And after this annual conversation, Molly would run to her room, and there in its privacy, even at the risk of falling below the punctuality of the Starks, she would consult two objects for quite a minute before she began to dress. These objects, as you have already correctly guessed, were the miniature of the General’s wife and the looking glass.
So much for Miss Molly Stark Wood’s descent.
The second reason why she was not a usual girl was her character. This character was the result of pride and family pluck battling with family hardship.
Just one year before she was to be presented to the world—not the great metropolitan world, but a world that would have made her welcome and done her homage at its little dances and little dinners in Troy and Rutland and Burlington—fortune had turned her back upon the Woods. Their possessions had never been great ones; but they had sufficed. From generation to generation the family had gone to school like gentlefolk, dressed like gentlefolk, used the speech and ways of gentlefolk, and as gentlefolk lived and died. And now the mills failed.
Instead of thinking about her first evening dress, Molly found pupils to whom she could give music lessons. She found handkerchiefs that she could embroider with initials. And she found fruit that she could make into preserves. That machine called the typewriter was then in existence, but the day of women typewriters had as yet scarcely begun to dawn, else I think Molly would have preferred this occupation to the handkerchiefs and the preserves.
There were people in Bennington who “wondered how Miss Wood could go about from house to house teaching the piano, and she a lady.” There always have been such people, I suppose, because the world must always have a rubbish heap. But we need not dwell upon them further than to mention one other remark of theirs regarding Molly. They all with one voice declared that Sam Bannett was good enough for anybody who did fancy embroidery at five cents a letter.
“I dare say he had a great-grandmother quite as good as hers,” remarked Mrs. Flynt, the wife of the Baptist minister.
“That’s entirely possible,” returned the Episcopal rector of Hoosic, “only we don’t happen to know who she was.” The rector was a friend of Molly’s. After this little observation, Mrs. Flynt said no more, but continued her purchases in the store where she and the rector had happened to find themselves together. Later she stated to a friend that she had always thought the Episcopal Church a snobbish one, and now she knew it.
So public opinion went on being indignant over Molly’s conduct. She could stoop to work for money, and yet she pretended to hold herself above the most rising young man in Hoosic Falls, and all just because there was a difference in their grandmothers!
Was this the reason at the bottom of it? The very bottom? I cannot be certain, because I have never been a girl myself. Perhaps she thought that work is not a stooping, and that marriage may be. Perhaps—But all I really know is that Molly Wood continued cheerfully to embroider the handkerchiefs, make the preserves, teach the pupils—and firmly to reject Sam Bannett.
Thus it went on until she was twenty. There certain members of her family began to tell her how rich Sam was going to be—was, indeed, already. It was at this time that she wrote Mrs. Balaam her doubts and her desires as to migrating to Bear Creek. It was at this time also that her face grew a little paler, and her friends thought that she was overworked, and Mrs. Flynt feared she was losing her looks. It was at this time, too, that she grew very intimate with that great-aunt over at Dunbarton, and from her received much comfort and strengthening.
“Never!” said the old lady, “especially if you can’t love him.”
“I do like him,” said Molly; “and he is very kind.”
“Never!” said the old lady again. “When I die, you’ll have something—and that will not be long now.”
Molly flung her arms around her aunt, and stopped her words with a kiss. And then one winter afternoon, two years later, came the last straw.
The front door of the old house had shut. Out of it had stepped the persistent suitor. Mrs. Flynt watched him drive away in his smart sleigh.
“That girl is a fool!” she said furiously; and she came away from her bedroom window where she had posted herself for observation.
Inside the old house a door had also shut. This was the door of Molly’s own room. And there she sat, in floods of tears. For she could not bear to hurt a man who loved her with all the power of love that was in him.
It was about twilight when her door opened, and an elderly lady came softly in.
“My dear,” she ventured, “and you were not able—”
“Oh, mother!” cried the girl, “have you come to say that too?”
The next day Miss Wood had become very hard. In three weeks she had accepted the position on Bear Creek. In two months she started, heart-heavy, but with a spirit craving the unknown.
IX.
THE SPINSTER MEETS THE UNKNOWN
On a Monday noon a small company of horsemen strung out along the trail from Sunk Creek to gather cattle over their allotted sweep of range. Spring was backward, and they, as they rode galloping and gathering upon the cold week’s work, cursed cheerily and occasionally sang. The Virginian was grave in bearing and of infrequent speech; but he kept a song going—a matter of some seventy-nine verses. Seventy-eight were quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cow-punchers monstrously. They, knowing him to be a singular man, forebore ever to press him, and awaited his own humor, lest he should weary of the lyric; and when after a day of silence apparently saturnine, he would lift his gentle voice and begin:
“If you go to monkey with my Looloo girl, I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll cyarve your heart with my razor, AND I’ll shoot you with my pistol, too—”
then they would stridently take up each last line, and keep it going three, four, ten times, and kick holes in the ground to the swing of it.
By the levels of Bear Creek that reach like inlets among the promontories of the lonely hills, they came upon the schoolhouse, roofed and ready for the first native Wyoming crop. It symbolized the dawn of a neighborhood, and it brought a change into the wilderness air. The feel of it struck cold upon the free spirits of the cow-punchers, and they told each other that, what with women and children and wire fences, this country would not long be a country for men. They stopped for a meal at an old comrade’s. They looked over his gate, and there he was pattering among garden furrows.
“Pickin’ nosegays?” inquired the Virginian and the old comrade asked if they could not recognize potatoes except in the dish. But he grinned sheepishly at them, too, because they knew that he had not always lived in a garden. Then he took them into his house, where they saw an object crawling on the floor with a handful of sulphur matches. He began to remove the matches, but stopped in alarm at the vociferous result; and his wife looked in from the kitchen to caution him about humoring little Christopher.
When she beheld the matches she was aghast but when she saw her baby grow quiet in the arms of the Virginian, she smiled at that cow-puncher and returned to her kitchen.
Then the Virginian slowly spoke again: “How many little strangers have yu’ got, James?”
“Only two.”
“My! Ain’t it most three years since yu’ maried? Yu’ mustn’t let time creep ahaid o’ yu’, James.”
The father once more grinned at his guests, who themselves turned sheepish and polite; for Mrs. Westfall came in, brisk and hearty, and set the meat upon the table. After that, it was she who talked. The guests ate scrupulously, muttering, “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” in their plates, while their hostess told them of increasing families upon Bear Creek, and the expected school-teacher, and little Alfred’s early teething,