right," and went in-doors with a feeling of admiration! for
colt and man that bordered on reverence.




XII.


This last drop of the local meanness filled Bartley's bitter cup. As he
passed the house at the end of the street he seemed to drain it all. He
knew that the old lawyer was there sitting by the office stove, drawing his
hand across his chin, and Bartley hoped that he was still as miserable as
he had looked when he last saw him; but he did not know that by the window
in the house, which he would not even look at, Marcia sat self-prisoned in
her room, with her eyes upon the road, famishing for the thousandth part of
a chance to see him pass. She saw him now for the instant of his coming and
going. With eyes trained to take in every point, she saw the preparation
which seemed like final departure, and with a gasp of "Bartley!" as if she
were trying to call after him, she sank back into her chair and shut her
eyes.

He drove on, plunging into the deep hollow beyond the house, and keeping
for several miles the road they had taken on that Sunday together; but he
did not make the turn that brought them back to the village again. The pale
sunset was slanting over the snow when he reached the Junction, for he
had slackened his colt's pace after he had put ten miles behind him, not
choosing to reach a prospective purchaser with his horse all blown and
bathed with sweat. He wished to be able to say, "Look at him! He's come
fifteen miles since three o'clock, and he's as keen as when he started."

This was true, when, having left his baggage at the Junction, he drove
another mile into the country to see the farmer of the gentleman who had
his summer-house here, and who had once bantered Bartley to sell him his
colt. The farmer was away, and would not be at home till the up-train from
Boston was in. Bartley looked at his watch, and saw that to wait would
lose him the six o'clock down-train. There would be no other till eleven
o'clock. But it was worth while: the gentleman had said, "When you want the
money for that colt, bring him over any time; my farmer will have it ready
for you." He waited for the up-train; but when the farmer arrived, he was
full of all sorts of scruples and reluctances. He said he should not like
to buy it till he had heard from Mr. Farnham; he ended by offering Bartley
eighty dollars for the colt on his own account; he did not want the cutter.

"You write to Mr. Farnham," said Bartley, "that you tried that plan with
me, and it wouldn't work, he's lost the colt."

He made this brave show of indifference, but he was disheartened, and,
having carried the farmer home from the Junction for the convenience of
talking over the trade with him, he drove back again through the early
night-fall in sullen desperation.

The weather had softened and was threatening rain or snow; the dark was
closing in spiritlessly; the colt, shortening from a trot into a short,
springy jolt, dropped into a walk at last as if he were tired, and gave
Bartley time enough on his way back to the Junction for reflection upon the
disaster into which his life had fallen. These passages of utter despair
are commoner to the young than they are to those whom years have
experienced in the impermanence of any fate, good, bad, or indifferent,
unless, perhaps, the last may seem rather constant. Taken in reference to
all that had been ten days ago, the present ruin was incredible, and had
nothing reasonable in proof of its existence. Then he was prosperously
placed, and in the way to better himself indefinitely. Now, he was here in
the dark, with fifteen dollars in his pocket, and an unsalable horse on his
hands; outcast, deserted, homeless, hopeless: and by whose fault? He owned
even then that he had committed some follies; but in his sense of Marcia's
all-giving love he had risen for once in his life to a conception of
self-devotion, and in taking herself from him as she did, she had taken
from him the highest incentive he had ever known, and had checked him in
his first feeble impulse to do and be all in all for another. It was she
who had ruined him.

As he jumped out of the cutter at the Junction the station-master stopped
with a cluster of party-colored signal-lanterns in his hand and cast their
light over the sorrel.

"Nice colt you got there."

"Yes," said Bartley, blanketing the horse, "do you know anybody who wants
to buy?"

"Whose is he?" asked the man.

"He's mine!" shouted Bartley. "Do you think I stole him?"

"I don't know where you got him," said the man, walking off, and making a
soft play of red and green lights on the snow beyond the narrow platform.

Bartley went into the great ugly barn of a station, trembling, and sat down
in one of the gouged and whittled arm-chairs near the stove. A pomp of
timetables and luminous advertisements of Western railroads and their
land-grants decorated the wooden walls of the gentlemen's waiting-room,
which had been sanded to keep the gentlemen from writing and sketching upon
them. This was the more judicious because the ladies' room, in the absence
of tourist travel, was locked in winter, and they were obliged to share the
gentlemen's. In summer, the Junction was a busy place, but after the snow
fell, and until the snow thawed, it was a desolation relieved only by the
arrival of the sparsely peopled through-trains from the north and east, and
by such local travellers as wished to take trains not stopping at their own
stations. These broke in upon the solitude of the joint station-master and
baggage-man and switch-tender with just sufficient frequency to keep him
in a state of uncharitable irritation and unrest. To-night Bartley was the
sole intruder, and he sat by the stove wrapped in a cloud of rebellious
memories, when one side of a colloquy without made itself heard.

"What?"

Some question was repeated.

"No; it went down half an hour ago."

An inaudible question followed.

"Next down-train at eleven."

There was now a faintly audible lament or appeal.

"Guess you'll have to come earlier next time. Most folks doos that wants to
take it."

Bartley now heard the despairing moan of a woman: he had already divined
the sex of the futile questioner whom the station-master was bullying; but
he had divined it without compassion, and if he had not himself been a
sufferer from the man's insolence he might even have felt a ferocious
satisfaction in it. In a word, he was at his lowest and worst when the
door opened and the woman came in, with a movement at once bewildered and
daring, which gave him the impression of a despair as complete and final as
his own. He doggedly kept his place; she did not seem to care for him, but
in the uncertain light of the lamp above them she drew near the stove, and,
putting one hand to her pocket as if to find her handkerchief, she flung
aside her veil with her other, and showed her tear stained face.

He was on his feet somehow. "Marcia!"

"Oh! Bartley--"

He had seized her by the arm to make sure that she was there in verity of
flesh and blood, and not by some trick of his own senses, as a cold chill
running over him had made him afraid. At the touch their passion ignored
all that they had made each other suffer; her head was on his breast, his
embrace was round her; it was a moment of delirious bliss that intervened
between the sorrows that had been and the reasons that must come.

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