The Desert and the Sown Part 4

"I'm trying to keep it."

"You couldn't keep it if you cared--really and truly--as some do!" She dropped her voice hurriedly. "To live here and eat your meals day after day and pa.s.s me like a stick or a stone!"

The slow blood burned in Adam's face and hammered in his pulses. His blue eyes were bashful through its heat. "I don't feel like a stick nor a stone. You know it, Emmy. You want to be careful," he added gently.

"Would going away look as if I cared?"

"Why--why don't you ask me to go with you?" The girl tried to meet his eyes. She turned off her question with a proud laugh.

"Be--careful, child! You know why I can't take you up on that. Would you want we should leave him here alone--without even Becky? You're only trying me for fun."

"No; I am not!" Emmy was pale now. Her breast was rising in strong excitement. "If we were gone, he would know then what you are worth to him. Now, you're only Adam! He thinks he can put you down like a boy. He won't believe I care for you. There's only one way to show him--that is, if we do care. In one month he would be sending for us back. Then we could come, and you would take your right place here, and be somebody.

You would not eat in the kitchen, then. Haven't you been like a son to him? And why shouldn't he own it?"

"But if he won't? Suppose he don't send for us to come back?"

"Then you could strike out for yourself. What was Tom Madden, before he went away to Colorado, or somewhere--where was it? And now everybody stops to shake hands with him;--he's as much of a man as anybody. If you could make a little money. That's the proof he wants. If you were rich, you'd be all right with him. You know that!"

"I'd hate to think it. But I'll never be rich. Put that out of your mind, Emmy. It don't run in the blood. I don't come of a money-making breed."

"What a silly thing to say! Of course, if you don't believe you can, you can't. Who has made the money here for the last ten years?"

"It was his capital done it. It ain't hard to make money after you've sc.r.a.ped the first few thousands together. But it's the first thousand that costs."

"How much have you got ahead?"

Adam answered awkwardly, "Eleven hundred and sixty odd." He did not like to talk of money to the girl who was the prayer, the inspiration, of his life. It hurt him to be questioned by her in this sordid way.

"You earned it all, didn't you?"

"I've took no risks. Here was my home. He give me the chance and he showed me how. And--he's your father. I don't like to talk about his money, nor about my own, to you."

"Oh, you are good, good! n.o.body knows! But it's all wasted if you haven't got any push--anything inside of yourself that makes people know what you are. I wish I could put into you some of my _fury_ that I feel when things get in my way! You have held yourself in too long. You can't--_can't_ love a girl, and be so careful--like a mother. Don't you understand?"

"Stop right there, Emmy! You needn't push no harder. I can let go whenever you say so. But--do _you_ understand, little girl? Man and wife it will have to be."

Emmy did not shrink at the words. Her face grew set, her dark eyes full of mystery fixed themselves on the slow-moving ice-floe grinding along the sh.o.r.e.

"I know," she a.s.sented slowly.

"I can't give you no farm, nor horses and carriages, nor help in the kitchen. It's bucklin' right down with our bare hands--me outside and you in? And you only eighteen. See what little hands--If I could do it all!"

"Your promise is broken," she whispered. "I made you break it. You will have to tell him now, or--we must go."

"So be!" said Adam solemnly. "And G.o.d do so to me and more also, if I have to hurt my little girl,--Emmy--wife!"

He folded her in his great arms clumsily--the man she had said was like a mother. He was almost as ignorant as she, and more hopeful than he had dared to seem, as to their worldly chances. But the love he had for her told him it was not love that made her so bold. The first touch of such love as his would have made her fear him as he feared her. And the subtle pain of this instinctive knowledge, together with that broken promise, shackled the wings of his great joy. It was not as he had hoped to win the crown of life.

Paul, it may be supposed, had never liked to think of his mother's elopement. It had been the one hard point to get over in his conception of his father, but he could never have explained it by such a scene as this. It would have hampered him terribly in his tale had he dreamed of it. He pa.s.sed over the unfortunate incident with a romancer's touch, and dwelt upon his grandfather's bitter resentment which he resented as the son of his mother's choice. The Van Eltens and Brodericks all fared hardly at the hands of their legatee.

It was not only in the person of a hireling who had abused his trust that Abraham had felt himself outraged. There were old neighborhood spites and feuds going back, dividing blood from blood--even brothers of the same blood. There was trouble between him and his brother Jacob, of New York, dating from the settlement of their father's, Broderick Van Elten's, estate; and no one knows what besides that was private and personal may have entered into it. It was years since they had met, but Jacob kept well abreast of his brother's misfortunes. A bachelor himself, with no children to lose or to quarrel with, it was not displeasing to him to hear of the breaks in his brother's household.

"What, what, what! The last one left him,--run off with one of his men!

What a fool the man must be. Can't he look after his women folks better than that? Better have lost her with the others. Two boys, and Chrissy, and the girl--and now the last girl gone off with his hired man. Poor Chrissy! Guess she had about enough of it. Things have come out pretty much even, after all! There was more love and lickin's wasted on Abe.

Father was proudest of him, but he couldn't break him. Hi! but I've crawled under the woodshed to hear him yell, and father would tan him with a raw-hide, but he couldn't break him; couldn't get a sound out of him. Big, and hard, and tough--Chrissy thought she knew a man; she thought she took the best one."

With slow, cold spite Jacob had tracked his brother's path in life through its failures. Jacob had no failures, and no life.

V

DISINHERITED

Proud little Emmy, heiress no longer, had put her spirit into her farm-hand and incited him to the first rebellion of his life. They crossed the river at night, poling through floating ice, and climbed aboard one of those great through trains whose rus.h.i.+ng thunder had made the girlish heart so often beat. This was long before the West Sh.o.r.e Line was built. Neither of them had ever seen the inside of a Pullman sleeper. Emmy could count the purchased meals she had eaten in her life; she had never slept in a hotel or hired lodging till after her marriage.

Hardly any one could be so provincial in these days.

Adam Bogardus was a plodder in the West as he had been in the East. He was an honest man, and he was wise enough not to try to be a shrewd one.

He tried none of the short-cuts to a fortune. Hard work suited him best, and no work was too hard for his iron strength and patient resolution.

But it broke the spirit of a man in him to see his young wife's despair.

Poverty frightened and quelled her. The deep-rooted security of her old home was something she missed every day of her makes.h.i.+ft existence. It was degradation to live in "rooms," or a room; to move for want of means to pay the rent. She pined for the good food she had been used to. Her health suffered through anxiety and hard work. She was too proud to complain, but the sight of her dumb unacceptance of what had come to her through him undoubtedly added the last straw to her husband's mental strain.

"It is hard for me to realize it as I once did," said Paul, as the story paused. "You make tragedy a dream. But there is a deep vein of tragedy in our blood. And my theory is that it always crops out in families where it's the keynote, as it were."

"Never mind, you old care-taker! We Middletons carry sail enough to need a ton or two of lead in our keel."

"But, you understand?"--

"I understand the distinction between what I call your good blood, and the sort of blood I thought you had. It explains a certain funny way you have with arms--weapons. Do you mind?"

"Not at all," said Paul coldly. "I hate a weapon. I am always ashamed of myself when I get one in my hand."

"You act that way, dear!"

"G.o.d made tools and the Devil made weapons."

"You are civil to my father's profession."

"Your father is what he is aside from his profession."

"You are quite mistaken, Paul. My father and his profession are one.

His sword is a symbol of healing. The army is the great surgeon of the nation when the time comes for a capital operation."

"It grows harder to tell my story," said Paul gloomily;--"the short and simple annals of the poor."

"Now come! Have I been a sn.o.b about my father's profession?"