The Lawton Girl. Frederic HaroldЧитать онлайн книгу.
afresh with tears.
Thus she still stood when her father returned. The expressman who halted his bob-sleigh at the cutting in front of her, and who sat holding the reins while her father piled her valise and parcels on behind, looked her over with a half-awed, half-quizzical glance, and seemed a long time making up his mind to speak. Finally he said:
“How d’do? Want to ride here, on the seat, longside of me?”
There was an indefinable something in his tone, and in the grin that went with it, which she resented quickly.
“I had no idea of riding at all,” she made answer.
Her father, who had seated himself on a trunk in the centre of the sleigh, interposed. “Why, Jess, you remember Steve, don’t you?” he asked, apologetically.
The expressman and the girl looked briefly at one another, and nodded in a perfunctory manner.
Lawton went on: “He offered himself to give us a lift as far as the house. He’s goin’ that way—ain’t you, Steve?”
The impulse was strong in Jessica to resist—precisely why she might have found it difficult to explain—but apparently there was no choice remaining to her. “Very well, then,” she said, “I will sit beside you, father.”
She stepped into the sleigh at this, and took her seat on the other end of the big trunk. The express-man gave a slap of the lines and a cluck to the horse, which started briskly down the wide street, the bell at its collar giving forth a sustained, cheery tinkle as they sped through the snow.
“Well, what do you think—ain’t this better’n walkin’?” remarked Lawton, after a time, knocking his heels in a satisfied way against the side of the trunk.
“I felt as if the walk would do me good,” she answered, simply. Her face was impassivity itself, as she looked straight before her, over the express-man’s shoulder.
Ben Lawton felt oppressed by the conviction that his daughter was annoyed. Perhaps it was because he had insisted on riding—instead of saying that he would walk too, when she had disclosed her preference. He ventured upon an explanation, stealing wistful glances at her meantime:
“You see, Jess, Dave Rantell’s got a turkey-shoot on to-day, down at his place, and I kind o’ thought I’d try my luck with this here half-dollar, ’fore it gets dark. The days are shortenin’ so, this season o’ year, that I couldn’t get there without Steve give me a lift. And if I should get a turkey—why, we’ll have a regular Thanksgiving dinner; and with you come home, too!”
To this she did not trust herself to make answer, but kept her face rigidly set, and her eyes fixed as if engrossed in meditation. They had passed the great iron-works on the western outskirts of the village now, and the road leading to the suburb of Burfield ran for a little through almost open country. The keener wind raised here in resistance to the rapid transit of the sleigh—no doubt it was this which brought the deep flush to her cheeks and the glistening moisture to her eyes.
They presently overtook two young men who were trudging along abreast, each in one of the tracks made by traffic, and who stepped aside to let the sleigh go by.
“Hello, Hod!” called out the expressman as he passed. “I’ve got your trunks. Come back for good?”
“Hello, Steve! … I don’t quite know yet,” was the reply which came back—the latter half of it too late for the expressman’s ears.
Jessica had not seen the pedestrians until the sleigh was close upon them; then, in the moment’s glimpse of them vouchsafed her, she had recognized young Mr. Boyce, and, in looking away from him with swift decision, had gazed full into the eyes of his companion. This other remembered her too, it was evident, even in that brief instant of passing, for a smile of greeting was in the glance he returned, and he lifted his hat as she swept by.
This was Reuben Tracy, then! Despite his beard, he seemed scarcely to have aged in face during these last five years; but he looked straighter and stronger, and his bearing had more vigor and firmness than she remembered of him in the days when she was an irregular pupil at the little old Burfield-road school-house, and he was the teacher. She was glad that he looked so hale and healthful. And had her tell-tale face, she wondered, revealed as she passed him all the deep pleasure she felt at seeing him again—at knowing he was near? She tried to recall whether she had smiled, and could not make sure. But he had smiled—of that there was not a doubt; and he had known her on the instant, and had taken off his hat, not merely jerked his finger toward it. Ah, what delight there was in these thoughts!
She turned to her father, and lifting her voice above the jingle of the bell, spoke with animation:
“Tell me about the second man we just, passed—Mr. Tracy. Has he been in Thessaly long, and is he doing a good business?” She added hastily, as if to forestall some possible misconception: “He used to be my school-teacher, you know.”
“Guess he’s gettin’ on all right,” replied Lawton: “I hain’t heard nothin’ to the contrary. He must a’ been back from New York along about a year—maybe two.” To her great annoyance he shouted out to the driver: “Steve, how long’s Rube Tracy been back in Thessaly? You keep track o’ things better’n I do.”
The expressman replied over his shoulder: “Should say about a year come Christmas.” Then, after a moment’s pause, he transferred the reins to his other hand, twisted himself half around on his seat, and looked into Jessica’s face with his earlier and offensive expression of mingled familiarity and diffidence. “He appeared to remember you: took off his hat,” he said. There was an unmistakable leer on his lank countenance as he added:
“That other fellow was Hod Boyce, the General’s son, you know—just come back from the old country.”
“Yes, I know!” she made answer curtly, and turned away from him.
During what remained of the journey she preserved silence, keeping her gaze steadily fixed on the drifted fields beyond the fence in front of her and thinking about these two young men—at first with infinite bitterness and loathing of the one, and then, for a longer time, and with a soft, half-saddened pleasure, of the other.
It was passing strange that she should find herself here at all—here in this village which for years at a time she had sworn never to see again. But, when she thought of it, it seemed still more remarkable that at the very outset she should see, walking together, the two men whom memory most distinctly associated with her old life here as a girl. She had supposed them both—her good and her evil genius—to be far away; in all her inchoate specula-tions about how she should meet various people, no idea of encountering either of these had risen in her mind. Yet here they were—and walking together!
Their conjunction disturbed and vaguely troubled her. She tried over and over again to reassure herself by saying that it was a mere accident; of course they had been acquainted with each other for years, and they had happened to meet, and what more natural than that they should walk on side by side? And yet it somehow seemed wrong.
Reuben Tracy was the best man she had ever known. Poor girl—so grievous had been her share of life’s lessons that she really thought of him as the only good man she had ever known. In all the years of her girlhood—unhappy, wearied, and mutinous, with squalid misery at home, and no respite from it possible outside which, looked back upon at this distance, did not seem equally coarse and repellent—there had been but this solitary gleam of light, the friendship of Reuben Tracy. Striving now to recall the forms in which this friendship had been manifested, she was conscious that there was not much to remember. He had simply impressed her as a wise and unselfish friend—that was all. The example of kindness, gentleness, of patient industry which he had set before her in the rude, bare-walled little school-room, and which she felt now had made a deep and lasting impression on her, had been set for all the rest as well. If sometimes he had seemed to like her better than the other girls, his preference was of a silent, delicate, unexpressed sort—as if prompted solely by acquaintance with her greater