"In the dark, hey?"
"Completely in the dark."
"Well, light up, light up!"
"I"m trying to."
"What the deuce do you mean by that tone? What"s been going on here since my absence?"
Albert did not reply, and Hartley shuffled about after a match, lighted the lamp, threw his coat and hat in the corner, and then said:
"Well, I"ve got everything straightened up. Been freezing out old Daggett; the old skeesix has been promisin" f"r a week, and I just said, "Old man, I"ll camp right down with you here till you fork over," and he did. By-the-way, everybody I talked with to-day about leaving said, "What"s Lohr going to do with that girl?" I told "em I didn"t know; do you? It seems you"ve been thicker"n I supposed."
"I"m going to marry her," said Albert, calmly, but his voice sounded strained and hoa.r.s.e.
"What"s that?" yelled Hartley.
"Sh! don"t raise the neighbors. I"m going to marry her."
"Well, by jinks! When? Say, looky here! Well, I swanny!" exclaimed Hartley, helplessly. "When?"
"Right away; some time this summer--June, maybe."
Hartley thrust his hands into his trousers pockets, stretched out his legs, and stared at his friend in vast amaze.
"You"re givin" me guff!"
"I"m in dead earnest."
"I thought you was going through college all so fast?"
"Well, I"ve made up my mind it isn"t any use to try," replied Albert, listlessly.
"What y" goin" t" do here, or are y" goin" t" take the girl away with yeh?"
"She can"t leave her mother. We"ll run this boarding-house for the present. I"ll try for the princ.i.p.alship of the school here. Raff is going to resign, they say. If I can"t get that, I"ll go into a law office. Don"t worry about me."
"But why go into this so quick? Why not put it off fifteen or twenty years?" asked Hartley, trying to get back to cheerful voice.
"What would be the use? At the end of a year I"d be just about as poor as I am now."
"Can"t y"r father step in and help you?"
"No. There are three boys and two girls, all younger than I, to be looked out for, and he has all he can carry. Besides, _she_ needs me right here and right now, and if I can do anything to make life easier for her I"m going t" do it. Besides," he ended, in a peculiar tone, "we don"t feel as if we could live apart much longer."
"But, great Scott! man, you can"t--"
"Now, hold on, Jim! I"ve thought this thing all over, and I"ve made up my mind. It ain"t any use to go on talking about it. What good would it do me to go to school another year? I"d come out without a dollar, and no more fitted for earning a living for her than I am now! And, besides all that, I couldn"t draw a free breath thinking of her workin" away here to keep things moving, liable at any minute to break down."
Hartley gazed at him in despair, and with something like awe. It was a tremendous transformation in the young, ambitious student.
Like most men in America, and especially Western men, he still clung to the idea that a man was entirely responsible for his success or failure in life. He had not admitted that conditions of society might be so adverse that only men of most exceptional endowments, and willing and able to master many of the best and deepest and most sacred of their inspirations and impulses, could succeed.
Of the score of specially promising young fellows who had been with him at school, seventeen had dropped out and down. Most of them had married and gone back to farming, or to earn a precarious living in the small, dull towns where farmers trade and traders farm. Conditions were too adverse; they simply weakened and slipped slowly back into dulness and an ox-like or else a fretful patience. Thinking of these men, and thinking their failure due to themselves alone, Hartley could not endure the idea of his friend adding one more to the list of failures. He sprang up at last.
"Say, Bert, you might just as well hang y"rself, and done with it! Why, it"s suicide! I can"t allow it. I started in at college bravely, and failed because I"d let it go too long. I couldn"t study--couldn"t get down to it; but you--why, old man, I"d _bet_ on you!" He had a tremor in his voice. "I hate like thunder to see you give up your plans. Say, you can"t afford to do this; it"s too much to pay."
"No, it isn"t."
"I say it is--and, besides, you"d get over this in a week--"
"Jim!" called Albert, warningly, sharply.
"All right," said Jim, in the tone of a man who knows it"s all wrong--"all right; but the time "ll come when you"ll wish I"d--You ain"t doin" the girl enough good to make up for the harm you"re doin"
yourself." He broke off again, and said in a tone of finality: "I"m done. I"m all through, and I c"n see you"re through with Jim Hartley.
All right!"
"Darn curious," he muttered to himself, "that boy should get caught just at this time, and not with some o" those girls in Marion. Well, it"s none o" my funeral," he ended, with a sigh; for it had stirred him to the bottom of his sunny nature, after all. A dozen times, as he lay there beside his equally sleepless companion, he started to say something more in deprecation of the step, but each time stifled the opening word into a groan.
It would not be true to say that love had come to Albert Lohr as a relaxing influence, but it had changed the direction of his energies so radically as to make his whole life seem weaker and lower. As long as his love-dreams went out toward a vague and ideal woman, supposedly higher and grander than himself, he was spurred on to face the terrible sheer escarpment of social eminence; but when he met, by accident, the actual woman who was to inspire his future efforts, the difficulties he faced took on solid reality. His aspirations fell to the earth, their wings clipped, and became, perforce, submissive beasts at the plough.
The force that moved so much of his thought was transformed into other energy.
The table was very gay at dinner next day. Maud was standing at the highest point of her girlhood dreams. Her flushed cheeks and shining eyes made her seem almost a child, and Hartley wondered at her, and relented a little in the face of such happiness.
"They"re gay as larks now," thought Hartley to himself, as he joined in the laughter; "but that won"t help "em any ten years from now."
He could hardly speak next day as he shook hands at the station with his friend.
"Good-by, ol" man; I hope it"ll come out all right, but I"m afraid--But there! I promised not to say anything about it. Good-by till we meet in Congress," he ended, in a resolute attempt to conceal his dismay.
"Can"t you come to the wedding, Jim? We"ve decided on June. You see, they need a man around the house, so we--You"ll come, won"t you, old fellow? And don"t mind my being a little crusty last night."
"Oh yes; I"ll come," Jim said, in a tone which concealed a desire to utter one more protest, but to himself he said:
"That ends him! He"s jumped into a hole and pulled the hole in after him. A man can"t marry a family like that at his age, and pull out of it. He _may_, but I doubt it. Well, as I remarked before, it"s none o"
my funeral so long as _he"s_ satisfied."
But he said it with a painful lump in his throat, and he could not bring himself to feel that Albert"s course was right, and felt himself to be somehow culpable in the case.
A DIVISION IN THE COOLLY
A funeral is a depressing affair under the best circ.u.mstances, but a funeral in a lonely farm-house in March, the roads full of slush, the ragged gray clouds leaping the sullen hills like eagles, is tragic.
The teams arrived splashed with mud, the women blue with cold under their scanty cotton-quilt lap robes, their hats set awry by the wind.