CHAPTER III
THE SPARK IN THE CLOD
It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite ofhis bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberriesfollowed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden thatOllie had planted and tilled under her husband's orders.
Along in early summer the wormy codlings which fell from the apple-treeshad to be gathered up and fed to the hogs by Ollie, and it was such aseason of blighted fruit that the beasts could not eat them all. Sothere was apple sauce, sweetened with molasses from the new barrel thatIsom broached.
If it had not been so niggardly unnecessary, the faculty that Isom hadfor turning the waste ends of the farm into profit would have beenadmirable. But the suffering attendant upon this economy fell only uponthe human creatures around him. Isom's beasts wallowed in plenty andgrew fat in the liberality of his hand. For himself, it looked as if hehad the ability to extract his living from the bare surface of a rock.
All of this green truck was filling, as Isom had said, but far fromsatisfying to a lad in the process of building on such generous plans asJoe. Isom knew that too much skim-milk would make a pot-bellied calf,but he was too stubborn in his rule of life to admit the cause when hesaw that Joe began to lag at his work, and grow surly and sour.
Isom came in for quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of alurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horsecultivators, "laying by" the corn. Joe threw his plow down in thefurrow, cast the lines from his shoulders, and declared that he wasstarving. He vowed that he would not cultivate another row unlessassured, then and there, that Isom would make an immediate enlargementin the bill-of-fare.
Isom stood beside the handles of his own cultivator, there being thespace of ten rows between him and Joe, and took the lines from aroundhis shoulders, with the deliberate, stern movement of a man who ispreparing for a fight.
"What do you mean by this kind of capers?" he demanded.
"I mean that you can't go on starving me like you've been doing, andthat's all there is to it!" said Joe. "The law don't give you the rightto do that."
"Law! Well, I'll law you," said Isom, coming forward, his hard bodycrouched a little, his lean and guttered neck stretched as if hegathered himself for a run and jump at the fence. "I'll feed you whatcomes to my hand to feed you, you onery whelp! You're workin' for me,you belong to me!"
"I'm working for mother--I told you that before," said Joe. "I don't oweyou anything, Isom, and you've got to feed me better, or I'll walk awayand leave you, that's what I'll do!"
"Yes, I see you walkin' away!" said Isom, plucking at his alreadyturned-up sleeve. "I'm goin' to give you a tannin' right now, and oneyou'll not forget to your dyin' day!"
At that moment Isom doubtless intended to carry out his threat. Here wasa piece of his own property, as much his property as his own weddedwife, defying him, facing him with extravagant demands, threatening tostop work unless more bountifully fed! Truly, it was a state ofinsurrection such as no upright citizen like Isom Chase could allow togo by unreproved and unquieted by castigation of his hand.
"You'd better stop where you are," advised Joe.
He reached down and righted his plow. Isom could see the straining ofthe leaders in his lean wrist as he stood gripping the handle, and thethought passed through him that Joe intended to wrench it off and use itas a weapon against him.
Isom had come but a few steps from his plow. He stopped, looking down atthe furrow as if struggling to hold himself within bounds. Still lookingat the earth, he went back to his implement.
"I'll put you where the dogs won't bite you if you ever threaten my lifeag'in!" said he.
"I didn't threaten your life, Isom, I didn't say a word," said Joe.
"A motion's a threat," said Isom.
"But I'll tell you now," said Joe, quietly, lowering his voice andleaning forward a little, "you'd better think a long time before youever start to lay hands on me again, Isom. This is twice. The nexttime----"
Joe set his plow in the furrow with a push that sent the swingle-treeknocking against the horse's heels. The animal started out of the dozeinto which it had fallen while the quarrel went on. Joe grinned,thinking how even Isom's dumb creatures took every advantage of him thatopportunity offered. But he left his warning unfinished as for words.
There was no need to say more, for Isom was cowed. He was quaking downto the tap-root of his salt-hardened soul, but he tried to put adifferent face on it as he took up his plow.
"I don't want to cripple you, and lay you up," he said. "If I was tobegin on you once I don't know where I'd leave off. Git back to yourwork, and don't give me any more of your sass!"
"I'll go back to work when you give me your word that I'm to have meatand eggs, butter and milk, and plenty of it," said Joe.
"I orto tie you up to a tree and lash you!" said Isom, jerking angrilyat his horse. "I don't know what ever made me pity your mother and keepher out of the poorhouse by takin' in a loafer like you!"
"Well, if you're sick of the bargain go and tell mother. Maybe she is,too," Joe suggested.
"No, you'll not git out of it now, you'll stick right here and put inyour time, after all the trouble and expense I've been put to teachin'you what little you know about farmin'," Isom declared.
He took up his plow and jerked his horse around into the row. Joe stoodwatching him, with folded arms, plainly with no intention of following.Isom looked back over his shoulder.
"Git to work!" he yelled.
"You didn't promise me what I asked," said Joe, quietly.
"No, and that ain't all!" returned Isom.
The tall corn swallowed Isom and his horse as the sea swallowed Pharaohand his host. When he returned to the end of the field where therebellion had broken out, he found Joe sitting on the beam of his plowand the well-pleased horse asleep in the sun.
Isom said nothing, but plunged away into the tall corn. When he cameback next time Joe was unhitching his horse.
"Now, look a-here, Joe," Isom began, in quite a changed tone, "don't youfly up and leave an old man in the lurch that way."
"You know what I said," Joe told him.
"I'll give in to you, Joe; I'll give you everything you ask for, andmore," yielded Isom, seeing that Joe intended to leave. "I'll put it inwriting if you want me to Joe--I'll do anything to keep you, son. You'rethe only man I ever had on this place I wouldn't rather see goin' thancomin'."
Isom's word was satisfactory to Joe, and he returned to work.
That turned out a day to be remembered in the household of Isom Chase.If he had come into the kitchen at noon with all the hoarded savings ofhis years and thrown them down before her eyes, Ollie could not havebeen more surprised and mystified than she was when he appeared from thesmokehouse carrying a large ham.
After his crafty way in a tight pinch Isom turned necessity into profitby making out that the act was free and voluntary, with the pleasure andcomfort of his pretty little wife underlying and prompting it all. Hegrinned as if he would break his beard when he put the ham down on thetable and cut it in two at the middle joint as deftly as a butcher.
"I've been savin' that ham up for you, Ollie. I think it's just aboutright now," said he.
"That was nice of you, Isom," said she, moved out of her settledtaciturnity by his little show of thought for her, "I've been just dyingfor a piece of ham!"
"Well, fry us a big skilletful of it, and some eggs along with it, andfetch up a crock of sweet milk, and stir it up cream and all," directedIsom.
Poor Ollie, overwhelmed by the suddenness and freedom of thisgenerosity, stood staring at him, her eyes round, her lips open. Isomcould not have studied a more astounding surprise. If he had hungdiamonds on her neck, rubies on her wrists, and garnets in her hair, shecould quicker have found her tongue.
"It's all right, Ollie, it's all right," said Isom pettishly. "We'regoing to have these things from now on. Might as well eat 'em, and gitsome of the good
of what we produce, as let them city people fatten off'em."
Isom went out with that, and Ollie attacked the ham with the butcherknife in a most savage and barbarous fashion.
Isom's old wife must have shifted in her grave at sight of the prodigalrepast which Ollie soon spread on the kitchen table. Granting, ofcourse, that people in their graves are cognizant of such things, which,according to this old standard of comparison in human amazement, theymust be.
But whether the old wife turned over or lay quiescent in the place wherethey put her when they folded her tired old hands upon her shrunkenbreast, it is indisputable that the new one eased the pangs of many ahungry day in that bountiful meal. And Joe's face glowed from the firesof it, and his eyes sparkled in the satisfaction of his long-abusedstomach.
Next day a more startling thing happened. Twice each week there passedthrough the country, from farm to farm, a butcher's wagon fromShelbyville, the county-seat, a few miles away. Isom Chase never hadbeen a customer of the fresh meat purveyor, and the traveling merchant,knowing from the old man's notoriety that he never could expect him tobecome one, did not waste time in stopping at his house. His surprisewas almost apoplectic when Isom stopped him and bought a soup-bone, andit almost became fatal when the order was made a standing one. It wassuch a remarkable event that the meat man told about it at every stop.It went round the country like the news of a wedding or a death.
Isom seemed to be satisfied with the new dietary regulations, for hamswere cheap that summer, anyhow, and the season was late. Besides that,the more that Joe ate the harder he worked. It seemed a kind ofspontaneous effort on the lad's part, as if it was necessary to burn upthe energy in surplus of the demand of his growing bone and muscle.
Ollie had picked up and brightened under the influence of ham and milkalso, although it was all a foolish yielding to appetite, as Isom verywell knew. He had beaten that weakness in himself to death with the clubof abstinence; for himself he could live happily on what he had beenaccustomed to eating for thirty years and more. But as long as theinvestment of ham and milk paid interest in kitchen as well as field,Isom was grudgingly willing to see them consumed.
Ollie's brightening was only physical. In her heart she was as gloomilyhopeless as before. After his first flash of fire she had not found muchcomfort or hope of comradeship in the boy, Joe Newbolt. He was sorespectful in her presence, and so bashful, it seemed, that it almostmade her uncomfortable to have him around.
Man that he was in stature, he appeared no more than a timid boy inunderstanding, and her little advances of friendliness, her littleappeals for sympathy, all glanced from the unconscious armor of hisyouthful innocence and reserve. She was forced to put him down aftermany weeks as merely stupid, and she sighed when she saw the hope ofcomradeship in her hard lot fade out and give way to a feeling borderingupon contempt.
On Sunday evenings, after he came back from visiting his mother, Olliefrequently saw Joe reading the little brown Bible which he had carriedwith him when he came. She had taken it up one day while making Joe'sbed. It brought back to her the recollection of her Sunday-school days,when she was all giggles and frills; but there was no association ofreligious training to respond to its appeal. She wondered what Joe sawin it as she put it back on the box beside his bed.
It chanced that she met Joe the next morning after she had made thatshort incursion between the brown covers of his book, as she wasreturning from the well and he was setting out for the hog-lot betweentwo pails of sour swill. He stood out of the path to let her passwithout stepping into the long, dewy grass. She put her bucket down witha gasp of weariness, and looked up into his eyes with a smile.
The buckets were heavy in Joe's hands; he stood them down, meeting herfriendly advances with one of his rare smiles, which came as seldom tohis face, thought she, as a hummingbird to the honeysuckle on thekitchen porch.
"Whew, this is going to be a scorcher!" said she.
"I believe it is," he agreed.
From the opposite sides of the path their eyes met. Both smiled again,and felt better for it.
"My, but you're a mighty religious boy, aren't you?" she askedsuddenly.
"Religious?" said he, looking at her in serious surprise.
She nodded girlishly. The sun, long slanting through the cherry-trees,fell on her hair, loosely gathered up after her sleep, one free strandon her cheek.
"No, I'm not religious."
"Well, you read the Bible all the time."
"Oh, well!" said he, stooping as if to lift his pails.
"Why?" she wanted to know.
Joe straightened his long back without his pails. Beyond the orchard thehogs were clamoring shrilly for their morning draught; from the barnthere came the sound of Isom's voice, speaking harshly to the beasts.
"Well, because I like it, for one thing," said he, "and because it's theonly book I've got here, for another."
"My, I think it's awful slow!" said she.
"Do you?" he inquired, as if interested in her likes and dislikes atlast.
"I'd think you'd like other books better--detective stories and thatkind," she ventured. "Didn't you ever read any other book?"
"Some few," he replied, a reflection as of amusement in his eyes, whichshe thought made them look old and understanding and wise. "But I'vealways read the Bible. It's one of the books that never seems to get oldto you."
"Did you ever read _True as Steel_?"
"No, I never did."
"Or _Tempest and Sunshine_?"
He shook his head.
"Oh-h," said she, fairly lifting herself by the long breath which shedrew, like the inhalation of a pleasant recollection, "you don't knowwhat you've missed! They are lovely!"
"Well, maybe I'd like them, too."
He stooped again, and this time came up with his pails.
"I'm glad you're not religious, anyhow," she sighed, as if heaving atrouble off her heart.
"Are you?" he asked, turning to her wonderingly.
"Yes; religious people are so glum," she explained. "I never saw one ofthem laugh."
"There are some that way," said Joe. "They seem to be afraid they'll goto hell if they let the Almighty hear them laugh. Mother used to be thatway when she first got _her_ religion, but she's outgrowing it now."
"The preachers used to scare me to death," she declared. "If I couldhear some comfortable religion I might take up with it, but it seems tome that everybody's so sad after they get it. I don't know why."
Joe put down the pails again. Early as the day was, it was hot, and hewas sweating. He pushed his hat back from his forehead. It was likelifting a shadow from his serious young face. She smiled.
"A person generally gets the kind of religion that he hears preached,"said he, "and most of it you hear is kind of heavy, like bread withoutrising. I've never seen a laughing preacher yet."
"There must be some, though," she reflected.
"I hope so," said Joe.
"I'm _glad_ you're not full of that kind of religion," said she. "For along time I thought you were."
"You did? Why?"
"Oh, because--" said she.
Her cheek was toward him; he saw that it was red, like the first tint ofa cherry. She snatched up her bucket then and sped along the path.
Joe walked on a little way, stopped, turned, and looked after her. Hesaw the flick of her skirt as her nimble heels flew up the three stepsof the kitchen porch, and he wondered why she was glad that he was notreligious, and why she had gone away like that, so fast. The pigs wereclamoring, shriller, louder. It was no hour for a youth who had not yetwetted his feet in manhood's stream to stand looking after a pair ofheels and try to figure out a thing like that.
As Joe had said, he was not religious, according to catechisms andcreeds. He could not have qualified in the least exacting of the manyfaiths. All the religion that he had was of his own making, for hismother's was altogether too ferocious in its punishments and too dun andfoggy in its rewards for him.
He
read the Bible, and he believed most of it. There was as muchreligion, said he, in the Commandments as a man needed; a man could geton with that much very well. Beyond that he did not trouble.
He read the adventures of David and the lamentations of Jeremiah, andthe lofty exhortations of Isaiah for the sonority of the phrasing, thepoetry and beauty. For he had not been sated by many tales nor bluntedby many books. If he could manage to live according to the Commandments,he sometimes told his mother, he would not feel uneasy over a better wayto die.
But he was not giving this matter much thought as he emptied theswill-pails to the chortling hogs. He was thinking about the red inOllie's cheeks, like the breast of a bright bird seen through theleaves, and of her quick flight up the path. It was a new Ollie that hehad discovered that morning, one unknown and unspoken to before thatday. But why had her face grown red that way, he wondered? Why had sherun away?
And Ollie, over her smoking pan on the kitchen stove, was thinking thatsomething might be established in the way of comradeship between herselfand the bound boy, after all. It took him a long time to get acquainted,she thought; but his friendship might be all the more stable for that.There was comfort in it; as she worked she smiled.
There was no question of the need in which Ollie stood of friendship,sympathy, and kind words. Joe had been in that house six months, and inthat time he had witnessed more pain than he believed one small woman'sheart could bear. While he was not sure that Isom ever struck his wife,he knew that he tortured her in endless combinations of cruelty, andpierced her heart with a thousand studied pangs. Often, when the housewas still and Isom was asleep, he heard her moaning and sobbing, herhead on the kitchen table.
These bursts of anguish were not the sudden gusts of a pettish woman'spassion, but the settled sorrow of one who suffered without hope.Many a time Joe tiptoed to the bottom of the staircase in his barefeet and looked at her, the moonlight dim in the cheerless kitchen, herhead a dark blotch upon the whiteness of her arms, bowed there inher grief. Often he longed to go to her with words of comfort and lether know that there was one at least who pitied her hard fate andsad disillusionment.
In those times of tribulation Joe felt that they could be of mutual helpand comfort if they could bring themselves to speak, for he sufferedalso the pangs of imprisonment and the longings for liberty in thatcruel house of bondage. Yet he always turned and went softly, almostbreathlessly, back to his bed, leaving her to sob and cry alone in thestruggle of her hopeless sorrow.
It was a harder matter to keep his hands from the gristly throat of grimold Isom Chase, slumbering unfeelingly in his bed while his young wifeshredded her heart between the burr-stones of his cruel mill. Joe hadmany an hour of struggle with himself, lying awake, his hot templesstreaming sweat, his eyes staring at the ribs of the roof.
During those months Joe had set and hardened. The muscles had thickenedover his chest and arms; his neck was losing the long scragginess ofyouth; his fingers were firm-jointed in his broadening hands. He knewthat Isom Chase was no match for him, man to man.
But, for all his big body and great strength, he was only a boy in hissense of justice, in his hot, primitive desire to lunge out quickly andset the maladjustments of that household straight. He did not know thatthere was a thing as old as the desires of men at the bottom of Ollie'ssorrow, nor understand the futility of chastisement in the case of IsomChase.
Isom was as far as ever from his hope of a son or heir of anydescription--although he could not conceive the possibility of fatheringa female child--and his bitter reproaches fell on Ollie, as they hadfallen upon and blasted the woman who had trudged that somber coursebefore her into the grateful shelter of the grave. It was a thing whichOllie could not discuss with young Joe, a thing which only a sympatheticmother might have lightened the humiliation of or eased with tendercounsel.
Isom, seeing that the book of his family must close with him, expelledthe small grain of tenderness that his dry heart had held for his wifeat the beginning, and counted her now nothing but another back to bearhis burdens. He multiplied her tasks, and snarled and snapped, and morethan once in those work-crowded autumn days, when she had lagged in herweariness, he had lifted his hand to strike. The day would come whenthat threatened blow would fall; of that Ollie had no consoling doubt.She did not feel that she would resent it, save in an addition to heraccumulated hate, for hard labor by day and tears by night break thespirit until the flints of cruelty no longer wake its fire.
Day after day, as he worked by the side of Isom in the fields, Joe hadit foremost in his mind to speak to him of his unjust treatment of hiswife. Yet he hung back out of the Oriental conception which he held, dueto his Scriptural reading, of that relationship between woman and man. Aman's wife was his property in a certain, broad sense. It would seemunwarranted by any measure of excess short of murder for another tointerfere between them. Joe held his peace, therefore, but with internalferment and unrest.
It was in those days of Joe's disquietude that Ollie first spoke to himof Isom's oppressions. The opportunity fell a short time after theirearly morning meeting in the path. Isom had gone to town with a load ofproduce, and Joe and Ollie had the dinner alone for the first time sincehe had been under that roof.
Ollie's eyes were red and swollen from recent weeping, her face wasmottled from her tears. Much trouble had made her careless of late ofher prettiness, and now she was disheveled, her apron awry around herwaist, her hair mussed, her whole aspect one of slovenly disregard. Herdepression was so great that Joe was moved to comfort her.
"You've got a hard time of it," said he. "If there's anything I can doto help you I wish you'd let me know."
Ollie slung a dish carelessly upon the table, and followed it with Joe'scoffee, which she slopped half out into the saucer.
"Oh, I feel just like I don't care any more!" said she, her lipstrembling, tears starting again in her irritated eyes. "I get treatmenthere that no decent man would give a dog!"
Joe felt small and young in Ollie's presence, due to the fact that shewas older by a year at least than himself.
That feeling of littleness had been one of his peculiarities as long ashe could remember when there were others about older than himself, andsupposed from that reason to be graver and wiser. It probably had itsbeginning in Joe's starting out rather spindling and undersized, and notgrowing much until he was ten or thereabout, when he took a sudden shootahead, like a water-sprout on an apple-tree.
And then he always had regarded matrimony as a state of gravity andmaturity, into which the young and unsophisticated did not venture. Thisfeeling seemed to place between them in Joe's mind a boundless gulf,across which he could offer her only the sympathy and assistance of aboy. There was nothing in his mind of sympathy from an equality of yearsand understanding, only the chivalric urging of succor to theoppressed.
"It's a low-down way for a man to treat a woman, especially his wife,"said Joe, his indignation mounting at sight of her tears.
"Yes, and he'd whip you, too, if he dared to do it," said she, sittingin Isom's place at the end of the table, where she could look acrossinto Joe's face. "I can see that in him when he watches you eat."
"I hope he'll never try it," said Joe.
"You're not afraid of him?"
"Maybe not," admitted Joe.
"Then why do you say you hope he'll never try it?" she pressed.
"Oh, because I do," said Joe, bending over his plate.
"I'd think you'd be glad if he did try it, so you could pay him off forhis meanness," she said.
Joe looked across at her seriously.
"Did he slap you this morning?" he asked.
Ollie turned her head, making no reply.
"I thought I heard you two scuffling around in the kitchen as I came tothe porch with the milk," said he.
"Don't tell it around!" she appealed, her eyes big and terrified at therecollection of what had passed. "No, he didn't hit me, Joe; but hechoked me. He grabbed me by the throat and shook m
e--his old hand's ashard as iron!"
Joe had noticed that she wore a handkerchief pinned around her neck. Asshe spoke she put her hand to her throat, and her tears gushed again.
"That's no way for a man to treat his wife," said Joe indignantly.
"If you knew everything--_if you knew everything_!" said she.
Joe, being young, and feeling younger, could not see how she wasstraining to come to a common footing of understanding with him, toreach a plane where his sympathy would be a balm. He could not realizethat her orbit of thought was similar to his own, that she was nearer amate for him, indeed, than for hairy-limbed, big-jointed Isom Chase,with his grizzled hair and beard.
"It was all over a little piece of ribbon I bought yesterday when I tookthe eggs up to the store," she explained. "I got two cents a dozen morethan I expected for them, and I put the extra money into a ribbon--onlyhalf a yard. Here it is," said she, taking it from the cupboard; "Iwanted it to wear on my neck."
She held it against her swathed throat with a little unconscious play ofcoquetry, a sad smile on her lips.
"It's nice, and becoming to you, too," said Joe, speaking after themanner of the countryside etiquette on such things.
"Isom said I ought to have put the money into a package of soda, andwhen I wouldn't fuss with him about it, that made him madder and madder.And then he--he--did that!"
"You wouldn't think Isom would mind ten cents," said Joe.
"He'd mind one cent," said she in bitter disdain. "One cent--_huh_! he'dmind one egg! Some people might not believe it, but I tell you, Joe,that man counts the eggs every day, and he weighs every pound of butterI churn. If I wanted to, even, I couldn't hide away a pound of butter ora dozen of eggs any more than I could hide away that stove."
"But I don't suppose Isom means to be hard on you or anybody," said Joe."It's his way to be close and stingy, and he may do better by you one ofthese days."
"No, he'll never do any better," she sighed. "If anything, he'll doworse--if he can do any worse. I look for him to strike me next!"
"He'd better not try that when I'm around!" said Joe hotly.
"What would you do to him, Joe?" she asked, her voice lowered almost toa whisper. She leaned eagerly toward him as she spoke, a flush on herface.
"Well, I'd stop him, I guess," said Joe deliberately, as if he hadconsidered his words. As he spoke he reached down for his hat, which healways placed on the floor beside his chair when he took his meals.
"If there was a soul in this world that cared for me--if I had anywhereto go, I'd leave him this hour!" declared Ollie, her face burning withthe hate of her oppressor.
Joe got up from his chair and left the table; she rose with him and camearound the side. He stopped on his way to the door, looking at her withawkward bashfulness as she stood there flushed and brilliant in hertossed state, scarcely a yard between them.
"But there's nobody in the world that cares for me," she complainedsorrowfully.
Joe was lifting his hat to his head. Midway he stayed his hand, his faceblank with surprise.
"Why, you've got your mother, haven't you?" he asked.
"Mother!" she repeated scornfully. "She'd drive me back to him; she wascrazy for me to marry him, for she thinks I'll get all his property andmoney when he dies."
"Well, he may die before long," consoled Joe.
"Die!" said she; and again, "Die! He'll never die!"
She leaned toward him suddenly, bringing her face within a few inches ofhis. Her hot breath struck him on the cheek; it moved the clustered hairat his temple and played warm in the doorway of his ear.
"He'll never die," she repeated in low, quick voice, which fell to awhisper in the end, "unless somebody he's tramped on and ground down andcursed and driven puts him out of the way!"
Joe stood looking at her with big eyes, dead to that feminine shockwhich would have tingled a mature man to the marrow, insensible to thestrong effort she was making to wake him and draw him to her. He drewback from her, a little frightened, a good deal ashamed, troubled, andmystified.
"Why, you don't suppose anybody would do that?" said he.
Ollie turned from him, the fire sinking down in her face.
"Oh, no; I don't suppose so," she said, a little distant and cold in hermanner.
She began gathering up the dishes.
Joe stood there for a little while, looking at her hands as they flewfrom plate to plate like white butterflies, as if something had stirredin him that he did not understand. Presently he went his way to take uphis work, no more words passing between them.
Ollie, from under her half raised lids, watched him go, tiptoeingswiftly after him to the door as he went down the path toward the well.Her breath was quick upon her lips; her breast was agitated. If thatslow hunk could be warmed with a man's passions and desires; if shecould wake him; if she could fling fire into his heart! He was only aboy, the man in him just showing its strong face behind that mask ofwild, long hair. It lay there waiting to move him in ways yet strange tohis experience. If she might send her whisper to that still slumberingforce and charge it into life a day before its time!
She stood with hand upon the door, trailing him with her eyes as hepassed on to the barn. She felt that she had all but reached beyond theinsulation of his adolescence in that burning moment when her breath wason his cheek; she knew that the wood, even that hour, was warm under thefire. What might a whisper now, a smile then, a kindness, a word, a handlaid softly upon his hair, work in the days to come?
She turned back to her work, her mind stirred out of its sluggish rut,the swirl of her new thoughts quickening in her blood. Isom Chase wouldnot die; he would live on and on, harder, drier, stingier year by year,unless a bolt from heaven withered him or the hand of man laid him low.What might come to him, he deserved, even the anguish of death with astrangling cord about his neck; even the strong blow of an ax as heslept on his bed, snatching from him the life that he had debased of allits beauty, without the saving chance of repentance in the end.
She had thought of doing it with her own hand; a hundred ways she hadplanned and contrived it in her mind, goaded on nearer and nearer to itby his inhuman oppressions day by day. But her heart had recoiled fromit as a task for the hand of a man. If a man could be raised up to it, aman who had suffered servitude with her, a man who would strike for thedouble vengeance, and the love of her in his heart!
She went to the door again, gripping the stove-lid lifter in her littlehand, as the jangle of harness came to her when Joe passed with theteam. He rode by toward the field, the sun on his broad back, slouchingforward as his heavy horses plodded onward. The man in him was asleepyet, yes; but there was a pit of fire as deep as a volcano's throat inhis slumbering soul.
If she could lift him up to it, if she could pluck the heart out of himand warm it in her own hot breast, then there would stand the man forher need. For Isom Chase would not die. He would live on and on, like aworm in wood, until some strong hand fed him to the flames.