Big Timber Part 15

"Well, isn't it rather nice to come home to?" he observed.

"It's dear. A homey looking place," she answered. "A beautiful site, and the house fits,--that white and the red tiles. Is the big stone fireplace in the living room, Jack?"

"Yes, and one in pretty nearly every other room besides," he nodded.

"Wood fires are cheerful."

The _Panther_ turned her nose sh.o.r.eward at Fyfe's word.

"I wondered about that foundation the first time I saw it," Stella confessed, "whether you built it, and why it was never finished. There was moss over the stones in places. And that lawn wasn't made in a single season. I know, because dad had a country place once, and he was raging around two or three summers because the land was so hard to get well-gra.s.sed."

"No, I didn't build the foundation or make the lawn," Fyfe told her. "I merely kept it in shape. A man named Hale owned the land that takes in the bay and the point when I first came to the lake. He was going to be married. I knew him pretty well. But it was tough going those days. He was in the hole on some of his timber, and he and his girl kept waiting.

Meantime he cleared and graded that little hill, sowed it to gra.s.s, and laid the foundation. He was about to start building when he was killed.

A falling tree caught him. I bought in his land and the timber limits that lie back of it. That's how the foundation came there."

"It's a wonder it didn't grow up wild," Stella mused. "How long ago was that?"

"About five years," Fyfe said. "I kept the gra.s.s trimmed. It didn't seem right to let the brush overrun it after the poor devil put that labor of love on it. It always seemed to me that it should be kept smooth and green, and that there should be a big, roomy bungalow there. You see my hunch was correct, too."

She looked up at him in some wonder. She hadn't accustomed herself to a.s.sociating Jack Fyfe with actions based on pure sentiment. He was too intensely masculine, solid, practical, impa.s.sive. He did not seem to realize even that sentiment had influenced him in this. He discussed it too matter-of-factly for that. She wondered what became of the bride-to-be. But that Fyfe could not tell her.

"Hale showed me her picture once," he said, "but I never saw her. Oh, I suppose she's married some other fellow long ago. Hale was a good sort.

He was out-lucked, that's all."

The _Panther_ slid in to the float. Jack and Stella went ash.o.r.e. Lefty Howe came down to meet them. Thirty-five or forty men were stringing away from the camp, back to their work in the woods. Some waved greeting to Jack Fyfe, and he waved back in the hail-fellow fas.h.i.+on of the camps.

"How's the frau, Lefty?" he inquired, after they had shaken hands.

"Fine. Down to Vancouver. Sister's sick," Howe answered laconically.

"House's all s.h.i.+pshape. Wanta eat here, or up there?"

"Here at the camp, until we get straightened around," Fyfe responded.

"Tell Pollock to have something for us in about half an hour. We'll go up and take a look."

Howe went in to convey this message, and the two set off up the path. A sudden spirit of impishness made Jack Fyfe sprint. Stella gathered up her skirt and raced after him, but a sudden shortness of breath overtook her, and she came panting to where Fyfe had stopped to wait.

"You'll have to climb hills and row and swim so you'll get some wind,"

Fyfe chuckled. "Too much easy living, lady."

She smiled without making any reply to this sally, and they entered the house--the House of Fyfe, that was to be her home.

If the exterior had pleased her, she went from room to room inside with growing amazement. Fyfe had finished it from bas.e.m.e.nt to attic without a word to her that he had any such undertaking in hand. Yet there was scarcely a room in which she could not find the visible result of some expressed wish or desire. Often during the winter they had talked over the matter of furnis.h.i.+ngs, and she recalled how unconsciously she had been led to make suggestions which he had stored up and acted upon. For the rest she found her husband's taste beyond criticism. There were drapes and rugs and prints and odds and ends that any woman might be proud to have in her home.

"You're an amazing sort of a man, Jack," she said thoughtfully. "Is there anything you're not up to? Even a Chinese servant in the kitchen.

It's perfect."

"I'm glad you like it," he said. "I hoped you would."

"Who wouldn't?" she cried impulsively. "I love pretty things. Wait till I get done rearranging."

They introduced themselves to the immobile-featured Celestial when they had jointly and severally inspected the house from top to bottom. Sam Foo gazed at them, listened to their account of themselves, and disappeared. He re-entered the room presently, bearing a package.

"Mist' Chol' Bentlee him leave foh yo'."

Stella looked at it. On the outer wrapping was written:

_From C.A. Benton to Mrs. John Henderson Fyfe_ _A Belated Wedding Gift_

She cut the string, and delved into the cardboard box, and gasped. Out of a swathing of tissue paper her hands bared sundry small articles. A little cap and jacket of knitted silk--its double in fine, fleecy yarn--a long silk coat--a bonnet to match,--both daintily embroidered.

Other things--a shoal of them--baby things. A grin struggled for lodgment on Fyfe's freckled countenance. His blue eyes twinkled.

"I suppose," he growled, "that's Charlie's idea of a joke, huh?"

Stella turned away from the tiny garments, one little, hood crumpled tight in her hand. She laid her hot face against his breast and her shoulders quivered. She was crying.

"Stella, Stella, what's the matter?" he whispered.

"It's no joke," she sobbed. "It's a--it's a reality."

CHAPTER XIII

IN WHICH EVENTS MARK TIME

From that day on Stella found in her hands the reins over a smooth, frictionless, well-ordered existence. Sam Foo proved himself such a domestic treasure as only the trained Oriental can be. When the labor of an eight-room dwelling proved a little too much for him, he urbanely said so. Thereupon, at Fyfe's suggestion, he imported a fellow countryman, another bland, silent-footed model of efficiency in personal service. Thereafter Stella's task of supervision proved a sinecure.

A week or so after their return, in sorting over some of her belongings, she came across the check Charlie had given her: that two hundred and seventy dollars which represented the only money she had ever earned in her life. She studied it a minute, then went out to where her husband sat perched on the verandah rail.

"You might cash this, Jack," she suggested.

He glanced at the slip.

"Better have it framed as a memento," he said, smiling. "You'll never earn two hundred odd dollars so hard again, I hope. No, I'd keep it, if I were you. If ever you should need it, it'll always be good--unless Charlie goes broke."

There never had been any question of money between them. From the day of their marriage Fyfe had made her a definite monthly allowance, a greater sum than she needed or spent.

"As a matter of fact," he went on, "I'm going to open an account in your name at the Royal Bank, so you can negotiate your own paper and pay your own bills by check."

She went in and put away the check. It was hers, earned, all too literally, in the sweat of her brow. For all that it represented she had given service threefold. If ever there came a time when that hunger for independence which had been fanned to a flame in her brother's kitchen should demand appeas.e.m.e.nt--she pulled herself up short when she found her mind running upon such an eventuality. Her future was ordered. She was married--to be a mother. Here lay her home. All about her ties were in process of formation, ties that with time would grow stronger than any shackles of steel, constraining her to walk in certain ways,--ways that were pleasant enough, certain of ease if not of definite purpose.

Yet now and then she found herself falling into fits of abstraction in which Roaring Lake and Jack Fyfe, all that meant anything to her now, faded into the background, and she saw herself playing a lone hand against the world, making her individual struggle to be something more than the petted companion of a dominant male and the mother of his children. She never quite lost sight of the fact that marriage had been the last resort, that in effect she had taken the avenue her personal charm afforded to escape drudgery and isolation. There was still deep-rooted in her a craving for something bigger than mere ease of living. She knew as well as she knew anything that in the natural evolution of things marriage and motherhood should have been the big thing in her life. And it was not. It was too incidental, too incomplete, too much like a mere breathing-place on life's highway.

Sometimes she reasoned with herself bluntly, instead of dreaming, was driven to look facts in the eye because she did dream. Always she encountered the same obstacle, a feeling that she had been defrauded, robbed of something vital; she had forgone that wonderful, pa.s.sionate drawing together which makes the separate lives of the man and woman who experiences it so fuse that in the truest sense of the word they become one.

Mostly she kept her mind from that disturbing introspection, because invariably it led her to vague dreaming of a future which she told herself--sometimes wistfully--could never be realized. She had shut the door on many things, it seemed to her now. But she had the sense to know that dwelling on what might have been only served to make her morbid, and did not in the least serve to alter the unalterable. She had chosen what seemed to her at the time the least of two evils, and she meant to abide steadfast by her choice.

Charlie Benton came to visit them. Strangely enough to Stella, who had never seen him on Roaring Lake, at least, dressed otherwise than as his loggers, he was sporting a natty gray suit, he was clean shaven, Oxford ties on his feet, a gentleman of leisure in his garb. If he had started on the down grade the previous winter, he bore no signs of it now, for he was the picture of ruddy vigor, clear-eyed, brown-skinned, alert, bubbling over with good spirits.