"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--b.a.s.t.a.r.d. 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 G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l--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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l."
"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 st.u.r.dy 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.