Thessaly! Ten minutes for refreshments!” called out the brisk young colored porter, advancing up the aisle of the drawing-room car, whisk-broom in hand. “Change cahs foh Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce,” he added, upon humorous after-thought, smiling broadly as he spoke, and chuckling to himself.
This friendly remark was addressed in confidence to a group of three persons at the forward end of the car, who began preparations for the halt as the clanking of the wheels beneath them grew more measured, and the carriage trembled and lurched under the pressure of the brakes. But the cheery grin which went with it was exclusively directed to the two ladies who rose now from their arm-chairs, and who gently relaxed their features in amused response.
Whether the porter was moved only by the comeliness of these faces and their gracious softening, or whether he was aware that they were patrician countenances, so to speak, and belonged to Mrs. and Miss Minster, persons of vast wealth and importance and considerable stockholders in this very railroad, is not clear. But he made a great bustle over getting their parcels down from the racks overhead, and helping them to don their outer garments. He smoothed the rich fur of their sealskin cloaks with almost affectionate strokes of his coffee-colored palms, and made a pile of their belongings on the next seat with an exaggerated show of dexterity and zeal. This done, he turned for a cursory moment to the young man who constituted the third member of the group, peremptorily pulled up the collar of his overcoat to the top of his ears, and was back again with his arms full of the ladies’ bundles as the train came to a stop.
“This way, ladies,” he said, marching jauntily under his burden toward the door.
“I will bid you good-day, Mr. Boyce,” said the elder of the women, speaking with somewhat formal politeness, but offering her hand.
“Good-day, sir,” the younger said simply, with a little inclination of the head, but with no “Mr. Boyce,” and no proffer of her gloved fingers.
The young man murmured “so delighted to have had the privilege” between low answering bows, and then stood watching the two fur-draped figures move to the door and disappear, with a certain blankness of expression on his face which seemed to say that he had hoped for a more cordial leave-taking. Then he smiled with reassurance, folded up and pocketed his thin car-cap, adjusted his glossy silk hat carefully, and proceeded to tug out his own valise. It was a matter of some difficulty to get the cumbrous bag down off the high icy steps to the ground. It was even more disagreeable to carry it along when he had got it down, and after a few paces he let it fall with a grunt of vexation, and looked about him for assistance. “How much better they do these things in Europe!” was what he thought as he looked.
All day long he had been journeying over a snowbound country—with white-capped houses, white-frozen streams, white-tufted firs, white-mantled fields and roads and hillsides, forever dodging one another in the dissolving panorama before his window. The train drawn up for the moment behind him might have come in from the North Pole, so completely laden with snow was every flat surface—of roof and beam, of platform and window-frame—presented by the dark line of massive coaches. Yet it seemed to him that there was more snow, more bleak and cheerless evidence of winter, here in his native Thessaly, than he had seen anywhere else. It was characteristic, too, he felt, that nobody should appear to care how much inconvenience this snow caused. There was but an indifferently shovelled path leading from where he stood, across the open expanse of side-tracks to the old and dingy dép?t beyond—cleared for the use of such favored passengers as might alight from the drawing-room section of the train. Those who had arrived in the ordinary cars at the rear were left to flounder through the smoke-begrimed drifts as best they could.
The foremost of these unconsidered travellers were coming up, red and angry with the exertion of carrying their own luggage, and plunging miserably along through the great ridges of discolored snow heaped between the tracks, when Mr. Boyce’s impatient eye fell upon somebody he knew.
“Hello there, Lawton!” he shouted. “Come here and help me with this infernal bag, won’t you!”
The man to whom he called had been gazing down the yard at the advancing wayfarers. He looked up now, hesitated for a moment, then came forward slowly, shuffling through the snow to the path. He was a middle-aged, thin, and round-shouldered man, weak and unkempt as to face and hair and beard, with shabby clothes and no overcoat. Although he wore mittens, he still from force of habit had his hands plunged half-way into his trousers pockets. Even where it would have been easy to step over the intermittent drifts and mounds at the sides of the tracks, he shiftlessly pushed his feet through them instead.
“Hello, Hod!” he said slowly, with a kind of melancholy hesitation, “is that you?”
Young Mr. Boyce ignored the foolish question, and indicated the valise with a nod of his head.
“I wish you’d get that thing down to the house, Ben. And take these checks for my trunks, too, will you, and see that they’re brought down. Where is that expressman, anyway? Why isn’t he here, on hand, attending to his business?”
“I don’t know as I can, Hod,” said the man without an overcoat, idly kicking into a heap of mingled cinders and snow with his wet, patched boots, and glancing uneasily down the yard. “I’m down here a-waitin’—for—that is to say, I’ve got somethin’ else to do. Prob’ly you can get some other fellow outside the deepo.”
Mr. Boyce’s answer to this was to add a bright half-dollar to the brass baggage-checks he already held in his hand. The coin was on the top, and Ben Lawton could not help looking at it. The temptation was very great.
“I ought to stay here, you know,” he faltered. “Fact is, honest Injun! I got to stay here! I’m lookin’ for—somebody a-comin’ in on this train.”
“Well, you can look, can’t you, and do this too? There’s no hurry about the things. If they’re home two hours hence it will be time enough.”
“Yes, I know, it might be so as I could do it, later on,” said Lawton, taking one of his hands from his pocket and stretching it tentatively toward the money. Then a second thought prompted him to waver, and he drew back the hand, muttering feebly: “Then, again, it might be so as I couldn’t do it. You better get somebody else. And yet—I don’t know—p’raps—”
Mr. Boyce settled the question by briskly reaching down for his bag. “All right! Please yourself,” he said. “I’ve got no more time to waste with you. I’ll do it myself.”
Before he had fairly lifted the valise from the ground, the irresolute Lawton made up his mind. “Put her down again, Hod,” he said. “I’ll manage it somehow.”
He took the half-dollar in his mittened hand, and tossed it gently up and down on the striped blue and white surface of yarn. “It’s the first money I’ve earned for over a week,” he remarked, as if in self-defence.
Even as he spoke, a young woman in black who had been wandering about in the dép?t yard came running excitedly up to him. She gave a little inarticulate cry of recognition as she drew near. He turned, saw her, and in a bewildered way opened his arms. She dropped her bundles and bandbox heedlessly into the snow, and threw herself upon his breast, hiding her face on his threadbare coat, and sobbing audibly.
Mr. Boyce had been entirely unprepared for this demonstration, and looked wonderingly upon the couple who stood in the path before him. After a moment or two of silent inspection he made as if to pass them, but they did not move. The girl still hid her face, although she had ceased to weep, and Lawton bent his head down over hers, with tears in his eyes and his gaze fixed vaguely on the snow beyond her, while he tenderly patted her shoulder with the hand that did not hold the half-dollar.
“All right, then, Ben,” Mr. Boyce called out. “If you’ll just let me pass, I’ll walk on. Have the things there by five.”
At the first sound of this voice, the girl raised her head. She turned now, her tear-stained face luminous with a deep, wrathful emotion, and looked at the speaker.
The young man did not for more than an instant try to meet this glance. His cheek flushed and his eyes sought the ground. He lifted his hand with a hurried, awkward gesture toward his hat, made a hasty plunge around them through the snow, and walked swiftly away past the gate into the dép?t.
The girl’s intent gaze followed the retiring Mr. Boyce until he disappeared. Then it shifted suddenly and fell upon the face of Ben Lawton, from whose embrace she had now withdrawn.
The poor man made no effort whatsoever to brave its searching and reproachful inquiry. He balanced the half-dollar on his mitten’s edge, watched the exercise with a piteously futile pretence of interest, and looked as if he was about to cry.
“What ‘things’ were those he spoke of, father?” she asked, after a long pause.
The passengers who had temporarily left the train for the doubtful solace of the refreshment counter were beginning now to return. Some of them jostled past the couple who stood blocking the narrow path; and one of these, a stout and choleric man in a silk skull-cap and a fur-lined overcoat, brusquely kicked the big valise out of the way, overturning it in the snow. Lawton had not found the courage necessary for a complete explanation. He bent over now, set the bag on its bottom again, and made partial answer:
“This is one of ’em.”
The heavy train, snow-capped and sombre, began to draw out of the yard. The two Lawtons stood and silently watched it unfold its length—saw first the broad, plate-glass panes of the drawing-room and sleeping cars, with their luxurious shadows and glimpses of well-groomed heads and costly stuffs behind, glide slowly, sedately by; then, more rapidly, the closer-set windows of the yellow, common cars, through the steam on which visions of hats and faces dimly crowded; and last, the diminishing rear platform, with its solitary brakeman vehemently whirling the horizontal wheel of the brake—grow small, then indistinct, then vanish altogether. A sense of desertion, of having been left behind, seemed to brood over the old clapboarded dép?t like a cloud, darkening the ashen masses of snow round about and chilling the very air.
The daughter looked once more at her father.
“You are going to carry his things!” she said, with a stern, masterful inflection in her voice, and with flashing eyes.
“Hope-to-die, Jess, I tried as hard as I could to get out of it—made all sorts of excuses,” Lawton pleaded, shrinking meantime from her gaze, and furtively but clumsily slipping the coin into his pocket. “But you know the kind of fellow Hod is—” he stammered here with confusion, and made haste to add—“what I mean is—he—well, he just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
She went, on coldly, as if she had not heard: “You have got his money—I saw it—there in your hand.”
“Well, I tell you what, Jess,” the father answered, with an accession of boldness, “half-dollars don’t grow on every bush up this way. I ain’t seen one afore in a fortnight. And to-morrow’s Thanksgiving, you know—and then you’ve come home—and what was a fellow to do?”
The girl turned, as if it were fruitless to say more. Then the necessity for relief mastered her: she faced him again, and ground the words from between her set teeth with scornful sadness:
“You take his money—and yet you knew!”