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TILLIE: A MENNONITE MAID

A STORY OF THE PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH


BY

HELEN REIMENSNYDER MARTIN





CONTENTS


     I "OH, I LOVE HER! I LOVE HER!"
    II "I'M GOING TO LEARN YOU ONCE!"
   III "WHAT'S HURTIN' YOU, TILLIE?"
    IV "THE DOC" COMBINES BUSINESS AND PLEASURE
     V "NOVELS AIN'T MORAL, DOC!"
    VI JAKE GETZ IN A QUANDARY
   VII "THE LAST DAYS OF PUMP-EYE"
  VIII MISS MARGARET'S ERRAND
    IX "I'LL DO MY DARN BEST, TEACHER!"
     X ADAM SCHUNK'S FUNERAL
    XI "POP! I FEEL TO BE PLAIN"
   XII ABSALOM KEEPS COMPANY
  XIII EZRA HERR, PEDAGOGUE
   XIV THE HARVARD GRADUATE
    XV THE WACKERNAGELS AT HOME
   XVI THE WACKERNAGELS "CONWERSE"
  XVII THE TEACHER MEETS ABSALOM
 XVIII TILLIE REVEALS HERSELF
   XIX TILLIE TELLS A LIE
    XX TILLIE IS "SET BACK"
   XXI "I'LL MARRY HIM TO-MORROW!"
  XXII THE DOC CONCOCTS A PLOT
 XXIII SUNSHINE AND SHADOW
  XXIV THE REVOLT OF TILLIE
   XXV GETZ "LEARNS" TILLIE
  XXVI TILLIE'S LAST FIGHT





TILLIE: A MENNONITE MAID

A STORY OF THE PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH




I

"OH, I LOVE HER! I LOVE HER!"


Tillie's slender little body thrilled with a peculiar ecstasy as she
stepped upon the platform and felt her close proximity to the
teacher--so close that she could catch the sweet, wonderful fragrance
of her clothes and see the heave and fall of her bosom. Once Tillie's
head had rested against that motherly bosom. She had fainted in school
one morning after a day and evening of hard, hard work in her father's
celery-beds, followed by a chastisement for being caught with a
"story-book"; and she had come out of her faint to find herself in the
heaven of sitting on Miss Margaret's lap, her head against her breast
and Miss Margaret's soft hand smoothing her cheek and hair. And it was
in that blissful moment that Tillie had discovered, for the first time
in her young existence, that life could be worth while. Not within her
memory had any one ever caressed her before, or spoken to her tenderly,
and in that fascinating tone of anxious concern.

Afterward, Tillie often tried to faint again in school; but, such is
Nature's perversity, she never could succeed.

School had just been called after the noon recess, and Miss Margaret
was standing before her desk with a watchful eye on the troops of
children crowding in from the playground to their seats, when the
little girl stepped to her side on the platform.

This country school-house was a dingy little building in the heart of
Lancaster County, the home of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Miss Margaret had
been the teacher only a few months, and having come from Kentucky and
not being "a Millersville Normal," she differed quite radically from
any teacher they had ever had in New Canaan. Indeed, she was so wholly
different from any one Tillie had ever seen in her life, that to the
child's adoring heart she was nothing less than a miracle. Surely no
one but Cinderella had ever been so beautiful! And how different, too,
were her clothes from those of the other young ladies of New Canaan,
and, oh, so much prettier--though not nearly so fancy; and she didn't
"speak her words" as other people of Tillie's acquaintance spoke. To
Tillie it was celestial music to hear Miss Margaret say, for instance,
"buttah" when she meant butter-r-r, and "windo" for windah. "It gives
her such a nice sound when she talks," thought Tillie.

Sometimes Miss Margaret's ignorance of the dialect of the neighborhood
led to complications, as in her conversation just now with Tillie.

"Well?" she inquired, lifting the little girl's chin with her
forefinger as Tillie stood at her side and thereby causing that small
worshiper to blush with radiant pleasure. "What is it, honey?"

Miss Margaret always made Tillie feel that she LIKED her. Tillie
wondered how Miss Margaret could like HER! What was there to like? No
one had ever liked her before.

"It wonders me!" Tillie often whispered to herself with throbbing heart.

"Please, Miss Margaret," said the child, "pop says to ast you will you
give me the darst to go home till half-past three this after?"

"If you go home till half-past three, you need not come back, honey--it
wouldn't be worth while, when school closes at four."

"But I don't mean," said Tillie, in puzzled surprise, "that I want to
go home and come back. I sayed whether I have the darst to go home till
half-past three. Pop he's went to Lancaster, and he'll be back till
half-past three a'ready, and he says then I got to be home to help him
in the celery-beds."

Miss Margaret held her pretty head on one side, considering, as she
looked down into the little girl's upturned face. "Is this a conundrum,
Tillie? How your father be in Lancaster now and yet be home until
half-past three? It's uncanny. Unless," she added, a ray of light
coming to her,--"unless 'till' means BY. Your father will be home BY
half-past three and wants you then?"

"Yes, ma'am. I can't talk just so right," said Tillie apologetically,
"like what you can. Yes, sometimes I say my we's like my w's, yet!"

Miss Margaret laughed. "Bless your little heart!" she said, running her
fingers through Tillie's hair. "But you would rather stay in school
until four, wouldn't you, than go home to help your father in the
celery-beds?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am," said Tillie wistfully, "but pop he has to get them
beds through till Saturday market a'ready, and so we got to get 'em
done behind Thursday or Friday yet."

"If I say you can't go home?"

Tillie colored all over her sensitive little face as, instead of
answering, she nervously worked her toe into a crack in the platform.

"But your father can't blame YOU, honey, if I won't let you go home."

"He wouldn't stop to ast me was it my fault, Miss Margaret. If I wasn't
there on time, he'd just--"

"All right, dear, you may go at half-past three, then," Miss Margaret
gently said, patting the child's shoulder. "As soon as you have written
your composition."

"Yes, ma'am, Miss Margaret."

It was hard for Tillie, as she sat at her desk that afternoon, to fix
her wandering attention upon the writing of her composition, so
fascinating was it just to revel idly in the sense of the touch of that
loved hand that had stroked her hair, and the tone of that caressing
voice that had called her "honey."

Miss Margaret always said to the composition classes, "Just try to
write simply of what you see or feel, and then you will be sure to
write a good 'composition.'"

Tillie was moved this afternoon to pour out on paper all that she
"felt" about her divinity. But she had some misgivings as to the
fitness of this.

She dwelt upon the thought of it, however, dreamily gazing out of the
window near which she sat, into the blue sky of the October
afternoon--until presently her ear was caught by the sound of Miss
Margaret's voice speaking to Absalom Puntz, who stood at the foot of
the composition class, now before her on the platform.

"You may read your composition, Absalom."

Absalom was one of "the big boys," but though he was sixteen years old
and large for his age, his slowness in learning classed him with the
children of twelve or thirteen. However, as learning was considered in
New Canaan a superfluous and wholly unnecessary adjunct to the means of
living, Absalom's want of agility in imbibing erudition never troubled
him, nor did it in the least call forth the pity or contempt of his
schoolmates.

Three times during the morning session he had raised his hand to
announce stolidly to his long-suffering teacher, "I can't think of no
subjeck"; and at last Miss Margaret had relaxed her Spartan resolution
to make him do his own thinking and had helped him out.

"Write of something that is interesting you just at present. Isn't
there some one thing you care more about than other things?" she had
asked.

Absalom had stared at her blankly without replying.

"Now, Absalom," she had said desperately, "I think I know one thing you
have been interested in lately--write me a composition on Girls."

Of course the school had greeted the advice with a laugh, and Miss
Margaret had smiled with them, though she had not meant to be facetious.

Absalom, however, had taken her suggestion seriously.

"Is your composition written, Absalom?" she was asking as Tillie turned
from the window, her contemplation of her own composition arrested by
the sound of the voice which to her was the sweetest music in the world.

"No'm," sullenly answered Absalom. "I didn't get it through till it was
time a'ready."

"But, Absalom, you've been at it this whole blessed day! You've not
done another thing!"

"I wrote off some of it."

"Well," sighed Miss Margaret, "let us hear what you have done."

Absalom unfolded a sheet of paper and laboriously read:

"GIRLS

"The only thing I took particular notice to, about Girls, is that they
are always picking lint off each other, still."

He stopped and slowly folded his paper.

"But go on," said Miss Margaret. "Read it all.'

"That's all the fu'ther I got."

Miss Margaret looked at him for an instant, then suddenly lifted the
lid of her desk, evidently to search for something. When she closed it
her face was quite grave.

"We'll have the reading-lesson now," she announced.

Tillie tried to withdraw her attention from the teacher and fix it on
her own work, but the gay, glad tone in which Lizzie Harnish was
reading the lines,

     "When thoughts
  Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
  Over thy spirit--"

hopelessly checked the flow of her ideas.

This class was large, and by the time Absalom's turn to read was
reached, "Thanatopsis" had been finished, and so the first stanza of
"The Bells" fell to him. It had transpired in the reading of
"Thanatopsis" that a grave and solemn tone best suited that poem, and
the value of this intelligence was made manifest when, in a voice of
preternatural solemnity, he read:

"What a world of merriment their melody foretells!"

Instantly, when he had finished his "stanza," Lizzie raised her hand to
offer a criticism. "Absalom, he didn't put in no gestures."

Miss Margaret's predecessor had painstakingly trained his
reading-classes in the Art of Gesticulation in Public Speaking, and
Miss Margaret found the results of his labors so entertaining that she
had never been able to bring herself to suppress the monstrosity.

"I don't like them gestures," sulkily retorted Absalom.

"Never mind the gestures," Miss Margaret consoled him--which
indifference on her part seemed high treason to the well-trained class.

"I'll hear you read, now, the list of synonyms you found in these two
poems," she added. "Lizzie may read first."

While the class rapidly leafed their readers to find their lists of
synonyms, Miss Margaret looked up and spoke to Tillie, reminding her
gently that that composition would not be written by half-past three if
she did not hasten her work.

Tillie blushed with embarrassment at being caught in an idleness that
had to be reproved, and resolutely bent all her powers to her task.

She looked about the room for a subject. The walls were adorned with
the print portraits of "great men,"--former State superintendents of
public instruction in Pennsylvania,--and with highly colored chromo
portraits of Washington, Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield. Then there were
a number of framed mottos: "Education rules in America," "Rely on
yourself," "God is our hope," "Dare to say No," "Knowledge is power,"
"Education is the chief defense of nations."

But none of these things made Tillie's genius to burn, and again her
eyes wandered to the window and gazed out into the blue sky; and after
a few moments she suddenly turned to her desk and rapidly wrote down
her "subject"--"Evening."

The mountain of the opening sentence being crossed, the rest went
smoothly enough, for Tillie wrote it from her heart.


"EVENING.

"I love to take my little sisters and brothers and go out, still, on a
hill-top when the sun is setting so red in the West, and the birds are
singing around us, and the cows are coming home to be milked, and the
men are returning from their day's work.

"I would love to play in the evening if I had the dare, when the
children are gay and everything around me is happy.

"I love to see the flowers closing their buds when the shades of
evening are come. The thought has come to me, still, that I hope the
closing of my life may come as quiet and peaceful as the closing of the
flowers in the evening.

"MATILDA MARIA GETZ."


Miss Margaret was just calling for Absalom's synonyms when Tillie
carried her composition to the desk, and Absalom was replying with his
customary half-defiant sullenness.

"My pop he sayed I ain't got need to waste my time gettin' learnt them
cinnamons. Pop he says what's the use learnin' TWO words where [which]
means the selfsame thing--one's enough."

Absalom's father was a school director and Absalom had grown
accustomed, under the rule of Miss Margaret's predecessors, to feel the
force of the fact in their care not to offend him.

"But your father is not the teacher here--I am," she cheerfully told
him. "So you may stay after school and do what I require."

Tillie felt a pang of uneasiness as she went back to her seat.
Absalom's father was very influential and, as all the township knew,
very spiteful. He could send Miss Margaret away, and he would do it, if
she offended his only child, Absalom. Tillie thought she could not bear
it at all if Miss Margaret were sent away. Poor Miss Margaret did not
seem to realize her own danger. Tillie felt tempted to warn her. It was
only this morning that the teacher had laughed at Absalom when he said
that the Declaration of Independence was "a treaty between the United
States and England,"--and had asked him, "Which country, do you think,
hurrahed the loudest, Absalom, when that treaty was signed?" And now
this afternoon she "as much as said Absalom's father should mind to his
own business!" It was growing serious. There had never been before a
teacher at William Penn school-house who had not judiciously "showed
partiality" to Absalom.

"And he used to be dummer yet [stupider even] than what he is now,"
thought Tillie, remembering vividly a school entertainment that had
been given during her own first year at school, when Absalom, nine
years old, had spoken his first piece. His pious Methodist grandmother
had endeavored to teach him a little hymn to speak on the great
occasion, while his frivolous aunt from the city of Lancaster had tried
at the same time to teach him "Bobby Shafto." New Canaan audiences were
neither discriminating nor critical, but the assembly before which
little Absalom had risen to "speak his piece off," had found themselves
confused when he told them that

  "On Jordan's bank the Baptist stands,
    Silver buckles on his knee."

Tillie would never forget her own infantine agony of suspense as she
sat, a tiny girl of five, in the audience, listening to Absalom's
mistakes. But Eli Darmstetter, the teacher, had not scolded him.

Then there was the time that Absalom had forced a fight at recess and
had made little Adam Oberholzer's nose bleed--it was little Adam (whose
father was not at that time a school director) that had to stay after
school; and though every one knew it wasn't fair, it had been accepted
without criticism, because even the young rising generation of New
Canaan understood the impossibility and folly of quarreling with one's
means of earning money.

But Miss Margaret appeared to be perfectly blind to the perils of her
position. Tillie was deeply troubled about it.

At half-past three, when, at a nod from Miss Margaret the little girl
left her desk to go home, a wonderful thing happened--Miss Margaret
gave her a story-book.

"You are so fond of reading, Tillie, I brought you this. You may take
it home, and when you have read it, bring it back to me, and I'll give
you something else to read."

Delighted as Tillie was to have the book for its own sake, it was yet
greater happiness to handle something belonging to Miss Margaret and to
realize that Miss Margaret had thought so much about her as to bring it
to her.

"It's a novel, Tillie. Have you ever read a novel?"

"No'm. Only li-bries."

"What?"

"Sunday-school li-bries. Us we're Evangelicals, and us children we go
to the Sunday-school, and I still bring home li-bry books. Pop he don't
uphold to novel-readin'. I have never saw a novel yet."

"Well, this book won't injure you, Tillie. You must tell me all about
it when you have read it. You will find it so interesting, I'm afraid
you won't be able to study your lessons while you are reading it."

Outside the school-room, Tillie looked at the title,--Ivanhoe,"--and
turned over the pages in an ecstasy of anticipation.

"Oh! I love her! I love her!" throbbed her little hungry heart.




II

"I'M GOING TO LEARN YOU ONCE!"


Tillie was obliged, when about a half-mile from her father's farm, to
hide her precious book. This she did by pinning her petticoat into a
bag and concealing the book in it. It was in this way that she always
carried home her "li-bries" from Sunday-school, for all story-book
reading was prohibited by her father. It was uncomfortable walking
along the highroad with the book knocking against her legs at every
step, but that was not so painful as her father's punishment would be
did he discover her bringing home a "novel"! She was not permitted to
bring home even a school-book, and she had greatly astonished Miss
Margaret, one day at the beginning of the term, by asking, "Please,
will you leave me let my books in school? Pop says I darsen't bring 'em
home."

"What you can't learn in school, you can do without," Tillie's father
had said. "When you're home you'll work fur your wittles."

Tillie's father was a frugal, honest, hard-working, and very prosperous
Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, who thought he religiously performed his
parental duty in bringing up his many children in the fear of his heavy
hand, in unceasing labor, and in almost total abstinence from all
amusement and self-indulgence. Far from thinking himself cruel, he was
convinced that the oftener and the more vigorously he applied "the
strap," the more conscientious a parent was he.

His wife, Tillie's stepmother, was as submissive to his authority as
were her five children and Tillie. Apathetic, anemic, overworked, she
yet never dreamed of considering herself or her children abused,
accepting her lot as the natural one of woman, who was created to be a
child-bearer, and to keep man well fed and comfortable. The only
variation from the deadly monotony of her mechanical and unceasing
labor was found in her habit of irritability with her stepchild. She
considered Tillie "a dopple" (a stupid, awkward person); for though
usually a wonderful little household worker, Tillie, when very much
tired out, was apt to drop dishes; and absent-mindedly she would put
her sunbonnet instead of the bread into the oven, or pour molasses
instead of batter on the griddle. Such misdemeanors were always
plaintively reported by Mrs. Getz to Tillie's father, who, without
fail, conscientiously applied what he considered the undoubted cure.

In practising the strenuous economy prescribed by her husband, Mrs.
Getz had to manoeuver very skilfully to keep her children decently
clothed, and Tillie in this matter was a great help to her; for the
little girl possessed a precocious skill in combining a pile of patches
into a passably decent dress or coat for one of her little brothers or
sisters. Nevertheless, it was invariably Tillie who was slighted in the
small expenditures that were made each year for the family clothing.
The child had always really preferred that the others should have "new
things" rather than herself--until Miss Margaret came; and now, before
Miss Margaret's daintiness, she felt ashamed of her own shabby
appearance and longed unspeakably for fresh, pretty clothes. Tillie
knew perfectly well that her father had plenty of money to buy them for
her if he would. But she never thought of asking him or her stepmother
for anything more than what they saw fit to give her.

The Getz family was a perfectly familiar type among the German farming
class of southeastern Pennsylvania. Jacob Getz, though spoken of in the
neighborhood as being "wonderful near," which means very penurious, and
considered by the more gentle-minded Amish and Mennonites of the
township to be "overly strict" with his family and "too ready with the
strap still," was nevertheless highly respected as one who worked hard
and was prosperous, lived economically, honestly, and in the fear of
the Lord, and was "laying by."

The Getz farm was typical of the better sort to be found in that
county. A neat walk, bordered by clam shells, led from a wooden gate to
the porch of a rather large, and severely plain frame house, facing the
road. Every shutter on the front and sides of the building was tightly
closed, and there was no sign of life about the place. A stranger,
ignorant of the Pennsylvania Dutch custom of living in the kitchen and
shutting off the "best rooms,"--to be used in their mustiness and stiff
unhomelikeness on Sunday only,--would have thought the house
temporarily empty. It was forbiddingly and uncompromisingly
spick-and-span.

A grass-plot, ornamented with a circular flower-bed, extended a short
distance on either side of the house. But not too much land was put to
such unproductive use; and the small lawn was closely bordered by a
corn-field on the one side and on the other by an apple orchard. Beyond
stretched the tobacco--and wheat-fields, and behind the house were the
vegetable garden and the barn-yard.

Arrived at home by half-past three, Tillie hid her "Ivanhoe" under the
pillow of her bed when she went up-stairs to change her faded calico
school dress for the yet older garment she wore at her work.

If she had not been obliged to change her dress, she would have been
puzzled to know how to hide her book, for she could not, without
creating suspicion, have gone up-stairs in the daytime. In New Canaan
one never went up-stairs during the day, except at the rare times when
obliged to change one's clothes. Every one washed at the pump and used
the one family roller-towel hanging on the porch. Miss Margaret, ever
since her arrival in the neighborhood, had been the subject of
wide-spread remark and even suspicion, because she "washed up-stairs"
and even sat up-stairs!--in her bedroom! It was an unheard-of
proceeding in New Canaan.

Tillie helped her father in the celery-beds until dark; then, weary,
but excited at the prospect of her book, she went in from the fields
and up-stairs to the little low-roofed bed-chamber which she shared
with her two half-sisters. They were already in bed and asleep, as was
their mother in the room across the hall, for every one went to bed at
sundown in Canaan Township, and got up at sunrise.

Tillie was in bed in a few minutes, rejoicing in the feeling of the
book under her pillow. Not yet dared she venture to light a candle and
read it--not until she should hear her father's heavy snoring in the
room across the hall.

The candles which she used for this surreptitious reading of
Sunday-school "li-bries" and any other chance literature which fell in
her way, were procured with money paid to her by Miss Margaret for
helping her to clean the school-room on Friday afternoons after school.
Tillie would have been happy to help her for the mere joy of being with
her, but Miss Margaret insisted upon paying her ten cents for each such
service.

The little girl was obliged to resort to a deep-laid plot in order to
do this work for the teacher. It had been her father's custom--ever
since, at the age of five, she had begun to go to school--to "time" her
in coming home at noon and afternoon, and whenever she was not there on
the minute, to mete out to her a dose of his ever-present strap.

"I ain't havin' no playin' on the way home, still! When school is done,
you come right away home then, to help me or your mom, or I 'll learn
you once!"

But it happened that Miss Margaret, in her reign at "William Perm"
school-house, had introduced the innovation of closing school on Friday
afternoons at half-past three instead of four, and Tillie, with bribes
of candy bought with part of her weekly wage of ten cents, secured
secrecy as to this innovation from her little sister and brother who
went to school with her--making them play in the school-grounds until
she was ready to go home with them.

Before Miss Margaret had come to New Canaan, Tillie had done her
midnight reading by the light of the kerosene lamp which, after every
one was asleep, she would bring up from the kitchen to her bedside. But
this was dangerous, as it often led to awkward inquiries as to the
speedy consumption of the oil. Candles were safer. Tillie kept them and
a box of matches hidden under the mattress.

It was eleven o'clock when at last the child, trembling with mingled
delight and apprehension, rose from her bed, softly closed her bedroom
door, and with extremely judicious carefulness lighted her candle,
propped up her pillow, and settled down to read as long as she should
be able to hold her eyes open. The little sister at her side and the
one in the bed at the other side of the room slept too soundly to be
disturbed by the faint flickering light of that one candle.

To-night her stolen pleasure proved more than usually engrossing. At
first the book was interesting principally because of the fact, so
vividly present with her, that Miss Margaret's eyes and mind had moved
over every word and thought which, she was now absorbing. But soon her
intense interest in the story excluded every other idea--even the fear
of discovery. Her young spirit was "out of the body" and following, as
in a trance, this tale, the like of which she had never before read.

The clock down-stairs in the kitchen struck twelve--one--two, but
Tillie never heard it. At half-past two o'clock in the morning, when
the tallow candle was beginning to sputter to its end, she still was
reading, her eyes bright as stars, her usually pale face flushed with
excitement, her sensitive lips parted in breathless interest--when,
suddenly, a stinging blow of "the strap" on her shoulders brought from
her a cry of pain and fright.

"What you mean, doin' somepin like, this yet!" sternly demanded her
father. "What fur book's that there?"

He took the book from her hands and Tillie cowered beneath the covers,
the wish flashing through her mind that the book could change into a
Bible as he looked at it!--which miracle would surely temper the
punishment that in a moment she knew would be meted out to her.

"'Iwanhoe'--a novel! A NOVEL!" he said in genuine horror. "Tillie,
where d'you get this here!"

Tillie knew that if she told lies she would go to hell, but she
preferred to burn in torment forever rather than betray Miss Margaret;
for her father, like Absalom's, was a school director, and if he knew
Miss Margaret read novels and lent them to the children, he would
surely force her out of "William Penn."

"I lent it off of Elviny Dinkleberger!" she sobbed.

"You know I tole you a'ready you darsen't bring books home! And you
know I don't uphold to novel-readin'! I 'll have to learn you to mind
better 'n this! Where d' you get that there candle?"

"I--bought it, pop."

"Bought? Where d'you get the money!"

Tillie did not like the lies she had to tell, but she knew she had
already perjured her soul beyond redemption and one lie more or less
could not make matters worse.

"I found it in the road."

"How much did you find?"

"Fi' cents."

"You hadn't ought to spent it without astin' me dare you. Now I'm goin'
to learn you once! Set up."

Tillie obeyed, and the strap fell across her shoulders. Her outcries
awakened the household and started the youngest little sister, in her
fright and sympathy with Tillie, to a high-pitched wailing. The rest of
them took the incident phlegmatically, the only novelty about it being
the strange hour of its happening.

But the hardest part of her punishment was to follow.

"Now this here book goes in the fire!" her father announced when at
last his hand was stayed. "And any more that comes home goes after it
in the stove, I'll see if you 'll mind your pop or not!"

Left alone in her bed, her body quivering, her little soul hot with
shame and hatred, the child stifled her sobs in her pillow, her whole
heart one bleeding wound.

How could she ever tell Miss Margaret? Surely she would never like her
any more!--never again lay her hand on her hair, or praise her
compositions, or call her "honey," or, even, perhaps, allow her to help
her on Fridays!--and what, then, would be the use of living? If only
she could die and be dead like a cat or a bird and not go to hell, she
would take the carving-knife and kill herself! But there was hell to be
taken into consideration. And yet, could hell hold anything worse than
the loss of Miss Margaret's kindness? HOW could she tell her of that
burned-up book and endure to see her look at her with cold disapproval?
Oh, to make such return for her kindness, when she so longed with all
her soul to show her how much she loved her!

For the first time in all her school-days, Tillie went next morning
with reluctance to school.




III

"WHAT'S HURTIN' YOU, TILLIE?"


She meant to make her confession as soon as she reached the
school-house--and have it over--but Miss Margaret was busy writing on
the blackboard, and Tillie felt an immense relief at the necessary
postponement of her ordeal to recess time.

The hours of that morning were very long to her heavy heart, and the
minutes dragged to the time of her doom--for nothing but blackness lay
beyond the point of the acknowledgment which must turn her teacher's
fondness to dislike.

She saw Miss Margaret's eyes upon her several times during the morning,
with that look of anxious concern which had so often fed her starved
affections. Yes, Miss Margaret evidently could see that she was in
trouble and she was feeling sorry for her. But, alas, when she should
learn the cause of her misery, how surely would that look turn to
coldness and displeasure!

Tillie felt that she was ill preparing the way for her dread confession
in the very bad recitations she made all morning. She failed in
geography--every question that came to her; she failed to understand
Miss Margaret's explanation of compound interest, though the
explanation was gone over a third time for her especial benefit; she
missed five words in spelling and two questions in United States
history!

"Tillie, Tillie!" Miss Margaret solemnly shook her head, as she closed
her book at the end of the last recitation before recess. "Too much
'Ivanhoe,' I'm afraid! Well, it's my fault, isn't it?"

The little girl's blue eyes gazed up at her with a look of such
anguish, that impulsively Miss Margaret drew her to her side, as the
rest of the class moved away to their seats.

"What's the matter, dear?" she asked. "Aren't you well? You look pale
and ill! What is it, Tillie?"

Tillie's overwrought heart could bear no more. Her head fell on Miss
Margaret's shoulder as she broke into wildest crying. Her body quivered
with her gasping sobs and her little hands clutched convulsively at
Miss Margaret's gown.

"You poor little thing!" whispered Miss Margaret, her arms about the
child; "WHAT'S the matter with you, honey? There, there, don't cry
so--tell me what's the matter."

It was such bliss to be petted like this--to feel Miss Margaret's arms
about her and hear that loved voice so close to her!--for the last
time! Never again after this moment would she be liked and caressed!
Her heart was breaking and she could not answer for her sobbing.

"Tillie, dear, sit down here in my chair until I send the other
children out to recess--and then you and I can have a talk by
ourselves," Miss Margaret said, leading the child a step to her
arm-chair on the platform. She stood beside the chair, holding Tillie's
throbbing head to her side, while she tapped the bell which dismissed
the children.

"Now," she said, when the door had closed on the last of them and she
had seated herself and drawn Tillie to her again, "tell me what you are
crying for, little girlie."

"Miss Margaret!" Tillie's words came in hysterical, choking gasps; "you
won't never like me no more when I tell you what's happened, Miss
Margaret!"

"Why, dear me, Tillie, what on earth is it?"

"I didn't mean to do it, Miss Margaret! And I'll redd up for you,
Fridays, still, till it's paid for a'ready, Miss Margaret, if you'll
leave me, won't you, please? Oh, won't you never like me no more?"

"My dear little goosie, what IS the matter with you? Come," she said,
taking the little girl's hand reassuringly in both her own, "tell me,
child."

A certain note of firmness in her usually drawling Southern voice
checked a little the child's hysterical emotion. She gulped the choking
lump in her throat and answered.

"I was readin' 'Ivanhoe' in bed last night, and pop woke up, and seen
my candle-light, and he conceited he'd look once and see what it was,
and then he seen me, and he don't uphold to novel-readin', and he--he--"

"Well?" Miss Margaret gently urged her faltering speech.

"He whipped me and--and burnt up your Book!"

"Whipped you again!" Miss Margaret's soft voice indignantly exclaimed.
"The br--" she checked herself and virtuously closed her lips. "I'm so
sorry, Tillie, that I got you into such a scrape!"

Tillie thought Miss Margaret could not have heard her clearly.

"He--burnt up your book yet, Miss Margaret!" she found voice to whisper
again.

"Indeed! I ought to make him pay for it!"

"He didn't know it was yourn, Miss Margaret--he don't uphold to
novel-readin', and if he'd know it was yourn he'd have you put out of
William Penn, so I tole him I lent it off of Elviny Dinkleberger--and
I'll help you Fridays till it's paid for a'ready, if you'll leave me,
Miss Margaret!"

She lifted pleading eyes to the teacher's face, to see therein a look
of anger such as she had never before beheld in that gentle
countenance--for Miss Margaret had caught sight of the marks of the
strap on Tillie's bare neck, and she was flushed with indignation at
the outrage. But Tillie, interpreting the anger to be against herself,
turned as white as death, and a look of such hopeless woe came into her
face that Miss Margaret suddenly realized the dread apprehension
torturing the child.

"Come here to me, you poor little thing!" she tenderly exclaimed,
drawing the little girl into her lap and folding her to her heart. "I
don't care anything about the BOOK, honey! Did you think I would?
There, there--don't cry so, Tillie, don't cry. _I_ love you, don't you
know I do!"--and Miss Margaret kissed the child's quivering lips, and
with her own fragrant handkerchief wiped the tears from her cheeks, and
with her soft, cool fingers smoothed back the hair from her hot
forehead.

And this child, who had never known the touch of a mother's hand and
lips, was transported in that moment from the suffering of the past
night and morning, to a happiness that made this hour stand out to her,
in all the years that followed, as the one supreme experience of her
childhood.

Ineffable tenderness of the mother heart of woman!

That afternoon, when Tillie got home from school,--ten minutes late
according to the time allowed her by her father,--she was quite unable
to go out to help him in the field. Every step of the road home had
been a dragging burden to her aching limbs, and the moment she reached
the farm-house, she tumbled in a little heap upon the kitchen settee
and lay there, exhausted and white, her eyes shining with fever, her
mouth parched with thirst, her head throbbing with pain--feeling
utterly indifferent to the consequences of her tardiness and her
failure to meet her father in the field.

"Ain't you feelin' good?" her stepmother phlegmatically inquired from
across the room, where she sat with a dish-pan in her lap, paring
potatoes for supper.

"No, ma'am," weakly answered Tillie.

"Pop 'll be looking fur you out in the field."

Tillie wearily closed her eyes and did not answer.

Mrs. Getz looked up from her pan and let her glance rest for an instant
upon the child's white, pained face. "Are you feelin' too mean to go
help pop?"

"Yes, ma'am. I--can't!" gasped Tillie, with a little sob.

"You ain't lookin' good," the woman reluctantly conceded. "Well, I'll
leave you lay a while. Mebbe pop used the strap too hard last night. He
sayed this dinner that he was some uneasy that he used the strap so
hard--but he was that wonderful spited to think you'd set up readin' a
novel-book in the night-time yet! You might of knew you'd ketch an
awful lickin' fur doin' such a dumm thing like what that was. Sammy!"
she called to her little eight-year-old son, who was playing on the
kitchen porch, "you go out and tell pop Tillie she's got sick fur me,
and I'm leavin' her lay a while. Now hurry on, or he'll come in here to
see, once, ain't she home yet, or what. Go on now!"

Sammy departed on his errand, and Mrs. Getz diligently resumed her
potato-paring.

"I don't know what pop'll say to you not comin' out to help," she
presently remarked.

Tillie's head moved restlessly, but she did not speak. She was past
caring what her father might say or do.

Mrs. Getz thoughtfully considered a doubtful potato, and, concluding at
length to discard it, "I guess," she said, throwing it back into the
pan, "I'll let that one; it's some poor. Do you feel fur eatin' any
supper?" she asked. "I'm havin' fried smashed-potatoes and wieners
[Frankfort sausages]. Some days I just don't know what to cook all."

Tillie's lips moved, but gave no sound.

"I guess you're right down sick fur all; ain't? I wonder if pop'll have
Doc in. He won't want to spend any fur that. But you do look wonderful
bad. It's awful onhandy comin' just to-day. I did feel fur sayin' to
pop I'd go to the rewiwal to-night, of he didn't mind. It's a while
back a'ready since I was to a meetin'--not even on a funeral. And they
say they do now make awful funny up at Bethel rewiwal this week. I was
thinkin' I'd go once. But if you can't redd up after supper and help
milk and put the childern to bed, I can't go fur all."

No response from Tillie.

Mrs. Getz sighed her disappointment as she went on with her work.
Presently she spoke again. "This after, a lady agent come along. She
had such a complexion lotion. She talked near a half-hour. She was,
now, a beautiful conversationist! I just set and listened. Then she was
some spited that I wouldn't buy a box of complexion lotion off of her.
But she certainly was, now, a beautiful conversationist!"

The advent of an agent in the neighborhood was always a noteworthy
event, and Tillie's utterly indifferent reception of the news that
to-day one had "been along" made Mrs. Getz look at her wonderingly.

"Are you too sick to take interest?" she asked.

The child made no answer. The woman rose to put her potatoes on the
stove.

It was an hour later when, as Tillie still lay motionless on the
settee, and Mrs. Getz was dishing up the supper and putting it on the
table, which stood near the wall at one end of the kitchen, Mr. Getz
came in, tired, dirty, and hungry, from the celery-beds.

The child opened her eyes at the familiar and often dreaded step, and
looked up at him as he came and stood over her.

"What's the matter? What's hurtin' you, Tillie?" he asked, an unwonted
kindness in his voice as he saw how ill the little girl looked.

"I don'--know," Tillie whispered, her heavy eyelids falling again.

"You don' know! You can't be so worse if you don' know what's hurtin'
you! Have you fever, or the headache, or whatever?"

He laid his rough hand on her forehead and passed it over her cheek.

"She's some feverish," he said, turning to his wife, who was busy at
the stove. "Full much so!"

"She had the cold a little, and I guess she's took more to it," Mrs.
Getz returned, bearing the fried potatoes across the kitchen to the
table.

"I heard the Doc talkin' there's smallpox handy to us, only a mile away
at New Canaan," said Getz, a note of anxiety in his voice that made the
sick child wearily marvel. Why was he anxious about her? she wondered.
It wasn't because he liked her, as Miss Margaret did. He was afraid of
catching smallpox himself, perhaps. Or he was afraid she would be
unable to help him to-morrow, and maybe for many days, out in the
celery-beds. That was why he spoke anxiously--not because he liked her
and was sorry.

No bitterness was mingled with Tillie's quite matter-of-fact acceptance
of these conclusions.

"It would be a good much trouble to us if she was took down with the
smallpox," Mrs. Getz's tired voice replied.

"I guess not as much as it would be to HER," the father said, a rough
tenderness in his voice, and something else which Tillie vaguely felt
to be a note of pain.

"Are you havin' the Doc in fur her, then?" his wife asked.

"I guess I better, mebbe," the man hesitated. His thrifty mind shrank
at the thought of the expense.

He turned again to Tillie and bent over her.

"Can't you tell pop what's hurtin' you, Tillie?"

"No--sir."

Mr. Getz looked doubtfully and rather helplessly at his wife. "It's a
bad sign, ain't, when they can't tell what's hurtin' 'em?"

"I don't know what fur sign that is when they don't feel nothin'," she
stoically answered, as she dished up her Frankfort sausages.

"If a person would just know oncet!" he exclaimed anxiously. "Anyhow,
she's pretty much sick--she looks it so! I guess I better mebbe not
take no risks. I'll send fur Doc over. Sammy can go, then."

"All right. Supper's ready now. You can come eat."

She went to the door to call the children in front the porch and the
lawn; and Mr. Getz again bent over the child.

"Can you eat along, Tillie?"

Tillie weakly shook her head.

"Don't you feel fur your wittles?"

"No--sir."

"Well, well. I'll send fur the Doc, then, and he can mebbe give you
some pills, or what, to make you feel some better; ain't?" he said,
again passing his rough hand over her forehead and cheek, with a touch
as nearly like a caress as anything Tillie had ever known from him. The
tears welled up in her eyes and slowly rolled over her white face, as
she felt this unwonted expression of affection.

Her father turned away quickly and went to the table, about which the
children were gathering.

"Where's Sammy?" he asked his wife. "I'm sendin' him fur the Doc after
supper."

"Where? I guess over," she motioned with her head as she lifted the
youngest, a one-year-old boy, into his high chair. "Over" was the
family designation for the pump, at which every child of a suitable age
was required to wash his face and hands before coming to the table.

While waiting for the arrival of the doctor, after supper, Getz
ineffectually tried to force Tillie to eat something. In his genuine
anxiety about her and his eagerness for "the Doc's" arrival, he quite
forgot about the fee which would have to be paid for the visit.




IV

"THE DOC" COMBINES BUSINESS AND PLEASURE


Miss Margaret boarded at the "hotel" of New Canaan. As the only other
regular boarder was the middle-aged, rugged, unkempt little man known
as "the Doc," and as the transient guests were very few and far
between, Miss Margaret shared the life of the hotel-keeper's family on
an intimate and familiar footing.

The invincible custom of New Canaan of using a bedroom only at night
made her unheard-of inclination to sit in her room during the day or
before bedtime the subject of so much comment and wonder that, feeling
it best to yield to the prejudice, she usually read, sewed, or wrote
letters in the kitchen, or, when a fire was lighted, in the combination
dining-room and sitting-room.

It was the evening of the day of Tillie's confession about "Ivanhoe,"
and Miss Margaret, after the early supper-hour of the country hotel,
had gone to the sitting-room, removed the chenille cover from the
centre-table, uncorked the bottle of fluid sold at the village store as
ink, but looking more like raspberryade, and settled herself to write,
to one deeply interested in everything which interested her, an account
of her day and its episode with the little daughter of Jacob Getz.

This room in which she sat, like all other rooms of the district, was
too primly neat to be cozy or comfortable. It contained a bright new
rag carpet, a luridly painted wooden settee, a sewing-machine, and
several uninviting wooden chairs. Margaret often yearned to pull the
pieces of furniture out from their stiff, sentinel-like stations
against the wall and give to the room that divine touch of homeyness
which it lacked. But she did not dare venture upon such a liberty.

Very quickly absorbed in her letter-writing, she did not notice the
heavy footsteps which presently sounded across the floor and paused at
her chair.

"Now that there writin'--" said a gruff voice at her shoulder; and,
startled, she quickly turned in her chair, to find the other boarder,
"the Doc," leaning on the back of it, his shaggy head almost on a level
with her fair one.

"That there writin'," pursued the doctor, continuing to hold his fat
head in unabashed proximity to her own and to her letter, "is wonderful
easy to read. Wonderful easy."

Miss Margaret promptly covered her letter with a blotter, corked the
raspberry-ade, and rose.

"Done a'ready?" asked the doctor.

"For the present, yes."

"See here oncet, Teacher!"

He suddenly fixed her with his small, keen eyes as he drew from the
pocket of his shabby, dusty coat a long, legal-looking paper.

"I have here," he said impressively, "an important dokiment, Teacher,
concerning of which I desire to consult you perfessionally."

"Yes?"

"You just stay settin'; I'll fetch a chair and set aside of you and
show it to you oncet."

He drew a chair up to the table and Margaret reluctantly sat down,
feeling annoyed and disappointed at this interruption of her letter,
yet unwilling, in the goodness of her heart, to snub the little man.

The doctor bent near to her and spoke confidentially.

"You see, them swanged fools in the legislature has went to work and
passed a act--ag'in' my protest, mind you--compellin' doctors to fill
out blanks answerin' to a lot of darn-fool questions 'bout one thing
and 'nother, like this here."

He had spread open on the table the paper he had drawn from his pocket.
It was soiled from contact with his coat and his hands, and Margaret,
instead of touching the sheet, pressed it down with the handle of her
pen.

The doctor noticed the act and laughed. "You're wonderful easy
kreistled [disgusted]; ain't? I took notice a'ready how when things is
some dirty they kreistle you, still. But indeed, Teacher," he gravely
added, "it ain't healthy to wash so much and keep so clean as what you
do. It's weakenin'. That's why city folks ain't so hearty--they get
right into them big, long tubs they have built in their houses
up-stairs! I seen one oncet in at Doc Hess's in Lancaster. I says to
him when I seen it, 'You wouldn't get me into THAT--it's too much like
a coffin!' I says. 'It would make a body creepy to get in there.' And
he says, 'I'd feel creepy if I DIDN'T get in.' 'Yes,' I says,'that's
why you're so thin. You wash yourself away,' I says."

"What's it all about?" Miss Margaret abruptly asked, examining the
paper.

"These here's the questions," answered the doctor, tracing them with
his thick, dirty forefinger; "and these here's the blank spaces fur to
write the answers into. Now you can write better 'n me, Teacher; and if
you'll just take and write in the answers fur me, why, I'll do a favor
fur you some time if ever you ast it off of me. And if ever you need a
doctor, just you call on me, and I'm swanged if I charge you a cent!"

Among the simple population of New Canaan the Doc was considered the
most blasphemous man in America, but there seemed to be a sort of
general impression in the village that his profanity was, in some way,
an eccentricity of genius.

"Thank you," Miss Margaret responded to his offer of free medical
services. "I'll fill out the paper for you with pleasure."

She read aloud the first question of the list. '"Where did you attend
lectures?'"

Her pen suspended over the paper, she looked at him inquiringly.
"Well?" she asked.

"Lekshures be blowed!" he exclaimed. "I ain't never 'tended no
lekshures!"

"Oh!" said Miss Margaret, nodding conclusively. "Well, then, let us
pass on to the next question. 'To what School of Medicine do you
belong?'"

"School?" repeated the doctor; "I went to school right here in this
here town--it's better 'n thirty years ago, a'ready."

"No," Miss Margaret explained, "that's not the question. 'To what
School of MEDICINE do you belong?' Medicine, you know," she repeated,
as though talking to a deaf person.

"Oh," said the doctor, "medicine, is it? I never have went to none," he
announced defiantly. "I studied medicine in old Doctor Johnson's office
and learnt it by practisin' it. That there's the only way to learn any
business. Do you suppose you could learn a boy carpenterin' by settin'
him down to read books on sawin' boards and a-lekshurin' him on drivin'
nails? No more can you make a doctor in no such swanged-fool way like
that there!"

"But," said Margaret, "the question means do you practise allopathy,
homeopathy, hydropathy, osteopathy,--or, for instance, eclecticism? Are
you, for example, a homeopathist?"

"Gosh!" said the doctor, looking at her admiringly, "I'm blamed if you
don't know more big words than I ever seen in a spellin'-book or heard
at a spellin'-bee! Home-o-pathy? No, sir! When I give a dose to a
patient, still, he 'most always generally finds it out, and pretty
gosh-hang quick too! When he gits a dose of my herb bitters he knows it
good enough. Be sure, I don't give babies, and so forth, doses like
them. All such I treat, still, according to home-o-pathy, and not like
that swanged fool, Doc Hess, which only last week he give a baby a dose
fitten only fur a field-hand--and HE went to college!--Oh, yes!--and
heerd lekshures too! Natural consequence, the baby up't and died fur
'em. But growed folks they need allopathy."

"Then," said Margaret, "you might be called an eclectic?"

"A eclectic?" the doctor inquiringly repeated, rubbing his nose. "To be
sure, I know in a general way what a eclectic IS, and so forth. But
what would YOU mean, anyhow, by a eclectic doctor, so to speak, heh?"

"An eclectic," Margaret explained, "is one who claims to adopt whatever
is good and reject whatever is bad in every system or school of
medicine."

"If that ain't a description of me yet!" exclaimed the doctor,
delighted. "Write 'em down, Teacher! I'm a--now what d'you call 'em?"

"You certainly are a what-do-you-call-'em!" thought Margaret--but she
gravely repeated, "An eclectic," and wrote the name in the blank space.

"And here I've been practisin' that there style of medicine fur fifteen
years without oncet suspicioning it! That is," he quickly corrected
himself, in some confusion, "I haven't, so to speak, called it pretty
often a eclectic, you see, gosh hang it! and--YOU understand, don't
you, Teacher?"

Margaret understood very well indeed, but she put the question by.

The rest of the blank was filled with less difficulty, and in a few
minutes the paper was folded and returned to the doctor's pocket.

"I'm much obliged to you, Teacher," he said heartily. "And mind, now,"
he added, leaning far back in his chair, crossing his legs, thrusting
his thumbs into his vest pockets, and letting his eyes rest upon her,
"if ever you want a doctor, I ain't chargin' you nothin'; and leave me
tell you somethin'," he said, emphasizing each word by a shake of his
forefinger, "Jake Getz and Nathaniel Puntz they're the two school
directors that 'most always makes trouble fur the teacher. And I pass
you my word that if they get down on you any, and want to chase you off
your job, I'm standin' by you--I pass you my word!"

"Thank you. But what would they get down on me for?"

"Well, if Jake Getz saw you standin' up for his childern against his
lickin' 'em or makin' 'em work hard; or if you wanted to make 'em take
time to learn their books at home when he wants 'em to work--or some
such--he'd get awful down on you. And Nathaniel Puntz he 's just the
conTRARY--he wants his n' spoiled--he's got but the one."

Miss Margaret recalled with a little thrill the loyalty with which
Tillie had tried to save her from her father's anger by telling him
that Elviny Dinkleberger had lent her "Ivanhoe." "I suppose I had a
narrow escape there," she thought. "Poor little Tillie! She is so
conscientious--I can fancy what that lie cost her!"

Gathering up her stationery, she made a movement to rise--but the
doctor checked her with a question.

"Say! Not that I want to ast questions too close--but what was you
writin', now, in that letter of yourn, about Jake Getz?"

Miss Margaret was scarcely prepared for the question. She stared at the
man for an instant, then helplessly laughed at him.

"Well," he said apologetically, "I don't mean to be inquisitive that
way--but sometimes I speak unpolite too--fur all I've saw high society
a'ready!" he added, on the defensive. "Why, here one time I went in to
Lancaster City to see Doc Hess, and he wouldn't have it no other way
but I should stay and eat along. 'Och,' I says, 'I don't want to, I'm
so common that way, and I know yous are tony and it don't do. I'll just
pick a piece [have luncheon] at the tavern,' I says. But no, he says I
was to come eat along. So then I did. And his missus she was wonderful
fashionable, but she acted just that nice and common with me as my own
mother or my wife yet. And that was the first time I have eat what the
noos-papers calls a course dinner. They was three courses. First they
was soup and nothin' else settin' on the table, and then a colored
young lady come in with such a silver pan and such a flat, wide knife,
and she scraped the crumbs off between every one of them three courses.
I felt awful funny. I tell you they was tony. I sayed to the missus, 'I
hadn't ought to of came here. I'm not grand enough like yous'; but she
sayed, 'It's nothing of the kind, and you're always welcome.' Yes, she
made herself that nice and common!" concluded the doctor. "So you see I
have saw high society."

"Yes," Miss Margaret assented.

"Say!" he suddenly put another question to her. "Why don't you get
married?"

"Well," she parried, "why don't YOU?"

"I was married a'ready. My wife she died fur me. She was layin' three
months. She got so sore layin'. It was when we was stoppin' over in
Chicago yet. That's out in Illinois. Then, when she died,--och," he
said despondently, "there fur a while I didn't take no interest in
nothin' no more. When your wife dies, you don't feel fur nothin'. Yes,
yes," he sighed, "people have often troubles! Oh," he granted, "I went
to see other women since. But," shaking his head in discouragement, "it
didn't go. I think I'm better off if I stay single. Yes, I stay single
yet. Well," he reconsidered the question, his head on one side as he
examined the fair lady before him, "if I could get one to suit me
oncet."

Miss Margaret grew alarmed. But the doctor complacently continued,
"When my wife died fur me I moved fu'ther west, and I got out as fur as
Utah yet. That's where they have more 'n one wife. I thought, now, that
there was a poor practice! One woman would do ME. Say!" he again fixed
her with his eye.

"What?"

"Do you like your job?"

"Well," she tentatively answered, "it's not uninteresting."

"Would you ruther keep your job than quit and get married?"

"That depends--"

"Or," quickly added the doctor, "you might jus keep on teachin' the
school after you was married, if you married some one livin' right
here. Ain't? And if you kep' on the right side of the School Board.
Unlest you'd ruther marry a town fellah and give up your job out here.
Some thinks the women out here has to work too hard; but if they
married a man where [who] was well fixed," he said, insinuatingly, "he
could hire fur 'em [keep a servant]. Now, there's me. I'm well fixed. I
got money plenty."

"You are very fortunate," said Miss Margaret, sympathetically.

"Yes, ain't? And I ain't got no one dependent on me, neither. No
brothers, no sisters, no--wife--" he looked at her with an ingratiating
smile. "Some says I'm better off that way, but sometimes I think
different. Sometimes I think I'd like a wife oncet."

"Yes?" said Miss Margaret.

"Um--m," nodded the doctor. "Yes, and I'm pretty well fixed. I wasn't
always so comfortable off. It went a long while till I got to doin'
pretty good, and sometimes I got tired waitin' fur my luck to come. It
made me ugly dispositioned, my bad luck did. That's how I got in the
way of addicting to profane language. I sayed, still, I wisht, now, the
good Lord would try posperity on me fur a while--fur adwersity
certainly ain't makin' me a child of Gawd, I sayed. But now," he added,
rubbing his knees with satisfaction, "I'm fixed nice. Besides my
doctor's fees, I got ten acres, and three good hommies that'll be cows
till a little while yet. And that there organ in the front room is my
property. Bought it fifteen years ago on the instalment plan. I leave
missus keep it settin' in her parlor fur style that way. Do you play
the organ?"

"I CAN," was Miss Margaret's qualified answer.

"I always liked music--high-class music--like 'Pinnyfore.' That's a
nopery I heard in Lancaster there one time at the rooft-garden. That
was high-toned music, you bet. No trash about that. Gimme somepin nice
and ketchy. That's what I like. If it ain't ketchy, I don't take to it.
And so," he added admiringly, "you can play the organ too!"

"That's one of my distinguished accomplishments," said Miss Margaret.

"Well, say!" The doctor leaned forward and took her into his
confidence. "I don't mind if my wife is smart, so long as she don't
bother ME any!"

With this telling climax, the significance of which Miss Margaret could
hardly mistake, the doctor fell back again in his chair, and regarded
with complacency the comely young woman before him.

But before she could collect her shocked wits to reply, the entrance of
Jake Getz's son, Sammy, interrupted them. He had come into the house at
the kitchen door, and, having announced the object of his errand to the
landlady, who, by the way, was his father's sister, he was followed
into the sitting-room by a procession, consisting of his aunt, her
husband, and their two little daughters.

Sammy was able to satisfy but meagerly the eager curiosity or interest
of the household as to Tillie's illness, and his aunt, cousins, and
uncle presently returned to their work in the kitchen or out of doors,
while the doctor rose reluctantly to go to the stables to hitch up.

"Pop says to say you should hurry," said Sammy.

"There's time plenty," petulantly answered the doctor. "I conceited I'd
stay settin' with you this evening," he said regretfully to Miss
Margaret. "But a doctor can't never make no plans to stay no-wheres!
Well!" he sighed, "I'll go round back now and hitch a while."

"Sammy," said Miss Margaret, when she found herself alone with the
child, "wasn't your mother afraid YOU would get ill, coming over here,
on such a cool evening, barefooted?" "Och, no; she leaves me let my
shoes off near till it snows already. The teacher we had last year he
used to do worse 'n that yet!--HE'D WASH HIS FEET IN THE WINTER-TIME!"
said Sammy, in the tone of one relating a deed of valor. "I heard Aunty
Em speak how he washed 'em as much as oncet a week, still, IN WINTER!
The Doc he sayed no wonder that feller took cold!"

Miss Margaret gazed at the child with a feeling of fascination. "But,
Sammy," she said wonderingly, "your front porches get a weekly bath in
winter--do the people of New Canaan wash their porches oftener than
they wash themselves?"

"Porches gets dirty," reasoned Sammy. "Folks don't get dirty in
winter-time. Summer's the time they get dirty, and then they mebbe wash
in the run."

"Oh!" said Miss Margaret.

During the six weeks of her life in Canaan, she had never once seen in
this or any other household the least sign of any toilet appointments,
except a tin basin at the pump, a roller-towel on the porch, and a
small mirror in the kitchen. Tooth-brushes, she had learned, were
almost unknown in the neighborhood, nearly every one of more than
seventeen years wearing "store-teeth." It was a matter of much
speculation to her that these people, who thought it so essential to
keep their houses, especially their front porches, immaculately
scrubbed, should never feel an equal necessity as to their own persons.

The doctor came to the door and told Sammy he was ready. "I wouldn't do
it to go such a muddy night like what this is," he ruefully declared to
Miss Margaret, "if I didn't feel it was serious; Jake Getz wouldn't
spend any hirin' a doctor, without it was some serious. I'm sorry I got
to go."

"Good-night, Sammy," said Miss Margaret. "Give Tillie my love; and if
she is not able to come to school to-morrow, I shall go to see her."




V

"NOVELS AIN'T MORAL, DOC!"


Tillie still lay on the kitchen settee, her father sitting at her side,
when the doctor and Sammy arrived. The other children had all been put
to bed, and Mrs. Getz, seated at the kitchen table, was working on a
pile of mending by the light of a small lamp.

The doctor's verdict, when he had examined his patient's tongue, felt
her pulse, and taken her temperature, was not clear.

"She's got a high fever. That's 'a all the fu'ther I can go now. What
it may turn to till morning, I can't tell TILL morning. Give her these
powders every hour, without she's sleeping. That's the most that she
needs just now."

"Yes, if she can keep them powders down," said Mr. Getz, doubtfully.
"She can't keep nothin' with her."

"Well, keep on giving them, anyhow. She's a pretty sick child."

"You ain't no fears of smallpox, are you?" Mrs. Getz inquired. "Mister
was afraid it might mebbe be smallpox," she said, indicating her
husband by the epithet.

"Not that you say that I sayed it was!" Mr. Getz warned the doctor. "We
don't want no report put out! But is they any symptoms?"

"Och, no," the doctor reassured them. "It ain't smallpox. What did you
give her that she couldn't keep with her?"

"I fed some boiled milk to her."

"Did she drink tea?" he inquired, looking profound.

"We don't drink no store tea," Mrs. Getz answered him. "We drink
peppermint tea fur supper, still. Tillie she didn't drink none this
evening. Some says store tea's bad fur the nerves. I ain't got no
nerves," she went on placidly. "Leastways, I ain't never felt none, so
fur. Mister he likes the peppermint."

"And it comes cheaper," said Mister.

"Mebbe you've been leavin' Tillie work too much in the hot sun out in
the fields with you?" the doctor shot a keen glance at the father; for
Jake Getz was known to all Canaan Township as a man that got more work
out of his wife and children than any other farmer in the district.

"After school, some," Mr. Getz replied. "But not fur long at a time,
fur it gets late a'ready till she gets home. Anyhow, it's healthy fur
her workin' in the fields. I guess," he speculated, "it was her settin'
up in bed readin' last night done it. I don't know right how long it
went that she was readin' before I seen the light, but it was near
morning a'ready, and she'd burned near a whole candle out."

"And mebbe you punished her?" the doctor inquired, holding his hand to
Tillie's temples.

"Well," nodded Mr. Getz, "I guess she won't be doin' somepin like that
soon again. I think, still, I mebbe used the strap too hard, her bein'
a girl that way. But a body's got to learn 'em when they're young, you
know. And here it was a NOVEL-book! She borrowed the loan of it off of
Elviny Dinkleberger! I chucked it in the fire! I don't uphold to
novel-readin'!"

"Well, now," argued the doctor, settling back in his chair, crossing
his legs, and thrusting his thumbs into the arm-holes of his vest,
"some chance times I read in such a 'Home Companion' paper, and here
this winter I read a piece in nine chapters. I make no doubt that was a
novel. Leastways, I guess you'd call it a novel. And that piece," he
said impressively, "wouldn't hurt nobody! It learns you. That piece,"
he insisted, "was got up by a moral person."

"Then I guess it wasn't no novel, Doc," Mr. Getz firmly maintained.
"Anybody knows novels ain't moral. Anyhow, I ain't havin' none in my
house. If I see any, they get burnt up."

"It's a pity you burnt it up, Jake. I like to come by somepin like
that, still, to pass the time when there ain't much doin'. How did
Elviny Dinkleberger come by such a novel?"

"I don't know. If I see her pop, I 'll tell him he better put a stop to
such behaviors."

Tillie stirred restlessly on her pillow.

"What was the subjeck of that there novel, Tillie?" the doctor asked.

"Its subjeck was 'Iwanhoe,'" Mr. Getz answered. "Yes, I chucked it
right in the stove."

"'Iwanhoe'!" exclaimed the doctor. "Why, Elviny must of borrowed the
loan of that off of Teacher--I seen Teacher have it."

Tillie turned pleading eyes upon his face, but he did not see her.

"Do you mean to say," demanded Mr. Getz, "that Teacher lends NOVELS to
the scholars!"

"Och!" said the doctor, suddenly catching the frantic appeal of
Tillie's eyes, and answering it with ready invention, "what am I
talkin' about! It was Elviny lent it to Aunty Em's little Rebecca at
the HOtel, and Teacher was tellin' Rebecca she mustn't read it, but
give it back right aways to Elviny."

"Well!" said Mr. Getz, "a teacher that would lend novels to the
scholars wouldn't stay long at William Penn if MY wote could put her
out! And there 's them on the Board that thinks just like what I think!"

"To be sure!" the doctor soothed him. "TO be sure! Yes," he romanced,
"Rebecca she lent that book off of Elviny Dinkleberger, and Teacher she
tole Rebecca to give it back."

"I'll speak somepin to Elviny's pop, first time I see him, how Elviny's
lendin' a novel to the scholars!" affirmed Mr. Getz.

"You needn't trouble," said the doctor, coolly. "Elviny's pop he GIVE
Elviny that there book last Christmas. I don't know what he'll think,
Jake, at your burnin' it up."

Tillie was gazing at the doctor, now, half in bewilderment, half in
passionate gratitude.

"If Tillie did get smallpox," Mrs. Getz here broke in, "would she mebbe
have to be took to the pest-house?"

Tillie started, and her feverish eyes sought in the face of the doctor
to know what dreadful place a "pest-house" might be.

"Whether she'd have to be took to the pest-house?" the doctor
inquiringly repeated. "Yes, if she took the smallpox. But she ain't
takin' it. You needn't worry."

"Doctors don't know near as much now as what they used to, still," Mr.
Getz affirmed. "They didn't HAVE to have no such pest-houses when I was
a boy. Leastways, they didn't have 'em. And they didn't never ketch
such diseases like 'pendycitis and grip and them."

"Do you mean to say, Jake Getz, that you pass it as your opinion us
doctors don't know more now than what they used to know thirty years
ago, when you was a boy?"

"Of course they don't," was the dogmatic rejoinder. "Nor nobody knows
as much now as they did in ancient times a'ready. I mean back in Bible
times."

"Do you mean to say," hotly argued the doctor, "that they had
automobiles in them days?"

"To be sure I do! Automobiles and all the other lost sciences!"

"Well," said the doctor, restraining his scorn with a mighty effort,
"I'd like to see you prove it oncet!"

"I can prove it right out of the Bible! Do you want better proof than
that, Doc? The Bible says in so many words, 'There's nothing new under
the sun.' There! You can't come over that there, can you? You don't
consider into them things enough, Doc. You ain't a religious man, that
's the trouble!"

"I got religion a plenty, but I don't hold to no SICH dumm thoughts!"

"Did you get your religion at Bethel rewiwal?" Mrs. Getz quickly asked,
glancing up from the little stocking she was darning, to look with some
interest at the doctor. "I wanted to go over oncet before the rewiwal's
done. But now Tillie's sick, mebbe I won't get to go fur all. When they
have rewiwals at Bethel they always make so! And," she added, resuming
her darning, "I like to see 'em jump that way. My, but they jump, now,
when they get happy! But I didn't get to go this year yet."

"Well, and don't you get affected too?" the doctor asked, "and go out
to the mourners' bench?"

"If I do? No, I go just to see 'em jump," she monotonously repeated. "I
wasn't never conwerted. Mister he's a hard Evangelical, you know."

"And what does he think of your unconwerted state?" the doctor
jocularly inquired.

"What he thinks? There's nothing to think," was the stolid answer.

"Up there to Bethel rewiwal," said Mr. Getz, "they don't stay
conwerted. Till rewiwal's over, they're off church again."

"It made awful funny down there this two weeks back," repeated Mrs.
Getz. "They jumped so. Now there's the Lutherans, they don't make
nothin' when they conwert themselves. They don't jump nor nothin'. I
don't like their meetin's. It's onhandy Tillie got sick fur me just
now. I did want to go oncet. Here 's all this mendin' she could have
did, too. She 's handier at sewin' than what I am, still. I always had
so much other work, I never come at sewin', and I 'm some dopplig at
it."

"Yes?--yes," said the doctor, rising to go. "Well, Tillie, good-by, and
don't set up nights any more readin' novels," he laughed.

"She ain't likely to," said her father. "My childern don't generally do
somepin like that again after I once ketch 'em at it. Ain't so, Tillie?
Well, then, Doc, you think she ain't serious?"

"I said I can't tell till I've saw her again a'ready."

"How long will it go till you come again?"

"Well," the doctor considered, "it looks some fur fallin'
weather--ain't? If it rains and the roads are muddy till morning, so 's
I can't drive fast, I won't mebbe be here till ten o'clock."

"Oh, doctor," whispered Tillie, in a tone of distress, "can't I go to
school? Can't I? I'll be well enough, won't I? It's Friday to-morrow,
and I--I want to go!" she sobbed. "I want to go to Miss Margaret!"

"No, you can't go to school to-morrow, Tillie," her father said, "even
if you're some better; I'm keepin' you home to lay still one day
anyhow."

"But I don't want to stay home!" the child exclaimed, casting off the
shawl with which her father had covered her and throwing out her arms.
"I want to go to school! I want to, pop!" she sobbed, almost screaming.
"I want to go to Miss Margaret! I will, I will!"

"Tillie--Tillie!" her father soothed her in that unwonted tone of
gentleness that sounded so strange to her. His face had turned pale at
her outcries, delirious they seemed to him, coming from his usually
meek and submissive child. "There now," he said, drawing the cover over
her again; "now lay still and be a good girl, ain't you will?"

"Will you leave me go to school to-morrow?" she pleaded piteously.
"DARE I go to school to-morrow?"

"No, you dassent, Tillie. But if you're a good girl, mebbe I 'll leave
Sammy ast Teacher to come to see you after school."

"Oh, pop!" breathed the child ecstatically, as in supreme contentment
she sank back again on her pillow. "I wonder will she come? Do you
think she will come to see me, mebbe?"

"To be sure will she."

"Now think," said the doctor, "how much she sets store by Teacher! And
a lot of 'em's the same way--girls AND boys."

"I didn't know she was so much fur Teacher," said Mr. Getz. "She never
spoke nothin'."

"She never spoke nothin' to me about it neither," said Mrs. Getz.

"Well, I 'll give you all good-by, then," said the doctor; and he went
away.

On his slow journey home through the mud he mused on the inevitable
clash which he foresaw must some day come between the warm-hearted
teacher (whom little Tillie so loved, and who so injudiciously lent her
"novel-books") and the stern and influential school director, Jacob
Getz.

"There MY chanct comes in," thought the doctor; "there's where I mebbe
put in my jaw and pop the question--just when Jake Getz is makin' her
trouble and she's gettin' chased off her job. I passed my word I'd
stand by her, and, by gum, I 'll do it! When she's out of a job--that's
the time she 'll be dead easy! Ain't? She's the most allurin' female I
seen since my wife up't and died fur me!"




VI

JAKE GETZ IN A QUANDARY


Tillie's illness, though severe while it lasted, proved to be a matter
of only a few days' confinement to bed; and fortunately for her, it was
while she was still too weak and ill to be called to account for her
misdeed that her father discovered her deception as to the owner of
"Ivanhoe." At least he found out, in talking with Elviny Dinkleberger
and her father at the Lancaster market, that the girl was innocent of
ever having owned or even seen the book, and that, consequently, she
had of course never lent it either to Rebecca Wackernagel at the hotel
or to Tillie.

Despite his rigorous dealings with his family (which, being the outcome
of the Pennsylvania Dutch faith in the Divine right of the head of the
house, were entirely conscientious), Jacob Getz was strongly and deeply
attached to his wife and children; and his alarm at Tillie's illness,
coming directly upon his severe punishment of her, had softened him
sufficiently to temper his wrath at finding that she had told him what
was not true.

What her object could have been in shielding the real owner of the book
he could not guess. His suspicions did not turn upon the teacher,
because, in the first place, he would have seen no reason why Tillie
should wish to shield her, and, in the second, it was inconceivable
that a teacher at William Penn should set out so to pervert the young
whom trusting parents placed under her care. There never had been a
novel-reading teacher at William Penn. The Board would as soon have
elected an opium-eater.

WHERE HAD TILLIE OBTAINED THAT BOOK? And why had she put the blame on
Elviny, who was her little friend? The Doc, evidently, was in league
with Tillie! What could it mean? Jake Getz was not used to dealing with
complications and mysteries. He pondered the case heavily.

When he went home from market, he did not tell Tillie of his discovery,
for the doctor had ordered that she be kept quiet.

Not until a week later, when she was well enough to be out of bed, did
he venture to tell her he had caught her telling a falsehood.

He could not know that the white face of terror which she turned to him
was fear for Miss Margaret and not, for once, apprehension of the strap.

"I ain't whippin' you this time," he gruffly said, "if you tell me the
truth whose that there book was."

Tillie did not speak. She was resting in the wooden rocking-chair by
the kitchen window, a pillow at her head and a shawl over her knees.
Her stepmother was busy at the table with her Saturday baking; Sammy
was giving the porch its Saturday cleaning, and the other children, too
little to work, were playing outdoors; even the baby, bundled up in its
cart, was out on the grass-plot.

"Do you hear me, Tillie? Whose book was that there?"

Tillie's head hung low and her very lips were white. She did not answer.

"You 're goin' to act stubborn to ME!" her father incredulously
exclaimed, and the woman at the table turned and stared in dull
amazement at this unheard-of defiance of the head of the family.
"Tillie!" he grasped her roughly by the arm and shook her. "Answer to
me!"

Tillie's chest rose and fell tumultuously. Bat she kept her eyes
downcast and her lips closed.

"Fur why don't you want to tell, then?"

"I--can't, pop!"

"Can't! If you wasn't sick I 'd soon learn you if you can't! Now you
might as well tell me right aways, fur I'll make you tell me SOME time!"

Tillie's lips quivered and the tears rolled slowly over her white
cheeks.

"Fur why did you say it was Elviny?"

"She was the only person I thought to say."

"But fur why didn't you say the person it WAS? Answer to me!" he
commanded.

Tillie curved her arm over her face and sobbed. She was still too weak
from her fever to bear the strain of this unequal contest of wills.

"Well," concluded her father, his anger baffled and impotent before the
child's weakness, "I won't bother you with it no more NOW. But you just
wait till you 're well oncet! We'll see then if you'll tell me what I
ast you or no!"

"Here's the Doc," announced Mrs. Getz, as the sound of wheels was heard
outside the gate.

"Well," her husband said indignantly as he rose and went to the door,
"I just wonder what he's got to say fur hisself, lyin' to me like what
he done!"

"Hello, Jake!" was the doctor's breezy greeting as he walked into the
kitchen, followed by a brood of curious little Getzes, to whom the
doctor's daily visits were an exciting episode. "Howdy-do, missus," he
briskly addressed the mother of the brood, pushing his hat to the back
of his head in lieu of raising it. "And how's the patient?" he inquired
with a suddenly professional air and tone. "Some better, heh? HEH? Been
cryin'! What fur?" he demanded, turning to Mr. Getz. "Say, Jake, you
ain't been badgerin' this kid again fur somepin? She'll be havin' a
RElapse if you don't leave her be!"

"It's YOU I'm wantin' to badger, Doc Weaver!" retorted Mr. Getz. "What
fur did you lie to me about that there piece entitled 'Iwanhoe'?"

"You and your 'Iwanhoe' be blowed! Are you tormentin' this here kid
about THAT yet? A body'd think you'd want to change that subjec', Jake
Getz!"

"Not till I find from you, Doc, whose that there novel-book was, and
why you tole me it was Elviny Dinkleberger's!"

"That's easy tole," responded the doctor. "That there book belonged
to--"

"No, Doc, no, no!" came a pleading cry from Tillie. "Don't tell, Doc,
please don't tell!"

"Never you mind, Tillie, THAT'S all right. Look here, Jake Getz!" The
doctor turned his sharp little eyes upon the face of the father grown
dark with anger at his child's undutiful interference. "You're got this
here little girl worked up to the werge of a RElapse! I tole you she
must be kep' quiet and not worked up still!"

"All right. I'm leavin' HER alone--till she's well oncet! You just
answer fur YOURself and tell why you lied to me!"

"Well, Jake, it was this here way. That there book belonged to ME and
Tillie lent it off of me. That's how! Ain't Tillie?"

Mr. Getz stared in stupefied wonder, while Mrs. Getz, too, looked on
with a dull interest, as she leaned her back against the sink and dried
her hands upon her apron.

As for Tillie, a great throb of relief thrilled through her as she
heard the doctor utter this Napoleonic lie--only to be followed the
next instant by an overwhelming sense of her own wickedness in thus
conniving with fraud. Abysses of iniquity seemed to yawn at her feet,
and she gazed with horror into their black depths. How could she ever
again hold up her head.

But--Miss Margaret, at least, was safe from the School Board's wrath
and indignation, and how unimportant, compared with that, was her own
soul's salvation!

"Why didn't Tillie say it was yourn?" Mr. Getz presently found voice to
ask.

"I tole her if she left it get put out I am addicted to novel readin',"
said the doctor glibly, and with evident relish, "it might spoil my
practice some. And Tillie she's that kind-hearted she was sorry far me!"

"And so you put her up to say it was Elviny's! You put her up to tell
lies to her pop!"

"Well, I never thought you 'd foller it up any, Jake, and try to get
ELVINY into trouble."

"Doc, I always knowed you was a blasPHEmer and that you didn't have no
religion. But I thought you had anyhow morals. And I didn't think, now,
you was a coward that way, to get behind a child and lie out of your
own evil deeds!"

"I'm that much a coward and a blasPHEmer, Jake, that I 'm goin' to add
the cost of that there book of mine where you burnt up, to your
doctor's bill, unlest you pass me your promise you 'll drop this here
subjec' and not bother Tillie with it no more."

The doctor had driven his victim into a corner. To yield a point in
family discipline or to pay the price of the property he had
destroyed--one of the two he must do. It was a most untoward
predicament for Jacob Getz.

"You had no right to lend that there Book to Tillie, Doc, and I ain't
payin' you a cent fur it!" he maintained.

"I jus' mean, Jake, I 'll make out my bill easy or stiff accordin' to
the way you pass your promise."

"If my word was no more better 'n yours, Doe, my passin' my promise
wouldn't help much!"

"That's all right, Jake. I don't set up to be religious and moral. I
ain't sayed my prayers since I am old enough a'ready to know how likely
I was, still, to kneel on a tack!"

"It's no wonder you was put off of church!" was the biting retort.

"Hold up there, Jake. I wasn't put off. I WENT off. I took myself off
of church before the brethren had a chanct to PUT me off."

"Sammy!" Mr. Getz suddenly and sharply admonished his little son, who
was sharpening his slate-pencil on the window-sill with a table-knife,
"you stop right aways sharpenin' that pencil! You dassent sharpen your
slate-pencils, do you hear? It wastes 'em so!"

Sammy hastily laid down the knife and thrust the pencil into his pocket.

Mr. Getz turned again to the doctor and inquired irritably, "What is it
to YOU if I teach my own child to mind me or not, I'd like to know?"

"Because she's been bothered into a sickness with this here thing
a'ready, and it 's time it stopped now!"

"It was you started it, leavin' her lend the book off of you!"

"That's why I feel fur sparin' her some more trouble, seein' I was the
instrument in the hands of Providence fur gettin' her into all this
here mess. See?"

"I can't be sure when TO know if you're lyin' or not," said Mr. Getz
helplessly.

"Mebbe you can't, Jake. Sometimes I'm swangfid if I'm sure, still,
myself. But there's one thing you KIN be cocksure of--and that's a big
doctor-bill unlest you do what I sayed."

"Now that I know who she lent the book off of there ain't nothin' to
bother her about," sullenly granted Mr. Getz. "And as fur
punishment--she's had punishment a-plenty, I guess, in her bein' so
sick."

"All right," the doctor said magnanimously. "There's one thing I 'll
give you, Jake: you're a man of your word, if you ARE a Dutch hog!"

"A--WHATEVER?" Mr. Getz angrily demanded.

"And I don't see," the doctor complacently continued, rising and
pulling his hat down to his eyebrows, preparatory to leaving, "where
Tillie gets her fibbin' from. Certainly not from her pop."

"I don't mind her ever tellin' me no lie before."

"Och, Jake, you drive your children to lie to you, the way you bring
'em up to be afraid of you. They GOT to lie, now and again, to a feller
like you! Well, well," he soothingly added as he saw the black look in
the father's face at the airing of such views in the presence of his
children, "never mind, Jake, it 's all in the day's work!"

He turned for a parting glance at Tillie. "She 's better. She 'll be
well till a day or two, now, and back to school--IF she's kep' quiet,
and her mind ain't bothered any. Now, GOOD-by to yous."




VII

"THE LAST DAY OF PUMP-EYE"


For a long time after her unhappy experiences with "Ivanhoe" Tillie did
not again venture to transgress against her father's prohibition of
novels. But her fear of the family strap, although great, did not equal
the keenness of her mental hunger, and was not sufficient, therefore,
to put a permanent check upon her secret midnight reading, though it
did lead her to take every precaution against detection. Miss Margaret
continued to lend her books and magazines from time to time, and in
spite of the child's reluctance to risk involving the teacher in
trouble with the School Board through her father, she accepted them.
And so during all this winter, through her love for books and her
passionate devotion to her teacher, the little girl reveled in feasts
of fancy and emotion and this term at school was the first season of
real happiness her young life had ever known.

Once on her return from school the weight of a heavy volume had proved
too great a strain on her worn and thin undergarment during the long
walk home; the skirt had torn away from the band, and as she entered
the kitchen, her stepmother discovered the book. Tillie pleaded with
her not to tell her father, and perhaps she might have succeeded in
gaining a promise of secrecy had it not happened that just at the
critical moment her father walked into the kitchen.

Of course, then the book was handed over to him, and Tillie with it.

"Did you lend this off the Doc again?" her father sternly demanded, the
fated book in one hand and Tillie's shoulder grasped in the other.

Tillie hated to utter the lie. She hoped she had modified her
wickedness a bit by answering with a nod of her head.

"What's he mean, throwin' away so much money on books?" Mr. Getz took
time in his anger to wonder. He read the title, "'Last Days of
Pump-eye.' Well!" he exclaimed, "this here's the last HOUR of this here
'Pump-eye'! In the stove she goes! I don't owe the Doc no doctor's bill
NOW, and I'd like to see him make me pay him fur these here novels he
leaves you lend off of him!"

"Please, please, pop!" Tillie gasped, "don't burn it. Give it back
to--him! I won't read it--I won't bring home no more books of--hisn!
Only, please, pop, don't burn it--please!"

For answer, he drew her with him as he strode to the fireplace. "I'm
burnin' every book you bring home, do you hear?" he exclaimed; but
before he could make good his words, the kitchen door was suddenly
opened, and Sammy's head was poked in, with the announcement, "The
Doc's buggy's comin' up the road!" The door banged shut again, but
instantly Tillie wrenched her shoulder free from her father's hand,
flew out of doors and dashed across the "yard" to the front gate. Her
father's voice followed her, calling to her from the porch to "come
right aways back here!" Unheeding, she frantically waved to the doctor
in his approaching buggy. Sammy, with a bevy of small brothers and
sisters, to whom, no less than to their parents, the passing of a
"team" was an event not to be missed, were all crowded close to the
fence.

"Some one sick again?" inquired the doctor as he drew up at Tillie's
side.

"No, Doc--but," Tillie could hardly get her breath to speak, "pop's
goin' to burn up 'Last Days of Pompeii'; it's Miss Margaret's, and he
thinks it's yourn; come in and take it, Doc--PLEASE--and give it back
to Miss Margaret, won't you?"

"Sure!" The doctor was out of his buggy at her side in an instant.

"Oh!" breathed Tillie, "here's pop comin' with the book!"

"See me fix him!" chuckled the doctor. "He's so dumm he'll b'lee' most
anything. If I have much more dealin's with your pop, Tillie, I'll be
ketchin' on to how them novels is got up myself. And then mebbe I'll
LET doctorin', and go to novel-writin'!"

The doctor laughed with relish of his own joke, as Mr. Getz, grim with
anger, stalked up to the buggy.

"Look-ahere!" His voice was menacing as he held out the open book for
Tillie's inspection, and the child turned cold as she read on the
fly-leaf,

"Margaret Lind.

"From A. C. L.

Christmas, 18--"

"You sayed the Doc give it to you! Did you lend that other 'n' off of
Teacher too? Answer to me! I'll have her chased off of William Penn!
I'll bring it up at next Board meetin'!"

"Hold your whiskers, Jake, or they'll blow off! You're talkin' through
your hat! Don't be so dumm! Teacher she gev me that there book because
she passed me her opinion she don't stand by novel-readin'. She was
goin' to throw out that there book and I says I'd take it if she didn't
want it. So then I left Tillie borrow the loan of it."

"So that's how you come by it, is it?" Mr. Getz eyed the doctor with
suspicion. "How did you come by that there 'Iwanhoe'?"

"That there I bought at the second-hand book-store in there at
Lancaster one time. I ain't just so much fur books, but now and again I
like to buy one too, when I see 'em cheap."

"Well, here!" Mr. Getz tossed the book into tie buggy. "Take your old
'Pump-eye.' And clear out. If I can't make you stop tryin' to spoil my
child fur me, I can anyways learn her what she'll get oncet, if she
don't mind!"

Again his hand grasped Tillie's shoulder as he turned her about to take
her into the house.

"You better watch out, Jake Getz, or you 'll have another doctor's bill
to pay!" the doctor warningly called after him. "That girl of yourn
ain't strong enough to stand your rough handlin', and you'll find it
out some day--to your regret! You'd better go round back and let off
your feelin's choppin' wood fur missus, stead of hittin' that little
girl, you big dopple!"

Mr. Getz stalked on without deigning to reply, thrusting Tillie ahead
of him. The doctor jumped into his buggy and drove off.

His warning, however, was not wholly lost upon the father. Tillie's
recent illness had awakened remorse for the severe punishment he had
given her on the eve of it; and it had also touched his purse; and so,
though she did not escape punishment for this second and, therefore,
aggravated offense, it was meted out in stinted measure. And indeed, in
her relief and thankfulness at again saving Miss Margaret, the child
scarcely felt the few light blows which, in order that parental
authority be maintained, her father forced himself to inflict upon her.

In spite of these mishaps, however, Tillie continued to devour all the
books she could lay hold of and to run perilous risks for the sake of
the delight she found in them.

Miss Margaret stood to her for an image of every heroine of whom she
read in prose or verse, and for the realization of all the romantic
day-dreams in which, as an escape from the joyless and sordid life of
her home, she was learning to live and move and have her being.

Therefore it came to her as a heavy blow indeed when, just after the
Christmas holidays, her father announced to her on the first morning of
the reopening of school, "You best make good use of your time from now
on, Tillie, fur next spring I'm takin' you out of school."

Tillie's face turned white, and her heart thumped in her breast so that
she could not speak.

"You're comin' twelve year old," her father continued, "and you're
enough educated, now, to do you. Me and mom needs you at home."

It never occurred to Tillie to question or discuss a decision of her
father's. When he spoke it was a finality and one might as well rebel
at the falling of the snow or rain. Tillie's woe was utterly hopeless.

Her dreary, drooping aspect in the next few days was noticed by Miss
Margaret.

"Pop's takin' me out of school next spring," she heart-brokenly said
when questioned. "And when I can't see you every day, Miss Margaret, I
won't feel for nothin' no more. And I thought to get more educated than
what I am yet. I thought to go to school till I was anyways fourteen."

So keenly did Miss Margaret feel the outrage and wrong of Tillie's
arrested education, when her father could well afford to keep her in
school until she was grown, if he would; so stirred was her warm
Southern blood at the thought of the fate to which poor Tillie seemed
doomed--the fate of a household drudge with not a moment's leisure from
sunrise to night for a thought above the grubbing existence of a
domestic beast of burden (thus it all looked to this woman from
Kentucky), that she determined, cost what it might, to go herself to
appeal to Mr. Getz.

"He will have me 'chased off of William Penn,'" she ruefully told
herself. "And the loss just now of my munificent salary of thirty-five
dollars a month would be inconvenient. 'The Doc' said he would 'stand
by' me. But that might be more inconvenient still!" she thought, with a
little shudder. "I suppose this is an impolitic step for me to take.
But policy 'be blowed,' as the doctor would say! What are we in this
world for but to help one another? I MUST try to help little
Tillie--bless her!"

So the following Monday afternoon after school, found Miss Margaret, in
a not very complacent or confident frame of mind, walking with Tillie
and her younger brother and sister out over the snow-covered road to
the Getz farm to face the redoubtable head of the family.




VIII

MISS MARGARET'S ERRAND


It was half-past four o'clock when they reached the farm-house, and
they found the weary, dreary mother of the family cleaning fish at the
kitchen sink, one baby pulling at her skirts, another sprawling on the
floor at her feet.

Miss Margaret inquired whether she might see Mr. Getz.

"If you kin? Yes, I guess," Mrs. Getz dully responded. "Sammy, you go
to the barn and tell pop Teacher's here and wants to speak somepin to
him. Mister's out back," she explained to Miss Margaret, "choppin'
wood."

Sammy departed, and Miss Margaret sat down in the chair which Tillie
brought to her. Mrs. Getz went on with her work at the sink, while
Tillie set to work at once on a crock of potatoes waiting to be pared.

"You are getting supper very early, aren't you?' Miss Margaret asked,
with a friendly attempt to make conversation.

"No, we're some late. And I don't get it ready yet, I just start it.
We're getting strangers fur supper."

"Are you?"

"Yes. Some of Mister's folks from East Bethel."

"And are they strangers to you?"

Mrs. Getz paused in her scraping of the fish to consider the question.

"If they're strangers to us? Och, no. We knowed them this long time
a'ready. Us we're well acquainted. But to be sure they don't live with
us, so we say strangers is comin'. You don't talk like us; ain't?"

"N--not exactly."

"I do think now (you must excuse me sayin' so) but you do talk awful
funny," Mrs. Getz smiled feebly.

"I suppose I do," Miss Margaret sympathetically replied.

Mr. Getz now came into the room, and Miss Margaret rose to greet him.

"I'm much obliged to meet you," he said awkwardly as he shook hands
with her.

He glanced at the clock on the mantel, then turned to speak to Tillie.

"Are yous home long a'ready?" he inquired.

"Not so very long," Tillie answered with an apprehensive glance at the
clock.

"You're some late," he said, with a threatening little nod as he drew
up a chair in front of the teacher.

"It's my fault," Miss Margaret hastened to say, "I made the children
wait to bring me out here."

"Well," conceded Mr. Getz, "then we'll leave it go this time."

Miss Margaret now bent her mind to the difficult task of persuading
this stubborn Pennsylvania Dutchman to accept her views as to what was
for the highest and best good of his daughter. Eloquently she pointed
out to him that Tillie being a child of unusual ability, it would be
much better for her to have an education than to be forced to spend her
days in farm-house drudgery.

But her point of view, being entirely novel, did not at all appeal to
him.

"I never thought to leave her go to school after she was twelve. That's
long enough fur a girl; a female don't need much book-knowledge. It
don't help her none to keep house fur her mister."

"But she could become a teacher and then she could earn money," Miss
Margaret argued, knowing the force of this point with Mr. Getz.

"But look at all them years she'd have to spend learnin' herself to be
intelligent enough fur to be a teacher, when she might be helpin' me
and mom."

"But she could help you by paying board here when she becomes the New
Canaan teacher."

"That's so too," granted Mr. Getz; and Margaret grew faintly hopeful.

"But," he added, after a moment's heavy weighing of the matter, "it
would take too long to get her enough educated fur to be a teacher, and
I'm one of them," he maintained, "that holds a child is born to help
the parent, and not contrarywise--that the parent must do everything
fur the child that way."

"If you love your children, you must wish for their highest good," she
suggested, "and not trample on their best interests."

"But they have the right to work for their parents," he insisted. "You
needn't plague me to leave Tillie stay in school, Teacher. I ain't
leavin' her!"

"Do you think you have a right to bring children into the world only to
crush everything in them that is worth while?" Margaret dared to say to
him, her face flushed, her eyes bright with the intensity of her
feelings.

"That's all blamed foolishness!" Jake Getz affirmed.

"Do you think that your daughter, when she is grown and realizes all
that she has lost, will 'rise up and call you blessed'?" she persisted.

"Do I think? Well, what I think is that it's a good bit more particular
that till she's growed she's been learnt to work and serve them that
raised her. And what I think is that a person ain't fit to be a teacher
of the young that sides along with the childern ag'in' their parents."

Miss Margaret felt that it was time she took her leave.

"Look-ahere oncet, Teacher!" Mr. Getz suddenly said, fixing on her a
suspicious and searching look, "do you uphold to novel-readin'?"

Miss Margaret hesitated perceptibly. She must shield Tillie even more
than herself. "What a question to ask of the teacher at William Penn!"
she gravely answered.

"I know it ain't such a wery polite question," returned Mr. Getz, half
apologetically. "But the way you side along with childern ag'in' their
parents suspicions me that the Doc was lyin' when he sayed them
novel-books was hisn. Now was they hisn or was they yourn?"

Miss Margaret rose with a look and air of injury. "'Mr. Getz, no one
ever before asked me such questions. Indeed," she said, in a tone of
virtuous primness, "I can't answer such questions."

"All the same," sullenly asserted Mr. Getz, "I wouldn't put it a-past
you after the way you passed your opinion to me this after!"

"I must be going," returned Miss Margaret with dignity.

Mrs. Getz came forward from the stove with a look and manner of apology
for her husband's rudeness to the visitor.

"What's your hurry? Can't you stay and eat along? We're not anyways
tired of you."

"Thank you. But they will be waiting for me at the hotel," said Miss
Margaret gently.

Tillie, a bit frightened, also hovered near, her wistful little face
pale. Miss Margaret drew her to her and held her at her side, as she
looked up into the face of Mr. Getz.

"I am very, very sorry, Mr. Getz, that my visit has proved so
fruitless. You don't realize what a mistake you are making."

"That ain't the way a teacher had ought to talk before a scholar to its
parent!" indignantly retorted Mr. Getz. "And I'm pretty near sure it
was all the time YOU where lent them Books to Tillie--corruptin' the
young! I can tell you right now, I ain't votin' fur you at next
election! And the way I wote is the way two other members always wotes
still--and so you'll lose your job at William Penn! That's what you get
fur tryin' to interfere between a parent and a scholar! I hope it'll
learn you!"

"And when is the next election?" imperturbably asked Miss Margaret.

"Next month on the twenty-fifth of February. Then you'll see oncet!"

"According to the terms of my agreement with the Board I hold my
position until the first of April unless the Board can show reasons why
it should be taken from me. What reasons can you show?"

"That you side along with the--"

"That I try to persuade you not to take your child out of school when
you can well afford to keep her there. That's what you have to tell the
Board."

Mr. Getz stared at her, rather baffled. The children also stared in
wide-eyed curiosity, realizing with wonder that Teacher was "talkin' up
to pop!" It was a novel and interesting spectacle.

"Well, anyways," continued Mr. Getz, rallying, "I'll bring it up in
Board meeting that you mebbe leave the scholars borry the loan of
novels off of you."

"But you can't prove it. I shall hold the Board to their contract. They
can't break it."

Miss Margaret was taking very high ground, of which, in fact, she was
not at all sure.

Mr. Getz gazed at her with mingled anger and fascination. Here was
certainly a new species of woman! Never before had any teacher at
William Penn failed to cringe to his authority as a director.

"This much I KIN say," he finally declared. "Mebbe you kin hold us to
that there contract, but you won't, anyways, be elected to come back
here next term! That's sure! You'll have to look out fur another place
till September a'ready. And we won't give you no recommend, neither, to
get yourself another school with!"

Just here it was that Miss Margaret had her triumph, which she was
quite human enough to thoroughly enjoy.

"You won't have a chance to reelect me, for I am going to resign at the
end of the term. I am going to be married the week after school closes."

Never had Mr. Getz felt himself so foiled. Never before had any one
subject in any degree to his authority so neatly eluded a reckoning at
his hands. A tingling sensation ran along his arm and he had to
restrain his impulse to lift it, grasp this slender creature standing
so fearlessly before him, and thoroughly shake her.

"Who's the party?" asked Mrs. Getz, curiously. "It never got put out
that you was promised. I ain't heard you had any steady comp'ny. To be
sure, some says the Doc likes you pretty good. Is it now, mebbe, the
Doc? But no," she shook her head; "Mister's sister Em at the hotel
would have tole me. Is it some one where lives around here?"

"I don't mind telling you," Miss Margaret graciously answered,
realizing that her reply would greatly increase Mr. Getz's sense of
defeat. "It is Mr. Lansing, a nephew of the State Superintendent of
schools and a professor at the Millersville Normal School."

"Well, now just look!" Mrs. Getz exclaimed wonderingly. "Such a tony
party! The State Superintendent's nephew! That's even a more way-up
person than what the county superintendent is! Ain't? Well, who'd 'a'
thought!"

"Miss Margaret!" Tillie breathed, gazing up at her, her eyes wide and
strained with distress, "if you go away and get married, won't I NEVER
see you no more?"

"But, dear, I shall live so near--at the Normal School only a few miles
away. You can come to see me often."

"But pop won't leave me, Miss Margaret--it costs too expensive to go
wisiting, and I got to help with the work, still. O Miss Margaret!"
Tillie sobbed, as Margaret sat down and held the clinging child to her,
"I'll never see you no more after you go away!"

"Tillie, dear!" Margaret tried to soothe her. "I 'll come to see YOU,
then, if you can't come to see me. Listen, Tillie,--I've just thought
of something."

Suddenly she put the little girl from her and stood up.

"Let me take Tillie to live with me next fall at the Normal School.
Won't you do that, Mr. Getz!" she urged him. "She could go to the
preparatory school, and if we stay at Millersville, Dr. Lansing and I
would try to have her go through the Normal School and graduate. Will
you consent to it, Mr. Getz?"

"And who'd be payin' fur all this here?" Mr. Getz ironically inquired.

"Tillie could earn her own way as my little maid--helping me keep my
few rooms in the Normal School building and doing my mending and
darning for me. And you know after she was graduated she could earn her
living as a teacher."

Margaret saw the look of feverish eagerness with which Tillie heard
this proposal and awaited the outcome.

Before her husband could answer, Mrs. Getz offered a weak protest.

"I hear the girls hired in town have to set away back in the kitchen
and never dare set front--always away back, still. Tillie wouldn't like
that. Nobody would."

"But I shall live in a small suite of rooms at the school--a library, a
bedroom, a bath-room, and a small room next to mine that can be
Tillie's bedroom. We shall take our meals in the school dining-room."

"Well, that mebbe she wouldn't mind. But 'way back she wouldn't be
satisfied to set. That's why the country girls don't like to hire in
town, because they dassent set front with the missus. Here last
market-day Sophy Haberbush she conceited she'd like oncet to hire out
in town, and she ast me would I go with her after market to see a lady
that advertised in the newspaper fur a girl, and I sayed no, I wouldn't
mind. So I went along. But Sophy she wouldn't take the place fur all.
She ast the lady could she have her country company, Sundays--he was
her company fur four years now and she wouldn't like to give him up
neither. She tole the lady her company goes, still, as early as eleven.
But the lady sayed her house must be darkened and locked at half-past
ten a'ready. She ast me was I Sophy's mother and I sayed no, I'm
nothin' to her but a neighbor woman. And she tole Sophy, when they eat,
still, Sophy she couldn't eat along. I guess she thought Sophy
Haberbush wasn't good enough. But she's as good as any person. Her
mother's name is Smith before she was married, and them Smiths was well
fixed. She sayed Sophy'd have to go in and out the back way and never
out the front. Why, they say some of the town people's that proud, if
the front door-bell rings and the missus is standin' right there by it,
she won't open that there front door but wants her hired girl to come
clear from the kitchen to open it. Yes, you mightn't b'lee me, but I
heerd that a'ready. And Mary Hertzog she tole me when she hired out
there fur a while one winter in town, why, one day she went to the
missus and she says, 'There's two ladies in the parlor and I tole 'em
you was helpin' in the kitchen,' and the missus she ast her, 'What fur
did you tell 'em that? Why, I'm that ashamed I don't know how to walk
in the parlor!' And Mary she ast the colored gentleman that worked
there, what, now, did the missus mean?--and he sayed, 'Well, Mary,
you've a heap to learn about the laws of society. Don't you know you
must always leave on the ladies ain't doin' nothin'?' Mary sayed that
colored gentleman was so wonderful intelligent that way. He'd been a
restaurant waiter there fur a while and so was throwed in with the best
people, and he was, now, that tony and high-minded! Och, I wouldn't
hire in town! To be sure, Mister can do what he wants. Well," she
added, "it's a quarter till five--I guess I'll put the peppermint on a
while. Mister's folks'll be here till five."

She moved away to the stove, and Margaret resumed her assault upon the
stubborn ignorance of the father.

"Think, Mr. Getz, what a difference all this would make in Tillie's
life," she urged.

"And you'd be learnin' her all them years to up and sass her pop when
she was growed and earnin' her own livin'!" he objected.

"I certainly would not."

"And all them years till she graduated she'd be no use to us where owns
her," he said, as though his child were an item of live stock on the
farm.

"She could come home to you in the summer vacations," Margaret
suggested.

"Yes, and she'd come that spoilt we couldn't get no work out of her.
No, if I hire her out winters, it'll be where I kin draw her wages
myself--where's my right as her parent. What does a body have childern
fur? To get no use out of 'em? It ain't no good you're plaguin' me. I
ain't leavin' her go. Tillie!" he commanded the child with a twirl of
his thumb and a motion of his head; "go set the supper-table!"

Margaret laid her arm about Tillie's shoulder. "Well, dear," she said
sorrowfully, "we must give it all up, I suppose. But don't lose heart,
Tillie. I shall not go out of your life. At least we can write to each
other. Now," she concluded, bending and kissing her, "I must go, but
you and I shall have some talks before you stop school, and before I go
away from New Canaan."

She pressed her lips to Tillie's in a long kiss, while the child clung
to her in passionate devotion. Mr. Getz looked on with dull
bewilderment. He knew, in a vague way, that every word the teacher
spoke to the child, no less than those useless caresses, was "siding
along with the scholar ag'in' the parent," and yet he could not
definitely have stated just how. He was quite sure that she would not
dare so to defy him did she not know that she had the whip-handle in
the fact that she did not want her "job" next year, and that the Board
could not, except for definite offenses, break their contract with her.
It was only in view of these considerations that she played her game of
"plaguing" him by championing Tillie. Jacob Getz was incapable of
recognizing in the teacher's attitude toward his child an unselfish
interest and love.

So, in dogged, sullen silence, he saw this extraordinary young woman
take her leave and pass out of his house.




IX

"I'LL DO MY DARN BEST, TEACHER!"


It soon "got put out" in New Canaan that Miss Margaret was "promised,"
and the doctor was surprised to find how much the news depressed him.

"I didn't know, now, how much I was stuck on her! To think I can't have
her even if I do want her" (up to this time he had had moments now and
then of not feeling absolutely sure of his inclination), "and that
she's promised to one of them tony Millersville Normal professors! If
it don't beat all! Well," he drew a long, deep sigh as, lounging back
in his buggy, he let his horse jog at his own gait along the muddy
country road, "I jus' don't feel fur NOTHIN' to-day. She was now
certainly a sweet lady," he thought pensively, as though alluding to
one who had died. "If there's one sek I do now like, it's the
female--and she was certainly a nice party!"

In the course of her career at William Penn, Miss Margaret had
developed such a genuine fondness for the shaggy, good-natured,
generous, and unscrupulous little doctor, that before she abandoned her
post at the end of the term, and shook the dust of New Canaan from her
feet, she took him into her confidence and begged him to take care of
Tillie.

"She is an uncommon child, doctor, and she must--I am determined that
she must--be rescued from the life to which that father of hers would
condemn her. You must help me to bring it about."

"Nothin' I like better, Teacher, than gettin' ahead of Jake Getz," the
doctor readily agreed. "Or obligin' YOU. To tell you the truth,--and it
don't do no harm to say it now,--if you hadn't been promised, I was
a-goin' to ast you myself! You took notice I gave you an inwitation
there last week to go buggy-ridin' with me. That was leadin' up to it.
After that Sunday night you left me set up with you, I never conceited
you was promised a'ready to somebody else--and you even left me set
with my feet on your chair-rounds!" The doctor's tone was a bit injured.

"Am I to understand," inquired Miss Margaret, wonderingly, "that the
permission to sit with one's feet on the rounds of a lady's chair is
taken in New Canaan as an indication of her favor--and even of her
inclination to matrimony?"

"It's looked to as meanin' gettin' down to BIZ!" the doctor affirmed.

"Then," meekly, "I humbly apologize."

"That's all right," generously granted the doctor, "if you didn't know
no better. But to be sure, I'm some disappointed."

"I'm sorry for that!"

"Would you of mebbe said yes, if you hadn't of been promised a'ready to
one of them tony Millersville Normal professors," the doctor inquired
curiously--"me bein' a professional gentleman that way?"

"I'm sure," replied this daughter of Eve, who wished to use the doctor
in her plans for Tillie, "I should have been highly honored."

The rueful, injured look on the doctor's face cleared to flattered
complacency. "Well," he said, "I'd like wery well to do what you ast
off of me fur little Tillie Getz. But, Teacher, what can a body do
against a feller like Jake Getz? A body can't come between a man and
his own offspring."

"I know it," replied Margaret, sadly. "But just keep a little watch
over Tillie and help her whenever you see that you can. Won't you?
Promise me that you will. You have several times helped her out of
trouble this winter. There may be other similar opportunities. Between
us, doctor, we may be able to make something of Tillie."

The doctor shook his head. "I'll do my darn best, Teacher, but Jake
Getz he's that wonderful set. A little girl like Tillie couldn't never
make no headway with Jake Getz standin' in her road. But anyways,
Teacher, I pass you my promise I'll do what I can."

Miss Margaret's parting advice and promises to Tillie so fired the
girl's ambition and determination that some of the sting and anguish of
parting from her who stood to the child for all the mother-love that
her life had missed, was taken away in the burning purpose with which
she found herself imbued, to bend her every thought and act in all the
years to come to the reaching of that glorious goal which her idolized
teacher set before her.

"As soon as you are old enough," Miss Margaret admonished her, "you
must assert yourself. Take your rights--your right to an education, to
some girlish pleasures, to a little liberty. No matter what you have to
suffer in the struggle, FIGHT IT OUT, for you will suffer more in the
end if you let yourself be defrauded of everything which makes it worth
while to have been born. Don't let yourself be sacrificed for those who
not only will never appreciate it, but who will never be worth it. I
think I do you no harm by telling you that you are worth all the rest
of your family put together. The self-sacrifice which pampers the
selfishness of others is NOT creditable. It is weak. It is unworthy.
Remember what I say to you--make a fight for your rights, just as soon
as you are old enough--your right to be a woman instead of a chattel
and a drudge. And meantime, make up for your rebellion by being as
obedient and helpful and affectionate to your parents as you can be,
without destroying yourself."

Such sentiments and ideas were almost a foreign language to Tillie, and
yet, intuitively, she understood the import of them. In her loneliness,
after Miss Margaret's departure, she treasured and brooded over them
day and night; and very much as the primitive Christian courted
martyrdom, her mind dwelt, with ever-growing resolution, upon the
thought of the heroic courage with which, in the years to come, she
would surely obey them.

Miss Margaret had promised Tillie that she would write to her, and the
child, overlooking the serious difficulties in the way, had eagerly
promised in return, to answer her letters.

Once a week Mr. Getz called for mail at the village store, and Miss
Margaret's first letter was laboriously read by him on his way out to
the farm.

He found it, on the whole, uninteresting, but he vaguely gathered from
one or two sentences that the teacher, even at the distance of five
miles, was still trying to "plague" him by "siding along with his child
ag'in' her parent."

"See here oncet," he said to Tillie, striding to the kitchen stove on
his return home, the letter in his hand: "this here goes after them
novel-books, in the fire! I ain't leavin' that there woman spoil you
with no such letters like this here. Now you know!"

The gleam of actual wickedness in Tillie's usually soft eyes, as she
saw that longed-for letter tossed into the flames, would have startled
her father had he seen it. The girl trembled from head to foot and
turned a deathly white.

"I hate you, hate you, hate you!" her hot heart was saying as she
literally glared at her tormentor. "I'll never forget this--never,
never; I'll make you suffer for it--I will, I will!"

But her white lips were dumb, and her impotent passion, having no other
outlet, could only tear and bruise her own heart as all the long
morning she worked in a blind fury at her household tasks.

But after dinner she did an unheard-of thing. Without asking
permission, or giving any explanation to either her father or her
stepmother, she deliberately abandoned her usual Saturday afternoon
work of cleaning up (she said to herself that she did not care if the
house rotted), and dressing herself, she walked straight through the
kitchen before her stepmother's very eyes, and out of the house.

Her father was out in the fields when she undertook this high-handed
step; and her mother was so dumb with amazement at such unusual
behavior that she offered but a weak protest.

"What'll pop say to your doin' somepin like this here!" she called
querulously after Tillie as she followed her across the kitchen to the
door. "He'll whip you, Tillie; and here's all the sweepin' to be did--"

There was a strange gleam in Tillie's eyes before which the woman
shrank and held her peace. The girl swept past her, almost walked over
several of the children sprawling on the porch, and went out of the
gate and up the road toward the village.

"What's the matter of her anyways?" the woman wonderingly said to
herself as she went back to her work. "Is it that she's so spited about
that letter pop burnt up? But what's a letter to get spited about?
There was enough worse things'n that that she took off her pop without
actin' like this. Och, but he'll whip her if he gets in here before she
comes back. Where's she goin' to, I wonder! Well, I never did! I would
not be HER if her pop finds how she went off and let her work! I wonder
shall I mebbe tell him on her or not, if he don't get in till she's
home a'ready?"

She meditated upon this problem of domestic economy as she mechanically
did her chores, her reflections on Tillie taking an unfriendly color as
she felt the weight of her stepdaughter's abandoned tasks added to the
already heavy burden of her own.

It was to see the doctor that Tillie had set out for the village hotel.
He was the only person in all her little world to whom she felt she
could turn for help in her suffering. Her "Aunty Em," the landlady at
the hotel, was, she knew, very fond of her; but Tillie never thought of
appealing to her in her trouble.

"I never thought when I promised Miss Margaret I'd write to her still
where I'd get the stamps from, and the paper and envelops," Tillie
explained to the doctor as they sat in confidential consultation in the
hotel parlor, the child's white face of distress a challenge to his
faithful remembrance of his promise to the teacher. "And now I got to
find some way to let her know I didn't see her letter to me. Doc, will
you write and tell her for me?" she pleaded.

"My hand-writin' ain't just so plain that way, Tillie. But I'll give
you all the paper and envelops and stamps you want to write on yourself
to her."

"Oh, Doc!" Tillie gazed at him in fervent gratitude. "But mebbe I
hadn't ought to take 'em when I can't pay you."

"That's all right. If it'll make you feel some easier, you kin pay me
when you're growed up and teachin'. Your Miss Margaret she's bound to
make a teacher out of you--or anyways a educated person. And then you
kin pay me when you're got your nice education to make your livin'
with."

"That's what we'll do then!" Tillie joyfully accepted this proposal.
"I'll keep account and pay you back every cent, Doc, when I'm earnin'
my own livin'."

"All right. That's settled then. Now, fur your gettin' your letters,
still, from Teacher. How are we goin' to work that there? I'll tell
you, Tillie!" he slapped the table as an idea came to him. "You write
her off a letter and tell her she must write her letters to you in a
envelop directed to ME. And I'll see as you get 'em all right, you bet!
Ain't?"

"Oh, Doc!" Tillie was affectionately grateful. "You are so kind to me!
What would I do without you?" Tears choked her voice, filled her eyes,
and rolled down her face.

"Och, that's all right," he patted her shoulder. "Ain't no better fun
goin' fur me than gettin' ahead of that mean old Jake Getz!" Tillie
drew back a bit shocked; but she did not protest.

Carrying in her bosom a stamped envelop, a sheet of paper and a pencil,
the child walked home in a very different frame of mind from that in
which she had started out. She shuddered as she remembered how wickedly
rebellious had been her mood that morning. Never before had such hot
and dreadful feelings and thoughts burned in her heart and brain. In an
undefined way, the growing girl realized that such a state of mind and
heart was unworthy her sacred friendship with Miss Margaret.

"I want to be like her--and she was never ugly in her feelings like
what I was all morning!"

When she reached home, she so effectually made up for lost time in the
vigor with which she attacked the Saturday cleaning that Mrs. Getz,
with unusual forbearance, decided not to tell her father of her
insubordination.

Tillie wrote her first letter to Miss Margaret, ty stealth, at midnight.




X

ADAM SCHUNK'S FUNERAL


A crucial struggle with her father, to which both Tillie and Miss
Margaret had fearfully looked forward, came about much sooner than
Tillie had anticipated. The occasion of it, too, was not at all what
she had expected and even planned it to be.

It was her conversion, just a year after she had been taken out of
school, to the ascetic faith of the New Mennonites that precipitated
the crisis, this conversion being wrought by a sermon which she heard
at the funeral of a neighboring farmer.

A funeral among the farmers of Lancaster County is a festive occasion,
the most popular form of dissipation known, bringing the whole
population forth as in some regions they turn out to a circus.

Adam Schank's death, having been caused by his own hand in a fit of
despair over the loss of some money he had unsuccessfully invested, was
so sudden and shocking that the effect produced on Canaan Township was
profound, not to say awful.

As for Tillie, it was the first event of the kind that had ever come
within her experience, and the religious sentiments in which she had
been reared aroused in her, in common with the rest of the community, a
superstitious fear before this sudden and solemn calling to judgment of
one whom they had all known so familiarly, and who had so wickedly
taken his own life.

During the funeral at the farm-house, she sat in the crowded parlor
where the coffin stood, and though surrounded by people, she felt
strangely alone with this weird mystery of Death which for the first
time she was realizing.

Her mother was in the kitchen with the other farmers' wives of the
neighborhood who were helping to prepare the immense quantity of food
necessary to feed the large crowd that always attended a funeral, every
one of whom, by the etiquette of the county, remained to supper after
the services.

Her father, being among the hired hostlers of the occasion, was outside
in the barn. Mr. Getz was head hostler at every funeral of the
district, being detailed to assist and superintend the work of the
other half dozen men employed to take charge of the "teams" that
belonged to the funeral guests, who came in families, companies, and
crowds. That so well-to-do a farmer as Jake Getz, one who owned his
farm "clear," should make a practice of hiring out as a funeral
hostler, with the humbler farmers who only rented the land they tilled,
was one of the facts which gave him his reputation for being "keen on
the penny."

Adam Schunk, deceased, had been an "Evangelical," but his wife being a
New Mennonite, a sect largely prevailing in southeastern Pennsylvania,
the funeral services were conducted by two ministers, one of them a New
Mennonite and the other an Evangelical. It was the sermon of the New
Mennonite that led to Tillie's conversion.

The New Mennonites being the most puritanic and exclusive of all sects,
earnestly regarding themselves as the custodians of the only absolutely
true light, their ministers insist on certain prerogatives as the
condition of giving their services at a funeral. A New Mennonite
preacher will not consent to preach after a "World's preacher"--he must
have first voice. It was therefore the somber doctrine of fear preached
by the Reverend Brother Abram Underwocht which did its work upon
Tillie's conscience so completely that the gentler Gospel set forth
afterward by the Evangelical brother was scarcely heeded.

The Reverend Brother Abram Underwocht, in the "plain" garb of the
Mennonite sect, took his place at the foot of the stairway opening out
of the sitting-room, and gave expression to his own profound sense of
the solemnity of the occasion by a question introductory to his sermon,
and asked in a tone of heavy import: "If this ain't a blow, what is it?"

Handkerchiefs were promptly produced and agitated faces hidden therein.

Why this was a "blow" of more than usual force, Brother Underwocht
proceeded to explain in a blood-curdling talk of more than an hour's
length, in which he set forth the New Mennonite doctrine that none
outside of the only true faith of Christ, as held and taught by the New
Mennonites, could be saved from the fire which cannot be quenched. With
the heroism born of deep conviction, he stoically disregarded the
feelings of the bereaved family, and affirmed that the deceased having
belonged to one of "the World's churches," no hope could be entertained
for him, nor could his grieving widow look forward to meeting him again
in the heavenly home to which she, a saved New Mennonite, was destined.

Taking advantage of the fact that at least one third of those present
were non-Mennonites, Brother Underwoeht followed the usual course of
the preachers of his sect on such an occasion, and made of his funeral
sermon an exposition of the whole field of New Mennonite faith and
practice. Beginning in the Garden of Eden, he graphically described
that renowned locality as a type of the Paradise from which Adam Schunk
and others who did not "give themselves up" were excluded.

"It must have been a magnificent scenery to Almighty Gawd," he said,
referring to the beauties of man's first Paradise. "But how soon to be
snatched by sin from man's mortal vision, when Eve started that
conversation with the enemy of her soul! Beloved, that was an
unfortunate circumstance! And you that are still out of Christ and in
the world, have need to pray fur Gawd's help, his aid, and his
assistance, to enable you to overcome the enemy who that day was turned
loose upon the world--that Gawd may see fit to have you when you're
done here a'ready. Heed the solemn warning of this poor soul now laying
before you cold in death!

    "'Know that you're a transient creature,
    Soon to fade and pass away."

"Even Lazarus, where [who] was raised to life, was not raised fur never
to die no more!"

The only comfort he could offer to this stricken household was that HE
knew how bad they felt, having had a brother who had died with equal
suddenness and also without hope, as he "had suosode hisself with a
gun."

This lengthy sermon was followed by a hymn, sung a line at a time at
the preacher's dictation:

    "The body we now to the grave will commit,
    To there see corruption till Jesus sees fit
    A spirit'al body for it to prepare,
    Which henceforth then shall immortality wear."

The New Mennonites being forbidden by the "Rules of the Meeting" ever
to hear a prayer or sermon by one who is not "a member," it was
necessary, at the end of the Reverend Abram Underwocht's sermon, for
all the Mennonites present to retire to a room apart and sit behind
closed doors, while the Evangelical brother put forth his false
doctrine.

So religiously stirred was Tillie by the occasion that she was strongly
tempted to rise and follow into the kitchen those who were thus
retiring from the sound of the false teacher's voice. But her
conversion not yet being complete, she kept her place.

No doubt it was not so much the character of Brother Underwocht's New
Mennonite sermon which effected this state in Tillie as that the
spiritual condition of the young girl, just awakening to her womanhood,
with all its mysterious craving, its religious brooding, its emotional
susceptibility, led her to respond with her whole soul to the first
appeal to her feelings.

Absorbed in her mournful contemplation of her own deep "conviction of
sin," she did not heed the singing, led by the Evangelical brother, of
the hymn,

    "Rock of Ages, clept for me,"

nor did she hear a word of his discourse.

At the conclusion of the house services, and before the journey to the
graveyard, the supper was served, first to the mourners, and then to
all those who expected to follow the body to the grave. The third
table, for those who had prepared the meal, and the fourth, for the
hostlers, were set after the departure of the funeral procession.

Convention has prescribed that the funeral meal shall consist
invariably of cold meat, cheese, all sorts of stewed dried fruits,
pickles, "lemon rice" (a dish never omitted), and coffee.

As no one household possesses enough dishes for such an occasion, two
chests of dishes owned by the Mennonite church are sent to the house of
mourning whenever needed by a member of the Meeting.

The Mennonites present suffered a shock to their feelings upon the
appearance of the widow of the deceased Adam Schunk, for--unprecedented
circumstance!--she wore over her black Mennonite hood a crape veil!
This was an innovation nothing short of revolutionary, and the brethren
and sisters, to whom their prescribed form of dress was sacred, were
bewildered to know how they ought to regard such a digression from
their rigid customs.

"I guess Mandy's proud of herself with her weil," Tillie's stepmother
whispered to her as she gave the girl a tray of coffee-cups to deliver
about the table.

But Tillie's thoughts were inward bent, and she heeded not what went on
about her. Fear of death and the judgment, a longing to find the peace
which could come only with an assured sense of her salvation, darkness
as to how that peace might be found, a sense of the weakness of her
flesh and spirit before her father's undoubted opposition to her
"turning plain," as well as his certain refusal to supply the
wherewithal for her Mennonite garb, should she indeed be led of the
Spirit to "give herself up,"--all these warring thoughts and emotions
stamped their lines upon the girl's sweet, troubled countenance, as,
blind and deaf to her surroundings, she lent her helping hand almost as
one acting in a trance.




XI

"POP! I FEEL TO BE PLAIN"


The psychical and, considering the critical age of the young girl, the
physiological processes by which Tillie was finally led to her
conversion it is not necessary to analyze; for the experience is too
universal, and differs too slightly in individual cases, to require
comment. Perhaps in Tillie's case it was a more intense and permanent
emotion than with the average convert. Otherwise, deep and earnest
though it was with her, it was not unique.

The New Mennonite sermon which had been the instrument to determine the
channel in which should flow the emotional tide of her awakening
womanhood, had convinced her that if she would be saved, she dare not
compromise with the world by joining one of those churches as, for
instance, the Methodist or the Evangelical, which permitted every sort
of worldly indulgence,--fashionable dress, attendance at the circus,
voting at the polls, musical instruments, "pleasure-seeking," and many
other things which the Word of God forbade. She must give herself up to
the Lord absolutely and entirely, forswearing all the world's
allurements. The New Mennonites alone, of all the Christian sects,
lived up to this scriptural ideal, and with them Tillie would cast her
lot.

This austere body of Christians could not so easily have won her heart
had it forbidden her cherished ambition, constantly encouraged and
stimulated by Miss Margaret, to educate herself. Fortunately for her
peace of mind, the New Mennonites were not, like the Amish, "enemies to
education," though to be sure, as the preacher, Brother Abram
Underwocht, reminded her in her private talk with him, "To be dressy,
or TOO well educated, or stylish, didn't belong to Christ and the
apostles; they were plain folks."

It was in the lull of work that came, even in the Getz family, on
Sunday afternoon, that Tillie, summoning to her aid all the fervor of
her new-found faith, ventured to face the ordeal of opening up with her
father the subject of her conversion.

He was sitting on the kitchen porch, dozing over a big Bible spread
open on his knee. The children were playing on the lawn, and Mrs. Getz
was taking her Sunday afternoon nap on the kitchen settee.

Tillie seated herself on the porch step at her father's feet. Her eyes
were clear and bright, but her face burned, and her heart beat heavily
in her heaving bosom.

"Pop!" she timidly roused him from his dozing.

"Heh?" he muttered gruffly, opening his eyes and lifting his head.

"Pop, I got to speak somepin to you."

An unusual note in her voice arrested him, and, wide awake now, he
looked down at her inquiringly.

"Well? What, then?"

"Pop! I feel to be plain."

"YOU! Feel fur turnin' plain! Why, you ain't old enough to know the
meanin' of it! What d' you want about that there theology?"

"I'm fourteen, pop. And the Spirit has led me to see the light. I have
gave myself up," she affirmed quietly, but with a quiver in her voice.

"You have gave yourself up!" her father incredulously repeated.

"Yes, sir. And I'm loosed of all things that belong to the world. And
now I feel fur wearin' the plain dress, fur that's according to
Scripture, which says, 'all is wanity!'"

Never before in her life had Tillie spoken so many words to her father
at one time, and he stared at her in astonishment.

"Yes, you're growin' up, that's so. I ain't noticed how fast you was
growin'. It don't seem no time since you was born. But it's fourteen
years back a'ready--yes, that's so. Well, Tillie, if you feel fur
joinin' church, you're got to join on to the Evangelicals. I ain't
leavin' you follow no such nonsense as to turn plain. That don't belong
to us Getzes. We're Evangelicals this long time a'ready."

"Aunty Em was a Getz, and SHE's gave herself up long ago."

"Well, she's the only one by the name Getz that I ever knowed to be so
foolish! I'm an Evangelical, and what's good enough fur your pop will
do YOU, I guess!"

"The Evangelicals ain't according to Scripture, pop. They have wine at
the Communion, and the Bible says, 'Taste not, handle not,' and 'Look
not upon the wine when it is red.'"

That she should criticize the Evangelicals and pronounce them
unscriptural was disintegrating to all his ideas of the subjection, of
children. His sun-burned face grew darker.

"Mebbe you don't twist that there Book! Gawd he wouldn't of created
wine to be made if it would be wrong fur to look at it! You can't come
over that, can you? Them Scripture you spoke, just mean not to drink to
drunkenness, nor eat to gluttonness. But," he sternly added, "it ain't
fur you to answer up to your pop! I ain't leavin' you dress plain--and
that's all that's to say!"

"I got to do it, pop," Tillie's low voice answered, "I must obey to
Christ."

"What you sayin' to me? That you got to do somepin I tole you you
haven't the dare to do? Are you sayin' that to ME, Tillie? Heh?"

"I got to obey to Christ," she repeated, her face paling.

"You think! Well, we'll see about that oncet! You leave me see you
obeyin' to any one before your pop, and you'll soon get learnt better!
How do you bring it out that the Scripture says, 'Childern, obey your
parents'?"

"'Obey your parents in the Lord,'" Tillie amended.

"Well, you'll be obeyin' to the Scripture AND your parent by joinin'
the Evangelicals. D' you understand?"

"The Evangelicals don't hold to Scripture, pop. They enlist. And we
don't read of Christ takin' any interest in war."

"Yes, but in the Old Dispensation them old kings did it, and certainly
they was good men! They're in the Bible!"

"But we're livin' under the New Dispensation. And a many things is
changed to what they were under the Old. Pop, I can't dress fashionable
any more."

"Now, look here, Tillie, I oughtn't argy no words with you, fur you're
my child and you're got the right to mind me just because I say it. But
can't you see the inconsistentness of the plain people? Now a New
Mennonite he says his conscience won't leave him wear grand [wear
worldly dress] but he'll make his livin' in Lancaster city by keepin' a
jew'lry-store. And yet them Mennonites won't leave a sister keep a
millinery-shop!"

"But," Tillie tried to hold her ground, "there's watches, pop, and
clocks that jew'lers sells. They're useful. We got to have watches and
clocks. Millinery is only pleasing to the eye."

"Well, the women couldn't go bare-headed neither, could they? And is
ear-rings and such things like them useful? And all them fancy things
they keep in their dry-goods stores? Och, they're awful inconsistent
that way! I ain't got no use fur New Mennonites! Why, here one day,
when your mom was livin' yet, I owed a New Mennonite six cents, and I
handed him a dime and he couldn't change it out, but he sayed he'd send
me the four cents. Well, I waited and waited, and he never sent it.
Then I bought such a postal-card and wrote it in town to him yet. And
that didn't fetch the four cents neither. I wrote to him backward and
forward till I had wrote three cards a'ready, and then I seen I
wouldn't gain nothin' by writin' one more if he did pay me, and if he
didn't pay I'd lose that other cent yet. So I let it. Now that's a New
Mennonite fur you! Do you call that consistentness?"

"But it's the Word of Gawd I go by, pop, not by the weak brethren."

"Well, you'll go by your pop's word and not join to them New
Mennonites! Now I don't want to hear no more!"

"Won't you buy me the plain garb, pop?"

"Buy you the plain garb! Now look here, Tillie. If ever you ast me
again to leave you join to anything but the Evangelicals, or speak
somepin to me about buyin' you the plain garb, I'm usin' the strap. Do
you hear me?"

"Pop," said Tillie, solemnly, her face very white, "I'll always obey to
you where I can--where I think it's right to. But if you won't buy me
the plain dress and cap, Aunty Em Wackernagel's going to. She says she
never knew what happiness it was to be had in this life till she gave
herself up and dressed plain and loosed herself from all worldly
things. And I feel just like her."

"All right--just you come wearin' them Mennonite costumes 'round me
oncet! I'll burn 'em up like what I burned up them novels where you
lent off of your teacher! And I'll punish you so's you won't try it a
second time to do what I tell you you haven't the dare to do!"

The color flowed back into Tillie's white face as he spoke. She was
crimson now as she rose from the porch step and turned away from him to
go into the house.

Jake Getz realized, as with a sort of dull wonder his eyes followed
her, that there was a something in his daughter's face this day, and in
the bearing of her young frame as she walked before him, which he was
not wont to see, which he did not understand, and with which he felt he
could not cope. The vague sense of uneasiness which it gave him
strengthened his resolve to crush, with a strong hand, this budding
insubordination.

Two uneventful weeks passed by, during which Tillie's quiet and dutiful
demeanor almost disarmed her father's threatening watchfulness of her;
so that when, one Sunday afternoon, at four o'clock, she returned from
a walk to her Aunty Em Wackernagel's, clad in the meek garb of the New
Mennonites, his amazement at her intrepidity was even greater than his
anger.

The younger children, in high glee at what to them was a most comical
transformation in their elder sister, danced around her with shrieks of
laughter, crying out at the funny white cap which she wore, and the
prim little three-cornered cape falling over her bosom, designed
modestly to cover the vanity of woman's alluring form.

Mrs. Getz, mechanically moving about the kitchen to get the supper,
paused in her work only long enough to remark with stupid astonishment,
"Did you, now, get religion, Tillie?"

"Yes, ma'am. I've gave myself up."

"Where did you come by the plain dress?"

"Aunty Em bought it for me and helped me make it."

Her father had followed her in from the porch and now came up to her as
she stood in the middle of the kitchen. The children scattered at his
approach.

"You go up-stairs and take them clo'es off!" he commanded. "I ain't
leavin' you wear 'em one hour in this house!"

"I have no others to put on, pop," Tillie gently answered, her soft
eyes meeting his with an absence of fear which puzzled and baffled him.

"Where's your others, then?"

"I've let 'em at Aunty Em's. She took 'em in exchange for my plain
dress. She says she can use 'em on 'Manda and Rebecca."

"Then you walk yourself right back over to the hotel and get 'em back
of? of her, and let them clo'es you got on. Go!" he roughly pointed to
the door.

"She wouldn't give 'em back to me. She'd know I hadn't ought to yield
up to temptation, and she'd help me to resist by refusing me my
fashionable clo'es."

"You tell her if you come back home without 'em, I'm whippin' you!
She'll give 'em to you then."

"She'd say my love to Christ ought not to be so weak but I can bear
anything you want to do to me, pop. She had to take an awful lot off of
gran'pop when she turned plain. Pop," she added earnestly, "no matter
what you do to me, I ain't givin' 'way; I'm standin' firm to serve
Christ!"

"We'll see oncet!" her father grimly answered, striding across the room
and taking his strap from its corner in the kitchen cupboard he grasped
Tillie's slender shoulder and lifted his heavy arm.

And now for the first time in her life his wife interposed a word
against his brutality.

"Jake!"

In astonishment he turned to her. She was as pale as her stepdaughter.

"Jake! If she HAS got religion, you'll have awful bad luck if you try
to get her away from it!"

"I ain't sayin' she can't get RELIGION if she wants! To be sure, I
brung her up to be a Christian. But I don't hold to this here nonsense
of turnin' plain, and I tole her so, and she's got to obey to me or
I'll learn her!"

"You'll have bad luck if you whip her fur somepin like this here," his
wife repeated. "Don't you mind how when Aunty Em turned plain and
gran'pop he acted to her so ugly that way, it didn't rain fur two weeks
and his crops was spoilt, and he got that boil yet on his neck! Yes,
you'll see oncet," she warned him "if you use the strap fur somepin
like what this is, what you'll mebbe come by yet!"

"Och, you're foolish!" he answered, but his tone was not confident. His
raised arm dropped to his side and he looked uneasily into Tillie's
face, while he still kept his painful grasp of her shoulder.

The soft bright eyes of the young girl met his, not with defiance, but
with a light in them that somehow brought before his mind the look her
mother had worn the night she died. Superstition was in his blood, and
he shuddered inwardly at his uncanny sense of mystery before this
unfamiliar, illumined countenance of his daughter. The exalted soul of
the girl cast a spell which even HIS unsensitive spirit could keenly
feel, and something stirred in his breast--the latent sense of
affectionate, protecting fatherhood.

Tillie saw and felt this sudden change in him. She lifted her free hand
and laid it on his arm, her lips quivering. "Father!" she half
whispered.

She had never called him that before, and it seemed strangely to bring
home to him what, in this crisis of his child's life, was due to her
from him, her only living parent.

Suddenly he released her shoulder and tossed away the strap. "I see I
wouldn't be doin' right to oppose you in this here, Tillie. Well, I'm
glad, fur all, that I ain't whippin' you. It goes ag'in' me to hit you
since you was sick that time. You're gettin' full big, too, to be
punished that there way, fur all I always sayed still I'd never leave a
child of mine get ahead of me, no matter how big they was, so long as
they lived off of me. But this here's different. You're feelin'
conscientious about this here matter, and I ain't hinderin' you."

To Tillie's unspeakable amazement, he laid his hand on her head and
held it there for an instant. "Gawd bless you, my daughter, and help
you to serve the Lord acceptable!"

So that crisis was past.

But Tillie knew, that night, as she rubbed witch-hazel on her sore
shoulder, that a far worse struggle was before her. In seeking to carry
out the determination that burned in her heart to get an education, no
aid could come to her as it had to-day, from her father's sense of
religious awe. Would she be able, she wondered, to stand firm against
his opposition when, a second time, it came to an issue between them?




XII

ABSALOM KEEPS COMPANY


Tillie wrote to Miss Margaret (she could not learn to call her Mrs.
Lansing) how that she had "given herself up and turned plain," and Miss
Margaret, seeing how sacred this experience was to the young girl,
treated the subject with all respect and even reverence.

The correspondence between these two, together with the books which
from time to time came to the girl from her faithful friend, did more
toward Tillie's growth and development along lines of which her parents
had no suspicion, than all the schooling at William Penn, under the
instruction of the average "Millersville Normal," could ever have
accomplished.

And her tongue, though still very provincial, soon lost much of its
native dialect, through her constant reading and study.

Of course whenever her father discovered her with her books he made her
suffer.

"You're got education enough a'ready," he would insist. "And too much
fur your own good. Look at me--I was only educated with a Testament and
a spelling-book and a slate. We had no such a blackboards even, to
recite on. And do _I_ look as if I need to know any more 'n what I know
a'ready?"

Tillie bore her punishments like a martyr--and continued
surreptitiously to read and to study whenever and whatever she could;
and not even the extreme conscientiousness of a New Mennonite faltered
at this filial disobedience. She obeyed her father implicitly, however
tyrannical he was, to the point where he bade her suppress and kill all
the best that God had given her of mind and heart. Then she revolted;
and she never for an instant doubted her entire justification in
eluding or defying his authority.

There was another influence besides her books and Miss Margaret's
letters which, unconsciously to herself, was educating Tillie at this
time. Her growing fondness for stealing off to the woods not far from
the farm, of climbing to the hill-top beyond the creek, or walking over
the fields under the wide sky--not only in the spring and summer, but
at all times of the year--was yielding her a richness, a depth and
breadth, of experience that nothing else could have given her.

A nature deeply sensitive to the mysterious appeal of sky and green
earth, of deep, shady forest and glistening water, when unfolding in
daily touch with these things, will learn to see life with a broader,
saner mind and catch glimpses and vistas of truth with a clearer vision
than can ever come to one whose most susceptible years are spent walled
in and overtopped by the houses of the city that shut out and stifle
"the larger thought of God." And Tillie, in spite of her narrowing New
Mennonite "convictions," did reach through her growing love for and
intimacy with Nature a plane of thought and feeling which was
immeasurably above her perfunctory creed.

Sometimes the emotions excited by her solitary walks gave the young
girl greater pain than happiness--yet it was a pain she would not have
been spared, for she knew, though the knowledge was never formulated in
her thought, that in some precious, intimate way her suffering set her
apart and above the villagers and farming people about her--those whose
placid, contented eyes never strayed from the potato-patch to the
distant hills, or lifted themselves from the goodly tobacco-fields to
the wide blue heavens.

Thus, cramped and crushing as much of her life was, it had--as all
conditions must have--its compensations; and many of the very
circumstances which at the time seemed most unbearable brought forth in
later years rich fruit.

And so, living under her father's watchful eye and relentless
rule,--with long days of drudgery and outward acquiescence in his
scheme of life that she devote herself, mind, body, and soul, to the
service of himself, his wife, and their children, and in return to be
poorly fed and scantily clad,--Tillie nevertheless grew up in a world
apart, hidden to the sealed vision of those about her; as unknown to
them in her real life as though they had never looked upon her face;
and while her father never for an instant doubted the girl's entire
submission to him, she was day by day waxing stronger in her resolve to
heed Miss Margaret's constant advice and make a fight for her right to
the education her father had denied her, and for a life other than that
to which his will would consign her.

There were dark times when her steadfast purpose seemed impossible of
fulfilment. But Tillie felt she would rather die in the struggle than
become the sort of apathetic household drudge she beheld in her
stepmother--a condition into which it would be so easy to sink, once
she loosed her wagon from its star.

It was when Tillie was seventeen years old--a slight, frail girl, with
a look in her eyes as of one who lives in two worlds--that Absalom
Puntz, one Sunday evening in the fall of the year, saw her safe home
from meeting and asked permission to "keep comp'ny" with her.

Now that morning Tillie had received a letter from Miss Margaret (sent
to her, as always, under cover to the doctor), and Absalom's company on
the way from church was a most unwelcome interruption to her happy
brooding over the precious messages of love and helpfulness which those
letters always brought her.

A request for permission to "keep comp'ny" with a young lady meant a
very definite thing in Canaan Township. "Let's try each other," was
what it signified; and acceptance of the proposition involved on each
side an exclusion of all association with others of the opposite sex.
Tillie of course understood this.

"But you're of the World's people, Absalom," her soft, sweet voice
answered him. They were walking along in the dim evening on the high
dusty pike toward the Getz farm. "And I'm a member of meeting. I can't
marry out of the meeting."

"This long time a'ready, Tillie, I was thinkin' about givin' myself up
and turnin' plain," he assured her. "To be sure, I know I'd have to, to
git you. You've took notice, ain't you, how reg'lar I 'tend meeting?
Well, oncet me and you kin settle this here question of gittin'
married, I'm turnin' plain as soon as I otherwise [possibly] kin."

"I have never thought about keeping company, Absalom."

"Nearly all the girls around here as old as you has their friend
a'ready."

Absalom was twenty years old, stoutly built and coarse-featured, a
deeply ingrained obstinacy being the only characteristic his heavy
countenance suggested. He still attended the district school for a few
months of the winter term. His father was one of the richest farmers of
the neighborhood, and Absalom, being his only child, was considered a
matrimonial prize.

"Is there nobody left for you but me?" Tillie inquired in a
matter-of-fact tone. The conjugal relation, as she saw it in her
father's home and in the neighborhood, with its entirely practical
basis and utter absence of sentiment, had no attraction or interest for
her, and she had long since made up her mind that she would none of it.

"There ain't much choice," granted Absalom. "But I anyways would pick
out you, Tillie."

"Why me?"

"I dunno. I take to you. And I seen a'ready how handy you was at the
work still. Mom says, too, you'd make me a good housekeeper."

Tillie never dreamed of resenting this practical approval of her
qualifications for the post with which Absalom designed to honor her.
It was because of her familiarity with such matrimonial standards as
these that from her childhood up she had determined never to marry.
From what she gathered of Miss Margaret's married life, through her
letters, and from what she learned from the books and magazines which
she read, she knew that out in the great unknown world there existed
another basis of marriage. But she did not understand it and she never
thought about it. The strongly emotional tide of her girlhood, up to
this time, had been absorbed by her remarkable love for Miss Margaret
and by her earnest religiousness.

"There's no use in your wasting your time keeping company with me,
Absalom. I never intend to marry. I've made up my mind."

"Is it that your pop won't leave you, or whatever?"

"I never asked him. I don't know what he would say."

"Mom spoke somepin about mebbe your pop he'd want to keep you at home,
you bein' so useful to him and your mom. But I sayed when you come
eighteen, you're your own boss. Ain't, Tillie?"

"Father probably would object to my marrying because I'm needed at
home," Tillie agreed. "That's why they wouldn't leave me go to school
after I was eleven. But I don't want to marry."

"You leave me be your steady friend, Tillie, and I'll soon get you over
them views," urged Absalom, confidently.

But Tillie shook her head. "It would just waste your time, Absalom."

In Canaan Township it would have been considered highly dishonorable
for a girl to allow a young man to "sit up with her Sundays" if she
definitely knew she would never marry him. Time meant money, and even
the time spent in courting must be judiciously used.

"I don't mind if I do waste my time settin' up with you Sundays,
Tillie. I take to you that much, it's something surprising, now! Will
you give me the dare to come next Sunday?"

"If you don't mind wasting your time--" Tillie reluctantly granted.

"It won't be wasted. I'll soon get you to think different to what you
think now. You just leave me set up with you a couple Sundays and see!"

"I know I'll never think any different, Absalom. You must not suppose
that I will."

"Is it somepin you're got ag'in' me?" he asked incredulously, for he
knew he was considered a prize. "I'm well-fixed enough, ain't I? I'd
make you a good purvider, Tillie. And I don't addict to no bad habits.
I don't chew. Nor I don't drink. Nor I don't swear any. The most I ever
sayed when I was spited was 'confound it.'"

"It isn't that I have anything against you, Absalom, especially.
But--look here, Absalom, if you were a woman, would YOU marry? What
does a woman gain?"

Absalom stared at her in the dusky evening light of the high road. To
ask of his slow-moving brain that it question the foundations of the
universe and wrestle with a social and psychological problem like this
made the poor youth dumb with bewilderment.

"Why SHOULD a woman get married?" Tillie repeated.

"That's what a woman's FUR," Absalom found his tongue to say.

"She loses everything and gains nothing."

"She gets kep'," Absalom argued.

"Like the horses. Only not so carefully. No, thank you, Absalom. I can
keep myself."

"I'd keep you better 'n your pop keeps you, anyways, Tillie. I'd make
you a good purvider."

"I won't ever marry," Tillie repeated.

"I didn't know you was so funny," Absalom sullenly answered. "You might
be glad I want to be your reg'lar friend."

"No," said Tillie, "I don't care about it."

They walked on in silence for a few minutes. Tillie looked away into
the starlit night and thought of Miss Margaret and wished she were
alone, that her thoughts might be uninterrupted. Absalom, at her side,
kicked up the dust with his heavy shoes, as he sulkily hung his head.

Presently he spoke again.

"Will you leave me come to see you Sundays, still, if I take my chancet
that I'm wastin' my time?"

"If you'll leave it that way," Tillie acquiesced, "and not hold me to
anything."

"All right. Only you won't leave no one else set up with you, ain't
not?"

"There isn't any one else."

"But some chance time another feller might turn up oncet that wants to
keep comp'ny with you too."

"I won't promise anything, Absalom. If you want to come Sundays to see
me and the folks, you can. That's all I'll say."

"I never seen such a funny girl as what you are!" growled Absalom.

Tillie made no reply, and again they went on in silence.

"Say!" It was Absalom who finally spoke.

Tillie's absent, dreamy gaze came down from the stars and rested upon
his heavy, dull face.

"Ezra Herr he's resigned William Penn. He's gettin' more pay at Abra'm
Lincoln in Janewille. It comes unhandy, his leavin', now the term's
just started and most all the applicants took a'ready. Pop he got a
letter from in there at Lancaster off of Superintendent Reingruber and
he's sendin' us a applicant out till next Saturday three weeks--fur the
directors to see oncet if he'll do."

Absalom's father was secretary of the Board, and Mr. Getz was the
treasurer.

"Pop he's goin' over to see your pop about it till to-morrow evenin'
a'ready if he can make it suit."

"When does Ezra go?" Tillie inquired. The New Mennonite rule which
forbade the use of all titles had led to the custom in this
neighborhood, so populated with Mennonites, of calling each one by his
Christian name.

"Till next Friday three weeks," Absalom replied. "Pop says he don't
know what to think about this here man Superintendent Reingruber's
sendin' out. He ain't no Millersville Normal. The superintendent says
he's a 'Harvard gradyate'--whatever that is, pop says! Pop he sayed it
ain't familiar with him what that there is. And I guess the other
directors don't know neither. Pop he sayed when we're payin' as much as
forty dollars a month we had ought, now, to have a Millersville Normal,
and nothin' less. Who wants to pay forty dollars a month fur such a
Harvard gradyate that we don't know right what it is."

"What pay will Ezra get at Janeville?" Tillie asked. Her heart beat
fast as she thought how SHE might, perhaps, in another year be the
applicant for a vacancy at William Penn.

"Around forty-five dollars," Absalom answered.

"Oh!" Tillie said; "it seems so much, don't it?"

"Fur settin' and doin' nothin' but hearin' off spellin' and readin' and
whatever, it's too much! Pop says he's goin' to ast your pop and the
rest of the Board if they hadn't ought to ast this here Harvard
gradyate to take a couple dollars less, seein' he ain't no Millersville
Normal."

They had by this time reached the farm, and Tillie, not very warmly,
asked Absalom whether he would "come in and sit awhile." She almost
sighed audibly as he eagerly consented.

When he had left at twelve o'clock that night, she softly climbed the
stairs to her room, careful not to disturb the sleeping household.
Tillie wondered why it was that every girl of her acquaintance exulted
in being asked to keep company with a gentleman friend. She had found
"sitting up" a more fatiguing task than even the dreaded Monday's
washing which would confront her on the morrow.

"Seein' it's the first time me and you set up together, I mebbe better
not stay just so late," Absalom had explained when, after three hours'
courting, he had reluctantly risen to take his leave, under the firm
conviction, as Tillie plainly saw, that she felt as sorry to have him
go as evidently he was to part from her!

"How late," thought Tillie, "will he stay the SECOND time he sits up
with me? And what," she wondered, "do other girls see in it?"

The following Sunday night, Absalom came again, and this time he stayed
until one o'clock, with the result that on the following Monday morning
Tillie overslept herself and was one hour late in starting the washing.

It was that evening, after supper, while Mrs. Getz was helping her
husband make his toilet for a meeting of the School Board--at which the
application of that suspicious character, the Harvard graduate, was to
be considered--that the husband and wife discussed these significant
Sunday night visits. Mrs. Getz opened up the subject while she
performed the wifely office of washing her husband's neck, his
increasing bulk making that duty a rather difficult one for him.
Standing over him as he sat in a chair in the kitchen, holding on his
knees a tin basin full of soapy water, she scrubbed his fat, sunburned
neck with all the vigor and enthusiasm that she would have applied to
the cleaning of the kitchen porch or the scouring of an iron skillet.

A custom prevailed in the county of leaving one's parlor plainly
furnished, or entirely empty, until the eldest daughter should come of
age; it was then fitted up in style, as a place to which she and her
"regular friend" could retire from the eyes of the girl's folks of a
Sunday night to do their "setting up." The occasion of a girl's
"furnishing" was a notable one, usually celebrated by a party; and it
was this fact that led her stepmother to remark presently:

"Say, pop, are you furnishin' fur Tillie, now she's comin' eighteen
years old?"

"I ain't thought about it," Mr. Getz answered shortly. "That front
room's furnished good enough a'ready. No--I ain't spendin' any!"

"Seein' she's a member and wears plain, it wouldn't cost wery expensive
to furnish fur her, fur she hasn't the dare to have nothin' stylish
like a organ or gilt-framed landscapes or sich stuffed furniture that
way."

"The room's good enough the way it is," repeated Mr. Getz. "I don't see
no use spendin' on it."

"It needs new paper and carpet. Pop, it'll get put out if you don't
furnish fur her. The neighbors'll talk how you're so close with your
own child after she worked fur you so good still. I don't like it so
well, pop, havin' the neighbors talk."

"Leave 'em talk. Their talkin' don't cost ME nothin'. I AIN'T
furnishin'!" His tone was obstinate and angry.

His wife rubbed him down with a crash towel as vigorously as she had
washed him, then fastened his shirt, dipped the family comb in the
soapy water and began with artistic care to part and comb his hair.

"Absalom Puntz he's a nice party, pop. He'll be well-fixed till his
pop's passed away a'ready."

"You think! Well, now look here, mom!" Mr. Getz spoke with stern
decision. "Tillie ain't got the dare to keep comp'ny Sundays! It made
her a whole hour late with the washin' this mornin'. I'm tellin' her
she's got to tell Absalom Puntz he can't come no more."

Mrs. Getz paused with comb poised in air, and her feeble jaw dropped in
astonishment.

"Why, pop!" she said. "Ain't you leavin' Tillie keep comp'ny?"

"No," affirmed Mr. Getz. "I ain't. What does a body go to the bother of
raisin' childern FUR? Just to lose 'em as soon as they are growed
enough to help earn a little? I ain't LEAVIN' Tillie get married! She's
stayin' at home to help her pop and mom--except in winter when they
ain't so much work, and mebbe then I'm hirin' her out to Aunty Em at
the hotel where she can earn a little, too, to help along. She can easy
earn enough to buy the children's winter clo'es and gums and
school-books."

"When she comes eighteen, pop, she'll have the right to get married
whether or no you'd conceited you wouldn't give her the dare."

"If I say I ain't buyin' her her aus styer, Absalom Puntz nor no other
feller would take her."

An "aus styer" is the household outfit always given to a bride by her
father.

"Well, to be sure," granted Mrs. Getz, "I'd like keepin' Tillie home to
help me out with the work still. I didn't see how I was ever goin' to
get through without her. But I thought when Absalom Puntz begin to come
Sundays, certainly you'd be fur her havin' him. I was sayin' to her
only this mornin' that if she didn't want to dishearten Absalom from
comin' to set up with her, she'd have to take more notice to him and
not act so dopplig with him--like as if she didn't care whether or no
he made up to her. I tole her I'd think, now, she'd be wonderful
pleased at his wantin' her, and him so well-fixed. Certainly I never
conceited you'd be ag'in' it. Tillie she didn't answer nothin'.
Sometimes I do now think Tillie's some different to what other girls
is."

"I'd be glad," said Jacob Getz in a milder tone, "if she ain't set on
havin' him. I was some oneasy she might take it a little hard when I
tole her she darsent get married."

"Och, Tillie she never takes nothin' hard," Mrs. Getz answered easily.
"She ain't never ast me you goin' to furnish fur her. She don't take no
interest. She's so funny that way. I think to myself, still, Tillie is,
now, a little dumm!"

It happened that while this dialogue was taking place, Tillie was in
the room above the kitchen, putting the two most recently arrived Getz
babies to bed; and as she sat near the open register with a baby on her
lap, every word that passed between her father and stepmother was
perfectly audible to her.

With growing bitterness she listened to her father's frank avowal of
his selfish designs. At the same time she felt a thrill of exultation,
as she thought of the cherished secret locked in her breast--hidden the
more securely from those with whom she seemed to live nearest. How
amazed they would be, her stolid, unsuspicious parents, when they
discovered that she had been secretly studying and, with Miss
Margaret's help, preparing herself for the high calling of a teacher!
One more year, now, and she would be ready, Miss Margaret assured her,
to take the county superintendent's examination for a certificate to
teach. Then good-by to household drudgery and the perpetual
self-sacrifice that robbed her of all that was worth while in life.

With a serene mind, Tillie rose, with the youngest baby in her arms,
and tenderly tucked it in its little bed.




XIII

EZRA HERR, PEDAGOGUE


It was a few days later, at the supper-table, that Tillie's father made
an announcement for which she was not wholly unprepared.

"I'm hirin' you out this winter, Tillie, at the hotel. Aunty Em says
she's leavin' both the girls go to school again this winter and she'll
need hired help. She'll pay me two dollars a week fur you. She'll pay
it to me and I'll buy you what you need, still, out of it. You're goin'
till next Monday."

Tillie's heart leaped high with pleasure at this news. She was fond of
her Aunty Em; she knew that life at the country hotel would be varied
and interesting in comparison with the dull, grubbing existence of her
own home; she would have to work very hard, of course, but not so hard,
so unceasingly, as under her father's eye; and she would have absolute
freedom to devote her spare time to her books. The thought of escaping
from her father's watchfulness, and the prospect of hours of safe and
uninterrupted study, filled her with secret joy.

"I tole Aunty Em she's not to leave you waste no time readin'; when she
don't need you, you're to come home and help mom still. Mom she says
she can't get through the winter sewin' without you. Well, Aunty Em she
says you can sew evenin's over there at the HOtel, on the childern's
clo'es. Mom she can easy get through the other work without you, now
Sallie's goin' on thirteen. Till December a'ready Sally'll be thirteen.
And the winter work's easy to what the summer is. In summer, to be
sure, you'll have to come home and help me and mom. But in winter I'm
hirin' you out."

"But Sally ain't as handy as what Tillie is," said Mrs. Getz,
plaintively. "And I don't see how I'm goin' to get through oncet
without Tillie."

"Sally's got to LEARN to be handier, that's all. She's got to get
learnt like what I always learnt Tillie fur you."

Fire flashed in Tillie's soft eyes--a momentary flame of shame and
aversion; if her blinded father had seen and understood, he would have
realized how little, after all, he had ever succeeded in "learning" her
the subservience he demanded of his children.

As for the warning to her aunt, she knew that it would be ignored; that
Aunty Em would never interfere with the use she made of the free time
allowed her, no matter what her father's orders were to the contrary.

"And you ain't to have Absalom Puntz comin' over there Sundays
neither," her father added. "I tole Aunty Em like I tole you the other
day, I ain't leavin' you keep comp'ny. I raised you, now you have the
right to work and help along a little. It's little enough a girl can
earn anyways."

Tillie made no comment. Her silence was of course understood by her
father to mean submission; while her stepmother felt in her heart a
contempt for a meekness that would bear, without a word of protest, the
loss of a steady friend so well-fixed and so altogether desirable as
Absalom Puntz.

In Absalom's two visits Tillie had been sufficiently impressed with the
steadiness of purpose and obstinacy of the young man's character to
feel appalled at the fearful task of resisting his dogged determination
to marry her. So confident he evidently was of ultimately winning her
that at times Tillie found herself quite sharing his confidence in the
success of his courting, which her father's interdict she knew would
not interfere with in the least. She always shuddered at the thought of
being Absalom's wife; and a feeling she could not always fling off, as
of some impending doom, at times buried all the high hopes which for
the past seven years had been the very breath of her life.

Tillie had one especially strong reason for rejoicing in the prospect
of going to the village for the winter. The Harvard graduate, if
elected, would no doubt board at the hotel, or necessarily near by, and
she could get him to lend her books and perhaps to give her some help
with her studies.

The village of New Canaan and all the township were curious to see this
stranger. The school directors had felt that they were conceding a good
deal in consenting to consider the application of sueh an unknown
quantity, when they could, at forty dollars a month, easily secure the
services of a Millersville Normal. But the stress that had been brought
to bear upon them by the county superintendent, whose son had been a
classmate of the candidate, had been rather too strong to be resisted;
and so the "Harvard gradyate man" was coming.

That afternoon Tillie had walked over in a pouring rain to William Penn
to carry "gums" and umbrellas to her four younger brothers and sisters,
and she had realized, with deep exultation, while listening to Ezra
Herr's teaching, that she was already far better equipped than was Ezra
to do the work he was doing,--and HE was a Millersville Normal!

It happened that Ezra was receiving a visit from a committee of
Janeville school directors, and he had departed from his every-day
mechanical style of teaching in favor of some fancy methods which he
had imbibed at the Normal School during his attendance at the spring
term, and which he reserved for use on occasions like the present.
Tillie watched him with profound attention, but hardly with profound
respect.

"Childern," Ezra said, with a look of deep thought, as he impressively
paced up and down before the class of small boys and girls ranged on
the platform, "now, childern, what's this reading lesson ABOUT?"

"'Bout a apple-tree!" answered several eager little voices.

"Yes," said Ezra. "About an apple-tree. Correct. Now,
childern--er--what grows on apple-trees, heh?"

"Apples!" answered the intelligent class.

"Correct. Apples. And--now--what was it that came to the apple-tree?"

"A little bird."

"Yes. A bird came to the apple tree. Well--er," he floundered for a
moment, then, by a sudden inspiration, "what can a bird do?"

"Fly! and sing!"

"A bird can fly and sing," Ezra nodded. "Very good. Now, Sadie, you
dare begin. I 'll leave each one read a werse."

The next recitation was a Fourth Reader lesson consisting of a speech
of Daniel Webster's, the import of which not one of the children, if
indeed the teacher himself, had the faintest suspicion. And so the
class was permitted to proceed, without interruption, in its labored
conning of the massive eloquence of that great statesman; and the
directors presently took their departure in the firm conviction that in
Ezra Herr they had made a good investment of the forty-five dollars a
month appropriated to their town out of the State treasury, and they
agreed, on their way back to Janeville, that New Canaan was to be
pitied for having to put up with anything so unheard-of as "a Harvard
gradyate or whatever," after having had the advantages of an educator
like Ezra Herr.

And Tillie, as she walked home with her four brothers and sisters,
hoped, for the sake of her own advancement, that a Harvard graduate was
at least not LESS intelligent than a Millersville Normal.




XIV

THE HARVARD GRADUATE


That a man holding a Harvard degree should consider so humble an
educational post as that of New Canaan needs a word of explanation.

Walter Fairchilds was the protege of his uncle, the High Church bishop
of a New England State, who had practically, though not legally,
adopted him, upon the death of his father, when the boy was fourteen
years old, his mother having died at his birth.

It was tacitly understood by Walter that his uncle was educating him
for the priesthood. His life, from the time the bishop took charge of
him until he was ready for college, was spent in Church
boarding-schools.

A spiritually minded, thoughtful boy, of an emotional temperament which
responded to every appeal of beauty, whether of form, color, sound, or
ethics, Walter easily fell in with his uncle's designs for him, and
rivaled him in the fervor of his devotion to the esthetic ritual of his
Church.

His summer vacations were spent at Bar Harbor with the bishop's family,
which consisted of his wife and two anemic daughters. They were people
of limited interests, who built up barriers about their lives on all
sides; social hedges which excluded all humanity but a select and very
dull, uninteresting circle; intellectual walls which never admitted a
stray unconventional idea; moral demarcations which nourished within
them the Mammon of self-righteousness, and theological harriers which
shut out the sunlight of a broad charity.

Therefore, when in the course of his career at Harvard, Walter
Fairchilds discovered that intellectually he had outgrown not only the
social creed of the divine right of the well-born, in which these
people had educated him, but their theological creed as well, the
necessity of breaking the fact to them, of wounding their affection for
him, of disappointing the fond and cherished hope with which for years
his uncle had spent money upon his education--the ordeal which he had
to face was a fiery one.

When, in deepest sorrow, and with all the delicacy of his sensitive
nature, he told the bishop of his changed mental attitude toward the
problem of religion, it seemed to him that in his uncle's reception of
it the spirit of the Spanish Inquisitors was revived, so mad appeared
to him his horror of this heresy and his conviction that he, Walter,
was a poison in the moral atmosphere, which must be exterminated at any
cost.

In this interview between them, the bishop stood revealed to him in a
new character, and yet Walter seemed to realize that in his deeper
consciousness he had always known him for what he really was, though
all the circumstances of his conventional life had conduced to hide his
real self. He saw, now, how the submissiveness of his own dreamy
boyhood had never called into active force his guardian's native love
of domineering; his intolerance of opposition; the pride of his
exacting will. But on the first provocation of circumstances, these
traits stood boldly forth.

"Is it for this that I have spent my time and money upon you--to bring
up an INFIDEL?" Bishop Fairchilds demanded, when he had in part
recovered from the first shock of amazement the news had given him.

"I am not an infidel even if I have outgrown High Church dogmas. I have
a Faith--I have a Religion; and I assure you that I never so fully
realized the vital truth of my religion as I do now--now that I see
things, not in the dim cathedral light, but out under the broad
heavens!"

"How can you dare to question the authority of our Holy Mother, the
Church, whose teachings have come down to us through all these
centuries, bearing the sacred sanction of the most ancient authority?"

"Old things can rot!" Walter answered.

"And you fancy," the bishop indignantly demanded, "that I will give one
dollar for your support while you are adhering to this blasphemy? That
I will ever again even so much as break bread with you, until, in
humble contrition, you return to your allegiance to the Church?"

Walter lifted his earnest eyes and met squarely his uncle's frowning
stare. Then the boy rose.

"Nothing, then, is left for me," he said steadily, "but to leave your
home, give up the course of study I had hoped to continue at Harvard,
and get to work."

"You fully realize all that this step must mean?" his uncle coldly
asked him. "You are absolutely penniless."

"In a matter of this kind, uncle, you must realize that such a
consideration could not possibly enter in."

"You have not a penny of your own. The few thousands that your father
left were long ago used up in your school-bills."

"And I am much in your debt; I know it all."

"So you choose poverty and hardship for the sake of this perversity?"

"Others have suffered harder things for principle."

Thus they parted.

And thus it was, through the suddenness and unexpectedness of the loss
of his home and livelihood, that Walter Fairchilds came to apply for
the position at William Penn.

"HERE, Tillie, you take and go up to Sister Jennie Hershey's and get
some mush. I'm makin' fried mush fur supper," said Aunty Em, bustling
into the hotel kitchen where her niece was paring potatoes, one
Saturday afternoon. "Here's a quarter. Get two pound."

"Oh, Tillie," called her cousin Rebecca from the adjoining dining-room,
which served also as the family sitting-room, "hurry on and you'll
mebbe be in time to see the stage come in with the new teacher in.
Mebbe you'll see him to speak to yet up at Hershey's."

"Lizzie Hershey's that wonderful tickled that the teacher's going to
board at their place!" said Amanda, the second daughter, a girl of
Tillie's age, as she stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Tillie
put on her black hood over the white Mennonite cap. Stout Aunty Em also
wore the Mennonite dress, which lent a certain dignity to her round
face with its alert but kindly eyes; but her two daughters were still
"of the world's people."

"When Lizzie she tole me about it, comin' out from Lancaster after
market this morning," continued Amanda, "she was now that tickled! She
sayed he's such a good-looker! Och, I wisht he was stoppin' here;
ain't, Tillie? Lizzie'll think herself much, havin' a town fellah
stoppin' at their place."

"If he's stoppin' at Hershey's," said Rebecca, appearing suddenly,
"that ain't sayin' he has to get in with Lizzie so wonderful thick! I
hope he's a JOLLY fellah."

Amanda and Rebecca were now girls of seventeen and eighteen
years--buxom, rosy, absolutely unideal country lasses. Beside them,
frail little Tillie seemed a creature of another clay.

"Lizzie tole me: she sayed how he come up to their market-stall in
there at Lancaster this morning," Amanda related, "and tole her he'd
heard Jonas Hershey's pork-stall at market was where he could mebbe
find out a place he could board at in New Canaan with a private
family--he'd sooner live with a private family that way than at the
HOtel. Well, Lizzie she coaxed her pop right there in front of the
teacher to say THEY'd take him, and Jonas Hershey he sayed HE didn't
care any. So Lizzie she tole him then he could come to their place, and
he sayed he'd be out this after in the four-o'clock stage."

"Well, and I wonder what her mother has to say to her and Jonas fixin'
it up between 'em to take a boarder and not waitin' to ast HER!" Aunty
Em said. "I guess mebbe Sister Jennie's spited!"

The appellation of "sister" indicated no other relation than that of
the Mennonite church membership, Mrs. Jonas Hershey being also a New
Mennonite.

"Now don't think you have to run all the way there and back, Tillie,"
was her aunt's parting injunction. "_I_ don't time you like what your
pop does! Well, I guess not! I take notice you're always out of breath
when you come back from an urrand. It's early yet--you dare stop awhile
and talk to Lizzie."

Tillie gave her aunt a look of grateful affection as she left the
house. Often when she longed to thank her for her many little acts of
kindness, the words would not come. It was the habit of her life to
repress every emotion of her mind, whether of bitterness or pleasure,
and an unconquerable shyness seized upon her in any least attempt to
reveal herself to those who were good to her.

It was four o'clock on a beautiful October afternoon as she walked up
the village street, and while she enjoyed, through all her sensitive
maiden soul, the sweet sunshine and soft autumn coloring, her thought
dwelt with a pleasant expectancy on her almost inevitable meeting with
"the Teacher," if he did indeed arrive in the stage now due at New
Canaan.

Unlike her cousins Amanda and Rebecca, and their neighbor Lizzie
Hershey, Tillie's eagerness to meet the young man was not born of a
feminine hunger for romance. Life as yet had not revealed those
emotions to her except as she had known them in her love for Miss
Margaret--which love was indeed full of a sacred sentiment. It was only
because the teacher meant an aid to the realization of her ambition to
become "educated" that she was interested in his coming.

It was but a few minutes' walk to the home of Jonas Hershey, the
country pork butcher. As Tillie turned in at the gate, she heard, with
a leap of her heart, the distant rumble of the approaching stagecoach.

Jonas Hershey's home was probably the cleanest, neatest-looking red
brick house in all the county. The board-walk from the gate to the door
fairly glistened from the effects of soap and water. The flower-beds,
almost painfully neat and free from weeds, were laid out on a strictly
mathematical plan. A border of whitewashed clam-shells, laid side by
side with military precision, set off the brilliant reds and yellows of
the flowers, and a glance at them was like gazing into the face of the
midday sun. Tillie shaded her dazzled eyes as she walked across the
garden to the side door which opened into the kitchen. It stood open
and she stepped in without ceremony. For a moment she could see nothing
but red and yellow flowers and whitewashed clam-shells. But as her
vision cleared, she perceived her neighbor, Lizzie Hershey, a
well-built, healthy-looking country lass of eighteen years, cutting
bread at a table, and her mother, a large fat woman wearing the
Mennonite dress, standing before a huge kitchen range, stirring
"ponhaus" in a caldron.

The immaculate neatness of the large kitchen gave evidence, as did
garden, board-walk, and front porch, of that morbid passion for
"cleaning up" characteristic of the Dutch housewife.

Jonas Hershey did a very large and lucrative business, and the work of
his establishment was heavy. But he hired no "help" and his wife and
daughter worked early and late to aid him in earning the dollars which
he hoarded.

"Sister Jennie!" Tillie accosted Mrs. Hershey with the New Mennonite
formal greeting, "I wish you the grace and peace of the Lord."

"The same to you, sister," Mrs. Hershey replied, bending to receive
Tillie's kiss as the girl came up to her at the stove--the Mennonite
interpretation of the command, "Salute the brethren with a holy kiss."

"Well, Lizzie," was Tillie's only greeting to the girl at the table.
Lizzie was not a member of meeting and the rules forbade the members to
kiss those who were still in the world.

"Well, Tillie," answered Lizzie, not looking up from the bread she was
cutting.

Tillie instantly perceived a lack of cordiality. Something was wrong.
Lizzie's face was sullen and her mother's countenance looked grim and
determined. Tillie wondered whether their evident ill-humor were in any
way connected with herself, or whether her Aunty Em's surmise were
correct, and Sister Jennie was really "spited."

"I've come to get two pound of mush," she said, remembering her errand.

"It's all," Mrs. Hershey returned. "We solt every cake at market, and
no more's made yet. It was all a'ready till market was only half over."

"Aunty Em'll be disappointed. She thought she'd make fried mush for
supper," said Tillie.

"Have you strangers?" inquired Mrs. Hershey.

"No, we haven't anybody for supper, unless some come on the stage this
after. We had four for dinner."

"Were they such agents, or what?" asked Lizzie.

Tillie turned to her. "Whether they were agents? No, they were just
pleasure-seekers. They were out for a drive and stopped off to eat."

At this instant the rattling old stage-coach drew up at the gate.

The mother and daughter, paying no heed whatever to the sound, went on
with their work, Mrs. Hershey looking a shade more grimly determined as
she stirred her ponhaus and Lizzie more sulky.

Tillie had just time to wonder whether she had better slip out before
the stranger came in, when a knock on the open kitchen door checked her.

Neither mother nor daughter glanced up in answer to the knock. Mrs.
Hershey resolutely kept her eyes on her caldron as she turned her big
spoon about in it, and Lizzie, with sullen, averted face, industriously
cut her loaf.

A second knock, followed by the appearance of a good-looking,
well-dressed young man on the threshold, met with the same reception.
Tillie, in the background, and hidden by the stove, looked on
wonderingly.

The young man glanced, in evident mystification, at the woman by the
stove and at the girl at the table, and a third time rapped loudly.

"Good afternoon!" he said pleasantly, an inquiring note in his voice.

Mrs. Hershey and Lizzie went on with their work as though they had not
heard him.

He took a step into the room, removing his hat. "You were expecting me
this afternoon, weren't you?" he asked.

"This is the place," Lizzie remarked at last.

"You were looking for me?" he repeated.

Mrs. Hershey suddenly turned upon Lizzie. "Why don't you speak?" she
inquired half-tauntingly. "You spoke BEFORE."

Tillie realized that Sister Jennie must be referring to Lizzie's
readiness at market that morning to "speak," in making her agreement
with the young man for board.

"You spoke this morning," the mother repeated. "Why can't you speak
now?"

"Och, why don't you speak yourself?" retorted Lizzie. "It ain't fur ME
to speak!"

The stranger appeared to recognize that he was the subject of a
domestic unpleasantness.

"You find it inconvenient to take me to board?" he hesitatingly
inquired of Mrs. Hershey. "I shouldn't think of wishing to intrude.
There is a hotel in the place, I suppose?"

"Yes. There IS a HOtel in New Canaan."

"I can get board there, no doubt?"

"Well," Mrs. Hershey replied argumentatively, "that's a public house
and this ain't. We never made no practice of takin' boarders. To be
sure, Jonas he always was FUR boarders. But I AIN'T fur!"

"Oh, yes," gravely nodded the young man. "Yes. I see."

He picked up the dress-suit case which he had set on the sill. "Where
is the hotel, may I ask?"

"Just up the road a piece. You can see the sign out," said Mrs.
Hershey, while Lizzie banged the bread-box shut with an energy forcibly
expressive of her feelings.

"Thank you," responded the gentleman, a pair of keen, bright eyes
sweeping Lizzie's gloomy face.

He bowed, put his hat on his head and stepped out of the house.

There was a back door at the other side of the kitchen. Not stopping
for the ceremony of leave-taking, Tillie slipped out of it to hurry
home before the stranger should reach the hotel.

Her heart beat fast as she hurried across fields by a short-cut, and
there was a sparkle of excitement in her eyes. Her ears were tingling
with sounds to which they were unaccustomed, and which thrilled them
exquisitely--the speech, accent, and tones of one who belonged to that
world unknown to her except through books--out of which Miss Margaret
had come and to which this new teacher, she at once recognized,
belonged. Undoubtedly he was what was called, by magazine-writers and
novel-writers, a "gentleman." And it was suddenly revealed to Tillie
that in real life the phenomenon thus named was even more interesting
than in literature. The clean cut of the young man's thin face, his
pale forehead, the fineness of the white hand he had lifted to his hat,
his modulated voice and speech, all these things had, in her few
minutes' observation of him, impressed themselves instantly and deeply
upon the girl's fresh imagination.

Out of breath from her hurried walk, she reached the back door of the
hotel several minutes before the teacher's arrival. She had just time
to report to her aunt that Sister Jennie's mush was "all," and to reply
in the affirmative to the eager questions of Amanda and Rebecca as to
whether she had seen the teacher, when the sound of the knocker on the
front door arrested their further catechism.

"The stage didn't leave out whoever it is--it drove right apast," said
Aunty Em. "You go, Tillie, and see oncet who is it."

Tillie was sure that she had not been seen by the evicted applicant for
board, as she had been hidden behind the stove. This impression was
confirmed when she now opened the door to him, for there was no
recognition in his eyes as he lifted his hat. It was the first time in
Tillie's life that a man had taken off his hat to her, and it almost
palsied her tongue as she tried to ask him to come in.

In reply to his inquiry as to whether he could get board here, she led
him into the darkened parlor at the right of a long hall. Groping her
way across the floor to the window she drew up the blind.

"Just sit down," she said timidly. "I'll call Aunty Em."

"Thank you," he bowed with a little air of ceremony that for an instant
held her spellbound. She stood staring at him--only recalled to herself
and to a sense of shame for her rudeness by the sudden entrance of her
aunt.

"How d' do?" said Mrs. Wackernagel in her brisk, businesslike tone.
"D'you want supper?"

"I am the applicant for the New Canaan school. I want to get board for
the winter here, if I can--and in case I'm elected."

"Well, I say! Tillie! D'you hear that? Why us we all heard you was
goin' to Jonas Hershey's."

"They decided it wasn't convenient to take me and sent me here."

"Now think! If that wasn't like Sister Jennie yet! All right!" she
announced conclusively. "We can accommodate you to satisfaction, I
guess."

"Have you any other boarders?" the young man inquired.

"No reg'lar boarders--except, to be sure, the Doc; and he's lived with
us it's comin' fifteen years, I think, or how long, till November
a'ready. It's just our own fam'ly here and my niece where helps with
the work, and the Doc. We have a many to meals though, just passing
through that way, you know. We don't often have more 'n one reg'lar
boarder at oncet, so we just make 'em at home still, like as if they
was one of us. Now YOU," she hospitably concluded, "we'll lay in our
best bed. We don't lay 'em in the best bed unless they're some
clean-lookin'."

Tillie noticed as her aunt talked that while the young man listened
with evident interest, his eyes moved about the room, taking in every
detail of it. To Tillie's mind, this hotel parlor was so "pleasing to
the eye" as to constitute one of those Temptations of the Enemy against
which her New Mennonite faith prescribed most rigid discipline. She
wondered whether the stranger did not think it very handsome.

The arrangement of the room was evidently, like Jonas Hershey's
flower-beds, the work of a mathematical genius. The chairs all stood
with their stiff backs squarely against the wall, the same number
facing each other from the four sides of the apartment. Photographs in
narrow oval frames, six or eight, formed another oval, all equidistant
from the largest, which occupied the dead center, not only of this
group, but of the wall from which it depended. The books on the square
oak table, which stood in the exact middle of the floor, were arranged
in cubical piles in the same rigid order. Tillie saw the new teacher's
glance sweep their titles: "Touching Incidents, and Remarkable Answers
to Prayer"; "From Tannery to White House"; "Gems of Religious Thought,"
by Talmage; "History of the Galveston Horror; Illustrated"; "Platform
Echoes, or Living Truths for Heart and Head," by John B. Gough.

"Lemme see--your name's Fairchilds, ain't?" the landlady abruptly asked.

"Yes," bowed the young man.

"Will you, now, take it all right if I call you by your Christian name?
Us Mennonites daresent call folks Mr. and Mrs. because us we don't
favor titles. What's your first name now?"

Mr. Fairchilds considered the question with the appearance of trying to
remember. "You'd better call me Pestalozzi," he answered, with a look
and tone of solemnity.

"Pesky Louzy!" Mrs. Waekernagel exclaimed. "Well, now think! That's a
name where ain't familiar 'round here. Is it after some of your folks?"

"It was a name I think I bore in a previous incarnation as a teacher of
youth," Fairchilds gravely replied.

Mrs. Waekernagel looked blank. "Tillie!" she appealed to her niece, who
had shyly stepped half behind her, "do you know right what he means?"

Tillie dumbly shook her head.

"Pesky Louzy!" Mrs. Waekernagel experimented with the unfamiliar name.
"Don't it, now, beat all! It'll take me awhile till I'm used to that
a'ready. Mebbe I'll just call you Teacher; ain't?"

She looked at him inquiringly, expecting an answer. "Ain't!" she
repeated in her vigorous, whole-souled way.

"Eh--ain't WHAT?" Fairchilds asked, puzzled.

"Och, I just mean, SAY NOT? Can't you mebbe talk English wery good? We
had such a foreigners at this HOtel a'ready. We had oncet one, he was
from Phil'delphy and he didn't know what we meant right when we sayed,
'The butter's all any more.' He'd ast like you, 'All what?' Yes, he was
that dumm! Och, well," she added consolingly, "people can't help fur
their dispositions, that way!"

"And what must I call you?" the young man inquired.

"My name's Wackernagel."

"Miss or Mrs.?"

"Well, I guess not MISS anyhow! I'm the mother of four!"

"Oh, excuse me!"

"Oh, that's all right!" responded Mrs. Wackernagel, amiably. "Well, I
must go make supper now. You just make yourself at home that way."

"May I go to my room?"

"Now?" asked Mrs. Wackernagel, incredulously. "Before night?"

"To unpack my dress-suit case," the young man explained. "My trunk will
be brought out to-morrow on the stage."

"All right. If you want. But we ain't used to goin' up-stairs in the
daytime. Tillie, you take his satchel and show him up. This is my
niece, Tillie Getz."

Again Mr. Fairchilds bowed to the girl as his eyes rested on the fair
face looking out from her white cap. Tillie bent her head in response,
then stooped to pick up the suit case. But he interposed and took it
from her hands--and the touch of chivalry in the act went to her head
like wine.

She led the way up-stairs to the close, musty, best spare bedroom.




XV

THE WACKERNAGELS AT HOME


At the supper-table, the apparently inexhaustible topic of talk was the
refusal of the Hersheys to receive the new teacher into the bosom of
their family. A return to this theme again and again, on the part of
the various members of the Wackernagel household, did not seem to
lessen its interest for them, though the teacher himself did not take a
very animated part in its discussion. Tillie realized, as with an
absorbing interest she watched his fine face, that all he saw and heard
here was as novel to him as the world whence he had come would be to
her and her kindred and neighbors, could they be suddenly transplanted
into it. Tillie had never looked upon any human countenance which
seemed to express so much of that ideal world in which she lived her
real life.

"To turn him off after he got there!" Mrs. Wackernagel exclaimed,
reverting for the third time to the episode which had so excited the
family. "And after Lizzie and Jonas they'd sayed he could come yet!"

"Well, I say!" Mr. Wackernagel shook his head, as though the story,
even at its third recital, were full of surprises.

Mr. Wackernagel was a tall, raw-boned man with conspicuously large feet
and hands. He wore his hair plastered back from his face in a unique,
not to say distinguished style, which he privately considered highly
becoming his position as the proprietor of the New Canaan Hotel. Mr.
Wackernagel's self-satisfaction did indeed cover every detail of his
life--from the elegant fashion of his hair to the quality of the whisky
which he sold over the bar, and of which he never tired of boasting.
Not only was he entirely pleased with himself, but his good-natured
satisfaction included all his possessions--his horse first, then his
wife, his two daughters, his permanent boarder, "the Doc," and his
wife's niece Tillie. For people outside his own horizon, he had a
tolerant but contemptuous pity.

Mr. Wackernagel and the doctor both sat at table in their
shirt-sleeves, the proprietor wearing a clean white shirt (his
extravagance and vanity in using two white shirts a week being one of
the chief historical facts of the village), while the doctor was wont
to appear in a brown cotton shirt, the appearance of which suggested
the hostler rather than the physician.

That Fairchilds should "eat in his coat" placed him, in the eyes of the
Wackernagels, on the high social plane of the drummers from the city,
many of whom yearly visited the town with their wares.

"And Teacher he didn't press 'em none, up at Jonas Hershey's, to take
him in, neither, he says," Mrs. Wackernagel pursued.

"He says?" repeated Mr. Wackernagel, inquiringly. "Well, that's like
what I was, too, when I was a young man," he boasted. "If I thought I
ain't wanted when I went to see a young lady--if she passed any
insinyations--she never wasn't worried with ME ag'in!"

"I guess Lizzie's spited that Teacher's stoppin' at our place," giggled
Rebecca, her pretty face rosy with pleasurable excitement in the turn
affairs had taken. She sat directly opposite Mr. Fairchilds, while
Amanda had the chair at his side.

Tillie could see that the young man's eyes rested occasionally upon the
handsome, womanly form of her very good-looking cousin Amanda. Men
always looked at Amanda a great deal, Tillie had often observed. The
fact had never before had any special significance for her.

"Are you from Lancaster, or wherever?" the doctor inquired of Mr.
Fairchilds.

"From Connecticut," he replied in a tone that indefinably, but
unmistakably checked further questioning.

"Now think! So fur off as that!"

"Yes, ain't!" exclaimed Mrs. Wackernagel. "It's a wonder a body'd ever
be contented to live that fur off."

"We're had strangers here in this HOtel," Mr. Wackernagel began to
brag, while he industriously ate of his fried sausage and fried
potatoes, "from as fur away as Illinois yet! And from as fur south as
down in Maine! Yes, indeed! Ain't, mom?" he demanded of his wife.

"Och, yes, many's the strange meals I cooked a'ready in this house. One
week I cooked forty strange meals; say not, Abe?" she returned.

"Yes, I mind of that week. It was Mrs. Johnson and her daughter we had
from Illinois and Mrs. Snyder from Maine," Abe explained to Mr.
Fairchilds. "And them Johnsons stayed the whole week."

"They stopped here while Mr. Johnson went over the county sellin'
milk-separators," added Mrs. Wackernagel. "And Abe he was in Lancaster
that week, and the Doc he was over to East Donegal, and there was no
man here except only us ladies! Do you mind, Rebecca?"

Eebecca nodded, her mouth too full for utterance.

"Mrs. Johnson she looked younger than her own daughter yet," Mrs.
Wackernagel related, with animation, innocent of any suspicion that the
teacher might not find the subject of Mrs. Johnson as absorbing as she
found it.

"There is nothing like good health as a preserver of youth," responded
Fairchilds.

"HOtel-keepin' didn't pay till we got the license," Mr. Wackernagel
chatted confidentially to the stranger. "Mom, to be sure, she didn't
favor my havin' a bar, because she belonged to meetin'. But I seen I
couldn't make nothin' if I didn't. It was never no temptation to me--I
was always among the whisky and I never got tight oncet. And it ain't
the hard work farmin' was. I had to give up followin' farmin'. I got it
so in my leg. Why, sometimes I can't hardly walk no more."

"And can't your doctor cure you?" Fairchilds asked, with a curious
glance at the unkempt little man across the table.

"Och, yes, he's helped me a heap a'ready. Him he's as good a doctor as
any they're got in Lancaster even!" was the loyal response. "Here a
couple months back, a lady over in East Donegal Township she had wrote
him a letter over here, how the five different kinds of doses where he
give her daughter done her so much good, and she was that grateful, she
sayed she just felt indebted fur a letter to him! Ain't, Doc? She sayed
now her daughter's engaged to be married and her mind's more
settled--and to be sure, that made somepin too. Yes, she sayed her
gettin' engaged done her near as much good as the five different kind
of doses done her."

"Are you an Allopath?" Fairchilds asked the doctor.

"I'm a Eclectic," he responded glibly. "And do you know, Teacher, I'd
been practisin' that there style of medicine fur near twelve years
before I knowed it was just to say the Eclectic School, you understand."

"Like Moliere's prose-writer!" remarked the teacher, then smiled at
himself for making such an allusion in such a place.

"Won't you have some more sliced radishes, Teacher?" urged the hostess.
"I made a-plenty."

"No, I thank you," Fairchilds replied, with his little air of courtesy
that so impressed the whole family. "I can't eat radishes in the
evening with impunity."

"But these is with WINEGAR," Mrs. Wackernagel corrected him.

Before Mr. Fairchilds could explain, Mr. Wackernagel broke in,
confirming the doctor's proud claim.

"Yes, Doc he's a Eclectic," he repeated, evidently feeling that the
fact reflected credit on the hotel. "You can see his sign on the side
door."

"I was always interested in science," explained the doctor, under the
manifest impression that he was continuing the subject. "Phe-non-e-ma.
That's what I like. Odd things. I'm stuck on 'em! Now this here
wireless teleGRAPHY. I'm stuck on that, you bet! To me that there's a
phe-non-e-ma."

"Teacher," interrupted Mrs. Wackernagel, "you ain't eatin' hearty.
Leave me give you some more sausage."

"If you please," Mr. Fairchilds bowed as he handed his plate to her.

"Why don't you leave him help hisself," protested Mr. Wackernagel. "He
won't feel to make hisself at home if he can't help hisself like as if
he was one of us that way."

"Och, well," confessed Mrs. Wackernagel, "I just keep astin' him will
he have more, so I can hear him speak his manners so nice." She laughed
aloud at her own vanity. "You took notice of it too, Tillie, ain't? You
can't eat fur lookin' at him!"

A tide of color swept Tillie's face as the teacher, with a look of
amusement, turned his eyes toward her end of the table. Her glance fell
upon her plate, and she applied herself to cutting up her untouched
sausage.

"Now, there's Doc," remarked Amanda, critically, "he's GOT good
manners, but he don't use 'em."

"Och," said the doctor, "it ain't worth while to trouble."

"I think it would be wonderful nice, Teacher," said Mrs. Wackernagel,
"if you learnt them manners you got to your scholars this winter. I
wisht 'Manda and Rebecca knowed such manners. THEY're to be your
scholars this winter."

"Indeed?" said Fairchilds; "are they?"

"'Manda there," said her father, "she's so much fur actin' up you'll
have to keep her right by you to keep her straight, still."

"That's where I shall be delighted to keep her," returned Fairchilds,
gallantly, and Amanda laughed boisterously and grew several shades
rosier as she looked boldly up into the young man's eyes.

"Ain't you fresh though!" she exclaimed coquettishly.

How dared they all make so free with this wonderful young man, marveled
Tillie. Why didn't they realize, as she did, how far above them he was?
She felt almost glad that in his little attentions to Amanda and
Rebecca he had scarcely noticed her at all; for the bare thought of
talking to him overwhelmed her with shyness.

"Mind Tillie!" laughed Mr. Wackernagel, suddenly, "lookin' scared at
the way yous are all talkin' up to Teacher! Tillie she's afraid of
you," he explained to Mr. Fairchilds. "She ain't never got her tongue
with her when there's strangers. Ain't, Tillie?"

Tillie's burning face was bent over her plate, and she did not attempt
to answer. Mr. Fairchilds' eyes rested for an instant on the delicate,
sensitive countenance of the girl. But his attention was diverted by an
abrupt exclamation from Mrs. Wackernagel.

"Oh, Abe!" she suddenly cried, "you ain't tole Teacher yet about the
Albright sisters astin' you, on market, what might your name be!"

The tone in which this serious omission was mentioned indicated that it
was an anecdote treasured among the family archives.

"Now, I would mebbe of forgot that!" almost in consternation said Mr.
Wackernagel. "Well," he began, concentrating his attention upon the
teacher, "it was this here way. The two Miss Albrights they had bought
butter off of us, on market, for twenty years back a'ready, and all
that time we didn't know what was their name, and they didn't know
ourn; fur all, I often says to mom, 'Now I wonder what's the name of
them two thin little women.' Well, you see, I was always a wonderful
man fur my jokes. Yes, I was wery fond of makin' a joke, still. So here
one day the two sisters come along and bought their butter, and then
one of 'em she says, 'Excuse me, but here I've been buyin' butter off
of yous fur this twenty years back a'ready and I ain't never heard your
name. What might your name BE?' Now I was such a man fur my jokes,
still, so I says to her"--Mr. Wackernagel's whole face twinkled with
amusement, and his shoulders shook with laughter as he contemplated the
joke he had perpetrated--"I says, 'Well, it MIGHT be Gener'l
Jackson'"--laughter again choked his utterance, and the stout form of
Mrs. Wackernagel also was convulsed with amusement, while Amanda and
Rebecca giggled appreciatively. Tillie and the doctor alone remained
unaffected. "'It might be Gener'l Jackson,' I says. 'But it ain't. It's
Abe Wackernagel,' I says. You see," he explained, "she ast me what
MIGHT my name be.--See?--and I says 'It might be Jackson'--MIGHT be,
you know, because she put it that way, what might it be. 'But it
ain't,' I says. 'It's Wackernagel.'"

Mr. and Mrs. Wackernagel and their daughters leaned back in their
chairs and gave themselves up to prolonged and exuberant laughter, in
which the teacher obligingly joined as well as he was able.

When this hilarity had subsided, Mr. Wackernagel turned to Mr.
Fairchilds with a question. "Are you mebbe feelin' oneasy, Teacher,
about meetin' the school directors to-night? You know they meet here in
the HOtel parlor at seven o'clock to take a look at you; and if you
suit, then you and them signs the agreement."

"And if I don't suit?"

"They'll turn you down and send you back home!" promptly answered the
doctor. "That there Board ain't conferrin' William Penn on no one where
don't suit 'em pretty good! They're a wonderful partic'lar Board!"

After supper the comely Amanda agreed eagerly to the teacher's
suggestion that she go with him for a walk, before the convening of the
School Board at seven o'clock, and show him the school-house, as he
would like to behold, he said, "the seat of learning" which, if the
Board elected him, was to be the scene of his winter's campaign.

Amanda improved this opportunity to add her word of warning to that of
the doctor.

"That there Board's awful hard to suit, still. Oncet they got a
Millersville Normal out here, and when she come to sign they seen she
was near-sighted that way, and Nathaniel Puntz--he's a director--he up
and says that wouldn't suit just so well, and they sent her back home.
And here oncet a lady come out to apply and she should have sayed [she
is reported to have said] she was afraid New Canaan hadn't no
accommodations good enough fur her, and the directors ast her, 'Didn't
most of our Presidents come out of log cabins?' So they wouldn't elect
her. Now," concluded Amanda, "you see!"

"Thanks for your warning. Can you give me some pointers?"

"What's them again?"

"Well, I must not be near-sighted, for one thing, and I must not demand
'all the modern improvements.' Tell me what manner of man this School
Board loves and admires. To be in the dark as to their tastes, you
know--"

"You must make yourself nice and common," Amanda instructed him. "You
haven't dare to put on no city airs. To be sure, I guess they come a
good bit natural to you, and, as mom says still, a body can't help fur
their dispositions; but our directors is all plain that way and they
don't like tony people that wants to come out here and think they're
much!"

"Yes? I see. Anything else?"

"Well, they'll be partic'lar about your bein' a perfessor."

"How do you mean?"

Amanda looked at him in astonishment. "If you're a perfessor or no.
They'll be sure to ast you."

Mr. Fairchilds thoughtfully considered it.

"You mean," he said, light coming to him, "they will ask me whether I
am a professor of religion, don't you?"

"Why, to be sure!"

"Oh!"

"And you better have your answer ready."

"What, in your judgment, may I ask, would be a suitable answer to that?"

"Well, ARE you a perfessor?"

"Oh, I'm anything at all that will get me this 'job.' I've got to have
it as a makeshift until I can get hold of something better. Let me
see--will a Baptist do?"

"Are you a Baptist?" the girl stolidly asked.

"When circumstances are pressing. Will they be satisfied with a
Baptist?"

"That's one of the fashionable churches of the world," Amanda replied
gravely. "And the directors is most all Mennonites and Amish and
Dunkards. All them is PLAIN churches and loosed of the world, you know."

"Oh, well, I'll wriggle out somehow! Trust to luck!" Fairchilds
dismissed the subject, realizing the injudiciousness of being too
confidential with this girl on so short an acquaintance.

At the momentous hour of seven, the directors promptly assembled. When
Tillie, at her aunt's request, carried two kerosene lamps into the
parlor, a sudden determination came to the girl to remain and witness
the reception of the new teacher by the School Board.

She was almost sick with apprehension lest the Board should realize, as
she did, that this Harvard graduate was too fine for such as they. It
was an austere Board, hard to satisfy, and there was nothing they would
so quickly resent and reject as evident superiority in an applicant.
The Normal School students, their usual candidates, were for the most
part, though not always, what was called in the neighborhood "nice and
common." The New Canaan Board was certainly not accustomed to sitting
in judgment upon an applicant such as this Pestalozzi Fairchilds.
(Tillie's religion forbade her to call him by the vain and worldly form
of Mr.)

No one noticed the pale-faced girl as, after placing one lamp on the
marble-topped table about which the directors sat and another on the
mantelpiece, she moved quietly away to the farthest corner of the long,
narrow parlor and seated herself back of the stove.

The applicant, too, when he came into the room, was too much taken up
with what he realized to be the perils of his case to observe the
little watcher in the corner, though he walked past her so close that
his coat brushed her shoulder, sending along her nerves, like a faint
electric shock, a sensation so novel and so exquisite that it made her
suddenly close her eyes to steady her throbbing head.

There were present six members of the Board--two Amishmen, one Old
Mennonite, one patriarchal-looking Dunkard, one New Mennonite, and one
Evangelical, the difference in their religious creeds being attested by
their various costumes and the various cuts of beard and hair. The
Evangelical, the New Mennonite, and the Amishmen were farmers, the
Dunkard kept the store and the post-office, and the Old Mennonite was
the stage-driver. Jacob Getz was the Evangelical; and Nathaniel Puntz,
Absalom's father, the New Mennonite.

The investigation of the applicant was opened up by the president of
the Board, a long-haired Amishman, whose clothes were fastened by hooks
and eyes instead of buttons and buttonholes, these latter being
considered by his sect as a worldly vanity.

"What was your experience a'ready as a teacher?"

Fairchilds replied that he had never had any.

Tillie's heart sank as, from her post in the corner, she heard this
answer. Would the members think for one moment of paying forty dollars
a month to a teacher without experience? She was sure they had never
before done so. They were shaking their heads gravely over it, she
could see.

But the investigation proceeded.

"What was your Persuasion then?"

Tillie saw, in the teacher's hesitation, that he did not understand the
question.

"My 'Persuasion'? Oh! I see. You mean my Church?"

"Yes, what's your conwictions?"

He considered a moment. Tillie hung breathlessly upon his answer. She
knew how much depended upon it with this Board of "plain" people. Could
he assure them that he was "a Bible Christian"? Otherwise, they would
never elect him to the New Canaan school. He gave his reply, presently,
in a tone suggesting his having at that moment recalled to memory just
what his "Persuasion" was. "Let me see--yes--I'm a Truth-Seeker."

"What's that again?" inquired the president, with interest. "I have not
heard yet of that Persuasion."

"A Truth-Seeker," he gravely explained, "is one who believes in--eh--in
a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite,
coherent heterogeneity."

The members looked at each other cautiously.

"Is that the English you're speakin', or whatever?" asked the Dunkard
member. "Some of them words ain't familiar with me till now, and I
don't know right what they mean."

"Yes, I'm talking English," nodded the applicant. "We also believe," he
added, growing bolder, "in the fundamental, biogenetic law that
ontogenesis is an abridged repetition of philogenesis."

"He says they believe in Genesis," remarked the Old Mennonite,
appealing for aid, with bewildered eyes, to the other members.

"Maybe he's a Jew yet!" put in Nathaniel Puntz. "We also believe," Mr.
Fairchilds continued, beginning to enjoy himself, "in the revelations
of science."

"He believes in Genesis and in Revelations," explained the president to
the others.

"Maybe he's a Cat'lic!" suggested the suspicious Mr. Puntz.

"No," said Fairchilds, "I am, as I said, a Truth-Seeker. A Truth-Seeker
can no more be a Catholic or a Jew in faith than an Amishman can, or a
Mennonite, or a Brennivinarian."

Tillie knew he was trying to say "Winebrennarian," the name of one of
the many religious sects of the county, and she wondered at his not
knowing better.

"You ain't a gradyate, neither, are you?" was the president's next
question, the inscrutable mystery of the applicant's creed being for
the moment dropped.

"Why, yes, I thought you knew that. Of Harvard."

"Och, that!" contemptuously; "I mean you ain't a gradyate of
Millersville Normal?"

"No," humbly acknowledged Fairchilds.

"When I was young," Mr. Getz irrelevantly remarked, "we didn't have no
gradyate teachers like what they have now, still. But we anyhow learnt
more ACCORDING."

"How long does it take you to get 'em from a, b, c's to the Testament?"
inquired the patriarchal Dunkard.

"That depends upon the capacity of the pupil," was Mr. Fairchilds's
profound reply.

"Can you learn 'em 'rithmetic good?" asked Nathaniel Puntz. "I got a
son his last teacher couldn't learn 'rithmetic to. He's wonderful dumm
in 'rithmetic, that there boy is. Absalom by name. After the
grandfather. His teacher tried every way to learn him to count and
figger good. He even took and spread toothpicks out yet--but that
didn't learn him neither. I just says, he ain't appointed to learn
'rithmetic. Then the teacher he tried him with such a Algebry. But
Absalom he'd get so mixed up!--he couldn't keep them x's spotted."

"I have a method," Mr. Fairchilds began, "which I trust--"

To Tillie's distress, her aunt's voice, at this instant calling her to
"come stir the sots [yeast] in," summoned her to the kitchen.

It was very hard to have to obey. She longed so to stay till Fairchilds
should come safely through his fiery ordeal. For a moment she was
tempted to ignore the summons, but her conscience, no less than her
grateful affection for her aunt, made such behavior impossible. Softly
she stole out of the room and noiselessly closed the door behind her.

A half-hour later, when her aunt and cousins had gone to bed, and while
the august School Board still occupied the parlor, Tillie sat sewing in
the sitting-room, while the doctor, at the other side of the table,
nodded over his newspaper.

Since Tillie had come to live at the hotel, she and the doctor were
often together in the evening; the Doc was fond of a chat over his pipe
with the child whom he so helped and befriended in her secret struggles
to educate herself. There was, of course, a strong bond of sympathy and
friendship between them in their common conspiracy with Miss Margaret,
whom the doctor had never ceased to hold in tender memory.

Just now Tillie's ears were strained to catch the sounds of the
adjourning of the Board. When at last she heard their shuffling
footsteps in the hall, her heart beat fast with suspense. A moment more
and the door leading from the parlor opened and Fairchilds came out
into the sitting-room.

Tillie did not lift her eyes from her sewing, but the room seemed
suddenly filled with his presence.

"Well!" the doctor roused himself to greet the young man; "were you
'lected?"

Breathlessly, Tillie waited to hear his answer.

"Oh, yes; I've escaped alive!" Fairchilds leaned against the table in
an attitude of utter relaxation. "They roasted me brown, though!
Galileo at Rome, and Martin Luther at Worms, had a dead easy time
compared to what I've been through!"

"I guess!" the doctor laughed. "Ain't!"

"I'm going to bed," the teacher announced in a tone of collapse. "Good
night!"

"Good night!" answered the doctor, cordially.

Fairchilds drew himself up from the table and took a step toward the
stairway; this brought him to Tillie's side of the table, and he paused
a moment and looked down upon her as she sewed.

Her fingers trembled, and the pulse in her throat beat suffocatingly,
but she did not look up.

"Good night, Miss--Tillie, isn't it?"

"Matilda Maria," Tillie's soft, shy voice replied as her eyes, full of
light, were raised, for an instant, to the face above her.

The man smiled and bowed his acknowledgment; then, after an instant's
hesitation, he said, "Pardon me: the uniform you and Mrs. Wackernagel
wear--may I ask what it is?"

"'Uniform'?" breathed Tillie, wonderingly. "Oh, you mean the garb? We
are members of meeting. The world calls us New Mennonites."

"And this is the uni--the garb of the New Mennonites?"

"Yes, sir."

"It is a very becoming garb, certainly," Fairchilds smiled, gazing down
upon the fair young girl with a puzzled look in his own face, for he
recognized, not only in her delicate features, and in the light of her
beautiful eyes, but also in her speech, a something that set her apart
from the rest of this household.

Tillie colored deeply at his words, and the doctor laughed outright.

"By gum! They wear the garb to make 'em look UNbecomin'! And he ups and
tells her it's becomin' yet! That's a choke, Teacher! One on you,
ain't? That there cap's to hide the hair which is a pride to the sek!
And that cape over the bust is to hide woman's allurin' figger. See?
And you ups and tells her it's a becomin' UNYFORM! Unyforms is what New
Mennonites don't uphold to! Them's fur Cat'lics and 'Piscopals--and fur
warriors--and the Mennonites don't favor war! Unyforms yet!" he
laughed. "I'm swanged if that don't tickle me!"

"I stand corrected. I beg pardon if I've offended," Fairchilds said
hastily. "Miss--Matilda--I hope I've not hurt your feelings? Believe
me, I did not mean to."

"Och!" the doctor answered for her, "Tillie she ain't so easy hurt to
her feelin's, are you, Tillie? Gosh, Teacher, them manners you got must
keep you busy! Well, sometimes I think I'm better off if I stay common.
Then I don't have to bother."

The door leading from the bar-room opened suddenly and Jacob Getz stood
on the threshold.

"Well, Tillie," he said by way of greeting. "Uncle Abe sayed you wasn't
went to bed yet, so I stopped to see you a minute."

"Well, father," Tillie answered as she put down her sewing and came up
to him.

Awkwardly he bent to kiss her, and Tillie, even in her emotional
excitement, realized, with a passing wonder, that he appeared glad to
see her after a week of separation.

"It's been some lonesome, havin' you away," he told her.

"Is everybody well?" she asked.

"Yes, middlin'. You was sewin', was you?" he inquired, glancing at the
work on the table.

"Yes, sir."

"All right. Don't waste your time. Next Saturday I 'll stop off after
market on my way out from Lancaster and see you oncet, and get your
wages off of Aunty Em."

"Yes, sir."

A vague idea of something unusual in the light of Tillie's eyes
arrested him. He glanced suspiciously at the doctor, who was speaking
in a low tone to the teacher.

"Look-ahere, Tillie. If Teacher there wants to keep comp'ny with one of
yous girls, it ain't to be you, mind. He ain't to be makin' up to you!
I don't want you to waste your time that there way."

Apprehensively, Tillie darted a sidelong glance at the teacher to see
if he had heard--for though no tender sentiment was associated in her
mind with the idea of "keeping company," yet intuitively she felt the
unseemliness of her father's warning and its absurdity in the eyes of
such as this stranger.

Mr. Fairchilds was leaning against the table, his arms folded, his lips
compressed and his face flushed. She was sure that he had overheard her
father. Was he angry, or--almost worse--did that compressed mouth mean
concealed amusement?

"Well, now, I must be goin'," said Mr. Getz. "Be a good girl, mind.
Och, I 'most forgot to tell you. Me and your mom's conceited we'd drive
up to Puntz's Sunday afternoon after the dinner work's through a'ready.
And if Aunty Em don't want you partic'lar, you're to come home and mind
the childern, do you hear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Now, don't forget. Well, good-by, then."

Again he bent to kiss her, and Tillie felt Fairchilds's eyes upon her,
as unresponsively she submitted to the caress.

"Good night to you, Teacher." Mr. Getz gruffly raised his voice to
speak to the pair by the table. "And to you, Doc."

They answered him and he went away. When Tillie slowly turned back to
the table, the teacher hastily took his leave and moved away to the
stairway at the other end of the room. As she took up her sewing, she
heard him mount the steps and presently close and lock the door of his
room at the head of the stairs.

"He was, now, wonderful surprised, Tillie," the doctor confided to her,
"when I tole him Jake Getz was your pop. He don't think your pop takes
after you any. I says to him, 'Tillie's pop, there, bein' one of your
bosses, you better make up to Tillie,' I says, and he sayed, 'You don't
mean to tell me that that Mr. Getz of the School Board is the father of
this girl?' 'That's what,' I says. 'He's that much her father,' I says,
'that you'd better keep on the right side of him by makin' up to
Tillie,' I says, just to plague him. And just then your pop up and
sayed if Teacher wanted to keep comp'ny he must pick out 'Manda or
Rebecca--and I seen Teacher wanted to laugh, but his manners wouldn't
leave him. He certainly has, now, a lot of manners, ain't, Tillie?"

Tillie's head was bent over her sewing and she did not answer.

The doctor yawned, stretched himself, and guessed he would step into
the bar-room.

Tillie bent over her sewing for a long time after she was left alone.
The music of the young man's grave voice as he had spoken her name and
called her "Miss Matilda" sang in her brain. The fascination of his
smile as he had looked down into her eyes, and the charm of his
chivalrous courtesy, so novel to her experience, haunted and
intoxicated her. And tonight, Tillie felt her soul flooded with a life
and light so new and strange that she trembled as before a miracle.

Meanwhile, Walter Fairchilds, alone in his room, his mind too full of
the events and characters to which the past day had introduced him to
admit of sleep, was picturing, with mingled amusement and regret, the
genuine horror of his fastidious relatives could they know of his
present environment, among people for whom their vocabulary had but one
word--a word which would have consigned them all, even that
sweet-voiced, clear-eyed little Puritan, Matilda Maria, to outer
darkness; and that he, their adopted son and brother, should be
breaking bread and living on a footing of perfect equality with these
villagers he knew would have been, in their eyes, an offense only
second in heinousness to that of his apostasy.




XVI

THE WACKERNAGELS "CONWERSE"


The next day, being the Sabbath, brought to Tillie two of the keenest
temptations she had ever known. In the first place, she did not want to
obey her father and go home after dinner to take care of the children.
All in a day the hotel had become to her the one haven where she would
be, outside of which the sun did not shine.

True, by going home she might hope to escape the objectionable Sunday
evening sitting-up with Absalom; for in spite of the note she had sent
him, telling him of her father's wish that he must not come to see her
at the hotel, she was unhappily sure that he would appear as usual.
Indeed, with his characteristic dogged persistency, he was pretty
certain to follow her, whithersoever she went. And even if he did not,
it would be easier to endure the slow torture of his endless visit
under this roof, which sheltered also that other presence, than to lose
one hour away from its wonderful and mysterious charm.

"Now, look here, Tillie," said Aunty Em, at the breakfast-table, "you
worked hard this week, and this after you're restin'--leastways, unless
you WANT to go home and take care of all them litter of childern. If
you don't want to go, you just stay--and _I'll_ take the blame! I'll
say I needed you."

"Let Jake Getz come 'round HERE tryin' to bully you, Tillie," exclaimed
Mr. Wackernagel, "and it won't take me a week to tell him what I think
of HIM! I don't owe HIM nothin'!"

"No," agreed Jake Getz's sister, "we don't live off of him!"

"And I don't care who fetches him neither!" added Mr.
Wackernagel--which expression of contempt was one of the most scathing
known to the tongue of a Pennsylvania Dutchman.

"What are you goin' to do, Tillie?" Amanda asked. "Are you goin' or
stayin'?"

Tillie wavered a moment between duty and inclination; between the habit
of servility to her father and the magic power that held her in its
fascinating spell here under her uncle's roof.

"I'm staying," she faltered.

"Good fur you, Tillie!" laughed her uncle. "You're gettin' learnt here
to take your own head a little fur things. Well, I'd like to get you
spoilt good fur your pop--that's what I'd like to do!"

"We darsent go too fur," warned Aunty Em, "or he won't leave her stay
with us at all."

"Now there's you, Abe," remarked the doctor, dryly; "from the time your
childern could walk and talk a'ready all you had to say was 'Go'--and
they stayed. Ain't?"

Mr. Wackernagel joined in the loud laughter of his wife and daughters.

Tillie realized that the teacher, as he sipped his coffee, was
listening to the dialogue with astonishment and curiosity, and she
hungered to know all that was passing through his mind.

Her second temptation came to her upon hearing Fairchilds, as they rose
from the breakfast-table, suggest a walk in the woods with Amanda and
Rebecca. "And won't Miss Tillie go too?" he inquired.

Her aunt answered for her. "Och, she wouldn't have dare, her bein' a
member, you know. It would be breakin' the Sabbath. And anyways, even
if it wasn't Sunday, us New Mennonites don't take walks or do anything
just fur pleasure when they ain't nothin' useful in it. If Tillie went,
I'd have to report her to the meetin', even if it did go ag'in' me to
do it."

"And then what would happen?" Mr. Fairchilds inquired curiously.

"She'd be set back."

"'Set back'?"

"She wouldn't have dare to greet the sisters with a kiss, and she
couldn't speak with me or eat with me or any of the brothers and
sisters till she gave herself up ag'in and obeyed to the rules."

"This is very interesting," commented Fairchilds, his contemplative
gaze moving from the face of Mrs. Wackernagel to Tillie. "But," he
questioned, "Mrs. Wackernagel, why are your daughters allowed to do
what you think wrong and would not do?"

"Well," began Aunty Em, entering with relish into the discussion, for
she was strong in theology, "we don't hold to forcin' our childern or
interferin' with the free work of the Holy Spirit in bringin' souls to
the truth. We don't do like them fashionable churches of the world
where teaches their childern to say their prayers and makes 'em read
the Bible and go to Sunday-school. We don't uphold to Sunday-schools.
You can't read nothin' in the Scripture about Sunday-schools. We hold
everybody must come by their free will, and learnt only of the Holy
Spirit, into the light of the One True Way."

Fairchilds gravely thanked her for her explanation and pursued the
subject no further.

When Tillie presently saw him start out with her cousins, an
unregenerate longing filled her soul to stay away from meeting and go
with them, to spend this holy Sabbath day in worshiping, not her God,
but this most god-like being who had come like the opening up of heaven
into her simple, uneventful life. In her struggle with her conscience
to crush such sinful desires, Tillie felt that now, for the first time,
she understood how Jacob of old had wrestled with the Angel.

Her spiritual struggle was not ended by her going dutifully to meeting
with her aunt. During all the long services of the morning she fought
with her wandering attention to keep it upon the sacred words that were
spoken and sung. But her thoughts would not be controlled. Straying
like a wicked imp into forbidden paths, her fancy followed the envied
ones into the soft, cool shadows of the autumn woods and along the
banks of the beautiful Conestoga, and mingling with the gentle
murmuring of the leaves and the rippling of the water, she heard that
resonant voice, so unlike any voice she had ever heard before, and that
little abrupt laugh with its odd falsetto note, which haunted her like
a strain of music; and she saw, in the sunlight of the lovely October
morning, against a background of gold and brown leaves and silver
water, the finely chiseled face, the thoughtful, pale forehead, the
kind eyes, the capable white hands, of this most wonderful young man.

Tillie well understood that could the brethren and sisters know in what
a worldly frame of mind she sat in the house of God this day,
undoubtedly they would present her case for "discipline," and even,
perhaps, "set her back." But all the while that she tried to fight back
the enemy of her soul, who thus subtly beset her with temptation to
sin, she felt the utter uselessness of her struggle with herself. For
even when she did succeed in forcing her attention upon some of the
hymns, it was in whimsical and persistent terms of the teacher that she
considered them. How was it possible, she wondered, for him, or any
unconverted soul, to hear, without being moved to "give himself up,"
such lines as these:

     "He washed them all to make them clean,
     But Judas still was full of sin.
     May none of us, like Judas, sell
     Our Lord for gold, and go to hell!"

And these:

     "O man, remember, thou must die;
     The sentence is for you and I.
     Where shall we be, or will we go,
     When we must leave this world below?"

In the same moment that Tillie was wondering how a "Truth-Seeker" would
feel under these searching words, she felt herself condemned by them
for her wandering attention.

The young girl's feelings toward the stranger at this present stage of
their evolution were not, like those of Amanda and Rebecca, the mere
instinctive feminine craving for masculine admiration. She did not
think of herself in relation to him at all. A great hunger possessed
her to know him--all his thoughts, his emotions, the depths and the
heights of him; she did not long, or even wish, that he might know and
admire HER.

The three-mile drive home from church seemed to Tillie, sitting in the
high, old-fashioned buggy at her aunt's side, an endless journey. Never
had old Dolly traveled so deliberately or with more frequent dead stops
in the road to meditate upon her long-past youth. Mrs. Wackernagel's
ineffectual slaps of the reins upon the back of the decrepit animal
inspired in Tillie an inhuman longing to seize the whip and lash the
feeble beast into a swift pace. The girl felt appalled at her own
feelings, so novel and inexplicable they seemed to her. Whether there
was more of ecstasy or torture in them, she hardly knew.

Immediately after dinner the teacher went out and did not turn up again
until evening, when he retired immediately to the seclusion of his own
room.

The mystification of the family at this unaccountably unsocial
behavior, their curiosity as to where he had been, their suspense as to
what he did when alone so long in his bedroom, reached a tension that
was painful.

Promptly at half-past six, Absalom, clad in his Sunday suit, appeared
at the hotel, to perform his weekly stint of sitting-up.

As Rebecca always occupied the parlor on Sunday evening with her
gentleman friend, there was only left to Absalom and Tillie to sit
either in the kitchen or with the assembled family in the sitting-room.
Tillie preferred the latter. Of course she knew that such respite as
the presence of the family gave her was only temporary, for in friendly
consideration of what were supposed to be her feelings in the matter,
they would all retire early. Absalom also knowing this, accepted the
brief inconvenience of their presence without any marked restiveness.

"Say, Absalom," inquired the doctor, as the young man took up his post
on the settee beside Tillie, sitting as close to her as he could
without pushing her off, "how did your pop pass his opinion about the
new teacher after the Board meeting Saturday, heh?"

The doctor was lounging in his own special chair by the table, his fat
legs crossed and his thumbs thrust into his vest arms. Amanda idly
rocked back and forth in a large luridly painted rocking-chair by the
window, and Mrs. Wackernagel sat by the table before an open Bible in
which she was not too much absorbed to join occasionally in the general
conversation.

"He sayed he was afraid he was some tony," answered Absalom. "And," he
added, a reflection in his tone of his father's suspicious attitude on
Saturday night toward Fairchilds, "pop sayed HE couldn't make out what
was his conwictions. He couldn't even tell right was he a Bible
Christian or no."

"He certainly does, now, have pecooliar views," agreed the doctor. "I
was talkin' to him this after--"

"You WAS!" exclaimed Amanda, a note of chagrin in her voice. "Well, I'd
like to know where at? Where had he took himself to?"

"Up to the woods there by the old mill. I come on him there at five
o'clock--layin' readin' and musin'--when I was takin' a short cut home
through the woods comin' from Adam Oberholzer's."

"Well I never!" cried Amanda. "And was he out there all by hisself the
whole afternoon?" she asked incredulously.

"So much as I know. AIN'T he, now, a queer feller not to want a girl
along when one was so handy?" teased the doctor.

"Well," retorted Amanda, "I think he's hard up--to be spendin' a whole
afternoon READIN'!"

"Oh, Doc!" Tillie leaned forward and whispered, "he's up in his room
and perhaps he can hear us through the register!"

"I wisht he KIN," declared Amanda, "if it would learn him how dumm us
folks thinks a feller where spends a whole Sunday afternoon by hisself
READIN'!"

"Why, yes," put in Mrs. Wackernagel; "what would a body be wantin' to
waste time like that fur?--when he could of spent his nice afternoon
settin' there on the porch with us all, conwersin'."

"And he's at it ag'in this evenin', up there in his room," the doctor
informed them. "I went up to give him my lamp, and I'm swanged if he
ain't got a many books and such pamp'lets in his room! As many as ten,
I guess! I tole him: I says, 'It does, now, beat all the way you take
to them books and pamp'lets and things!'"

"It's a pity of him!" said motherly Mrs. Wackernagel.

"And I says to him," added the doctor, "I says, 'You ain't much fur
sociability, are you?' I says."

"Well, I did think, too, Amanda," sympathized her mother, "he'd set up
with you mebbe to-night, seein' Rebecca and Tillie's each got their
gent'man comp'ny--even if he didn't mean it fur really, but only to
pass the time."

"Och, he needn't think I'm dyin' to set up with HIM! There's a plenty
others would be glad to set up with me, if I was one of them that was
fur keepin' comp'ny with just ANYbody! But I did think when I heard he
was goin' to stop here that mebbe he'd be a JOLLY feller that way.
Well," Amanda concluded scathingly, "I'm goin' to tell Lizzie Hershey
she ain't missin' much!"

"What's them pecooliar views of hisn you was goin' to speak to us,
Doc?" said Absalom.

"Och, yes, I was goin' to tell you them. Well, here this after we got
to talkin' about the subjeck of prayer, and I ast him his opinion. And
if I understood right what he meant, why, prayin' is no different to
him than musin'. Leastways, that's the thought I got out of his words."

"Musin'," repeated Absalom. "What's musin'?"

"Yes, what's that ag'in?" asked Mrs. Wackernagel, alert with curiosity,
theological discussions being always of deep interest to her.

"Musin' is settin' by yourself and thinkin' of your learnin',"
explained the doctor. "I've took notice, this long time back, educated
persons they like to set by theirselves, still, and muse."

"And do you say," demanded Absalom, indignantly, "that Teacher he says
it's the same to him as prayin'--this here musin'?"

"So much as I know, that's what he sayed."

"Well," declared Absalom, "that there ain't in the Bible! He'd better
watch out! If he ain't a Bible Christian, pop and Jake Getz and the
other directors'll soon put him off William Penn!"

"Och, Absalom, go sass your gran'mom!" was the doctor's elegant retort.
"What's ailin' YOU, anyways, that you want to be so spunky about
Teacher? I guess you're mebbe thinkin' he'll cut you out with Tillie,
ain't?"

"I'd like to see him try it oncet!" growled Absalom.

Tillie grew cold with fear that the teacher might hear them; but she
knew there was no use in protesting.

"Are you goin' to keep on at William Penn all winter, Absalom?" Mrs.
Wackernagel asked.

"Just long enough to see if he kin learn 'rithmetic to me. Ezra Herr,
he was too dumm to learn me."

"Mebbe," said the doctor, astutely, "you was too dumm to GET learnt!"

"I AM wonderful dumm in 'rithmetic," Absalom acknowledged shamelessly.
"But pop says this here teacher is smart and kin mebbe learn me. I've
not saw him yet myself."

Much as Tillie disliked being alone with her suitor, she was rather
relieved this evening when the family, en masse, significantly took its
departure to the second floor; for she hoped that with no one but
Absalom to deal with, she could induce him to lower his voice so their
talk would not be audible to the teacher in the room above.

Had she been able but faintly to guess what was to ensue on her being
left alone with him, she would have fled up-stairs with the rest of the
family and left Absalom to keep company with the chairs.




XVII

THE TEACHER MEETS ABSALOM


Only a short time had the sitting-room been abandoned to them when
Tillie was forced to put a check upon her lover's ardor.

"Now, Absalom," she firmly said, moving away from his encircling arm,
"unless you leave me be, I'm not sitting on the settee alongside you at
all. You MUST NOT kiss me or hold my hand--or even touch me. Never
again. I told you so last Sunday night."

"But why?" Absalom asked, genuinely puzzled. "Is it that I kreistle
you, Tillie?"

"N--no," she hesitated. An affirmative reply, she knew, would be
regarded as a cold-blooded insult. In fact, Tillie herself did not
understand her own repugnance to Absalom's caresses.

"You act like as if I made you feel repulsive to me, Tillie," he
complained.

"N--no. I don't want to be touched. That's all."

"Well, I'd like to know what fun you think there is in settin' up with
a girl that won't leave a feller kiss her or hug her!"

"I'm sure I don't know what you do see in it, Absalom. I told you not
to come."

"If I ain't to hold your hand or kiss yon, what are we to do to pass
the time?" he reasoned.

"I'll tell you, Absalom. Let me read to you. Then we wouldn't be
wasting the evening."

"I ain't much fur readin'. I ain't like Teacher." He frowned and looked
at her darkly. "I've took notice how much fur books you are that way.
Last Sunday night, too, you sayed, 'Let me read somepin to you.' Mebbe
you and Teacher will be settin' up readin' together. And mebbe the Doc
wasn't just jokin' when he sayed Teacher might cut me out!"

"Please, Absalom," Tillie implored him, "don't talk so loud!"

"I don't care! I hope he hears me sayin' that if he ever comes tryin'
to get my girl off me, I 'll get pop to have him put off his job!"

"None of you know what you are talking about," Tillie indignantly
whispered. "You can't understand. The teacher is a man that wouldn't
any more keep company with one of us country girls than you would keep
company, Absalom, with a gipsy. He's ABOVE us!"

"Well, I guess if you're good enough fur me, Tillie Getz, you're good
enough fur anybody else--leastways fur a man that gets his job off the
wotes of your pop and mine!"

"The teacher is a--a gentleman, Absalom."

Absalom did not understand. "Well, I guess I know he ain't a lady. I
guess I know what his sek is!"

Tillie sighed in despair, and sank back on the settee. For a few
minutes they sat in strained silence.

"I never seen a girl like what you are! You're wonderful different to
the other girls I've knew a'ready."

Tillie did not reply.

"Where d'you come by them books you read?"

"The Doc gets them for me."

"Well, Tillie, look-ahere. I spoke somepin to the Doc how I wanted to
fetch you somepin along when I come over sometime, and I ast him what,
now, he thought you would mebbe like. And he sayed a book. So I got
Cousin Sally Puntz to fetch one along fur me from the Methodist
Sunday-school li-bry, and here I brung it over to you."

He produced a small volume from his coat pocket.

"I was 'most ashamed to bring it, it's so wonderful little. I tole
Cousin Sally, 'Why didn't you bring me a bigger book?' And she sayed
she did try to get a bigger one, but they was all. There's one in that
li-bry with four hunderd pages. I tole her, now, she's to try to get me
that there one next Sunday before it's took by somebody. This one's
'most too little."

Tillie smiled as she took it from him. "Thank you, Absalom. I don't
care if it's LITTLE, so long as it's interesting--and instructive," she
spoke primly.

"The Bible's such a big book, I thought the bigger the book was, the
nearer it was like the Bible," said Absalom.

"But there's the dictionary, Absalom. It's as big as the Bible."

"Don't the size make nothin'?" Absalom asked.

Tillie shook her head, still smiling. She glanced down and read aloud
the title of the book she held: "'What a Young Husband Ought to Know.'"

"But, Absalom!" she faltered.

"Well? What?"

She looked up into his heavy, blank face, and suddenly a faint sense of
humor seemed born in her--and she laughed.

The laugh illumined her face, and it was too much for Absalom. He
seized her and kissed her, with resounding emphasis, squarely on the
mouth.

Instantly Tillie wrenched herself away from him and stood up. Her face
was flushed and her eyes sparkled. And yet, she was not indignant with
him in the sense that a less unsophisticated girl would have been.
Absalom, according to New Canaan standards, was not exceeding his
rights under the circumstances. But an instinct, subtle, undefined,
incomprehensible to herself, contradicted, indeed, by every convention
of the neighborhood in which she had been reared, made Tillie feel that
in yielding her lips to this man for whom she did not care, and whom,
if she could hold out against him, she did not intend to marry, she was
desecrating her womanhood. Vague and obscure as her feeling was, it was
strong enough to control her.

"I meant what I said, Absalom. If you won't leave me be, I won't stay
here with you. You'll have to go home, for now I'm going right
up-stairs."

She spoke with a firmness that made the dull youth suddenly realize a
thing of which he had never dreamed, that however slightly Tillie
resembled her father in other respects, she did have a bit of his
determination.

She took a step toward the stairs, but Absalom seized her skirts and
pulled her back. "You needn't think I'm leavin' you act like that to
me, Tillie!" he muttered, his ardor whetted by the difficulties of his
courting. "Now I'll learn you!" and holding her slight form in his
burly grasp he kissed her again and again.

"Leave me go!" she cried. "I'll call out if you don't! Stop it,
Absalom!"

Absalom laughed aloud, his eyes glittering as he felt her womanly
helplessness in his strong clasp.

"What you goin' to do about it, Tillie? You can't help yourself--you
got to get kissed if you want to or no!" And again his articulate
caresses sounded upon her shrinking lips, and he roared with laughter
in his own satisfaction and in his enjoyment of her predicament. "You
can't help yourself," he said, crushing her against him in a bearish
hug.

"Absalom!" the girl's voice rang out sharply in pain and fear.

Then of a sudden Absalom's wrists were seized in a strong grip, and the
young giant found his arms pinned behind him.

"Now, then, Absalom, you let this little girl alone. Do you
understand?" said Fairchilds, coolly, as he let go his hold on the
youth and stepped round to his side.

Absalom's face turned white with fury as he realized who had dared to
interfere. He opened his lips, but speech would not come to him.
Clenching his fingers, he drew back his arm, but his heavy fist, coming
swiftly forward, was caught easily in Fairchilds's palm--and held there.

"Come, come," he said soothingly, "it isn't worth while to row, you
know. And in the presence of the lady!"

"You mind to your OWN business!" spluttered Absalom, struggling to free
his hand, and, to his own surprise, failing. Quickly he drew back his
left fist and again tried to strike, only to find it too caught and
held, with no apparent effort on the part of the teacher. Tillie, at
first pale with fright at what had promised to be so unequal a contest
in view of the teacher's slight frame and the brawny, muscular strength
of Absalom, felt her pulses bound with a thrill of admiration for this
cool, quiet force which could render the other's fury so helpless;
while at the same time she felt sick with shame.

"Blame you!" cried Absalom, wildly. "Le' me be! It don't make nothin'
to you if I kiss my girl! I don't owe YOU nothin'! You le' me be!"

"Certainly," returned Fairchilds, cheerfully. "Just stop annoying Miss
Tillie, that's all I want."'

He dropped the fellow's hands and deliberately drew out his
handkerchief to wipe his own.

A third time Absalom made a furious dash at him, to find his two wrists
caught in the vise-like grip of his antagonist.

"Tut, tut, Absalom, this is quite enough. Behave yourself, or I shall
be obliged to hurt you."

"YOU--you white-faced, woman-faced mackerel! YOU think you kin hurt me!
You--"

"Now then," Fairchilds again dropped Absalom's hands and picked up from
the settee the book which the youth had presented to Tillie. "Here,
Absalom, take your 'What a Young Husband Ought to Know' and go home."

Something in the teacher's quiet, confident tone cowed Absalom
completely--for the time being, at least. He was conquered. It was very
bewildering. The man before him was not half his weight and was not in
the least ruffled. How had he so easily "licked" him? Absalom, by
reason of his stalwart physique and the fact that his father was a
director, had, during most of his school life, found pleasing diversion
in keeping the various teachers of William Penn cowed before him. He
now saw his supremacy in that quarter at an end--physically speaking at
least. There might be a moral point of attack.

"Look-ahere!" he blustered. "Do you know my pop's Nathaniel Puntz, the
director?"

"You are a credit to him, Absalom. By the way, will you take a message
to him from me? Tell him, please, that the lock on the school-room door
is broken, and I'd be greatly obliged if he would send up a lock-smith
to mend it."

Absalom looked discouraged. A Harvard graduate was, manifestly, a freak
of nature--invulnerable at all points.

"If pop gets down on you, you won't be long at William Penn!" he
bullied. "You'll soon get chased off your job!"

"My job at breaking you in? Well, well, I might be spending my time
more profitably, that's so."

"You go on out of here and le' me alone with my girl!" quavered
Absalom, blinking away tears of rage.

"That will be as she says. How is it, Miss Tillie? Do you want him to
go?"

Now Tillie knew that if she allowed Absalom Puntz to leave her in his
present state of baffled anger, Fairchilds would not remain in New
Canaan a month. Absalom was his father's only child, and Nathaniel
Puntz was known to be both suspicious and vindictive. "Clothed in a
little brief authority," as school director, he never missed an
opportunity to wield his precious power.

With quick insight, Tillie realized that the teacher would think meanly
of her if, after her outcry at Absalom's amorous behavior, she now
inconsistently ask that he remain with her for the rest of the evening.
But what the teacher might think about HER did not matter so much as
that he should be saved from the wrath of Absalom.

"Please leave him stay," she answered in a low voice.

Fairchilds gazed in surprise upon the girl's sweet, troubled face. "Let
him stay?"

"Yes."

"Then perhaps my interference was unwelcome?"

"I thank you, but--I want him to stay."

"Yes? I beg pardon for my intrusion. Good night."

He turned away somewhat abruptly and left the room.

And Tillie was again alone with Absalom.

IN his chamber, getting ready for bed, Fairchilds's thoughts idly dwelt
upon the strange contradictions he seemed to see in the character of
the little Mennonite maiden. He had thought that he recognized in her a
difference from the rest of this household--a difference in speech, in
feature, in countenance, in her whole personality. And yet she could
allow the amorous attentions of that coarse, stupid cub; and her
protestations against the fellow's liberties with her had been mere
coquetry. Well, he would be careful, another time, how he played the
part of a Don Quixote.

Meantime Tillie, with suddenly developed histrionic skill, was, by a
Spartan self-sacrifice in submitting to Absalom's love-making,
overcoming his wrath against the teacher. Absalom never suspected how
he was being played upon, or what a mere tool he was in the hands of
this gentle little girl, when, somewhat to his own surprise, he found
himself half promising that the teacher should not be complained of to
his father. The infinite tact and scheming it required on Tillie's part
to elicit this assurance without further arousing his jealousy left
her, at the end of his prolonged sitting-up, utterly exhausted.

Yet when at last her weary head found her pillow, it was not to rest or
sleep. A haunting, fearful certainty possessed her. "Dumm" as he was,
Absalom, in his invulnerable persistency, had become to the tired,
tortured girl simply an irresistible force of Nature. And Tillie felt
that, struggle as she might against him, there would come a day when
she could fight no longer, and so at last she must fall a victim to
this incarnation of Dutch determination.




XVIII

TILLIE REVEALS HERSELF


In the next few days, Tillie tried in vain to summon courage to appeal
to the teacher for assistance in her winter's study. Day after day she
resolved to speak to him, and as often postponed it, unable to conquer
her shyness. Meantime, however, under the stimulus of his constant
presence, she applied herself in every spare moment to the school-books
used by her two cousins, and in this unaided work she succeeded, as
usual, in making headway.

Fairchilds's attention was arrested by the frequent picture of the
little Mennonite maiden conning school-books by lamp-light.

One evening he happened to be alone with her for a few minutes in the
sitting-room. It was Hallowe'en, and he was waiting for Amanda to come
down from her room, where she was arraying herself for conquest at a
party in the village, to which he had been invited to escort her.

"Studying all alone?" he inquired sociably, coming to the table where
Tillie sat, and looking down upon her.

"Yes," said Tillie, raising her eyes for an instant.

"May I see!"

He bent to look at her book, pressing it open with his palm, and the
movement brought his hand in contact with hers. Tillie felt for an
instant as if she were going to swoon, so strangely delicious was the
shock.

"'Hiawatha,'" he said, all unconscious of the tempest in the little
soul apparently so close to him, yet in reality so immeasurably far
away. "Do you enjoy it?" he inquired curiously.

"Oh, yes"; then quickly she added, "I am parsing it."

"Oh!" There was a faint disappointment in his tone.

"But," she confessed, "I read it all through the first day I began to
parse it, and--and I wish I was parsing something else, because I keep
reading this instead of parsing it, and--"

"You enjoy the story and the poetry?" he questioned.

"But a body mustn't read just for pleasure," she said timidly; "but for
instruction; and this 'Hiawatha' is a temptation to me."

"What makes you think you ought not to read 'just for pleasure'?"

"That would be a vanity. And we Mennonites are loosed from the things
of the world."

"Do you never do anything just for the pleasure of it?"

"When pleasure and duty go hand in hand, then pleasure is not
displeasing to God. But Christ, you know, did not go about seeking
pleasure. And we try to follow him in all things."

"But, child, has not God made the world beautiful for our pleasure? Has
he not given us appetites and passions for our pleasure?--minds and
hearts and bodies constructed for pleasure?"

"Has he made anything for pleasure apart from usefulness?" Tillie asked
earnestly, suddenly forgetting her shyness.

"But when a thing gives pleasure it is serving the highest possible
use," he insisted. "It is blasphemous to close your nature to the
pleasures God has created for you. Blasphemous!"

"Those thoughts have come to me still," said Tillie. "But I know they
were sent to me by the Enemy."

"'The Enemy'?"

"The Enemy of our souls."

"Oh!" he nodded; then abruptly added, "Now do you know, little girl, I
wouldn't let HIM bother me at this stage of the game, if I were you!
He's a back number, really!" He checked himself, remembering how
dangerous such heresies were in New Canaan. "Don't you find it dull
working alone?" he asked hastily, "and rather uphill?"

"It is often very hard."

"Often? Then you have been doing it for some time?"

"Yes," Tillie answered hesitatingly. No one except the doctor shared
her secret with Miss Margaret. Self-concealment had come to be the
habit of her life--her instinct for self-preservation. And yet, the
teacher's evident interest, his presence so close to her, brought all
her soul to her lips. She had a feeling that if she could overcome her
shyness, she would be able to speak to him as unrestrainedly, as truly,
as she talked in her letters to Miss Margaret.

"Do you have no help at all?" he pursued.

Could she trust him with the secret of Miss Margaret's letters? The
habit of secretiveness was too strong upon her. "There is no one here
to help me--unless YOU would sometimes," she timidly answered.

"I am at your service always. Nothing could give me greater pleasure."

"Thank you." Her face flushed with delight.

"You have, of course, been a pupil at William Penn?" he asked.

"Yes, but father took me out of school when I was twelve. Ever since
then I've been trying to educate myself, but--" she lifted troubled
eyes to his face, "no one here knows it but the doctor. No one must
know it."

"Trust me," he nodded. "But why must they not know it?"

"Father would stop it if he found it out."

"Why?"

"He wouldn't leave me waste the time."

"You have had courage--to have struggled against such odds."

"It has not been easy. But--it seems to me the things that are worth
having are never easy to get."

Fairchilds looked at her keenly.

"'The things that are worth having'? What do you count as such things?"

"Knowledge and truth; and personal freedom to be true to one's self."

He concealed the shock of surprise he felt at her words. "What have we
here?" he wondered, his pulse quickening as he looked into the shining
upraised eyes of the girl and saw the tumultuous heaving of her bosom.
He had been right after all, then, in feeling that she was different
from the rest of them! He could see that it was under the stress of
unusual emotion that she gave expression to thoughts which of necessity
she must seldom or never utter to those about her.

"'Personal freedom to be true to one's self'?" he repeated. "What would
it mean to you if you had it?"

"Life!" she answered. "I am only a dead machine, except when I am
living out my true self."

He deliberately placed his hand on hers as it lay on the table. "You
make me want to clasp hands with you. Do you realize what a big truth
you have gotten hold of--and all that it involves?"

"I only know what it means to me."

"You are not free to be yourself?"

"I have never drawn a natural breath except in secret."

Tillie's face was glowing. Scarcely did she know herself in this
wonderful experience of speaking freely, face to face, with one who
understood.

"My own recent experiences of life," he said gravely, "have brought me,
too, to realize that it is death in life not to be true to one's self.
But if you wait for the FREEDOM to be so--" he shrugged his shoulders.
"One always has that freedom if he will take it--at its fearful cost.
To be uncompromisingly and always true to one's self simply means
martyrdom in one form or another."

He, too, marveled that he should have found any one in this household
to whom he could speak in such a vein as this.

"I always thought," Tillie said, "that when I was enough educated to be
a teacher and be independent of father, I would be free to live truly.
But I see that YOU cannot. You, too, have to hide your real self. Else
you could not stay here in New Canaan."

"Or anywhere else, child," he smiled. "It is only with the rare few
whom one finds on one's own line of march that one can be absolutely
one's self. Your secret life, Miss Tillie, is not unique."

A fascinating little brown curl had escaped from Tillie's cap and lay
on her cheek, and she raised her hand to push it back where it
belonged, under its snowy Mennonite covering.

"Don't!" said Fairchilds. "Let it be. It's pretty!"

Tillie stared up at him, a new wonder in her eyes.

"In that Mennonite cap, you look like--like a Madonna!" Almost
unwittingly the words had leaped from his lips; he could not hold them
back. And in uttering them, it came to him that in the freedom
permissible to him with an unsophisticated but interesting and gifted
girl like this--freedom from the conventional restraints which had
always limited his intercourse with the girls of his own social
world--there might be possible a friendship such as he had never known
except with those of his own sex--and with them but rarely. The thought
cheered him mightily; for his life in New Canaan was heavy with
loneliness.

With the selfishness natural to man, he did not stop to consider what
such companionship might come to mean to this inexperienced girl
steeped in a life of sordid labor and unbroken monotony.

There came the rustle of Amanda's skirts on the stairs.

Fairchilds clasped Tillie's passive hand. "I feel that I have found a
friend to-night."

Amanda, brilliant in a scarlet frock and pink ribbons, appeared in the
doorway. The vague, almost unseeing look with which the teacher turned
to her was interpreted by the vanity of this buxom damsel to be the
dazzled vision of eyes half blinded by her radiance.

For a long time after they had gone away together, Tillie sat with her
face bowed upon her book, happiness surging through her with every
great throb of her heart.

At last she rose, picked up the lamp and carried it into the kitchen to
the little mirror before which the family combed their hair. Holding
the lamp high, she surveyed her features. As long as her arm would bear
the weight of the uplifted lamp, she gazed at her reflected image.

When presently with trembling arm she set it on the dresser, Tillie,
like Mother Eve of old, had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. Tillie
knew that she was very fair.

That evening marked another crisis in the girl's inner life. Far into
the night she lay with her eyes wide open, staring into the darkness,
seeing there strange new visions of her own soul, gazing into its
hitherto unsounded depths and seeing there the heaven or the hell--she
scarcely knew which--that possessed all her being.

"Blasphemous to close your nature to the pleasures God has created for
you!" His words burned themselves into her brain. Was it to an abyss of
degradation that her nature was bearing her in a swift and fatal
tide--or to a holy height of blessedness? Alternately her fired
imagination and awakened passion exalted her adoration of him into an
almost religious joy, making her yearn to give herself to him, soul and
body, as to a god; then plunged her into an agony of remorse and terror
at her own idolatry and lawlessness.

A new universe was opened up to her, and all of life appeared changed.
All the poetry and the stories which she had ever read held new and
wonderful meanings. The beauty in Nature, which, even as a child, she
had felt in a way she knew those about her could never have understood,
now spoke to her in a language of infinite significance. The mystery,
the wonder, the power of love were revealed to her, and her soul was
athirst to drink deep at this magic fountain of living water.

"You look like a Madonna!" Oh, surely, thought Tillie, in the long
hours of that wakeful night, this bliss which filled her heart WAS a
temptation of the Evil One, who did not scruple to use even such as the
teacher for an instrument to work her undoing! Was not his satanic hand
clearly shown in these vain and wicked thoughts which crowded upon
her--thoughts of how fair she would look in a red gown like Amanda's,
or in a blue hat like Rebecca's, instead of in her white cap and black
hood? She crushed her face in her pillow in an agony of remorse for her
own faithlessness, as she felt how hideous was that black Mennonite
hood and all the plain garb which hitherto had stood to her for the
peace, the comfort, the happiness, of her life! With all her mind, she
tried to force back such wayward, sinful thoughts, but the more she
wrestled with them, the more persistently did they obtrude themselves.

On her knees she passionately prayed to be delivered from the
temptation of such unfaithfulness to her Lord, even in secret thought.
Yet even while in the very act of pleading for mercy, forgiveness,
help, to her own unutterable horror she found herself wondering whether
she would dare brave her father's wrath and ask her aunt, in the
morning, to keep back from her father a portion of her week's wages
that she might buy some new white caps, her old ones being of poor
material and very worn.

It was a tenet of her church that "wearing-apparel was instituted by
God as a necessity for the sake of propriety and also for healthful
warmth, but when used for purposes of adornment it becomes the evidence
of an un-Christlike spirit." Now Tillie knew that her present yearning
for new caps was prompted, not by the praiseworthy and simple desire to
be merely neat, but wholly by her vain longing to appear more fair in
the eyes of the teacher.

Thus until the small hours of the morning did the young girl wrestle
with the conflicting forces in her soul.

But the Enemy had it all his own way; for when Tillie went down-stairs
next morning to help her aunt get breakfast, she knew that she intended
this day to buy those new caps in spite of the inevitable penalty she
would have to suffer for daring to use her own money without her
father's leave.

And when she walked into the kitchen, her aunt was amazed to see the
girl's fair face looking out from a halo of tender little brown curls,
which, with a tortured conscience, and an apprehension of retribution
at the hands of the meeting, Tillie had brushed from under her cap and
arranged with artful care.




XIX

TILLIE TELLS A LIE


It was eleven o'clock on the following Saturday morning, a busy hour at
the hotel, and Mrs. Wackernagel and Tillie were both hard at work in
the kitchen, while Eebecca and Amanda were vigorously applying their
young strength to "the up-stairs work."

The teacher was lounging on the settee in the sitting-room, trying to
read his Boston Transcript and divert his mind from its irritation and
discontent under a condition of things which made it impossible for him
to command Tillie's time whenever he wanted a companion for a walk in
the woods, or for a talk in which he might unburden himself of his
pent-up thoughts and feelings. The only freedom she had was in the
evening; and even then she was not always at liberty. There was Amanda
always ready and at hand--it kept him busy dodging her. Why was Fate so
perverse in her dealings with him? Why couldn't it be Tillie instead of
Amanda? Fairchilds chafed under this untoward condition of things like
a fretful child--or, rather, just like a man who can't have what he
wants.

Both Tillie and her aunt went about their tasks this morning with a
nervousness of movement and an anxiety of countenance that told of
something unwonted in the air. Fairchilds was vaguely conscious of this
as he sat in the adjoining room, with the door ajar.

"Tillie!" said her aunt, with a sharpness unusual to her, as she closed
the oven door with a spasmodic bang, "you put on your shawl and bonnet
and go right up to Sister Jennie Hershey's for some bacon."

"Why, Aunty Em!" said Tillie, in surprise, looking up from the table
where she was rolling out paste; "I can't let these pies."

"I'll finish them pies. You just go now."

"But we've got plenty of bacon."

"If we've got bacon a-plenty, then get some ponhaus. Or some mush.
Hurry up and go, Tillie!"

She came to the girl's side and took the rolling-pin from her hands.
"And don't hurry back. Set awhile. Now get your things on quick."

"But, Aunty Em--"

"Are you mindin' me, Tillie, or ain't you?" her aunt sharply demanded.

"But in about ten minutes father will be stopping on his way from
Lancaster market," Tillie said, though obediently going toward the
corner where hung her shawl and bonnet, "to get my wages and see me,
Aunty Em--like what he does every Saturday still."

"Well, don't be so dumm, Tillie! That's why I'm sendin' you off!"

"Oh, Aunty Em, I don't want to go away and leave you to take all the
blame for those new caps! And, anyhow, father will stop at Sister
Jennie Hershey's if he don't find me here."

"I won't tell him you're there. And push them curls under your cap, or
Sister Jennie'll be tellin' the meeting, and you'll be set back yet! I
don't know what's come over you, Tillie, to act that vain and
unregenerate!"

"Father will guess I'm at Sister Jennie's, and he'll stop to see."

"That's so, too." Aunty Em thoughtfully considered the situation. "Go
out and hide in the stable, Tillie."

Tillie hesitated as she nervously twisted the strings of her bonnet.
"What's the use of hiding, Aunty Em? I'd have to see him NEXT Saturday."

"He won't be so mad about it till next Saturday."

Tillie shook her head. "He'll keep getting angrier--until he has
satisfied himself by punishing me in some way for spending that money
without leave."

The girl's face was pale, but she spoke very quietly, and her aunt
looked at her curiously.

"Tillie, ain't you afraid of your pop no more?"

"Oh, Aunty Em! YES, I am afraid of him."

"I'm all fidgety myself, thinkin' about how mad he'll be. Dear knows
what YOU must feel yet, Tillie--and what all your little life you've
been feelin', with his fear always hangin' over you still. Sometimes
when I think how my brother Jake trains up his childern!"--indignation
choked her--"I have feelin's that are un-Christlike, Tillie!"

"And yet, Aunty Em," the girl said earnestly, "father does care for me
too--even though he always did think I ought to want nothing else but
to work for him. But he does care for me. The couple of times I was
sick already, he was concerned. I can't forget it."

"To be sure, he'd have to be a funny man if he wasn't concerned when
his own child's sick, Tillie. I don't give him much for THAT."

"But it always puzzled me, Aunty Em--if father's concerned to see me
sick or suffering, why will he himself deliberately make me suffer more
than I ever suffered in any sickness? I never could understand that."

"He always thinks he's doin' his duty by you. That we must give him.
Och, my! there's his wagon stoppin' NOW! Go on out to the stable,
Tillie! Quick!"

"Aunty Em!" Tillie faltered, "I'd sooner stay and have it done with
now, than wait and have it hanging over me all the week till next
Saturday."

There was another reason for her standing her ground and facing it out.
Ever since she had yielded to the temptation to buy the caps and let
her hair curl about her face, her conscience had troubled her for her
vanity; and a vague feeling that in suffering her father's displeasure
she would be expiating her sin made her almost welcome his coming this
morning.

There was the familiar heavy tread in the bar-room which adjoined the
kitchen. Tillie flushed and paled by turns as it drew near, and her
aunt rolled out the paste with a vigor and an emphasis that expressed
her inward agitation. Even Fairchilds, in the next room, felt himself
infected with the prevailing suspense.

"Well!" was Jake Getz's greeting as he entered the kitchen. "Em!" he
nodded to his sister. "Well, Tillie!"

There was a note of affection in his greeting of his daughter. Tillie
realized that her father missed her presence at home almost as much as
he missed the work that she did. The nature of his regard for her was a
mystery that had always puzzled the girl. How could one be constantly
hurting and thwarting a person whom one cared for?

Tillie went up to him dutifully and held out her hand. He took it and
bent to kiss her.

"Are you well? You're lookin' some pale. And your hair's strubbly
[untidy]."

"She's been sewin' too steady on them clo'es fur your childern," said
Aunty Em, quickly. "It gives her such a pain in her side still to set
and sew. I ain't leavin' her set up every night to sew no more! You can
just take them clo'es home, Jake. They ain't done, and they won't get
done here."

"Do you mebbe leave her set up readin' books or such pamp'lets, ain't?"
Mr. Getz inquired.

"I make her go to bed early still," Mrs. Wackernagel said evasively,
though her Mennonite conscience reproached her for such want of strict
candor.

"That dude teacher you got stayin' here mebbe gives her things to read,
ain't?" Mr. Getz pursued his suspicions.

"He's never gave her nothin' that I seen him," Mrs. Wackernagel
affirmed.

"Well, mind you don't leave her waste time readin'. She ain't to."

"You needn't trouble, Jake!"

"Well," said Jake, "I'll leave them clo'es another week, and mebbe
Tillie'll feel some better and can get 'em done. Mom won't like it when
I come without 'em this mornin'. She's needin' 'em fur the childern,
and she thought they'd be done till this morning a'ready."

"Why don't you hire your washin' or buy her a washin'-machine? Then
she'd have time to do her own sewin'."

"Work don't hurt a body," Mr. Getz maintained. "It's healthy. What's
Tillie doin' this morning?"

"She was bakin' these pies, but I want her now to redd up. Take all
them pans to the dresser, Tillie."

Tillie went to the table to do as she was bid.

"Well, I must be goin' home now," said Mr. Getz. "I'll take Tillie's
wages, Em."

Mrs. Wackernagel set her lips as she wiped her hands on the
roller-towel and opened the dresser drawer to get her purse.

"How's her?" she inquired, referring to Mrs. Getz to gain time, as she
counted out the money.

"She's old-fashioned."

"Is the childern all well?"

"Yes, they're all middlin' well. Hurry up, Em; I'm in a hurry, and
you're takin' wonderful long to count out them two dollars."

"It's only one and a half this week, Jake. Tillie she had to have some
new caps, and they come to fifty cents. And I took notice her
underclo'es was too thin fur this cold spell, and I wanted her to buy
herself a warm petticoat, but she wouldn't take the money."

An angry red dyed the swarthy neck and forehead of the man, as his keen
eyes, very like his sister's, only lacking their expression of
kindness, flashed from her face to the countenance of his daughter at
the dresser.

"What business have you lettin' her buy anything?" he sternly demanded.
"You was to give me her wages, and _I_ was to buy her what she couldn't
do without. You're not keepin' your bargain!"

"She needed them caps right away. I couldn't wait till Saturday to ast
you oncet. And," she boldly added, "you ought to leave her have another
fifty cents to buy herself a warm petticoat!"

"Tillie!" commanded her father, "you come here!"

The girl was very white as she obeyed him. But her eyes, as they met
his, were not afraid.

"It's easy seen why you're pale! I guess it ain't no pain in your side
took from settin' up sewin' fur mom that's made you pale! Now see
here," he sternly said, "what did you do somepin like this fur?
Spendin' fifty cents without astin' me!"

"I needed the caps," she quietly answered. "And I knew you would not
let me buy them if I asked you, father."

"You're standin' up here in front of me and sayin' to my face you done
somepin you knowed I wouldn't give you darst to do! And you have no
business, anyhow, wearin' them New Mennonite caps! I never wanted you
to take up with that blamed foolishness! Well, I'll learn you! If I had
you home I'd whip you!"

"You ain't touchin' her 'round HERE!" exclaimed his sister. "You just
try it, Jake, and I'll call Abe out!"

"Is she my own child or ain't she, Em Wackernagel? And can I do with my
own what I please, or must I ast you and Abe Wackernagel?"

"She's too growed up fur to be punished, Jake, and you know it."

"Till she's too growed up to obey her pop, she'll get punished," he
affirmed. "Where's the good of your religion, I'd like to know,
Em--settin' a child on to defy her parent? And you, Tillie, you STOLE
that money off of me! Your earnin's ain't yourn till you're twenty-one.
Is them New Mennonite principles to take what ain't yourn? It ain't
only the fifty cents I mind--it's your disobedience and your stealin'."

"Oh, father! it wasn't STEALING!"

"Of course it wasn't stealin'--takin' what you earnt yourself--whether
you ARE seventeen instead of twenty-one!" her aunt warmly assured her.

"Now look-ahere, Em! If yous are goin' to get her so spoilt fur me,
over here, she ain't stayin' here. I'll take her home!"

"Well, take her!" diplomatically answered his sister. "I can get Abe's
niece over to East Donegal fur one-seventy-five. She'd be glad to come!"

Mr. Getz at this drew in his sails a bit. "I'll give her one more
chancet," he compromised. "But I ain't givin' her no second chancet if
she does somepin again where she ain't got darst to do. Next time I
hear of her disobeyin' me, home she comes. I'd sooner lose the money
than have her spoilt fur me. Now look-ahere, Tillie, you go get them
new caps and bring 'em here."

Tillie turned away to obey.

"Now, Jake, what are you up to?" his sister demanded as the girl left
the room.

"Do you suppose I'd leave her KEEP them caps she stole the money off of
me to buy?" Getz retorted.

"She earnt the money!" maintained Mrs. Wackernagel.

"The money wasn't hern, and I'd sooner throw them caps in the rag-bag
than leave her wear 'em when she disobeyed me to buy 'em."

"Jake Getz, you're a reg'lar tyrant! You mind me of Herod yet--and of
Punshus Palate!"

"Ain't I followin' Scripture when I train up my child to obey to her
parent?" he wanted to know.

"Now look-ahere, Jake; I'll give you them fifty cents and make a
present to Tillie of them caps if you'll leave her keep 'em."

But in spite of his yearning for the fifty cents, Mr. Getz firmly
refused this offer. Paternal discipline must be maintained even at a
financial loss. Then, too, penurious and saving as he was, he was
strictly honest, and he would not have thought it right to let his
sister pay for his child's necessary wearing-apparel.

"No, Tillie's got to be punished. When I want her to have new caps,
I'll buy 'em fur her."

Tillie reentered the room with the precious bits of linen tenderly
wrapped up in tissue paper. Her pallor was now gone, and her eyes were
red with crying. She came to her father's side and handed him the soft
bundle.

"These here caps," he said to her, "mom can use fur night-caps, or
what. When you buy somepin unknownst to me, Tillie, I ain't leavin' you
KEEP it! Now go 'long back to your dishes. And next Saturday, when I
come, I want to find them clo'es done, do you understand?"

Tillie's eyes followed the parcel as it was crushed ruthlessly into her
father's coat pocket--and she did not heed his question.

"Do you hear me, Tillie?" he demanded.

"Yes," she answered, looking up at him with brimming eyes.

His sister, watching them from across the room, saw in the man's face
the working of conflicting feelings--his stern displeasure warring with
his affection. Mrs. Wackernagel had realized, ever since Tillie had
come to live with her, that "Jake's" brief weekly visits to his
daughter were a pleasure to the hard man; and not only because of the
two dollars which he came to collect. Just now, she could see how he
hated to part from her in anger. Justice having been meted out in the
form of the crushed and forfeited caps in his pocket, he would fain
take leave of the girl with some expression of his kindlier feelings
toward her.

"Now are you behavin' yourself--like a good girl--till I come again?"
he asked, laying his hand upon her shoulder.

"Yes," she said dully.

"Then give me good-b'y." She held up her face and submitted to his kiss.

"Good-by, Em. And mind you stop spoilin' my girl fur me!"

He opened the door and went away.

And Fairchilds, an unwilling witness to the father's brutality, felt
every nerve in his body tingle with a longing first to break the head
of that brutal Dutchman, and then to go and take little Tillie in his
arms and kiss her. To work off his feelings, he sprang up from the
settee, put on his hat, and flung out of the house to walk down to "the
krik."

"Never you mind, Tillie," her aunt consoled her. "I'm goin' in town
next Wednesday, and I'm buyin' you some caps myself fur a present."

"Oh, Aunty Em, but maybe you'd better not be so good to me!" Tillie
said, dashing away the tears as she industriously rubbed her pans. "It
was my vanity made me want new caps. And father's taking them was maybe
the Lord punishing my vanity."

"You needed new caps--your old ones was wore out. AND DON'T YOU BE
JUDGIN' THE LORD BY YOUR POP! Don't try to stop me--I'm buyin' you some
caps."

Now Tillie knew how becoming the new caps were to her, and her soul
yearned for them even as (she told herself) Israel of old yearned after
the flesh-pots of Egypt. To lose them was really a bitter
disappointment to her.

But Aunty Em would spare her that grief! A sudden passionate impulse of
gratitude and love toward her aunt made her do a most unwonted thing.
Taking her hands from her dish-water, she dried them hastily, went over
to Mrs. Wackernagel, threw her arms about her neck, and kissed her.

"Oh, Aunty Em, I love you like I've never loved any one--except Miss
Margaret and--"

She stopped short as she buried her face in her aunt's motherly bosom
and clung to her.

"And who else, Tillie?" Mrs. Wackernagel asked, patting the girl's
shoulder, her face beaming with pleasure at her niece's affectionate
demonstration.

"No one else, Aunty Em."

Tillie drew herself away and again returned to her work at the dresser.

But all the rest of that day her conscience tortured her that she
should have told this lie.

For there was some one else.




XX

TILLIE IS "SET BACK"


On Sunday morning, in spite of her aunt's protestations, Tillie went to
meeting with her curls outside her cap.

"They'll set you back!" protested Mrs. Wackernagel, in great trouble of
spirit.

"It would be worse to be deceitful than to be vain," Tillie answered.
"If I am going to let my hair curl week-days, I won't be a coward and
deceive the meeting about myself."

"But whatever made you take it into your head to act so vain, Tillie?"
her bewildered aunt inquired for the hundredth time. "It can't be fur
Absalom, fur you don't take to him. And, anyways, he says he wants to
be led of the Spirit to give hisself up. To be sure, I hope he ain't
tempted to use religion as a means of gettin' the girl he wants!"

"I know I'm doing wrong, Aunty Em," Tillie replied sorrowfully. "Maybe
the meeting to-day will help me to conquer the Enemy."

She and her aunt realized during the course of the morning that the
curls were creating a sensation. An explanation would certainly be
demanded of Tillie before the week was out.

After the service, they did not stop long for "sociability,"--the
situation was too strained,--but hurried out to their buggy as soon as
they could escape.

Tillie marveled at herself as, on the way home, she found how small was
her concern about the disapproval of the meeting, and even about her
sin itself, before the fact that the teacher thought her curls adorable.

Aunty Em, too, marveled as she perceived the girl's strange
indifference to the inevitable public disgrace at the hands of the
brethren and sisters. Whatever was the matter with Tillie?

At the dinner-table, to spare Tillie's evident embarrassment (perhaps
because of the teacher's presence), Mrs. Wackernagel diverted the
curiosity of the family as to how the meeting had received the curls.

"What did yous do all while we was to meeting?" she asked of her two
daughters.

"Me and Amanda and Teacher walked to Buckarts Station," Rebecca
answered.

"Did yous, now?"

"Up the pike a piece was all the fu'ther I felt fur goin'," continued
Eebecca, in a rather injured tone; "but Amanda she was so fur seein'
oncet if that fellah with those black MUStache was at the blacksmith's
shop yet, at Buckarts! I tole her she needn't be makin' up to HIM, fur
he's keepin' comp'ny with Lizzie Hershey!"

"Say, mom," announced Amanda, ignoring her sister's rebuke, "I stopped
in this morning to see Lizzie Hershey, and she's that spited about
Teacher's comin' here instead of to their place that she never so much
as ast me would I spare my hat!"

"Now look!" exclaimed Mrs. Wackernagel. "And when I said, after while,
'Now I must go,' she was that unneighborly she never ast me, 'What's
your hurry?'"

"Was she that spited!" said Mrs. Wackernagel, half pityingly. "Well, it
was just like Sister Jennie Hershey, if she didn't want Teacher stayin'
there, to tell him right out. Some ain't as honest. Some talks to
please the people."

"What fur sermont did yous have this morning?" asked Mr. Wackernagel,
his mouth full of chicken.

"We had Levi Harnish. He preached good," said Mrs. Wackernagel. "Ain't
he did, Tillie?"

"Yes," replied Tillie, coloring with the guilty consciousness that
scarcely a word of that sermon had she heard.

"I like to hear a sermont, like hisn, that does me good to my heart,"
said Mrs. Wackernagel.

"Levi Harnish, he's a learnt preacher," said her husband, turning to
Fairchilds. "He reads wonderful much. And he's always thinkin' so
earnest about his learnin' that I've saw him walk along the street in
Lancaster a'ready and a'most walk into people!" "He certainly can stand
on the pulpit elegant!" agreed Mrs. Wackernagel. "Why, he can preach
his whole sermont with the Bible shut, yet! And he can put out
elocution that it's something turrible!"

"You are not a Mennonite, are you?" Fairchilds asked of the landlord.

"No," responded Mr. Wackernagel, with a shrug. "I bothered a whole lot
at one time about religion. Now I never bother."

"We had Silas Trout to lead the singin' this morning," continued Mrs.
Wackernagel. "I wisht I could sing by note, like him. I don't know
notes; I just sing by random."

"Where's Doc, anyhow?" suddenly inquired Amanda, for the doctor's place
at the table was vacant.

"He was fetched away. Mary Holzapple's mister come fur him!" Mr.
Wackernagel explained, with a meaning nod.

"I say!" cried Mrs. Wackernagel. "So soon a'ready! And last week it was
Sue Hess! Doc's always gettin' fetched! Nothin' but babies and babies!"

Tillie, whose eyes were always on the teacher, except when he chanced
to glance her way, noted wonderingly the blush that suddenly covered
his face and neck at this exclamation of her aunt's. In the primitive
simplicity of her mind, she could see nothing embarrassing in the mere
statement of any fact of natural history.

"Here comes Doc now!" cried Rebecca, at the opening of the kitchen
door. "Hello, Doc!" she cried as he came into the dining-room. "What IS
it?"

"Twin girls!" the doctor proudly announced, going over to the stove to
warm his hands after his long drive.

"My lands!" exclaimed Amanda.

"Now what do you think!" ejaculated Mrs. Wackernagel.

"How's missus?" Rebecca inquired.

"Doin' fine! But mister he ain't feelin' so well. He wanted a boy--OR
boys, as the case might be. It's gettin' some cold out," he added,
rubbing his hands and holding them to the fire.

That evening, when again Fairchilds was unable to have a chat alone
with Tillie, because of Absalom Puntz's unfailing appearance at the
hotel, he began to think, in his chagrin, that he must have exaggerated
the girl's superiority, since week after week she could endure the
attentions of "that lout."

He could not know that it was for HIS sake--to keep him in his place at
William Penn--that poor Tillie bore the hated caresses of Absalom.

That next week was one never to be forgotten by Tillie. It stood out,
in all the years that followed, as a week of wonder--in which were
revealed to her the depths and the heights of ecstatic bliss--a bliss
which so filled her being that she scarcely gave a thought to the
disgrace hanging over her--her suspension from meeting.

The fact that Tillie and the teacher sat together, now, every evening,
called forth no surmises or suspicions from the Wackernagels, for the
teacher was merely helping Tillie with some studies. The family was
charged to guard the fact from Mr. Getz.

The lessons seldom lasted beyond the early bedtime of the family, for
as soon as Tillie and Fairchilds found the sitting-room abandoned to
their private use, the school-books were put aside. They had somewhat
to say to each other.

Tillie's story of her long friendship with Miss Margaret, which she
related to Fairchilds, made him better understand much about the girl
that had seemed inexplicable in view of her environment; while her
wonder at and sympathetic interest in his own story of how he had come
to apply for the school at New Canaan both amused and touched him.

"Do you never have any doubts, Tillie, of the truth of your creed?" he
asked curiously, as they sat one evening at the sitting-room table, the
school-books and the lamp pushed to one end.

He had several times, in this week of intimacy, found it hard to
reconcile the girl's fine intelligence and clear thought in some
directions with her religious superstition. He hesitated to say a word
to disturb her in her apparently unquestioning faith, though he felt
she was worthy of a better creed than this impossibly narrow one of the
New Mennonites. "She isn't ready yet," he had thought, "to take hold of
a larger idea of religion."

"I have sometimes thought," she said earnestly, "that if the events
which are related in the Bible should happen now, we would not credit
them. An infant born of a virgin, a star leading three travelers, a man
who raised the dead and claimed to be God--we would think the folks who
believed these things were ignorant and superstitious. And because they
happened so long ago, and are in the Book which we are told came from
God, we believe. It is very strange! Sometimes my thoughts trouble me.
I try hard not to leave such thoughts come to me."

"LET, Tillie, not 'leave.'"

"Will I ever learn not to get my 'leaves' and 'lets' mixed!" sighed
Tillie, despairingly.

"Use 'let' whenever you find 'leave' on the end of your tongue, and
vice versa," he advised, with a smile.

She looked at him doubtfully. "Are you joking?"

"Indeed, no! I couldn't give you a better rule."

"There's another thing I wish you would tell me, please," she said, her
eyes downcast.

"Well?"

"I can't call you 'Mr.' Fairchilds, because such complimentary speech
is forbidden to us New Mennonites. It would come natural to me to call
you 'Teacher,' but you would think that what you call 'provincial.'"

"But you say 'Miss' Margaret."

"I could not get out of the way of it, because I had called her that so
many years before I gave myself up. That makes it seem different. But
you--what must I call you?"

"I don't see what's left--unless you call me 'Say'!"

"I must have something to call you," she pleaded. "Would you mind if I
called you by your Christian name?"

"I should like nothing better."

He drew forward a volume of Mrs. Browning's poems which lay among his
books on the table, opened it at the fly-leaf, and pointed to his name.

"'Walter'?" read Tillie. "But I thought--"

"It was Pestalozzi? That was only my little joke. My name's Walter."

On the approach of Sunday, Fairchilds questioned her one evening about
Absalom.

"Will that lad be taking up your whole Sunday evening again?" he
demanded.

She told him, then, why she suffered Absalom's unwelcome attentions. It
was in order that she might use her influence over him to keep the
teacher in his place.

"But I can't permit such a thing!" he vehemently protested. "Tillie, I
am touched by your kindness and self-sacrifice! But, dear child, I
trust I am man enough to hold my own here without your suffering for
me! You must not do it."

"You don't know Nathaniel Puntz!" She shook her head. "Absalom will
never forgive you, and, at a word from him, his father would never rest
until he had got rid of you. You see, none of the directors like
you--they don't understand you--they say you are 'too tony.' And then
your methods of teaching--they aren't like those of the Millersville
Normal teachers we've had, and therefore are unsound! I discovered last
week, when I was out home, that my father is very much opposed to you.
They all felt just so to Miss Margaret."

"I see. Nevertheless, you shall not bear my burdens. And don't you see
it's not just to poor Absalom? You can't marry him, so you ought not to
encourage him."

"'If I refused to le-LET Absalom come, you would not remain a month at
New Canaan," was her answer.

"But it isn't a matter of life and death to me to stay at New Canaan! I
need not starve if I lose my position here. There are better places."

Tillie gazed down upon the chenille table-cover, and did not speak. She
could not tell him that it did seem to HER a matter of life and death
to have him stay.

"It seems to me, Tillie, you could shake off Absalom through your
father's objections to his attentions. The fellow could not blame you
for that."

"But don't you see I must keep him by me, in order to protect you."

"My dear little girl, that's rough on Absalom; and I'm not sure it's
worthy of you."

"But you don't understand. You think Absalom will be hurt in his
feelings if I refuse to marry him. But I've told him all along I won't
marry him. And it isn't his feelings that are concerned. He only wants
a good housekeeper."

Fairchilds's eyes rested on the girl as she sat before him in the fresh
bloom of her maidenhood, and he realized what he knew she did not--that
unsentimental, hard-headed, and practical as Absalom might be, if she
allowed him the close intimacy of "setting-up" with her, the fellow
must suffer in the end in not winning her. But the teacher thought it
wise to make no further comment, as he saw, at any rate, that he could
not move her in her resolution to defend him.

And there was another thing that he saw. The extraneous differences
between himself and Tillie, and even the radical differences of
breeding and heredity which, he had assumed from the first, made any
least romance or sentiment on the part of either of them unthinkable,
however much they might enjoy a good comradeship,--all these
differences had strangely sunk out of sight as he had, from day to day,
grown in touch with the girl's real self, and he found himself unable
to think of her and himself except in that deeper sense in which her
soul met his. Any other consideration of their relation seemed almost
grotesque. This was his feeling--but his reason struggled with his
feeling and bade him beware. Suppose that she too should come to feel
that with the meeting of their spirits the difference in their
conditions melted away like ice in the sunshine. Would not the result
be fraught with tragedy for her? For himself, he was willing, for the
sake of his present pleasure, to risk a future wrestling with his
impracticable sentiments; but what must be the cost of such a struggle
to a frail, sensitive girl, with no compensations whatever in any
single phase of her life? Clearly, he was treading on dangerous ground.
He must curb himself.

Before another Sunday came around, the ax had fallen--the brethren came
to reason with Tillie, and finding her unable to say she was sincerely
repentant and would amend her vain and carnal deportment, she was, in
the course of the next week, "set back."

"I would be willing to put back the curls," she said to her aunt, who
also reasoned with her in private; "but it would avail nothing. For my
heart is still vain and carnal. 'Man looketh upon the outward
appearance, but God looketh on the heart.'"

"Then, Tillie," said her aunt, her kindly face pale with distress in
the resolution she had taken, "you'll have to go home and stay. You
can't stay here as long as you're not holding out in your professions."

Tillie's face went white, and she gazed into her aunt's resolute
countenance with anguish in her own.

"I'd not do it to send you away, Tillie, if I could otherwise help it.
But look how inconwenient it would be havin' you here to help work, and
me not havin' dare to talk or eat with you. I'm not obeyin' to the
'Rules' NOW in talkin' to you. But I tole the brethren I'd only speak
to you long enough to reason with you some--and then, if that didn't
make nothin', I'd send you home."

The Rules forbade the members to sit at table or hold any unnecessary
word of communication with one who had failed to "hold out," and who
had in consequence been "set back." Tillie, in her strange indifference
to the disgrace of being set back, had not foreseen her inevitable
dismissal from her aunt's employ. She recognized, now, with despair in
her soul, that Aunty Em could not do otherwise than send her home.

"When must I go, Aunty Em?"

"As soon as you make your mind up you AIN'T goin' to repent of your
carnal deportment."

"I can't repent, Aunty Em!" Tillie's voice sounded hollow to herself as
she spoke.

"Then, Tillie, you're got to go to-morrow. I 'll have to get my niece
from East Donegal over."

It sounded to Tillie like the crack of doom.

The doctor, who was loath to have her leave, who held her interests at
heart, and who knew what she would forfeit in losing the help which the
teacher was giving her daily in her studies, undertook to add his
expostulations to that of the brethern and sisters.

"By gum, Tillie, slick them swanged curls BACK, if they don't suit the
taste of the meeting! Are you willin' to leave go your nice education,
where you're gettin', fur a couple of damned curls? I don't know what's
got INto you to act so blamed stubborn about keepin' your hair
strubbled 'round your face!"

"But the vanity would still be in my heart even if I did brush them
back. And I don't want to be deceitful."

"Och, come now," urged the doctor, "just till you're got your
certificate a'ready to teach! That wouldn't be long. Then, after that,
you can be as undeceitful as you want."

But Tillie could not be brought to view the matter in this light.

She did not sit at table with the family that day, for that would have
forced her aunt to stay away from the table. Mrs. Wackernagel could
break bread without reproach with all her unconverted household; but
not with a backslider--for the prohibition was intended as a
discipline, imposed in all love, to bring the recalcitrant member back
into the fold.

That afternoon, Tillie and the teacher took a walk together in the
snow-covered woods.

"It all seems so extraordinary, so inexplicable!" Fairchilds repeated
over and over. Like all the rest of the household, he could not be
reconciled to her going. His regret was, indeed, greater than that of
any of the rest, and rather surprised himself. The pallor of Tillie's
face and the anguish in her eyes he attributed to the church discipline
she was suffering. He never dreamed how wholly and absolutely it was
for him.

"Is it any stranger," Tillie asked, her low voice full of pain, "than
that your uncle should send you away because of your UNbelief?" This
word, "unbelief," stood for a very definite thing in New Canaan--a lost
and hopeless condition of the soul. "It seems to me, the idea is the
same," said Tillie.

"Yes," acknowledged Fairchilds, "of course you are right. Intolerance,
bigotry, narrowness--they are the same the world over--and stand for
ignorance always."

Tillie silently considered his words. It had not occurred to her to
question the perfect justice of the meeting's action.

Suddenly she saw in the path before her a half-frozen, fluttering
sparrow. They both paused, and Tillie stooped, gently took it up, and
folded it in her warm shawl. As she felt its throbbing little body
against her hand, she thought of herself in the hand of God. She turned
and spoke her thought to Fairchilds.

"Could I possibly hurt this little bird, which is so entirely at my
mercy? Could I judge it, condemn and punish it, for some mistake or
wrong or weakness it had committed in its little world? And could God
be less kind, less merciful to me than I could be to this little bird?
Could he hold my soul in the hollow of his hand and vivisect it to
judge whether its errors were worthy of his divine anger? He knows how
weak and ignorant I am. I will not fear him," she said, her eyes
shining. "I will trust myself in his power--and believe in his love."

"The New Mennonite creed won't hold her long," thought Fairchilds.

"Our highest religious moments, Tillie," he said, "come to us, not
through churches, nor even through Bibles. They are the moments when we
are most receptive of the message Nature is always patiently waiting to
speak to us--if we will only hear. It is she alone that can lead us to
see God face to face, instead of 'through another man's dim thought of
him.'"

"Yes," agreed Tillie, "I have often felt more--more RELIGIOUS," she
said, after an instant's hesitation, "when I've been walking here alone
in the woods, or down by the creek, or up on Chestnut Hill--than I
could feel in church. In church we hear ABOUT God, as you say, through
other men's dim thoughts of Him. Here, alone, we are WITH him."

They walked in silence for a space, Tillie feeling with mingled bliss
and despair the fascination of this parting hour. But it did not occur
to Fairchilds that her departure from the hotel meant the end of their
intercourse.

"I shall come out to the farm to see you, Tillie, as often as you will
let me. You know, I've no one else to talk to, about here, as I talk
with you. What a pleasure it has been!"

"Oh, but father will never le--let me spend my time with you as I did
at the hotel! He will be angry at my being sent home, and he will keep
me constantly at work to make up for the loss it is to him. This is our
last talk together!"

"I'll risk your father's wrath, Tillie. You don't suppose I'd let a
small matter like that stand in the way of our friendship?"

"But father will not l--LET--me spend time with you. And if you come
when he told you not to he would put you out of William Penn!"

"I'm coming, all the same, Tillie."

"Father will blame me, if you do."

"Can't you take your own part, Tillie?" he gravely asked. "No, no," he
hastily added, for he did not forget the talk he had overheard about
the new caps, in which Mr. Getz had threatened personal violence to his
daughter. "I know you must not suffer for my sake. But you cannot mean
that we are not to meet at all after this?"

"Only at chance times," faltered Tillie; "that is all."

Very simply and somewhat constrainedly they said good-by the next
morning, Fairchilds to go to his work at William Penn and Tillie to
drive out with her Uncle Abe to meet her father's displeasure.




XXI

"I'LL MARRY HIM TO-MORROW!"


Mr. Getz had plainly given Absalom to understand that he did not want
him to sit up with Tillie, as he "wasn't leaving her marry." Absalom
had answered that he guessed Tillie would have something to say to that
when she was "eighteen a'ready." And on the first Sunday evening after
her return home he had boldly presented himself at the farm.

"That's where you'll get fooled, Absalom, fur she's been raised to mind
her pop!" Mr. Getz had responded. "If she disobeyed to my word, I
wouldn't give her no aus styer. I guess you wouldn't marry a girl where
wouldn't bring you no aus styer!"

Absalom, who was frugal, had felt rather baffled at this threat.
Nevertheless, here he was again on Sunday evening at the farm to assure
Tillie that HE would stand by her, and that if she was not restored to
membership in the meeting, he wouldn't give himself up, either.

Mr. Getz dared not go to the length of forbidding Absalom his house,
for that would have meant a family feud between all the Getzes and all
the Puntzes of the county. He could only insist that Tillie "dishearten
him," and that she dismiss him not later than ten o'clock. To almost
any other youth in the neighborhood, such opposition would have proved
effectual. But every new obstacle seemed only to increase Absalom's
determination to have what he had set out to get.

To-night he produced another book, which he said he had bought at the
second-hand book-store in Lancaster.

"'Cupid and Psyche,'" Tillie read the title. "Oh, Absalom, thank you.
This is lovely. It's a story from Greek mythology--I've been hearing
some of these stories from the teacher"--she checked herself, suddenly,
at Absalom's look of jealous suspicion.

"I'm wonderful glad you ain't in there at the HOtel no more," he said.
"I hadn't no fair chancet, with Teacher right there on the GROUNDS."

"Absalom," said Tillie, gravely, with a little air of dignity that did
not wholly fail to impress him, "I insist on it that you never speak of
the teacher in that way in connection with me. You might as well speak
of my marrying the County Superintendent! He'd be just as likely to ask
me!"

The county superintendent of public instruction was held in such awe
that his name was scarcely mentioned in an ordinary tone of voice.

"As if there's no difference from a teacher at William Penn to the
county superintendent! You ain't that dumm, Tillie!"

"The difference is that the teacher at William Penn is superior in
every way to the county superintendent!"

She spoke impulsively, and she regretted her words the moment they were
uttered. But Absalom only half comprehended her meaning.

"You think you ain't good enough fur him, and you think I ain't good
enough fur YOU!" he grumbled. "I have never saw such a funny girl!
Well," he nodded confidently, "you'll think different one of these here
days!"

"You must not cherish any false hopes, Absalom," Tillie insisted in
some distress.

"Well, fur why don't you want to have me?" he demanded for the
hundredth time.

"Absalom,"--Tillie tried a new mode of discouragement,--"I don't want
to get married because I don't want to be a farmer's wife--they have to
work too hard!"

It was enough to drive away any lover in the countryside, and for a
moment Absalom was staggered.

"Well!" he exclaimed, "a woman that's afraid of work ain't no wife fur
me, anyways!"

Tillie's heart leaped high for an instant in the hope that now she had
effectually cooled his ardor. But it sank again as she recalled the
necessity of retaining at least his good-will and friendship, that she
might protect the teacher.

"Now, Absalom," she feebly protested, "did you ever see me afraid of
work?"

"Well, then, if you ain't afraid of workin', what makes you talk so
CONTRARY?"

"I don't know. Come, let me read this nice book you've brought me," she
urged, much as she might have tried to divert one of her little sisters
or brothers.

"I'd ruther just set. I ain't much fur readin'. Jake Getz he says he's
goin' to chase you to bed at ten--and ten comes wonderful soon Sundays.
Leave us just set."

Tillie well understood that this was to endure Absalom's clownish
wooing. But for the sake of the cause, she said to herself, she would
conquer her repugnance and bear it.

For two weeks after Tillie's return home, she did not once have a word
alone with Fairchilds. He came several times, ostensibly on errands
from her aunt; but on each occasion he found her hard at work in her
father's presence. At his first visit, Tillie, as he was leaving, rose
from her corn-husking in the barn to go with him to the gate, but her
father interfered.

"You stay where you're at!"

With burning face, she turned to her work. And Fairchilds, carefully
suppressing an impulse to shake Jake Getz till his teeth rattled,
walked quietly out of the gate and up the road.

Her father was more than usually stern and exacting with her in these
days of her suspension from meeting, inasmuch as it involved her
dismissal from the hotel and the consequent loss to him of two dollars
a week.

As for Tillie, she found a faint consolation in the fact of the
teacher's evident chagrin and indignation at the tyrannical rule which
forbade intercourse between them.

At stated intervals, the brethren came to reason with her, but while
she expressed her willingness to put her curls back, she would not
acknowledge that her heart was no longer "carnal and vain," and so they
found it impossible to restore her to favor.

A few weeks before Christmas, Absalom, deciding that he had imbibed all
the arithmetical erudition he could hold, stopped school. On the
evening that he took his books home, he gave the teacher a parting
blow, which he felt sure quite avenged the outrageous defeat he had
suffered at his hands on that Sunday night at the hotel.

"Me and Tillie's promised. It ain't put out yet, but I conceited I'd
better tell you, so's you wouldn't be wastin' your time tryin' to make
up to her."

"You and Tillie are engaged to be married?" Fairchilds incredulously
asked.

"That's what! As good as, anyways. I always get somepin I want when I
make up my mind oncet." And he grinned maliciously.

Fairchilds pondered the matter as, with depressed spirits, he walked
home over the frozen road.

"No wonder the poor girl yielded to the pressure of such an
environment," he mused. "I suppose she thinks Absalom's rule will not
be so bad as her father's. But that a girl like Tillie should be pushed
to the wall like that--it is horrible! And yet--if she were worthy a
better fate would she not have held out?--it is too bad, it is unjust
to her 'Miss Margaret' that she should give up now! I feel," he sadly
told himself, "disappointed in Tillie!"

When the notable "Columbus Celebration" came off in New Canaan, in
which event several schools of the township united to participate, and
which was attended by the entire countryside, as if it were a funeral,
Tillie hoped that here would be an opportunity for seeing and speaking
with Walter Fairchilds. But in this she was bitterly disappointed.

It was not until a week later, at the township Institute, which met at
New Canaan, and which was also attended by the entire population, that
her deep desire was gratified.

It was during the reading of an address, before the Institute, by Miss
Spooner, the teacher at East Donegal, that Fairchilds deliberately came
and sat by Tillie in the back of the school-room.

Tillie's heart beat fast, and she found herself doubting the reality of
his precious nearness after the long, dreary days of hungering for him.

She dared not speak to him while Miss Spooner held forth, and, indeed,
she feared even to look at him, lest curious eyes read in her face what
consciously she strove to conceal.

She realized his restless impatience under Miss Spooner's eloquence.

"It was a week back already, we had our Columbus Celebration," read
this educator of Lancaster County, genteelly curving the little finger
of each hand, as she held her address, which was esthetically tied with
blue ribbon. "It was an inspiring sight to see those one hundred
enthusiastic and paterotic children marching two by two, led by their
equally enthusiastic and paterotic teachers! Forming a semicircle in
the open air, the exercises were opened by a song, 'O my Country,' sung
by clear--r-r-ringing--childish voices...."

It was the last item on the program, and by mutual and silent consent,
Tillie and Fairchilds, at the first stir of the audience, slipped out
of the schoolhouse together. Tillie's father was in the audience, and
so was Absalom. But they had sat far forward, and Tillie hoped they had
not seen her go out with the teacher.

"Let us hurry over to the woods, where we can be alone and undisturbed,
and have a good talk!" proposed Fairchilds, his face showing the
pleasure he felt in the meeting.

After a few minutes' hurried walking, they were able to slacken their
pace and stroll leisurely through the bleak winter forest.

"Tillie, Tillie!" he said, "why won't you abandon this 'carnal' life
you are leading, be restored to the approbation of the brethren, and
come back to the hotel? I am very lonely without you."

Tillie could scarcely find her voice to answer, for the joy that filled
her at his words--a joy so full that she felt but a very faint pang at
his reference to the ban under which she suffered. She had thought his
failure to speak to her at the "Celebration" had indicated indifference
or forgetfulness. But now that was all forgotten; every nerve in her
body quivered with happiness.

He, however, at once interpreted her silence to mean that he had
wounded her. "Forgive me for speaking so lightly of what to you must be
a sacred and serious matter. God knows, my own experience--which, as
you say, was not unlike your own--was sufficiently serious to me. But
somehow, I can't take THIS seriously--this matter of your pretty curls!"

"Sometimes I wonder whether you take any person or any thing, here,
seriously," she half smiled. "You seem to me to be always mocking at us
a little."

"Mocking? Not so bad as that. And never at YOU, Tillie."

"You were sneering at Miss Spooner, weren't you?"

"Not at her; at Christopher Columbus--though, up to the time of that
celebration, I was always rather fond of the discoverer of America. But
now let us talk of YOU, Tillie. Allow me to congratulate you!"

"What for?"

"True enough. I stand corrected. Then accept my sincere sympathy." He
smiled whimsically.

Tillie lifted her eyes to his face, and their pretty look of
bewilderment made him long to stoop and snatch a kiss from her lips.
But he resisted the temptation.

"I refer to your engagement to Absalom. That's one reason why I wanted
you to come out here with me this afternoon--so that you could tell me
about it--and explain to me what made you give up all your plans. What
will your Miss Margaret say?"

Tillie stopped short, her cheeks reddening.

"What makes you think I am promised to Absalom?"

"The fact is, I've only his word for it."

"He told you that?"

"Certainly. Isn't it true?"

"Do YOU think so poorly of me?" Tillie asked in a low voice.

He looked at her quickly. "Tillie, I'm sorry; I ought not to have
believed it for an instant!"

"I have a higher ambition in life than to settle down to take care of
Absalom Puntz!" said Tillie, fire in her soft eyes, and an unwonted
vibration in her gentle voice.

"My credulity was an insult to you!"

"Absalom did not mean to tell you a lie. He has made up his mind to
have me, so he thinks it is all as good as settled. Sometimes I am
almost afraid he will win me just by thinking he is going to."

"Send him about his business! Don't keep up this folly, dear child!"

"I would rather stand Absalom," she faltered, "than stand having you go
away."

"But, Tillie," he turned almost fiercely upon her--"Tillie, I would
rather see you dead at my feet than to see your soul tied to that clod
of earth!"

A wild thrill of rapture shot through Tillie's heart at his words. For
an instant she looked up at him, her soul shining in her eyes. "Does
he--does HE--care that much what happens to me?" throbbed in her brain.

For the first time Fairchilds fully realized, with shame at his blind
selfishness, the danger and the cruelty of his intimate friendship with
this little Mennonite maid. For her it could but end in a heartbreak;
for him--"I have been a cad, a despicable cad!" he told himself in
bitter self-reproach. "If I had only known! But now it's too
late--unless--" In his mind he rapidly went over the simple history of
their friendship as they walked along; and, busy with her own thought,
Tillie did not notice his abstraction.

"Tillie," he said suddenly. "Next Saturday there is an examination of
applicants for certificates at East Donegal. You must take that
examination. You are perfectly well prepared to pass it."

"Oh, do you really, REALLY think I am?" the girl cried breathlessly.

"I know it. The only question is, How are you going to get off to
attend the examination?"

"Father will be at the Lancaster market on Saturday morning!"

"Then I'll hire a buggy, come out to the farm, and carry you off!"

"No--oh, no, you must not do that. Father would be so angry with you!"

"You can't walk to Bast Donegal. It's six miles away."

"Let me think.--Uncle Abe would do anything I asked him--but he
wouldn't have time to leave the hotel Saturday morning. And I couldn't
make him or Aunty Em understand that I was educated enough to take the
examination. But there's the Doc!"

"Of course!" cried Fairchilds. "The Doc isn't afraid of the whole
county! Shall I tell him you'll go if he'll come for you?"

"Yes!"

"Good! I'll undertake to promise for him that he'll be there!"

"When father comes home from market and finds me gone!" Tillie
said--but there was exultation, rather than fear, in her voice.

"When you show him your certificate, won't that appease him? When he
realizes how much more you can earn by teaching than by working for
your aunt, especially as he bore none of the expense of giving you your
education? It was your own hard labor, and none of his money, that did
it! And now I suppose he'll get all the profit of it!" Fairchilds could
not quite keep down the rising indignation in his voice.

"No," said Tillie, quietly, though the color burned in her face.
"Walter! I'm going to refuse to give father my salary if I am elected
to a school. I mean to save my money to go to the Normal--where Miss
Margaret is."

"So long as you are under age, he can take it from you, Tillie."

"If the school I teach is near enough for me to live at home, I'll pay
my board. More than that I won't do."

"But how are you going to help yourself?"

"I haven't made up my mind, yet, how I'm going to do it. It will be the
hardest struggle I've ever had--to stand out against him in such a
thing," Tillie continued; "but I will not be weak, I will not! I have
studied and worked all these years in the hope of a year at the
Normal--with Miss Margaret. And I won't falter now!"

Before he could reply to her almost impassioned earnestness, they were
startled by the sound of footsteps behind them in the woods--the heavy
steps of men. Involuntarily, they both stopped short, Tillie with the
feeling of one caught in a stolen delight; and Fairchilds with mingled
annoyance at the interruption, and curiosity as to who might be
wandering in this unfrequented patch of woods.

"I seen 'em go out up in here!"

It was the voice of Absalom. The answer came in the harsh, indignant
tones of Mr. Getz. "Next time I leave her go to a Instytoot or such a
Columbus Sallybration, she'll stay at HOME! Wastin' time walkin' 'round
in the woods with that dude teacher!--and on a week-day, too!"

Tillie looked up at Fairchilds with an appeal that went to his heart.
Grimly he waited for the two.

"So here's where you are!" cried Mr. Getz, striding up to them, and,
before Fairchilds could prevent it, he had seized Tillie by the
shoulder. "What you mean, runnin' off up here, heh? What you mean?" he
demanded, shaking her with all his cruel strength.

"Stop that, you brute!" Fairchilds, unable to control his fury, drew
back and struck the big man squarely on the chest. Getz staggered back,
amazement at this unlooked-for attack for a moment getting the better
of his indignation. He had expected to find the teacher cowed with fear
at being discovered by a director and a director's son in a situation
displeasing to them.

"Let the child alone, you great coward--or I 'll horsewhip you!"

Getz recovered himself. His face was black with passion. He lifted the
horsewhip which he carried.

"You'll horsewhip me--me, Jake Getz, that can put you off William Penn
TO-MORROW if I want! Will you do it with this here? he demanded,
grasping the whip more tightly and lifting it to strike--but before it
could descend, Fairchilds wrenched it out of his hand.

"Yes," he responded, "if you dare to touch that child again, you
shameless dog!"

Tillie, with anguished eyes, stood motionless as marble, while Absalom,
with clenched fists, awaited his opportunity.

"If I dare!" roared Getz. "If I have dare to touch my own child!" He
turned to Tillie. "Come along," he exclaimed, giving her a cuff with
his great paw; and instantly the whip came down with stinging swiftness
on his wrist. With a bellow of pain, Getz turned on Fairchilds, and at
the same moment, Absalom sprang on him from behind, and with one blow
of his brawny arm brought the teacher to the ground. Getz sprawled over
his fallen antagonist and snatched his whip from him.

"Come on, Absalom--we'll learn him oncet!" he cried fiercely. "We'll
learn him what horsewhippin' is! We'll give him a lickin' he won't
forget!"

Absalom laughed aloud in his delight at this chance to avenge his own
defeat at the hands of the teacher, and with clumsy speed the two men
set about binding the feet of the half-senseless Fairchilds with
Absalom's suspenders.

Tillie felt herself spellbound, powerless to move or to cry out.

"Now!" cried Getz to Absalom, "git back, and I'll give it to him!"

The teacher, stripped of his two coats and bound hand and foot, was
rolled over on his face. He uttered no word of protest, though they all
saw that he had recovered consciousness. The truth was, he simply
recognized the uselessness of demurring.

"Warm him up, so he don't take cold!" shouted Absalom--and even as he
spoke, Jake Getz's heavy arm brought the lash down upon Fairchilds's
back.

At the spiteful sound, life came back to Tillie. Like a wild thing, she
sprang between them, seized her father's arm and hung upon it. "Listen
to me! Listen! Father! If you strike him again, I'LL MARRY ABSALOM
TO-MORROW!"

By inspiration she had hit upon the one argument that would move him.

Her father tried to shake her off, but she clung to his arm with the
strength of madness, knowing that if she could make him grasp, even in
his passionate anger, the real import of her threat, he would yield to
her.

"I'll marry Absalom! I'll marry him to-morrow!" she repeated.

"You darsent--you ain't of age! Let go my arm, or I'll slap you ag'in!"

"I shall be of age in three months! I'll marry Absalom if you go on
with this!"

"That suits me!" cried Absalom. "Keep on with it, Jake!"

"If you do, I'll marry him to-morrow!"

There was a look in Tillie's eyes and a ring in her voice that her
father had learned to know. Tillie would do what she said.

And here was Absalom "siding along with her" in her unfilial defiance!
Jacob Getz wavered. He saw no graceful escape from his difficulty.

"Look-ahere, Tillie! If I don't lick this here feller, I'll punish YOU
when I get you home!"

Tillie saw that she had conquered him, and that the teacher was safe.
She loosed her hold of her father's arm and, dropping on her knees
beside Fairchilds began quickly to loosen his bonds. Her father did not
check her.

"Jake Getz, you ain't givin' in THAT easy?" demanded Absalom, angrily.

"She'd up and do what she says! I know her! And I ain't leavin' her
marry! You just wait"--he turned threateningly to Tillie as she knelt
on the ground--"till I get you home oncet!"

Fairchilds staggered to his feet, and drawing Tillie up from the
ground, he held her two hands in his as he turned to confront his
enemies.

"You call yourselves men--you cowards and bullies! And you!" he turned
his blazing eyes upon Getz, "you would work off your miserable spite on
a weak girl--who can't defend herself! Dare to touch a hair of her head
and I'll break YOUR damned head and every bone in your Body! Now take
yourselves off, both of you, you curs, and leave us alone!"

"My girl goes home along with me!" retorted the furious Getz. "And
YOU--you 'll lose your job at next Board Meetin', Saturday night! So
you might as well pack your trunk! Here!" He laid his hand on Tillie's
arm, but Fairchilds drew her to him and held his arm about her waist,
while Absalom, darkly scowling, stood uncertainly by.

"Leave her with me. I must talk with her. MUST, I say. Do you hear me?
She--"

His words died on his lips, as Tillie's head suddenly fell forward on
his shoulder, and, looking down, Fairchilds saw that she had fainted.




XXII

THE DOC CONCOCTS A PLOT


"So you see I'm through with this place!" Fairchilds concluded as, late
that night, he and the doctor sat alone in the sitting-room, discussing
the afternoon's happenings.

"I was forced to believe," he went on, "when I saw Jake Getz's fearful
anxiety and real distress while Tillie remained unconscious, that the
fellow, after all, does have a heart of flesh under all his brutality.
He had never seen a woman faint, and he thought at first that Tillie
was dead. We almost had HIM on our hands unconscious!"

"Well, the faintin' saved Tillie a row with him till he got her home
oncet a'ready," the doctor said, as he puffed away at his pipe, his
hands in his vest arms, his feet on the table, and a newspaper under
them to spare the chenille table-cover.

"Yes. Otherwise I don't know how I could have borne to see her taken
home by that ruffian--to be punished for so heroically defending ME!"

"You bet! That took cheek, ain't?--fur that little girl to stand there
and jaw Jake Getz--and make him quit lickin' you! By gum, that minds me
of sceneries I've saw a'ready in the theayter! They most gener'ly
faints away in a swoond that way, too. Well, Tillie she come round all
right, ain't?--till a little while?"

"Yes. But she was very pale and weak, poor child!" Fairchilds answered,
resting his head wearily upon his palm. "When she became conscious,
Getz carried her out of the woods to his buggy that he had left near
the school-house."

"How did Absalom take it, anyhow?"

"He's rather dazed, I think! He doesn't quite know how to make it all
out. He is a man of one idea--one at a time and far apart. His idea at
present is that he is going to marry Tillie."

"Yes, and I never seen a Puntz yet where didn't come by what he set his
stubborn head to!" the doctor commented. "It wonders me sometimes, how
Tillie's goin' to keep from marryin' him, now he's made up his mind so
firm!"

"Tillie knows her own worth too well to throw herself away like that."

"Well, now I don't know," said the doctor, doubtfully. "To be sure, I
never liked them Puntzes, they're so damned thick-headed. Dummness runs
in that family so, it's somepin' surprisin'! Dummness and stubbornness
is all they got to 'em. But Absalom he's so well fixed--Tillie she
might go furder and do worse. Now there's you, Teacher. If she took up
with you and yous two got married, you'd have to rent. Absalom he'd own
his own farm."

"Now, come, Doc," protested Fairchilds, disgusted, "you know
better--you know that to almost any sort of a woman marriage means
something more than getting herself 'well fixed,' as you put it. And to
a woman like Tillie!"

"Yes--yes--I guess," answered the doctor, pulling briskly at his pipe.
"It's the same with a male--he mostly looks to somepin besides a good
housekeeper. There's me, now--I'd have took Miss Margaret--and she
couldn't work nothin'. I tole her I don't mind if my wife IS smart, so
she don't bother me any."

"You did, did you?" smiled Fairchilds. "And what did the lady say to
that?"

"Och, she was sorry!"

"Sorry to turn you down, do you mean?"

"It was because I didn't speak soon enough," the doctor assured him.
"She was promised a'ready to one of these here tony perfessers at the
Normal. She was sorry I hadn't spoke sooner. To be sure, after she had
gave her word, she had to stick to it." He thoughtfully knocked the
ashes from his pipe, while his eyes grew almost tender. "She was
certainly, now, an allurin' female!

"So now," he added, after a moment's thoughtful pause, "you think your
game's played out here, heh?"

"Getz and Absalom left me with the assurance that at the Saturday-night
meeting of the Board I'd be voted out. If it depends on them--and I
suppose it does--I'm done for. They'd like to roast me over a slow
fire!"

"You bet they would!"

"I suppose I haven't the least chance?"

"Well, I don' know--I don' know. It would suit me wonderful to get
ahead of Jake Getz and them Puntzes in this here thing--if I anyways
could! Le' me see." He thoughtfully considered the situation. "The
Board meets day after to-morrow. There's six directors. Nathaniel Puntz
and Jake can easy get 'em all to wote to put you out, fur they ain't
anyways stuck on you--you bein' so tony that way. Now me, I don't mind
it--them things don't never bother me any--manners and cleanness and
them."

"Cleanness?"

"Och, yes; us we never seen any person where wasted so much time
washin' theirself--except Miss Margaret. I mind missus used to say a
clean towel didn't last Miss Margaret a week, and no one else usin' it!
You see, what the directors don't like is your ALWAYS havin' your hands
so clean. Now they reason this here way--a person that never has dirty
hands is lazy and too tony."

"Yes?"

"But me, I don't mind. And I'm swanged if I wouldn't like to beat out
Jake and Nathaniel on this here deal! Say! I'll tell you what. This
here game's got fun in it fur me! I believe I got a way of DOIN' them
fellers. I ain't tellin' you what it is!" he said, with a chuckle. "But
it's a way that's goin' to WORK! I'm swanged if it ain't! You'll see
oncet! You just let this here thing to me and you won't be chased off
your job! I'm doin' it fur the sake of the fun I'll get out of seein'
Jake Getz surprised! Mebbe that old Dutchman won't be wonderful spited!"

"I shall be very much indebted to you, doctor, if you can help me, as
it suits me to stay here for the present."

"That's all right. Fur one, there's Adam Oberholzer; he 'll be an easy
guy when it comes to his wote. Fur if I want, I can bring a bill ag'in'
the estate of his pop, disceased, and make it 'most anything. His pop
he died last month. Now that there was a man"--the doctor settled
himself comfortably, preparatory to the relation of a tale--"that there
was a man that was so wonderful set on speculatin' and savin' and
layin' by, that when he come to die a pecooliar thing happened. You
might call that there thing phe-non-e-ma. It was this here way. When
ole Adam Oberholzer (he was named after his son, Adam Oberholzer, the
school director) come to die, his wife she thought she'd better send
fur the Evangelical preacher over, seein' as Adam he hadn't been inside
a church fur twenty years back, and, to be sure, he wasn't just so well
prepared. Oh, well, he was deef fur three years back, and churches
don't do much good to deef people. But then he never did go when he did
have his sound hearin'. Many's the time he sayed to me, he sayed, 'I
don't believe in the churches,' he sayed, 'and blamed if it don't keep
me busy believin' in a Gawd!' he sayed. So you see, he wasn't just what
you might call a pillar of the church. One time he had such a cough and
he come to me and sayed whether I could do somepin. 'You're to leave
tobacco be,' I sayed. Ole Adam he looked serious. 'If you sayed it was
caused by goin' to church,' he answered to me, 'I might mebbe break
off. But tobacco--that's some serious,' he says. Adam he used to have
some notions about the Bible and religion that I did think, now, was
damned unushal. Here one day when he was first took sick, before he got
so deef yet, I went to see him, and the Evangelical preacher was there,
readin' to him that there piece of Scripture where, you know, them that
worked a short time was paid the same as them that worked all day. The
preacher he sayed he thought that par'ble might fetch him 'round oncet
to a death-bed conwersion. But I'm swanged if Adam didn't just up and
say, when the preacher got through, he says, 'That wasn't a square deal
accordin' to MY way of lookin' at things.' Yes, that's the way that
there feller talked. Why, here oncet--" the doctor paused to chuckle at
the recollection--"when I got there, Reverend was wrestlin' with Adam
to get hisself conwerted, and it was one of Adam's days when he was at
his deefest. Reverend he shouted in his ear, 'You must experience
religion--and get a change of heart--and be conwerted before you die!'
'What d' you say?' Adam he ast. Then Reverend, he seen that wouldn't
work, so he cut it short, and he says wery loud, 'Trust the Lord!' Now,
ole Adam Oberholzer in his business dealin's and speculatin' was always
darned particular who he trusted, still, so he looked up at Reverend,
and he says, 'Is he a reliable party?' Well, by gum, I bu'st right out
laughin'! I hadn't ought to--seein' it was Adam's death-bed--and
Reverend him just sweatin' with tryin' to work in his job to get him
conwerted till he passed away a'ready. But I'm swanged if I could keep
in! I just HOLLERED!"

The doctor threw back his head and shouted with fresh appreciation of
his story, and Fairchilds joined in sympathetically.

"Well, did he die unconverted?" he asked the doctor.

"You bet! Reverend he sayed afterwards, that in all his practice of his
sacred calling he never had knew such a carnal death-bed. Now you see,"
concluded the doctor, "I tended ole Adam fur near two months, and
that's where I have a hold on his son the school-directer."

He laughed as he rose and stretched himself.

"It will be no end of sport foiling Jake Getz!" Fairchilds said, with
but a vague idea of what the doctor's scheme involved. "Well, doctor,
you are our mascot--Tillie's and mine!" he added, as he, too, rose.

"What's THAT?"

"Our good luck." He held out an objectionably clean hand with its
shining finger-nails. "Good night, Doc, and thank you!"

The doctor awkwardly shook it in his own grimy fist. "Good night to
you, then, Teacher."

Out in the bar-room, as the doctor took his nightly glass of beer at
the counter, he confided to Abe Wackernagel that somehow he did, now,
"like to see Teacher use them manners of hisn. I'm 'most as stuck on
'em as missus is!" he declared.




XXIII

SUNSHINE AND SHADOW


Tillie's unhappiness, in her certainty that on Saturday night the Board
would vote for the eviction of the teacher, was so great that she felt
almost indifferent to her own fate, as she and the doctor started on
their six-mile ride to East Donegal. But when he presently confided to
her his scheme to foil her father and Absalom, she became almost
hysterical with joy.

"You see, Tillie, it's this here way. Two of these here directers owes
me bills. Now in drivin' you over to East Donegal I'm passin' near to
the farms of both of them directers, and I'll make it suit to stop off
and press 'em fur my money. They're both of 'em near as close as Jake
Getz! They don't like it fur me to press 'em to pay right aways. So
after while I'll say that if they wote ag'in' Jake and Nathaniel, and
each of 'em gets one of the other two directers to wote with him to
leave Teacher keep his job, I'll throw 'em the doctor's bill off! Adam
Oberholzer he owes me about twelve dollars, and Joseph Kettering he
owes me ten. I guess it ain't worth twelve dollars to Adam and ten to
Joseph to run Teacher off William Penn!"

"And do you suppose that they will be able to influence the other
two--John Coppenhaver and Pete Underwocht?"

"When all them dollars depends on it, I don't suppose nothin'--I know.
I'll put it this here way: 'If Teacher ain't chased off, I'll throw you
my doctor's bill off. If he is, you'll pay me up, and pretty damned
quick, too!'"

"But, Doc," faltered Tillie, "won't it be bribery?"

"Och, Tillie, a body mustn't feel so conscientious about such little
things like them. That's bein' too serious."

"Did you tell the teacher you were going to do this?" she uneasily
asked.

"Well, I guess I ain't such a blamed fool! I guess I know that much,
that he wouldn't of saw it the way _I_ see it. I tole him I was goin'
to bully them directers to keep him in his job--but he don't know how
I'm doin' it."

"I'm glad he doesn't know," sighed Tillie.

"Yes, he darsent know till it's all over oncet."

The joy and relief she felt at the doctor's scheme, which she was quite
sure would work out successfully, gave her a self-confidence in the
ordeal before her that sharpened her wits almost to brilliancy. She
sailed through this examination, which otherwise she would have dreaded
unspeakably, with an aplomb that made her a stranger to herself. Even
that bugbear of the examination labeled by the superintendent, "General
Information," and regarded with suspicion by the applicants as a snare
and a delusion, did not confound Tillie in her sudden and new-found
courage; though the questions under this head brought forth from the
applicants such astonishing statements as that Henry VIII was chiefly
noted for being "a great widower"; and that the Mother of the Gracchi
was "probably Mrs. Gracchi."

In her unwonted elation, Tillie even waxed a bit witty, and in the quiz
on "Methods of Discipline," she gave an answer which no doubt led the
superintendent to mark her high.

"What method would you pursue with a boy in your school who was
addicted to swearing?" she was asked.

"I suppose I should make him swear off!" said Tillie, with actual
flippancy.

A neat young woman of the class, sitting directly in front of the
superintendent, and wearing spectacles and very straight, tight hair,
cast a shocked and reproachful look upon Tillie, and turning to the
examiner, said primly, "_I_ would organize an anti-swearing society in
the school, and reward the boys who were not profane by making them
members of it, expelling those who used any profane language."

"And make every normal boy turn blasphemer in derision, I'm afraid,"
was the superintendent's ironical comment.

When, at four o'clock that afternoon, she drove back with the doctor
through the winter twilight, bearing her precious certificate in her
bosom, the brightness of her face seemed to reflect the brilliancy of
the red sunset glow on snow-covered fields, frozen creek, and
farm-house windows.

"Bully fur you, Matilda!" the doctor kept repeating at intervals. "Now
won't Miss Margaret be tickled, though! I tell you what, wirtue like
hern gits its rewards even in this here life. She'll certainly be set
up to think she's made a teacher out of you unbeknownst! And mebbe it
won't tickle her wonderful to think how she's beat Jake Getz!" he
chuckled.

"Of course you're writin' to her to-night, Tillie, ain't you?" he
asked. "I'd write her off a letter myself if writin' come handier to
me."

"Of course I shall let her know at once," Tillie replied; and in her
voice, for the first time in the doctor's acquaintance with her, there
was a touch of gentle complacency.

"I'll get your letter out the tree-holler to-morrow morning, then, when
I go a-past--and I can stamp it and mail it fur you till noon. Then
she'll get it till Monday morning yet! By gum, won't she, now, be
tickled!"

"Isn't it all beautiful!" Tillie breathed ecstatically. "I've got my
certificate and the teacher won't be put out! What did Adam Oberholzer
and Joseph Kettering say, Doc?"

"I've got them fixed all right! Just you wait, Tillie!" he said
mysteriously. "Mebbe us we ain't goin' to have the laugh on your pop
and old Nathaniel Puntz! You'll see! Wait till your pop comes home and
says what's happened at Board meetin' to-night! Golly! Won't he be
hoppin' mad!"

"What is going to happen, Doc?"

"You wait and see! I ain't tellin' even you, Tillie. I'm savin' it fur
a surprise party fur all of yous!"

"Father won't speak to me about it, you know. He won't mention
Teacher's name to me."

"Then won't you find out off of him about the Board meetin'?" the
doctor asked in disappointment. "Must you wait till you see me again
oncet?"

"He will tell mother. I can get her to tell me," Tillie said.

"All right. Somepin's going to happen too good to wait! Now look-ahere,
Tillie, is your pop to be tole about your certificate?"

"I won't tell him until I must. I don't know how he'd take it. He might
not let me get a school to teach. Of course, when once I've got a
school, he will have to be told. And then," she quietly added, "I shall
teach, whether he forbids it or not."

"To be sure!" heartily assented the doctor. "And leave him go roll
hisself, ain't! I'll keep a lookout fur you and tell you the first
wacancy I hear of."

"What would I do--what should I have done in all these years, Doc--if
it hadn't been for you!" smiled Tillie, with an affectionate pressure
of his rough hand; and the doctor's face shone with pleasure to hear
her.

"You have been a good friend to me, Doc."

"Och, that's all right, Tillie. As I sayed, wirtue has its reward even
in this here life. My wirtuous acts in standin' by you has gave me as
much satisfaction as I've ever had out of anything! But now, Tillie,
about tellin' your pop. I don't suspicion he'd take it anyways ugly. A
body'd think he'd be proud! And he hadn't none of the expense of givin'
you your nice education!"

"I can't be sure how he WOULD take it, Doc, so I would rather not tell
him until I must."

"All right. Just what you say. But I dare tell missus, ain't?"

"If she won't tell the girls, Doc. It would get back to father, I'm
afraid, if so many knew it."

"I 'll tell her not to tell. She 'll be as pleased and proud as if it
was Manda or Rebecca!"

"Poor Aunty Em! She is so good to me, and I'm afraid I've disappointed
her!" Tillie humbly said; but somehow the sadness that should have
expressed itself in the voice of one under suspension from meeting,
when speaking of her sin, was quite lacking.

When, at length, they reached the Getz farm, Mr. Getz met them at the
gate, his face harsh with displeasure at Tillie's long and unpermitted
absence from home.

"Hello, Jake!" said the doctor, pleasantly, as her father lifted her
down from the high buggy. "I guess missus tole you how I heard Tillie
fainted away in a swoond day before yesterday, so this morning I come
over to see her oncet--Aunty Em she was some oneasy. And I seen she
would mebbe have another such a swoond if she didn't get a long day out
in the air. It's done her wonderful much good--wonderful!"

"She hadn't no need to stay all day!" growled Mr. Getz. "Mom had all
Tillie's work to do, and her own too, and she didn't get it through
all."

"Well, better LET the work than have Tillie havin' any more of them
dangerous swoonds. Them's dangerous, I tell you, Jake! Sometimes folks
never comes to, yet!"

Mr. Getz looked at Tillie apprehensively. "You better go in and get
your hot supper, Tillie," he said, not ungently.

Before this forbearance of her father, Tillie had a feeling of shame in
the doctor's subterfuges, as she bade her loyal friend good night and
turned to go indoors.

"You'll be over to Board meetin' to-night, ain't?" the doctor said to
Mr. Getz as he picked up the reins.

"To be sure! Me and Nathaniel Puntz has a statement to make to the
Board that'll chase that tony dude teacher off his job so quick he
won't have time to pack his trunk!"

"Is that so?" the doctor said in feigned surprise. "Well, he certainly
is some tony--that I must give him, Jake. Well, good night to yous! Be
careful of Tillie's health!"

Getz went into the house and the doctor, chuckling to himself, drove
away.

Tillie was in bed, but sleep was far from her eyes, when, late that
night, she heard her father return from the Board meeting. Long she lay
in her bed, listening with tense nerves to his suppressed tones as he
talked to his wife in the room across the hall, but she could not hear
what he said. Not even his tone of voice was sufficiently enlightening
as to how affairs had gone.

In her wakefulness the night was agonizingly long; for though she was
hopeful of the success of the doctor's plot, she knew that possibly
there might have been some fatal hitch.

At the breakfast-table, next morning, her father looked almost sick,
and Tillie's heart throbbed with unfilial joy in the significance of
this. His manner to her was curt and his face betrayed sullen anger; he
talked but little, and did not once refer to the Board meeting in her
presence.

It was not until ten o'clock, when he had gone with some of the
children to the Evangelical church, that she found her longed-for
opportunity to question her stepmother.

"Well," she began, with assumed indifference, as she and her mother
worked together in the kitchen preparing the big Sunday dinner, "did
they put the teacher out?"

"If they put him out?" exclaimed Mrs. Getz, slightly roused from her
customary apathy. "Well, I think they didn't! What do you think they
done yet?"

"I'm sure," said Tillie, evidently greatly interested in the turnips
she was paring, "I don't know."

"They raised his salary five a month!"

The turnips dropped into the pan, and Tillie raised her eyes to gaze
incredulously into the face of her stepmother, who, with hands on her
hips, stood looking down upon her.

"Yes," went on Mrs. Getz, "that's what they done! A dumm thing like
that! And after pop and Nathaniel Puntz they had spoke their speeches
where they had ready, how Teacher he wasn't fit fur William Penn! And
after they tole how he had up and sassed pop, and him a directer yet!
And Nathaniel he tole how Absalom had heard off the Doc how Teacher he
was a' UNbeliever and says musin' is the same to him as prayin'! Now
think! Such conwictions as them! And then, when the wote was took, here
it come out that only pop and Nathaniel Puntz woted ag'in' Teacher, and
the other four they woted FUR! And they woted to raise his salary five
a month yet!"

Tillie's eyes dropped from her mother's face, her chin quivered, she
bit her lip, and suddenly, unable to control herself, she broke into
wild, helpless laughter.

Mrs. Getz stared at her almost in consternation. Never before in her
life had she seen Tillie laugh with such abandon.

"What ails you?" she asked wonderingly.

Tillie could find no voice to answer, her slight frame shaking
convulsively.

"What you laughin' at, anyhow?" Mrs. Getz repeated, now quite
frightened.

"That--that Wyandotte hen jumped up on the sill!" Tillie murmured--then
went off into a perfect peal of mirth. It seemed as though all the
pent-up joy and gaiety of her childhood had burst forth in that moment.

"I don't see nothin' in that that's anyways comical--a Wyandotte hen on
the window-sill!" said Mrs. Getz, in stupid wonder.

"She looked so--so--oh!" Tillie gasped, and wiped her eyes with a
corner of her apron.

"You don't take no int'rust in what I tole you all!" Mrs. Getz
complained, sitting down near her stepdaughter to pick the chickens for
dinner. "I'd think it would make you ashamed fur the way you stood up
fur Teacher ag'in' your own pop here last Thursday--fur them four
directers to go ag'in' pop like this here!"

"What reasons did they give for voting for the teacher?" Tillie asked,
her hysterics subsiding.

"They didn't give no reasons till they had him elected a'ready. Then
Adam Oberholzer he got up and he spoke how Teacher learned the scholars
so good and got along without lickin' 'em any (pop he had brung that up
AG'IN' Teacher, but Adam he sayed it was FUR), and that they better
mebbe give him five extry a month to make sure to keep such a kind man
to their childern, and one that learnt 'em so good."

Tillie showed signs, for an instant, of going off into another fit of
laughter.

"What's ailin' you?" her mother asked in mystification. "I never seen
you act so funny! You better go take a drink."

Tillie repressed herself and went on with her work.

During the remainder of that day, and, indeed, through all the week
that followed, she struggled to conceal from her father the exultation
of her spirits. She feared he would interpret it as a rejoicing over
his defeat, and there was really no such feeling in the girl's gentle
heart. She was even moved to some faint--it must be confessed, very
faint--pangs of pity for him as she saw, from day to day, how hard he
took his defeat. Apparently, it was to him a sickening blow to have his
"authority" as school director defied by a penniless young man who was
partly dependent upon his vote for daily bread. He suffered keenly in
his conviction that the teacher was as deeply exultant in his victory
as Getz had expected to be.

In these days, Tillie walked on air, and to Mrs. Getz and the children
she seemed almost another girl, with that happy vibration in her
usually sad voice, and that light of gladness in her soft pensive eyes.
The glorious consciousness was ever with her that the teacher was
always near--though she saw him but seldom. This, and the possession of
the precious certificate, her talisman to freedom, hidden always in her
bosom, made her daily drudgery easy to her and her hours full of hope
and happiness.

Deep as was Tillie's impression of the steadiness of purpose in
Absalom's character, she was nevertheless rather taken aback when, on
the Sunday night after that horrible experience in the woods, her
suitor stolidly presented himself at the farm-house, attired in his
best clothes, his whole aspect and bearing eloquent of the fact that
recent defeat had but made him more doggedly determined to win in the
end.

Tillie wondered if she might not be safe now in dismissing him
emphatically and finally; but she decided there was still danger lest
Absalom might wreak his vengeance in some dreadful way upon the teacher.

Her heart was so full of happiness that she could tolerate even Absalom.

Only two short weeks of this brightness and glory, and then the blow
fell--the blow which blackened the sun in the heavens. The teacher
suddenly, and most mysteriously, resigned and went away.

No one knew why. Whether it was to take a better position, or for what
other possible reason, not a soul in the township could tell--not even
the Doc.

Strange to say, Fairchilds's going, instead of pleasing Mr. Getz, was
only an added offense to both him and Absalom. They had thirsted for
vengeance; they had longed to humiliate this "high-minded dude"; and
now not only was the opportunity lost to them, but the "job" they had
determined to wrest from him was indifferently hurled back in their
faces--he DIDN'T WANT IT! Absalom and Getz writhed in their helpless
spleen.

Tillie's undiscerning family did not for an instant attribute to its
true cause her sudden change from radiant happiness to the weakness and
lassitude that tell of mental anguish. They were not given to seeing
anything that was not entirely on the surface and perfectly obvious.

Three days had passed since Fairchilds's departure--three days of utter
blackness to Tillie; and on the third day she went to pay her weekly
visit to the tree-hollow in the woods where she was wont to place Miss
Margaret's letters.

On this day she found, to her amazement, two letters. Her knees shook
as she recognized the teacher's handwriting on one of them.

There was no stamp and no post-mark on the envelop. He had evidently
written the letter before leaving, and had left it with the doctor to
be delivered to her.

Tillie had always been obliged to maneuver skilfully in order to get
away from the house long enough to pay these weekly visits to the
tree-hollow; and she nearly always read her letter from Miss Margaret
at night by a candle, when the household was asleep.

But now, heedless of consequences, she sat down on a snow-covered log
and opened Fairchilds's letter, her teeth chattering with more than
cold.

It was only a note, written in great haste and evidently under some
excitement. It told her of his immediate departure for Cambridge to
accept a rather profitable private tutorship to a rich man's son. He
would write to Tillie, later, when he could. Meanwhile, God bless
her--and he was always her friend. That was all. He gave her no address
and did not speak of her writing to him.

Tillie walked home in a dream. All that evening, she was so "dopplig"
as finally to call forth a sharp rebuke from her father, to which she
paid not the slightest heed.

Would she ever see him again, her heart kept asking? Would he really
write to her again? Where was he at this moment, and what was he doing?
Did he send one thought to her, so far away, so desolate? Did he have
in any least degree the desire, the yearning, for her that she had for
him?

Tillie felt a pang of remorse for her disloyalty to Miss Margaret when
she realized that she had almost forgotten that always precious letter.
When, a little past midnight, she took it from her dress pocket she
noticed what had before escaped her--some erratic writing in lead on
the back of the envelop. It was in the doctor's strenuous hand.

"Willyam Pens as good as yoorn ive got them all promist but your pop to
wote for you at the bored meating saterdy its to be a surprize party
for your pop."




XXIV

THE REVOLT OF TILLIE


At half-past seven o'clock on Saturday evening, the School Board once
more convened in the hotel parlor, for the purpose of electing
Fairchilds's successor.

"Up till now," Mr. Getz had remarked at the supper-table, "I ain't been
tole of no candidate applyin' fur William Penn, and here to-night we
meet to elect him--or her if she's a female."

Tillie's heart had jumped to her throat as she heard him, wondering how
he would take it when they announced to him that the applicant was none
other than his own daughter--whether he would be angry at her long
deception, or gratified at the prospect of her earning so much
money--for, of course, it would never occur to him that she would dare
refuse to give him every cent she received.

There was unwonted animation in the usually stolid faces of the School
Board to-night; for the members were roused to a lively appreciation of
the situation as it related to Jake Getz. The doctor had taken each and
every one of them into his confidence, and had graphically related to
them the story of how Tillie had "come by" her certificate, and the
tale had elicited their partizanship for Tillie, as for the heroine of
a drama. Even Nathaniel Puntz was enjoying the fact that he was
to-night on the side of the majority. With Tillie, they were in doubt
as to how Jake Getz would receive the news.

"Is they a' applicant?" he inquired on his arrival.

"Why, to be sure," said Nathaniel Puntz. "What fur would it be worth
while to waste time meetin' to elect her if they ain't none?"

"Then she's a female, is she?"

"Well, she ain't no male, anyways, nor no Harvard gradyate, neither. If
she was, _I_ wouldn't wote fur her!"

"What might her name be?"

"It's some such a French name," answered the doctor, who had carried in
the lamp and was lingering a minute. "It would, now, surprise you,
Jake, if you heard it oncet."

"Is she such a foreigner yet?" Getz asked suspiciously. "I mistrust 'em
when they're foreigners."

"Well," spoke Adam Oberholzer, as the doctor reluctantly went out, "it
ain't ten mile from here she was raised."

"Is she a gradyate? We hadn't ought to take none but a Normal. We had
_enough_ trouble!"

"No, she ain't a Normal, but she's got her certificate off the
superintendent."

"Has any of yous saw her?"

"Och, yes, she's familiar with us," replied Joseph Kettering, the
Amishman, who was president of the Board.

"Why ain't she familiar with me, then?" Getz inquired, looking
bewildered, as the president opened the ink-bottle that stood on the
table about which they sat, and distributed slips of paper.

"Well, that's some different again, too," facetiously answered Joseph
Kettering.

"Won't she be here to-night to leave us see her oncet?"

"She won't, but her pop will," answered Nathaniel Puntz; and Mr. Getz
vaguely realized in the expressions about him that something unusual
was in the air.

"What do we want with her _pop_?" he asked.

"We want his _wote_!" answered Adam Oberholzer--which sally brought
forth hilarious laughter.

"What you mean?" demanded Getz, impatient of all this mystery.

"It's the daughter of one of this here Board that we're wotin' fur!"

Mr. Getz's eyes moved about the table. "Why, none of yous ain't got a
growed-up daughter that's been to school long enough to get a
certificate."

"It seems there's ways of gettin' a certificate without goin' to
school. Some girls can learn theirselves at home without even a
teacher, and workin' all the time at farm-work, still, and even livin'
out!" said Mr. Puntz. "I say a girl with inDUStry like that would make
any feller a good wife."

Getz stared at him in bewilderment.

"The members of this Board," said Mr. Kettering, solemnly, "and the
risin' generation of the future, can point this here applicant out to
their childern as a shinin' example of what can be did by inDUStry,
without money and without price--and it'll be fur a spur to 'em to go
thou and do likewise."

"Are you so dumm, Jake, you don't know YET who we mean?" Nathaniel
asked.

"Why, to be sure, don't I! None of yous has got such a daughter where
lived out."

"Except yourself, Jake!"

The eyes of the Board were fixed upon Mr. Getz in excited expectation.
But he was still heavily uncomprehending. Then the president, rising,
made his formal announcement, impressively and with dignity.

"Members of Canaan Township School Board: We will now proceed to wote
fur the applicant fur William Penn. She is not unknownst to this here
Board. She is a worthy and wirtuous female, and has a good moral
character. We think she's been well learnt how to manage childern, fur
she's been raised in a family where childern was never scarce. The
applicant," continued the speaker, "is--as I stated a couple minutes
back--a shining example of inDUStry to the rising generations of the
future, fur she's got her certificate to teach--and wery high marks on
it--and done it all by her own unaided efforts and inDUStry. Members of
Canaan Township School Board, we are now ready to wote fur Matilda
Maria Getz."

Before his dazed wits could recover from the shock of this
announcement, Jake Getz's daughter had become the unanimously elected
teacher of William Penn.

The ruling passion of the soul of Jacob Getz manifested itself
conspicuously in his reception of the revelation that his daughter,
through deliberate and systematic disobedience, carried on through all
the years of her girlhood, had succeeded in obtaining a certificate
from the county superintendent, and was now the teacher-elect at
William Penn. The father's satisfaction in the possession of a child
capable of earning forty dollars a month, his greedy joy in the
prospect of this addition to his income, entirely overshadowed and
dissipated the rage he would otherwise have felt. The pathos of his
child's courageous persistency in the face of his dreaded severity, of
her pitiful struggle with all the adverse conditions of her life,--this
did not enter at all into his consideration of the case. It was obvious
to Tillie, as it had been to the School Board on Saturday night, that
he felt an added satisfaction in the fact that this wonder had been
accomplished without any loss to him either of money or of his child's
labor.

Somehow, her father's reception of her triumph filled her heart with
more bitterness than she had ever felt toward him in all the years of
her hard endeavor. It was on the eve of her first day of teaching that
his unusually affectionate attitude to her at the supper-table suddenly
roused in her a passion of hot resentment such as her gentle heart had
not often experienced.

"I owe YOU no thanks, father, for what education I have!" she burst
forth. "You always did everything in your power to hinder me!"

If a bomb had exploded in the midst of them, Mr. and Mrs. Getz could
not have been more confounded. Mrs. Getz looked to see her husband
order Tillie from the table, or rise from his place to shake her and
box her ears. But he did neither. In amazement he stared at her for a
moment--then answered with a mildness that amazed his wife even more
than Tillie's "sassiness" had done.

"I'd of LEFT you study if I'd knowed you could come to anything like
this by it. But I always thought you'd have to go to the Normal to be
fit fur a teacher yet. And you can't say you don't owe me no
thanks--ain't I always kep' you?"

"Kept me!" answered Tillie, with a scorn that widened her father's
stare and made her stepmother drop her knife on her plate; "I never
worked half so hard at Aunty Em's as I have done here every day of my
life since I was nine years old--and SHE thought my work worth not only
my 'keep,' but two dollars a week besides. When do you ever spend two
dollars on me? You never gave me a dollar that I hadn't earned ten
times over! You owe me back wages!"

Jake Getz laid down his knife, with a look on his face that made his
other children quail. His countenance was livid with anger.

"OWE YOU BACK WAGES!" he choked. "Ain't you my child, then, where I
begat and raised? Don't I own you? What's a child FUR? To grow up to be
no use to them that raised it? You talk like that to me!" he roared.
"You tell me I OWE you back money! Now listen here! I was a-goin' to
leave you keep five dollars every month out of your forty. Yes, I
conceited I'd leave you have all that--five a month! Now fur sassin' me
like what you done, I ain't leavin' you have NONE the first month!"

"And what," Tillie wondered, a strange calm suddenly following her
outburst, as she sat back in her chair, white and silent, "what will he
do and say when I refuse to give him more than the price of my board?"

Her school-work, which began nest day, diverted her mind somewhat from
its deep yearning for him who had become to her the very breath of her
life.

It was on the Sunday night after her first week of teaching that she
told Absalom, with all the firmness she could command, that he must not
come to see her any more, for she was resolved not to marry him.

"Who are you goin' to marry, then?" he inquired, unconvinced.

"No one."

"Do you mean it fur really, that you'd ruther be a' ole maid?"

"I'd rather be SIX old maids than the wife of a Dutchman!"

"What fur kind of a man do you WANT, then?"

"Not the kind that grows in this township."

"Would you, mebbe," Absalom sarcastically inquired, "like such a dude
like what--"

"Absalom!" Tillie flashed her beautiful eyes upon him. "You are
unworthy to mention his name to me! Don't dare to speak to me of
him--or I shall leave you and go up-stairs RIGHT AWAY!"

Absalom sullenly subsided.

When, later, he left her, she saw that her firm refusal to marry him
had in no wise baffled him.

This impression was confirmed when on the next Sunday night, in spite
of her prohibition, he again presented himself.

Tillie was mortally weary that night. Her letter had not come, and her
nervous waiting, together with the strain of her unwonted work of
teaching, had told on her endurance. So poor Absalom's reception at her
hands was even colder than her father's greeting at the kitchen door;
for since Tillie's election to William Penn, Mr. Getz was more opposed
than ever to her marriage, and he did not at all relish the young man's
persistency in coming to see her in the face of his own repeated
warning.

"Tillie," Absalom began when they were alone together after the family
had gone to bed, "I thought it over oncet, and I come to say I'd ruther
have you 'round, even if you didn't do nothin' but set and knit mottos
and play the organ, than any other woman where could do all my
housework fur me. I'll HIRE fur you, Tillie--and you can just set and
enjoy yourself musin', like what Doc says book-learnt people likes to
do."

Tillie's eyes rested on him with a softer and a kindlier light in them
than she had ever shown him before; for such a magnanimous offer as
this, she thought, could spring only from the fact that Absalom was
really deeply in love, and she was not a little touched.

She contemplated him earnestly as he sat before her, looking so utterly
unnatural in his Sunday clothes. A feeling of compassion for him began
to steal into her heart.

"If I am not careful," she thought in consternation, "I shall be
saying, 'Yes,' out of pity."

But a doubt quickly crept into her heart. Was it really that he loved
her so very much, or was it that his obstinacy was stronger than his
prudence, and that if he could not get her as he wanted her,--as his
housekeeper and the mother of numberless children,--he would take her
on her own conditions? Only so he got her--that was the point. He had
made up his mind to have her--it must be accomplished.

"Absalom," she said, "I am not going to let you waste any more of your
time. You must never come to see me again after to-night. I won't ever
marry you, and I won't let you go on like this, with your false hope.
If you come again, I won't see you. I'll go up-stairs!"

One would have thought that this had no uncertain ring. But again
Tillie knew, when Absalom left her, that his resolution not only was
not shaken,--it was not even jarred.

The weeks moved on, and the longed-for letter did not come. Tillie
tried to gather courage to question the doctor as to whether Fairchilds
had made any arrangement with him for the delivery of a letter to her.
But an instinct of maidenly reserve and pride which, she could not
conquer kept her lips closed on the subject.

Had it not been for this all-consuming desire for a letter, she would
more keenly have felt her enforced alienation from her aunt, of whom
she was so fond; and at the same time have taken really great pleasure
in her new work and in having reached at last her long-anticipated goal.

In the meantime, while her secret sorrow--like Sir Hudibras's rusting
sword that had nothing else to feed upon and so hacked upon
itself--seemed eating out her very heart, the letter which would have
been to her as manna in the wilderness had fallen into her father's
hands, and after being laboriously conned by him, to his utter
confusion as to its meaning, had been consigned to the kitchen fire.

Mr. Getz's reasons for withholding the letter from his daughter and
burning it were several. In the first place, Fairchilds was "an
UNbeliever," and therefore his influence was baneful; he was Jacob
Getz's enemy, and therefore no fit person to be writing friendly
letters to his daughter; he asked Tillie, in his letter, to write to
him, and this would involve the buying of stationery and wasting of
time that might be better spent; and finally, he and Tillie, as he
painfully gathered from the letter, were "making up" to a degree that
might end in her wanting to marry the fellow.

Mr. Getz meant to tell Tillie that he had received this letter; but
somehow, every time he opened his lips to speak the words, the memory
of her wild-cat behavior in defense of the teacher that afternoon in
the woods, and her horribly death-like appearance when she had lain
unconscious in the teacher's arms, recurred to him with a vividness
that effectually checked him, and eventually led him to decide that it
were best not to risk another such outbreak. So she remained in
ignorance of the fact that Fairchilds had again written to her.

Carlyle's "Gospel of Work" was indeed Tillie's salvation in these days;
for in spite of her restless yearning and loneliness, she was deeply
interested and even fascinated with her teaching, and greatly pleased
and encouraged with her success in it.

At last, with the end of her first month at William Penn, came the
rather dreaded "pay-day"; for she knew that it would mean the hardest
battle of her life.

The forty dollars was handed to her in her schoolroom on Friday
afternoon, at the close of the session. It seemed untold wealth to
Tillie, who never before in her life had owned a dollar.

She' did not risk carrying it all home with her. The larger part of the
sum she intrusted to the doctor to deposit for her in a Lancaster bank.

When, at five o'clock, she reached home and walked into the kitchen,
her father's eagerness for her return, that he might lay his itching
palms on her earnings, was perfectly manifest to her in his unduly
affectionate, "Well, Tillie!"

She was pale, but outwardly composed. It was to be one of those supreme
crises in life which one is apt to meet with a courage and a serenity
that are not forthcoming in the smaller irritations and trials of daily
experience.

"You don't look so hearty," her father said, as she quietly hung up her
shawl and hood in the kitchen cupboard. "A body'd think you'd pick up
and get fat, now you don't have to work nothin', except mornings and
evenings."

"There is no harder work in the world, father, than teaching--even when
you like it."

"It ain't no work," he impatiently retorted, "to set and hear off
lessons."

Tillie did not dispute the point, as she tied a gingham apron over her
dress.

Her father was sitting in a corner of the room, shelling corn, with
Sammy and Sally at his side helping him. He stopped short in his work
and glanced at Tillie in surprise, as she immediately set about
assisting her mother in setting the supper-table.

"You was paid to-day, wasn't you?"

"Yes."

"Well, why don't you gimme the money, then? Where have you got it?"

Tillie drew a roll of bills from her pocket and came up to him.

He held out his hand. "You know, Tillie, I tole you I ain't givin' you
none of your wages this month, fur sassin' me like what you done. But
next month, if you're good-behaved till then, I'll give you mebbe five
dollars. Gimme here," he said, reaching for the money across the heads
of the children in front of him.

But she did not obey. She looked at him steadily as she stood before
him, and spoke deliberately, though every nerve in her body was jumping.

"Aunty Em charged the teacher fifteen dollars a month for board. That
included his washing and ironing. I really earn my board by the work I
do here Saturdays and Sundays, and in the mornings and evenings before
and after school. But I will pay you twelve dollars a month for my
board."

She laid on his palm two five-dollar bills and two ones, and calmly
walked back to the table.

Getz sat as one suddenly turned to stone. Sammy and Sally dropped their
corn-cobs into their laps and stared in frightened wonder. Mrs. Getz
stopped cutting the bread and gazed stupidly from her husband to her
stepdaughter. Tillie alone went on with her work, no sign in her white,
still face of the passion of terror in her heart at her own unspeakable
boldness.

Suddenly two resounding slaps on the ears of Sammy and Sally, followed
by their sharp screams of pain and fright, broke the tense stillness.

"Who tole you to stop workin', heh?" demanded their father, fiercely.
"Leave me see you at it, do you hear? You stop another time to gape
around and I 'll lick you good! Stop your bawlin' now, this minute!"

He rose from his chair and strode over to the table. Seizing Tillie by
the shoulder, he drew her in froet of him.

"Gimme every dollar of them forty!"

"I have given you all I have."

"Where are you got the others hid?"

"I have deposited my money in a Lancaster bank."

Jacob Getz's face turned apoplectic with rage.

"Who took it to Lancaster fur you?"

"I sent it."

"What fur bank?"

"I prefer not to tell you that."

"You PERFER! I'll learn you PERFER! Who took it in fur you--and what
fur bank? Answer to me!"

"Father, the money is mine."

"It's no such thing! You ain't but seventeen. And I don't care if
you're eighteen or even twenty-one! You're my child and you 'll obey to
me and do what I tell you!"

"Father, I will not submit to your robbing me, You can't force me to
give you my earnings. If you could, I wouldn't teach at all!"

"You won't submit! And I darsent rob you!" he spluttered. "Don't you
know I can collect your wages off the secretary of the Board myself?"

"Before next pay-day I shall be eighteen. Then you can't legally do
that. If you could, I would resign. Then you wouldn't even get your
twelve dollars a month for my board. That's four dollars more than I
can earn living out at Aunty Em's."

Beside himself with his fury, Getz drew her a few steps to the closet
where his strap hung, and jerking it from its nail, he swung out his
arm.

But Tillie, with a strength born of a sudden fury almost matching his
own, and feeling in her awakened womanhood a new sense of outrage and
ignominy in such treatment, wrenched herself free, sprang to the middle
of the room, and faced him with blazing eyes.

"Dare to touch me--ever again so long as you live!--and I'll kill you,
I'll KILL you!"

Such madness of speech, to ears accustomed to the carefully tempered
converse of Mennonites, Amish, and Dunkards, was in itself a wickedness
almost as great as the deed threatened. The family, from the father
down to six-year-old Zephaniah, trembled to hear the awful words.

"Ever dare to touch me again so long as we both live--and I'll stab you
dead!"

Mrs. Getz shrieked. Sally and Sammy clung to each other whimpering in
terror, and the younger children about the room took up the chorus.

"Tillie!" gasped her father.

The girl tottered, her eyes suddenly rolled back in her head, she
stretched out her hands, and fell over on the floor. Once more Tillie
had fainted.




XXV

GETZ "LEARNS" TILLIE


As a drowning man clings to whatever comes in his way, Tillie, in these
weary days of heart-ache and yearning, turned with new intensity of
feeling to Miss Margaret, who had never failed her, and their
interchange of letters became more frequent.

Her father did not easily give up the struggle with her for the
possession of her salary. Finding that he could not legally collect it
himself from the treasurer of the Board, he accused his brother-in-law,
Abe Wackernagel, of having taken it to town for her; and when Abe
denied the charge, with the assurance, however, that he "WOULD do that
much for Tillie any day he got the chancet," Mr. Getz next taxed the
doctor, who, of course, without the least scruple, denied all knowledge
of Tillie's monetary affairs.

On market day, he had to go to Lancaster City, and when his efforts to
force Tillie to sign a cheek payable to him had proved vain, his
baffled greed again roused him to uncontrollable fury, and lifting his
hand, he struck her across the cheek.

Tillie reeled and would have fallen had he not caught her, his anger
instantly cooling in his fear lest she faint again. But Tillie had no
idea of fainting. "Let me go," she said quietly, drawing her arm out of
his clasp. Turning quickly away, she walked straight out of the room
and up-stairs to her chamber.

Her one change of clothing she quickly tied into a bundle, and putting
on her bonnet and shawl, she walked down-stairs and out of the house.

"Where you goin'?" her father demanded roughly as he followed her out
on the porch.

She did not answer, but walked on to the gate. In an instant he had
overtaken her and stood squarely in her path.

"Where you goin' to?" he repeated.

"To town, to board at the store."

He dragged her, almost by main force, back into the house, and all that
evening kept a watch upon her until he knew that she was in bed.

Next morning, Tillie carried her bundle of clothing to school with her,
and at the noon recess she went to the family who kept the village
store and engaged board with them, saying she could not stand the daily
walks to and from school.

When, at six o'clock that evening, she had not returned home, her
father drove in to the village store to get her. But she locked herself
in her bedroom and would not come out.

In the next few weeks he tried every means of force at his command, but
in vain; and at last he humbled himself to propose a compromise.

"I'll leave you have some of your money every month, Tillie,--as much
as ten dollars,--if you'll give me the rest, still."

"Why should I give it to you, father? How would that benefit ME?" she
said, with a rather wicked relish in turning the tables on him and
applying his life principle of selfishness to her own case.

Her father did not know how to meet it. Never before in her life, to
his knowledge, had Tillie considered her own benefit before his and
that of his wife and children. That she should dare to do so now seemed
to knock the foundations from under him.

"When I'm dead, won't you and the others inherit off of me all I've
saved?" he feebly inquired.

"But that will be when I'm too old to enjoy or profit by it."

"How much do you want I should give you out of your wages every month,
then?"

"You can't give me what is not yours to give."

"Now don't you be sassin' me, or I'll learn you!"

They were alone in her school-room on a late February afternoon, after
school had been dismissed. Tillie quickly rose and reached for her
shawl and bonnet. She usually tried to avoid giving him an opportunity
like this for bullying her, with no one by to protect her.

"Just stay settin'," he growled sullenly, and she knew from his tone
that he had surrendered.

"If you'll come home to board, I won't bother you no more, then," he
further humbled himself to add. The loss even of the twelve dollars'
board was more than he could bear.

"It would not be safe," answered Tillie, grimly.

"Och, it 'll be safe enough. I'll leave you be."

"It would not be safe for YOU."

"Fur me? What you talkin'?"

"If you lost your temper and struck me, I might kill you. That's why I
came away."

The father stared in furtive horror at the white, impassive face of his
daughter.

Could this be Tillie--his meek, long-suffering Tillie?

"Another thing," she continued resolutely, for she had lost all fear of
speaking her mind to him, "why should I pay you twelve dollars a month
board, when I get my board at the store for six, because I wait on
customers between times?"

Mr. Getz looked very downcast. There was a long silence between them.

"I must go now, father. This is the hour that I always spend in the
store."

"I'll board you fur six, then," he growled.

"And make me work from four in the morning until eight or nine at
night? It is easier standing in the store. I can read when there are no
customers."

"To think I brung up a child to talk to me like this here!" He stared
at her incredulously.

"The rest will turn out even worse," Tillie prophesied with conviction,
"unless you are less harsh with them. Your harshness will drive every
child you have to defy you."

"I'll take good care none of the others turns out like you!" he
threateningly exclaimed. "And YOU'LL see oncet! You'll find out! You
just wait! I tried everything--now I know what I'm doin'. It'll LEARN
you!"

In the next few weeks, as nothing turned up to make good these threats,
Tillie often wondered what her father had meant by them. It was not
like him to waste time in empty words.

But she was soon to learn. One evening the doctor came over to the
store to repeat to her some rumors he had heard and which he thought
she ought to know.

"Tillie! your pop's workin' the directers to have you chased off
William Penn till the April election a'ready!"

"Oh, Doc!" Tillie gasped, "how do you know?"

"That's what the talk is. He's goin' about to all of 'em whenever he
can handy leave off from his work, and he's tellin' 'em they had ought
to set that example to onruly children; and most of 'em's agreein' with
him. Nathaniel Puntz he agrees with him. Absalom he talks down on you
since you won't leave him come no more Sundays, still. Your pop he says
when your teachin' is a loss to him instead of a help, he ain't leavin'
you keep on. He says when you don't have no more money, you'll have to
come home and help him and your mom with the work. Nathaniel Puntz he
says this is a warnin' to parents not to leave their children have too
much education--that they get high-minded that way and won't even get
married."

"But, Doc," Tillie pleaded with him in an agony of mind, "you won't let
them take my school from me, will you? You'll make them let me keep it?"

The doctor gave a little laugh. "By golly, Tillie, I ain't the
President of America! You think because I got you through oncet or
twicet, I kin do ANYthing with them directers, still! Well, a body
can't ALWAYS get ahead of a set of stubborn-headed Dutchmen--and with
Nathaniel Puntz so wonderful thick in with your pop to work ag'in' you,
because you won't have that dumm Absalom of hisn!"

"What shall I do?" Tillie cried. "I can never, never go back to my old
life again--that hopeless, dreary drudgery on the farm! I can't, indeed
I can't! I won't go back. What shall I do?"

"Look-ahere, Tillie!" the doctor spoke soothingly, "I'll do what I
otherwise kin to help you. I'll do, some back-talkin' myself to them
directers. But you see," he said in a troubled tone, "none of them
directers happens to owe me no doctor-bill just now, and that makes it
a little harder to persuade 'em to see my view of the case. Now if only
some of their wives would up and get sick for 'em and I could run 'em
up a bill! But," he concluded, shaking his head in discouragement,
"it's a wonderful healthy season--wonderful healthy!"

In the two months that followed, the doctor worked hard to counteract
Mr. Getz's influence with the Board. Tillie, too, missed no least
opportunity to plead her cause with them, not only by direct argument,
but by the indirect means of doing her best possible work in her school.

But both she and the doctor realized, as the weeks moved on, that they
were working in vain; for Mr. Getz, in his statements to the directors,
had appealed to some of their most deep-rooted prejudices. Tillie's
filial insubordination, her "high-mindedness," her distaste for
domestic work, so strong that she refused even to live under her
father's roof--all these things made her unfit to be an instructor and
guide to their young children. She would imbue the "rising generation"
with her worldly and wrong-headed ideas.

Had Tillie remained "plain," she would no doubt have had the
championship of the two New Mennonite members of the Board. But her
apostasy had lost her even that defense, for she no longer wore her
nun-like garb. After her suspension from meeting and her election to
William Penn, she had gradually drifted into the conviction that colors
other than gray, black, or brown were probably pleasing to the Creator,
and that what really mattered was not what she wore, but what she was.
It was without any violent struggles or throes of anguish that, in this
revolution of her faith, she quite naturally fell away from the creed
which once had held her such a devotee. When she presently appeared in
the vain and ungodly habiliments of "the world's people," the brethren
gave her up in despair and excommunicated her.

"No use, Tillie," the doctor would report in discouragement, week after
week; "we're up against it sure this time! You're losin' William Penn
till next month, or I'll eat my hat! A body might as well TRY to eat
his hat as move them pig-headed Dutch once they get sot. And they're
sot on puttin' you out, all right! You see, your pop and Nathaniel
Puntz they just fixed 'em! Me and you ain't got no show at all."

Tillie could think of no way of escape from her desperate position.
What was there before her but a return to the farm, or perhaps, at
best, marriage with Absalom?

"To be sure, I should have to be reduced to utter indifference to my
fate if I ever consented to marry Absalom," she bitterly told herself.
"But when it is a question between doing that and living at home, I
don't know but I might be driven to it!"

At times, the realization that there was no possible appeal from her
situation did almost drive her to a frenzy. After so many years of
struggle, just as she was tasting success, to lose all the fruits of
her labor--how could she endure it? With the work she loved taken away
from her, how could she bear the gnawing hunger at her heart for the
presence of him unto whom was every thought of her brain and every
throbbing pulse of her soul? The future seemed to stretch before her, a
terrible, an unendurable blank.

The first week of April was the time fixed for the meeting of the Board
at which she was to be "chased off her job"; and as the fatal day drew
near, a sort of lethargy settled upon her, and she ceased to straggle,
even in spirit, against the inevitable.

"Well, Tillie," the doctor said, with a long sigh, as he came into the
store at six o'clock on the eventful evening, and leaned over the
counter to talk to the girl, "they're all conwened by now, over there
in the hotel parlor. Your pop and Nathaniel Puntz they're lookin'
wonderful important. Tour pop," he vindictively added, "is just
chucklin' at the idea of gettin' you home under his thumb ag'in!"

Tillie did not speak. She sat behind the counter, her cheeks resting on
the backs of her hands, her wistful eyes gazing past the doctor toward
the red light in the hotel windows across the way.

"Golly! but I'd of liked to beat 'em out on this here game! But they've
got us, Tillie! They'll be wotin' you out of your job any minute now.
And then your pop'll be comin' over here to fetch you along home! Oh!
If he wasn't your pop I c'd say somethin' real perfane about him."

Tillie drew a long breath; but she did not speak. She could not. It
seemed to her that she had come to the end of everything.

"Look-ahere, Tillie," the doctor spoke suddenly, "you just up and get
ahead of 'em all--you just take yourself over to the Millersville
Normal! You've got some money saved, ain't you?"

"Yes!" A ray of hope kindled in her eyes. "I have saved one hundred and
twenty-five dollars! I should have more than that if I had not returned
to the world's dress."

"A hundred and twenty-five's plenty enough for a good starter at the
Millersville Normal," said the doctor.

"But," Tillie hesitated, "this is April, and the spring term closes in
three months. What should I do and where could I go after that? If I
made such a break with father, he might refuse to take me home even if
I had nowhere else to go. Could I risk that?"

The doctor leaned his head on his hand and heavily considered the
situation.

"I'm blamed if I dare adwise you, Tillie. It's some serious adwisin' a
young unprotected female to leave her pop's rooft to go out into the
unbeknownst world," he said sentimentally. "To be sure, Miss Margaret
would see after you while you was at the Normal. But when wacation is
here in June she might mebbe be goin' away for such a trip like, and
then if you couldn't come back home, you'd be throwed out on the cold
wide world, where there's many a pitfall for the onwary."

"It seems too great a risk to run, doesn't it? There seems to be
nothing--nothing--that I can do but go back to the farm," she said, the
hope dying out of her eyes.

"Just till I kin get you another school, Tillie," he consoled her.
"I'll be lookin' out for a wacancy in the county for you, you bet!"

"Thank you, Doc," she answered wearily; "but you know another school
couldn't possibly be open to me until next fall--five months from now."

She threw her head back upon the palm of her hand. "I'm so tired--so
very tired of it all. What's the use of struggling? What am I
struggling FOR?"

"What are you struggling FUR?" the doctor repeated. "Why, to get shed
of your pop and all them kids out at the Getz farm that wears out your
young life workin' for 'em! That's what! And to have some freedom and
money of your own--to have a little pleasure now and ag'in! I tell you,
Tillie, I don't want to see you goin' out there to that farm ag'in!"

"Do you think I should dare to run away to the Normal?" she asked
fearfully.

The doctor tilted back his hat and scratched his head.

"Leave me to think it over oncet, Tillie, and till to-morrow mornin'
a'ready I'll give you my answer. My conscience won't give me the dare
to adwise you offhand in a matter that's so serious like what this is."

"Father will want to make me go out to the farm with him this evening,
I am sure," she said; "and when once I am out there, I shall not have
either the spirit or the chance to get away, I'm afraid."

The doctor shook his head despondently. "We certainly are up ag'in' it!
I can't see no way out."

"There is no way out," Tillie said in a strangely quiet voice. "Doc,"
she added after an instant, laying her hand on his rough one and
pressing it, "although I have failed in all that you have tried to help
me to be and to do, I shall never forget to be grateful to you--my best
and kindest friend!"

The doctor looked down almost reverently at the little white hand
resting against his dark one.

Suddenly Tillie's eyes fixed themselves upon the open doorway, where
the smiling presence of Walter Fairchilds presented itself to her
startled gaze.

"Tillie! AND the Doc! Well, it's good to see you. May I break in on
your conference--I can see it '& important." He spoke lightly, but his
voice was vibrant with some restrained emotion. At the first sight of
him, Tillie's hand instinctively crept up to feel if those precious
curls were in their proper place. The care and devotion she had spent
upon them during all these weary, desolate months! And all because a
man--the one, only man--had once said they were pretty! Alas, Tillie,
for your Mennonite principles!

And now, at sight of the dear, familiar face and form, the girl
trembled and was speechless.

Not so the doctor. With a yell, he turned upon the visitor, grasped
both his hands, and nearly wrung them off.

"Hang me, of I was ever so glad to see a feller like wot I am you.
Teacher," he cried in huge delight, "the country's saved! Providence
fetched you here in the nick of time! You always was a friend to
Tillie, and you kin help her out now!"

Walter Fairchilds did not reply at first. He stood, gazing over the
doctor's shoulder at the new Tillie, transformed in countenance by the
deep waters through which she had passed in the five months that had
slipped round since he had gone out of her life; and so transformed in
appearance by the dropping of her Mennonite garb that he could hardly
believe the testimony of his eyes.

"Is it--is it really you, Tillie?" he said, holding out his hand. "And
aren't you even a little bit glad to see me?"

The familiar voice brought the life-blood back to her face. She took a
step toward him, both hands outstretched,--then, suddenly, she stopped
and her cheeks crimsoned. "Of course we're glad to see you--very!" she
said softly but constrainedly.

"Lemme tell you the news," shouted the doctor. "You 'll mebbe save
Tillie from goin' out there to her pop's farm ag'in! She's teacher at
William Penn, and her pop's over there at the Board meetin' now, havin'
her throwed off, and then he'll want to take her home to work herself
to death for him and all them baker's dozen of children he's got out
there! And Tillie she don't want to go--and waste all her nice
education that there way!"

Fairchilds took her hand and looked down into her shining eyes.

"I hardly know you, Tillie, in your new way of dressing!"

"What--what brings you here?" she asked, drawing away her hand.

"I've come from the Millersville Normal School with a letter for you
from Mrs. Lansing," he explained, "and I've promised to bring you back
with me by way of answer.

"I am an instructor in English there now, you know, and so, of course,
I have come to know your 'Miss Margaret,'" he added, in answer to
Tillie's unspoken question.

The girl opened the envelop with trembling fingers and read:

"MY DEAR LITTLE MENNONITE MAID: We have rather suddenly decided to go
abroad in July--my husband needs the rest and change, as do we all; and
I want you to go with me as companion and friend, and to help me in the
care of the children. In the meantime there is much to be done by way
of preparation for such a trip; so can't you arrange to come to me at
once and you can have the benefit of the spring term at the Normal. I
needn't tell you, dear child, how glad I shall be to have you with me.
And what such a trip ought to mean to YOU, who have struggled so
bravely to live the life the Almighty meant that you should live, you
only can fully realize. You're of age now and can act for yourself.
Break with your present environment now, or, I'm afraid, Tillie, it
will be never.

"Come to me at once, and with the bearer of this note. With love, I am,
as always, your affectionate

"'Miss MARGARET.'"

When she had finished Tillie looked up with brimming eyes.

"Doc," she said, "listen!" and she read the letter aloud, speaking
slowly and distinctly that he might fully grasp the glory of it all. At
the end the sweet voice faltered and broke.

"Oh, Doc!" sobbed Tillie, "isn't it wonderful!"

The shaggy old fellow blinked his eyes rapidly, then suddenly relieved
his feelings with an outrageous burst of profanity. With a rapidity
bewildering to his hearers, his tone instantly changed again to one of
lachrymose solemnity:

    "'Gawd moves in a mysterious way
    His wonders to perform!'"

he piously repeated. "AIN'T, now, he does, Tillie! Och!" he exclaimed,
"I got a thought! You go right straight over there to that there Board
meetin' and circumwent 'em! Before they're got TIME to wote you off
your job, you up and throw their old William Penn in their Dutch faces,
and tell 'em be blowed to 'em! Tell 'em you don't WANT their blamed old
school--and you're goin' to EUROPE, you are! To EUROPE, yet!"

He seized her hand as he spoke and almost pulled her to the store door.

"Do it, Tillie!" cried Fairchilds, stepping after them across the
store. "Present your resignation before they have a chance to vote you
out! Do it!" he said eagerly.

Tillie looked from one to the other of the two men before her,
excitement sparkling in her eyes, her breath coming short and fast.

"I will!"

Turning away, she ran down the steps, sped across the street, and
disappeared in the hotel.

The doctor expressed his overflowing feelings by giving Fairchilds a
resounding slap on the shoulders. "By gum, I'd like to be behind the
skeens and witness Jake Getz gettin' fooled ag'in! This is the most fun
I had since I got 'em to wote you five dollars a month extry, Teacher!"
he chuckled. "Golly! I'm glad you got here in time! It was certainly,
now," he added piously, "the hand of Providence that led you!"




XXVI

TILLIE'S LAST FIGHT


"We are now ready to wote fer the teacher fer William Penn fer the
spring term," announced the president of the Board, when all the
preliminary business of the meeting had been disposed of; "and before
we perceed to that dooty, we will be glad to hear any remarks."

The members looked at Mr. Getz, and he promptly rose to his feet to
make the speech which all were expecting from him--the speech which was
to sum up the reasons why his daughter should not be reelected for
another term to William Penn. As all these reasons had been expounded
many times over in the past few months, to each individual school
director, Mr. Getz's statements to-night were to be merely a more
forcible repetition of his previous arguments.

But scarcely had he cleared his throat to begin, when there was a knock
on the door; it opened, and, to their amazement, Tillie walked into the
room. Her eyes sparkling, her face flushed, her head erect, she came
straight across the room to the table about which the six educational
potentates were gathered.

That she had come to plead her own cause, to beg to be retained at her
post, was obviously the object of this intrusion upon the sacred
privacy of their weighty proceedings.

Had that, in very truth, been her purpose in coming to them, she would
have found little encouragement in the countenances before her. Every
one of them seemed to stiffen into grim disapproval of her unfilial act
in thus publicly opposing her parent.

But there was something in the girl's presence as she stood before
them, some potent spell in her fresh girlish beauty, and in the
dauntless spirit which shone in her eyes, that checked the words of
stern reproof as they sprang to the lips of her judges.

"John Kettering,"--her clear, soft voice addressed the Amish president
of the Board, adhering, in her use of his first name, to the mode of
address of all the "plain" sects of the county,--"have I your
permission to speak to the Board?"

"It wouldn't be no use." The president frowned and shook his head. "The
wotes of this here Board can't be influenced. There's no use your
wastin' any talk on us. We're here to do our dooty by the risin'
generation." Mr. Kettering, in his character of educator, was very fond
of talking about "the rising generation." "And," he added, "what's
right's right."

"As your teacher at William Penn, I have a statement to make to the
Board," Tillie quietly persisted. "It will take me but a minute. I am
not here to try to influence the vote you are about to take."

"If you ain't here to influence our wotes, what are you here fer?"

"That's what I ask your permission to tell the Board."

"Well," John Kettering reluctantly conceded, "I'll give you two
minutes, then. Go on. But you needn't try to get us to wote any way but
the way our conscience leads us to."

Tillie's eyes swept the faces before her, from the stern, set features
of her father on her left, to the mild-faced, long-haired,
hooks-and-eyes Amishman on her right. The room grew perfectly still as
they stared at her in expectant curiosity; for her air and manner did
not suggest the humble suppliant for their continued favor,--rather a
self-confidence that instinctively excited their stubborn opposition.
"She'll see oncet if she kin do with us what she wants," was the
thought in the minds of most of them.

"I am here," Tillie spoke deliberately and distinctly, "to tender my
resignation."

There was dead silence.

"I regret that I could not give you a month's notice, according to the
terms of my agreement with you. But I could not foresee the great good
fortune that was about to befall me."

Not a man stirred, but an ugly look of malicious chagrin appeared upon
the face of Nathaniel Puntz. Was he foiled in his anticipated revenge
upon the girl who had "turned down" his Absalom? Mr. Getz sat stiff and
motionless, his eyes fixed upon Tillie.

"I resign my position at William Penn," Tillie repeated, "TO GO TO
EUROPE FOR FOUR MONTHS' TRAVEL with Miss Margaret."

Again she swept them with her eyes. Her father's face was apoplectic;
he was leaning forward, trying to speak, but he was too choked for
utterance. Nathaniel Puntz looked as though a wet sponge had been
dashed upon his sleek countenance. The other directors stared,
dumfounded. This case had no precedent in their experience. They were
at a loss how to take it.

"My resignation," Tillie continued, "must take effect
immediately--to-night. I trust you will have no difficulty in getting a
substitute."

She paused--there was not a movement or a sound in the room.

"I thank you for your attention." Tillie bowed, turned, and walked
across the room. Not until she reached the door was the spell broken.
With her hand on the knob, she saw her father rise and start toward her.

She had no wish for an encounter with him; quickly she went out into
the hall, and, in order to escape him, she opened the street door,
stepped out, and closed it very audibly behind her. Then hurrying in at
the adjoining door of the bar-room, she ran out to the hotel kitchen,
where she knew she would find her aunt.

Mrs. Wackernagel was alone, washing dishes at the sink. She looked up
with a start at Tillie's hurried entrance, and her kindly face showed
distress as she saw who it was; for, faithful to the Rules, she would
not speak to this backslider and excommunicant from the faith. But
Tillie went straight up to her, threw her arms about her neck, and
pressed her lips to her aunt's cheek.

"Aunty Em! I can't go away without saying good-by to you. I am going to
Europe! TO EUROPE, Aunty Em!" she cried. The words sounded unreal and
strange to her, and she repeated them to make their meaning clear to
herself. "Miss Margaret has sent for me to take me with her TO EUROPE!"

She rapidly told her aunt all that had happened, and Mrs. Wackernagel's
bright, eager face of delight expressed all the sympathy and affection
which Tillie craved from her, but which the Mennonite dared not utter.

"Aunty Em, no matter where I go or what may befall me, I shall never
forget your love and kindness. I shall remember it always, ALWAYS."

Aunty Em's emotions were stronger, for the moment, than her allegiance
to the Rules, and her motherly arms drew the girl to her bosom and held
her there in a long, silent embrace.

She refrained, however, from kissing her; and presently Tillie drew
herself away and, dashing the tears from her eyes, went out of the
house by the back kitchen door. From here she made her way, in a
roundabout fashion, to the rear entrance of the store-keeper's house
across the road, for she was quite sure that her father had gone into
the store in search of her.

Cautiously stepping into the kitchen, she found Fairchilds restlessly
pacing the floor, and he greeted her return with a look of mingled
pleasure and apprehension.

"Your father is out front, in the store, Tillie," he whispered, coming
close to her. "He's looking for you. He doesn't know I'm in town, of
course. Come outside and I 'll tell you our plan."

He led the way out of doors, and they sought the seclusion of a
grape-arbor far down the garden.

"We'll leave it to the Doc to entertain your father," Fairchilds went
on; "you will have to leave here with me to-night, Tillie, and as soon
as possible, for your father will make trouble for us. We may as well
avoid a conflict with him--especially for your sake. For myself, I
shouldn't mind it!" He smiled grimly.

He was conscious, as his eyes rested on Tillie's fair face under the
evening light, of a reserve in her attitude toward him that was new to
her. It checked his warm impulse to take her hands in his and tell her
how glad he was to see her again.

"How can we possibly get away to-night?" she asked him. "There are no
stages until the morning."

"We shall have to let the Doc's fertile brain solve it for us, Tillie.
He has a plan, I believe. Of course, if we have to wait until morning
and fight it out with your father, then we'll have to, that's all. But
I hope that may be avoided and that we may get away quietly."

They sat in silence for a moment. Suddenly Fairchilds leaned toward her
and spoke to her earnestly.

"Tillie, I want to ask you something. Please tell me--why did you never
answer my letters?"

She lifted her startled eyes to his. "Your letters?"

"Yes. Why didn't you write to me?"

"You wrote to me?" she asked incredulously.

"I wrote you three times. You don't mean to tell me you never got my
letters?"

"I never heard from you. I would--I would have been so glad to!"

"But how could you have missed getting them?"

Her eyes fell upon her hands clasped in her lap, and her cheeks grew
pale.

"My father," she half whispered.

"He kept them from you?"

"It must have been so."

Fairchilds looked very grave. He did not speak at once.

"How can you forgive such things?" he presently asked. "One tenth of
the things you have had to bear would have made an incarnate fiend of
me!"

She kept her eyes downcast and did not answer.

"I can't tell you," he went on, "how bitterly disappointed I was when I
didn't hear from you. I couldn't understand why you didn't write. And
it gave me a sense of disappointment in YOU. I thought I must have
overestimated the worth of our friendship in your eyes. I see now--and
indeed in my heart I always knew--that I did you injustice."

She did not look up, but her bosom rose and fell in long breaths.

"There has not been a day," he said, "that I have not thought of you,
and wished I knew all about you and could see you and speak with
you--Tillie, what a haunting little personality you are!"

She raised her eyes then,--a soft fire in them that set his pulse to
bounding. But before she could answer him they were interrupted by the
sound of quick steps coming down the board walk toward the arbor.
Tillie started like a deer ready to flee, but Fairchilds laid a
reassuring hand upon hers. "It's the Doc," he said.

The faithful old fellow joined them, his finger on his lips to warn
them to silence.

"Don't leave no one hear us out here! Jake Getz he's went over to the
hotel to look fer Tillie, but he'll be back here in a jiffy, and we've
got to hurry on. Tillie, you go on up and pack your clo'es in a walise
or whatever, and hurry down here back. I'm hitchin' my buggy fer yous
as quick as I kin. I'll leave yous borry the loan of it off of me till
to-morrow--then, Teacher, you kin fetch it over ag'in. Ain't?"

"All right, Doc; you're a brick!"

Tillie sped into the house to obey the doctor's bidding, and Fairchilds
went with him across the street to the hotel stables.

In the course of ten minutes the three conspirators were together again
in the stable-yard behind the store, the doctor's horse and buggy ready
before them.

"Father's in the store--I heard his voice," panted Tillie, as
Fairchilds took her satchel from her and stowed it in the back of the
buggy.

"Hurry on, then," whispered the doctor, hoarsely, pushing them both,
with scant ceremony, into the carriage. "GOOD-by to yous--and good
luck! Och, that's all right; no thanks necessary! I'm tickled to the
end of my hair at gettin' ahead of Jake Getz! Say, Fairchilds," he
said, with a wink, "this here mare's wonderful safe--you don't HAVE to
hold the reins with both hands! See?"

And he shook in silent laughter at his own delicate and delicious
humor, as he watched them start out of the yard and down the road
toward Millersville.

For a space there was no sound but the rhythmic beat of hoofs and the
rattle of the buggy wheels; but in the heart of the Mennonite maid, who
had fought her last battle for freedom and won, there was ineffable
peace and content; and her happiness smiled from quivering lips and
shone in her steadfast eyes.

Mr. Abe Wackernagel, of the New Canaan hotel, was very fond, in the
years that followed, of bragging to his transient guests of his niece
who was the wife of "such a Millersville Normal perfessor--Perfessor
Fairchilds." And Mr. Jake Getz was scarcely less given to referring to
his daughter "where is married to such a perfessor at the Normal."

"But what do I get out of it?" he was wont ruefully to add. "Where do I
come in, yet?--I where raised her since she was born, a'ready?"










End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tillie: A Mennonite Maid, by 
Helen Reimensnyder Martin

*** 