The Way of the Strong

CHAPTER VI

LIFE THROUGH OTHER EYES

Phyllis Raysun was quite a remarkable girl when her parentage and simple, yet strenuous, upbringing were considered. Her beauty was quite decided, and was admitted even by those female souls who were really fond of her. She was dark, with large, dark eyes, deeply fringed with black lashes, almost Celtic in their depth and sleepy fire. And with it all she wore an expression of keenness and decision at all times. She was tall, of a height which always goes so well with a purposeful face such as hers; and the delightful contours of her figure were all the more gracefully natural for the absence of corsets. But wherein lay the unusual side of her personality was the unconventional views of life she already possessed at the age of eighteen years. The breadth of them was often quite disconcerting in one so young, and frequently it made her the despair of her plump and doting, and very ordinarily helpless mother.

Perhaps her mother's helplessness may have accounted in some measure for Phyllis's unusual mental development. It may have had a pronounced influence upon her, for they two were quite alone. Years ago, when she was an infant, her father had died, leaving her mother in sorely straitened circumstances.

From her earliest years Phyllis had had to think for herself, and help in the struggle against poverty. Then, as she grew older, she realized that they possessed a wholly neglected property which should yield them a living. So she set to work on the farm, and, little by little, she wrested from the soil that profit, which, as the years went on, gradually lifted them both from the depths of penury to a frugal comfort. Now the farm was nearing prosperity, and, with the aid of a hired man, Phyllis worked it with all the skill of an expert and widely experienced farmer.

Her mother was simply a chorewoman; a capable enough woman in this lowly capacity. She could never hope to rise above it. Nor was Phyllis ever disturbed by the knowledge. She valued the usefulness of her mother's work too well, and, besides, she loved the helpless old body, and delighted in the care of her as though she were some small child of her own.

Phyllis had spent her morning out seeding, as every other farmer in the district was doing, while her hired man was busy with plough and team breaking the last year's fallows. The work was arduous and monotonous, but the girl felt neither of these things. She loved her little homestead with its hundred and sixty acres, and she asked nothing better than to tend it, and watch, and reap the results. She was robust in mind and body, and none of the claims of this agricultural life came amiss to her.

But during the past six months a new interest had come into her life in the shape of a blue-eyed male giant of her own age; and from the moment she first set eyes upon him an added glow lit the heavens of her consciousness. She did not recognize its meaning at first. Only she realized that somehow the winter days were less dark and irksome, and an added zest became apparent in the everlasting looking forward.

But by degrees he became an intimate in her life, and, finally, almost part of it. It was a wonderful time for Phyllis. Through it all he was always associated with the first apparition she had had of him. In her dreaming mind, as she went about her work, she always saw him as she had seen him then, sitting on the back of a beautiful East-bred, golden chestnut horse, disconsolately viewing the distance with questioning blue eyes, seeking a direction he had absolutely lost.

That was her first meeting with Frank Burton, and somehow she had been glad, from the first moment she set eyes on him, that hers had been the opportunity of relieving him from the dilemma in which he had found himself.

Since then their friendship had ripened quickly. The pulses of youth had been quickly stirred, and almost before Phyllis was aware of it that glorious early spring day had dawned when the great golden sun of love had burst upon her horizon, and turned a chill, snow-clad world into a perfect poet's dream of delight.

Without a second thought she engaged herself to the boy, and the boy engaged himself to her. They loved, so what mattered anything else in the world? Their blood ran hot in healthy veins, and the whole wide world lay before them.

Phyllis was returning at midday with the old mare that hauled her seeder. As she came she was reckoning up the time which the rest of the seeding would take. This year an added twenty-five acres was to be put under crop, and time in spring was always the farmer's nightmare. She had completed her figures by the time she drew near the house, when, looking up, with satisfied eyes, she beheld the figure of the man, whose presence never failed to raise a smile of delight in her eyes, standing at the door talking to her mother.

"Ho, Frank!" she cried out joyously.

The man turned at once and answered her greeting, but the smile on his handsome face had little of the girl's unqualified joy in it. Her sensitive feelings quickly detected the lack, and she understood that there was something amiss. Frank came swiftly across to her, and relieved her of the mare, which he led to the barn while Phyllis walked at his side.

"I just felt I had to come over, Phyl," he said impulsively. "I couldn't pass another night until I had seen you and told you all. I'm – I'm utterly miserable. I – "

They had reached the barn and Phyllis halted.

"You put the mare in, and feed her hay," she interrupted him quickly. "Dan will feed her oats and water her when he comes in."

Her manner was studiously matter of fact. She had realized at once that Frank's condition must not be encouraged. So she remained outside the barn, and waited for him.

The boy found her sitting on the tongue of the wagon which stood close by, and the misery in his eyes deepened as he surveyed the charming, pensive face he loved so dearly.

"Come and sit here, Frank. Then you can tell me about it."

Phyllis looked up at him in that tender, mothering way she had learned in her years of care for her only parent.

The man obeyed, and, for the first time since he had left Sam Bernard's farm that morning, a genuine smile of something like contentment lit his hitherto somber face.

"Phyl," he cried suddenly, "you – you make me feel better already. You – oh, it's wonderful the influence you exercise over me. I – "

He broke off, and, seizing her two hands, bent over and kissed her on the lips.

"That's better," the girl exclaimed happily, when he had released her. "When two people really love each other they can generally manage to set the worst of any shadows scooting off to the dark places they belong."

The man smiled in spite of himself.

"But – but it's serious. It really is. It's simply awful."

The girl's eyes were just a shade anxious, but her manner was lightly tender.

"Of course it is. It surely is. Say, Frank, everything's awful that makes us unhappy. And I guess something's made you real unhappy. Now, just get very busy and tell me all about it."

The man sat with his great body drooping forward, and his hands clasped, and hanging between his parted knees.

"Unhappy? It's – it's worse than that. I – I came over here to tell you that – that you can have your promise back – if you want it."

It was out. He had blurted it clumsily he knew, but it was out. And now he sat fearing to look up into the truthful eyes he loved so dearly.

Phyllis drew a sharp breath. She looked straight ahead of her for one brief moment while her sunny cheeks paled. Then the soft color came back to them, and, presently, a very tender, very wise pair of eyes studied his dejected profile.

"And if I don't want it – back?" she said gently.

Frank raised his miserable eyes and looked straight into hers.

"But you will when you know all," he cried, almost passionately. "I know it. I feel it. I know that a good, honest girl like you could not bear disgrace. No disgrace has ever touched you, and, through me, no disgrace ever shall. When I asked for your promise I did not know all I know now. If I had I would rather have cut off my right hand than attempt to win your love. And now – now I know that I had no right to it. I have no right to any good woman's love. I – I have no right to anything. Not even to my name."

"Frank!"

Another sharp intake of breath came with the girl's exclamation.

"Yes, I mean it," the boy went on, with passionate misery. "I have known it for six weeks, and I should have told you before, but – but I hadn't the courage, the honesty. I – I have no legitimate father. I – I am a bastard."

He made his final statement with his eyes upon the ground. To see this great, honest boy bowed with such a sincerity of misery was too much for Phyllis.

"You didn't win my love, Frank," she said, with eyes that were tenderly smiling. "I gave it to you – quite unasked. I gave it to you such a long – long time ago. I think I must sure have given it you before ever I saw you. And – and as for my promise, I guess that was given most at the same time – only I just didn't know 'bout it. I don't think I could take my promise back if I felt that way. But I don't – not if you'd like to keep it."

"Phyl, Phyl!" The boy's eyes were shining, but his sense of right made him protest. "You don't know what you're doing. You surely don't. Think of it. I – I have no real name. Think what folks'll say when they know. Think of the disgrace for you. Think of your girl friends. Phyllis Raysun marrying a – bastard. Oh, it's awful."

"You do love me, Frank, don't you?"

The girl's question came so simply that Frank turned in astonishment. The next moment she was in his arms, and the joy of his hot kisses pervaded her whole body.

"Love you? Love you?" he cried. "You're all the world to me."

Presently she released herself from his embrace and smiled up into his face.

"Then what in the world else matters to – us?" she demanded frankly.

Then she went on, looking straight before her at the tumbled-down sod house which had been her home ever since her birth.

"Listen," she said. "You are illegitimate. I won't have that other word. It's brutal, and it's not right anyway. Do you ever think of our poor little lives? I do – often. Guess I've thought so much I wonder folks make all the to-do they do about lots of things that can't possibly matter. What is life? Why, it's a great big machine sort of thing that none of us, the wisest, don't know a thing about. Why is it? Where does it come from? What is it? Is it? No, not the wisest man in all the world can answer one of those questions right. He can't. He can't. And yet everybody gets busy making crazy little regulations for running it. Do you see? We're built and developed by this wonderful, wonderful machine thing, and then we turn right around and tell anybody, even, yes, the wonderful machine thing that made us itself, how we should live the life which has already been arranged for.

"Frank dear," she hurried on eagerly, "it's almost funny, only it's all so plumb crazy. Do you ever go to Meeting? I mean church?"

"I'm afraid I don't," Frank admitted ruefully.

"I do," cried the girl. "Oh yes, I do." Then she laughed. "It's more funny than you'd expect, if – if you only think about it. I always think a lot when I go. It makes me think, but not in the way the parson would have me. I always start thinking about him. It seems so queer, him standing up there talking Bible stuff, and telling you what it means, just, for all the world, as if he'd wrote it, and knew all about it; just as if he was a personal friend of that great machine thing that keeps this world buzzing around and sets us feeling, and doing, and happy, and miserable. Then he gets paid like any hired man for talking to us all, just as if we were silly folk who couldn't think just as well as him. But he don't really think far. He just tells you what he's told to tell you by those who pay him his wages, and if he told you anything else he'd lose his job, and maybe have to plow for a living, and then be told by some other feller every seventh day he was a fool and a sinner.

"Then you go to another church – or meeting house. It used to make me real bad one time. But it doesn't now, because I'm getting to understand better. Well, at the other place they tell you all different. And while you're listening it makes you think the other feller's a fool, and – and ought to be making hay, or maybe eating it. Then you get mazed up with so much contradiction about Life, and God, and all the other things, so you find another church. Then that feller gets up and tells you that none of the others have got it right – no one else in the world but him, as the representative of his particular religion. And he asks you to help him send out missionaries, and things, to tell everybody that don't think the same as him they're fools and worse, and – and – they're all going plumb to hell – wherever that is.

"Now what does it all come to, Frank?" she cried, with eyes glowing and cheeks flushed with enthusiasm. "Why, just this. We're born into this world, which is a wonderful, wonderful place, through none of our doing. A big God, somewhere, gives us our life, and implants in us a wonderful sense of right and wrong, and we've just got to use it the best we know. We don't know anything beyond the limits of understanding He's given us, and He doesn't intend us to know more. He just seems to say, 'Go right along and work out your own salvation; and when you've done, I'll come along and see how you've been doing, and, maybe, I'll fix it so your failures won't happen in the newer lives I set going.' That's how it seems to me. So you don't need to listen more than you want to what other folks, no wiser than yourself, tell you of what's right and what's wrong. You don't; because they don't know any better than you – and that's a fact. So when you come and tell me you're disgraced, just because your pa and momma weren't preached at by a feller all dressed in white, and they didn't have bells ringing, and she didn't have a trousseau, and the folks didn't get around and make speeches, and pile a shower of paper stuff down their backs, I say you're not. None of it matters. Nothing in the whole wide world matters – so long as we don't let go our hold on that sense of right and wrong which the good God gave us. That's all that really does matter to us. It's no concern of ours what folks who came before us did, or the doings of folks who're coming after. We've got to do our work. We've got to love and live till it pleases our great big God to tell us to stop. And I'm most sure if we do that, and hold tight to our sense of right and wrong, and act as it prompts us, we're just doing His Will – as He wants us to do it."

Frank sat staring in wide astonishment at the girl's flushed face and bright, enthusiastic eyes. But the effect of her words, her understanding of things, upon him was none the less. He felt the great underlying truth in all she said, and it brought him a measure of comfort which his own lack of real thought had left him without.

"Phyl!" he almost gasped.

The girl broke into happy laughter.

"Say, Frank," she cried, "don't tell me I'll – I'll go to hell for it all. I – I couldn't stand that – from you."

The boy shook his head. He, too, joined in the laugh. He felt he wanted to laugh. It was as though she had suddenly relieved him of an intolerable burden.

"I wouldn't tell you that, Phyl," he said, with heavy earnestness. "You'll go somewhere, but it won't be – to hell."

"And – and you don't want me to take my promise back?" she asked him, her gray eyes sobering at once.

"No, dear, I just love you more than ever." He sighed in great contentment. "And we'll get married as soon – as soon as mother buys me the farm she's going to. She's written me about it to-day."

"Ah, yes, that farm." Phyllis rested her chin upon her hand, and gazed out at the old house abstractedly.

"It's to be a swell place," the boy went on.

"I'm so glad, Frank," she replied absently. Then she recalled her dreaming faculties. "And – your momma's giving it to you? She must be very rich."

Frank flushed and turned his eyes away.

"She has a good deal of money," he said awkwardly.

The girl seemed to understand. She questioned him no further.

"She must be a good and kind woman," she said gently. "I hope some day I may get – to know her."

"I – "

Frank broke off. The promise he was rashly about to make remained unspoken. He knew he could not promise anything in his mother's name – now.

CHAPTER VII

HAPPY DAYS

Angus Moraine was a dour, hard-headed business man such as Alexander Hendrie liked to have about him. He was also an agriculturalist from his finger-tips to his back-bone, and the millionaire's great farm at Deep Willows owed most of its prosperity to this hard, raw-boned descendant from the Crofters of Scotland.

When he heard of his friend and employer's forthcoming marriage he shook his head, and his lean face took on an expression of added sourness. He saw visions of his own sphere of administration at Deep Willows becoming narrowed. He felt that the confidence of his employer was likely to be diverted into another channel. This meant more than a mere outrage to his pride. He knew it might affect his private pocket in an adverse degree. Therefore the news was all the more unwelcome.

Pondering on these matters while on a round of inspection of the far-reaching wheat-lands which he controlled, he abruptly drew up his sturdy broncho in full view of a great gray owl perched on the top of a barbed wire fence-post. He sat there surveying the creature for some moments, and finally apostrophized it, feeling that so uncanny and secretive a fowl was an admirable and safe recipient for his confidences.

"It's no sort of use, my gray and ugly friend," he said, in his wry way. "Folks call Master Alexander the Napoleon of the wheat world, and I'm not saying he isn't. But Napoleons generally make a mess of things when they marry. Their business is fighting, or – they wouldn't be Napoleons."

Quite apart from his own interests he felt that Hendrie was making a grave mistake, and, later on, when he learned that he had married his secretary, his conviction became permanent. This time his disapproval was directed at the map of Alberta, which hung upon his office wall. He shook his bony forefinger with its torn and dirty nail at the silent witness, his narrow eyes snapping with angry scorn.

"Female secretaries are pernicious," he cried angrily. "They're worse'n a colony of gophers in a wheat patch. You want a temperature of forty below to keep your office cool with a woman working in it. Hendrie always hated the cold."

But his apprehensions did not end there. Later he learned that Deep Willows was to be Monica's future home, and the place was to be immediately prepared for her reception.

This time the telephone over which he had received his instructions got the full benefit of his displeasure.

It was cold and calm, and thoroughly biting.

"I'll need to chase a new job, or the old one'll chase me," he muttered, and the thermometer of his feelings for women, as a race, dropped far below the zero at which it had hitherto stood.

But there was far too much of the old Crofter's blood in Angus's veins to let him relinquish the gold mine which Hendrie's affairs were to him. However he disliked the new conditions of things he kept his feelings to himself, or only permitted their expression before silent witnesses. With all the caution of his forefathers he awaited developments, and refrained from any precipitate action; and, later on, he was more than glad he had exercised such restraint.

The necessary preparations were duly put in hand, and Angus supervised everything himself. Every detail was carried out with that exactness for which Hendrie's manager was noted. He spared no pains, and that was his way. His native shrewdness had long ago taught him how best he could serve his employer's interests, and, consequently, his own. Implicit obedience to the millionaire left him with enormous pickings, and the building up of Hendrie's miniature world of wheat had left him comparatively a rich man, with small agricultural interests scattered all over the north-west. He was not the man to turn and rend the golden calf he worshiped, nor to attempt to cook his own tame golden goose in the fire of his displeasure. Besides, deep down in his rugged heart, he was utterly devoted to his employer. So he gave Monica and her husband a royal welcome to Deep Willows.

After all Monica was not permitted to explore Deep Willows by herself. Hendrie contrived to get his business in Chicago temporarily adjusted, and, as a surprise, explained at the last moment to his bride that he could not bring himself to permit her going to Deep Willows for the first time without him.