But no man, Willie, has seemed yet to put the come hither on Nell Blossom. She just won’t be led, coaxed, or driven. She’s as hard as molded glass. A man-hater, if ever you heard of one. With all your famed powers of persuasion, reverend, I’d like to make a wager that you couldn’t mold our Nell into a pattern of the New England virtues, such as your own prim little sister has become by this time, I’ve no doubt. No insult to Miss Betty intended, Willie. But our Nell – well, you’d have your hands full in trying to make her do a thing that she did not want to do.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was stung here, not by the good-natured raillery aimed at his own traits of character by his old college mate. But why had Joe gone out of his way to drag Betty’s name into it? It seemed to be a mild slur upon his sister’s character, and Hunt had an uneasy feeling that he ought to resent it.
Betty had met Joe Hurley but once – to Hunt’s knowledge. It was an occasion when she had stopped at the college town on her way home from boarding school. Hunt had met her at the station, and Joe had shown up, too. The three of them had sought a restaurant where they ate, and Betty had chattered like – well, just as a girl of her age and fresh from the excitement of boarding school would chatter. When her first fear of the big Westerner had worn off she had usurped the conversation almost completely. Hunt had often thought since that Joe Hurley was quite attracted by his lively sister.
But how did Joe know that Betty had changed so?
That his sister was not the same cheerful, brisk, chatterbox of a girl she had been when Joe met her, Hunt quite well knew. And the change puzzled him.
He visualized their Aunt Prudence Mason, who had lived all her long life in the rut of New England spinsterhood, molding more or less the characters of the orphaned brother and sister left at an early age to her sole care. Was Betty, here in the straitened environment of Ditson Corners, doomed to jog along the well-beaten track Aunt Prudence had followed? The brother shuddered as he thought of it.
He glanced at Joe’s letter once more. A golden-haired, blue-eyed girl who really sang – not shrieked as did Miss Pelter whose top notes in the church choir rasped Hunt’s nerves like a cross-cut saw dragged through a pine knot.
There was always a quarrel of some kind in that choir – the bickerings and heart-burnings of his volunteer church choir were perennial.
Then, there was the feud over the Ditson pew – which branch of the influential Ditson family should hold the chief seats in the church. Hunt could not satisfy everybody. There was still a clique, even after his two years’ pastorate, who let it be frankly known that they had desired to call Bardell, instead of him, to the pulpit of the First Church.
These continued faultfindings and disputes were getting on Hunt’s nerves. And they must be affecting Betty – influencing her more than he had heretofore considered.
This letter from Joe Hurley had come at a moment when Hunt was desperately and completely out of tune with his environment. He had brought to his first pastorate a modicum of enthusiasm which, during the first year, had expanded into an earnest and purposeful determination to do his duty as he saw it and to carry his congregation in spirit to the heights he would achieve.
He – and they – had risen to a certain apex of spiritual experience through the first months of his earnest endeavor, and then the cogs had begun to slip. Suddenly Willett Ford Hunt’s castles toppled and collapsed about him. He found himself, half stunned, wholly mazed, wallowing in the débris of his first church row, the renewed war over the Ditson pew.
Hunt had extricated himself from this cataclysm with difficulty, almost like a man lifting himself off the earth by his bootstraps. The Ditson feud was by no means at an end even now, and it never would be ended as long as two Ditsons of different branches of the family remained alive. Hunt had sought to renew his own and his congregation’s spiritual life. It was then and not until then that he discovered the fire was out.
Oh, for a church where one might preach as one pleased, so long as one followed the spiritual instincts aroused by right living and a true desire to help one’s fellow men! That is what Hunt said he longed for.
But actually what he longed for is what perhaps we all long for whether we know it or not – appreciation. Not fulsome praise, not a mawkishly sentimental fawning flattery. He desired to feel that the understanding heart of the community apprehended what he wished to do and respected his effort though he might fall short of the goal.
There seemed to be no heart – understanding or otherwise – in Ditson Corners. Why! A wild Western mining camp, such as Joe said Canyon Pass was, could be no more ungrateful a soil to cultivate than this case-hardened, hide-bound, self-centered and utterly uncharitable Berkshire community.
The thought – not even audibly expressed – nevertheless shocked Hunt.
Hunt reached for the letter again. What had Joe said about there being a field for religious endeavor in Canyon Pass? It was along in the first part of the screed, and when he had found it he read:
Joshing aside, Willie, I believe you might dig down to the very heart of Canyon Pass – and I believe it has a heart. You were such a devil of a fellow for getting at the tap-root of a subject. If anybody can electrify the moral fiber of Canyon Pass – as some of them say I have the business part – it will be a man like you. You could do the “Lazarus, arise!” stunt if anybody could – make the composite moral man of Canyon Pass get up, put on a boiled shirt, and go forth a decent citizen. And believe me, the composite figure of the moral man here sadly needs such an awakening.
There was something that gripped Hunt in the rough and ready diction of this letter – something that aroused his imagination. It brought to his mind, too, a picture of Joe himself – a picture of both his physical and his mental proportions.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was no pigmy himself, nor did he lack courage and vigor. He was good to look upon, dark without being sallow, crowned with a thick brush of dull black hair – there were some brown lights in it – possessing good features, keen gray eyes, broad shoulders, a hundred and eighty pounds of gristle and flesh on a perfect bony structure, and could look over a six-barred gate before he vaulted it. He had not allowed his spiritual experiences, neither rising nor falling, to interfere with his gymnastics or his daily walk.
But Joe Hurley topped Hunt by two inches, was broader, hardier, a wholly out-of-door man. Joe was typically of the West and the wilderness. He knew the open places and the tall timber, the mountains and the canyons, the boisterous waters of cascade and rock-hemmed river. He was such an entirely different being from Hunt that the latter had often wondered why the Westerner had made such a chum and confidant of him during those two years at college.
And now the pastor of Ditson Corners’ First Church realized that Joe Hurley had something that he wanted. He wished he was with Joe, out there in that raw country. He felt that he could get nearer to mankind out there and perhaps – he said it reverently – nearer to the God he humbly desired to serve. He thought of Betty.
“She needs a change as much as I do. How does Joe guess that she is becoming exactly a prim, repressed, narrow-thinking woman, and a Martha cumbered by many cares? She needs her chance as much as I need mine.”
He heard Betty’s step on the porch, and in a moment she entered the study, her hands full of those grateful mid-spring flowers, the lily of the valley.
Betty Hunt was not a fragile girl, but she did not possess much of that embonpoint the Greeks considered so necessary to beauty of figure. Nor was she angular. At least, her grace of carriage and credibly tailored frock masked any lack of flesh.
Slim hands she had, too, – beautiful hands, very white and with only a faint tracery of blue veins upon them. Really, they were a musician’s hands – pliable, light of touch, but strong. The deftness with which they arranged the flowers suggested that she did not need vision to aid in the task.
Therefore she kept her gaze on Hunt. He felt it, turned, and smiled up at her. He shook the leaves of the letter in his hand.
“Bet,” he said, “I’ve got another letter from Joe Hurley.”
Betty’s