PAGE 4
Min
by
Min made some scanty purchases and left the store quickly, brushing unheedingly past the minister as she did so. He saw her step on a rough wood-sleigh and drive down the river road. The platform loungers had been silent during her call, but now the talk bubbled forth anew. Telford was sick at heart as he drove swiftly away. He felt for Min Palmer a pity he could not understand or analyze. The attempt to measure the gulf between what she was and what she might have been hurt him like the stab of a knife.
He made several calls at various houses along the river during the forenoon. After dinner he suddenly turned his horse towards the Palmer place. Isaac Galletly, comfortably curled up in a neighbour’s chimney corner, saw him drive past.
“Ef the minister ain’t goin’ to Palmers’ after all!” he chuckled. “He’s a set one when he does take a notion. Well, I warned him what to expect. If Min claws his eyes out, he’ll only have himself to blame.”
Telford was not without his own misgivings as he drove into the Palmer yard. He tied his horse to the fence and looked doubtfully about him. Untrodden snowdrifts were heaped about the front door, so he turned towards the kitchen and walked slowly past the bare lilac trees along the fence. There was no sign of life about the place. It was beginning to snow again, softly and thickly, and the hills and river were hidden behind a misty white veil.
He lifted his hand to knock, but before he could do so, the door was flung open and Min herself confronted him on the threshold.
She did not now have on the man’s overcoat which she had worn at the store, and her neat, close-fitting home-spun dress revealed to perfection the full, magnificent curves of her figure. Her splendid hair was braided about her head in a glossy coronet, and her dark eyes were ablaze with ill-suppressed anger. Again Telford was overcome by a sense of her wonderful loveliness. Not all the years of bondage to ill-temper and misguided will had been able to blot out the beauty of that proud, dark face.
She lifted one large but shapely brown hand and pointed to the gate.
“Go!” she said threateningly.
“Mrs. Palmer,” began Telford, but she silenced him with an imperious gesture.
“I don’t want any of your kind here. I hate all you ministers. Did you come here to lecture me? I suppose some of the Corner saints set you on me. You’ll never cross my threshold.”
Telford returned her defiant gaze unflinchingly. His dark-blue eyes, magnetic in their power and sweetness, looked gravely, questioningly, into Min’s stormy orbs. Slowly the fire and anger faded out of her face and her head drooped.
“I ain’t fit for you to talk to anyway,” she said with a sort of sullen humility. “Maybe you mean well but you can’t do me any good. I’m past that now. The Corner saints say I’m possessed of the devil. Perhaps I am–if there is one.”
“I do mean well,” said Telford slowly. “I did not come here to reprove you. I came to help you if I could–if you needed help, Mrs. Palmer–“
“Don’t call me that,” she interrupted passionately. She flung out her hands as if pushing some loathly, invisible thing from her. “I hate the name–as I hated all who ever bore it. I never had anything but wrong and dog-usage from them all. Call me Min–that’s the only name that belongs to me now. Go–why don’t you go? Don’t stand there looking at me like that. I’m not going to change my mind. I don’t want any praying and whining round me. I’ve been well sickened of that. Go!”
Telford threw back his head and looked once more into her eyes. A long look passed between them. Then he silently lifted his cap and, with no word of farewell, he turned and went down to the gate. A bitter sense of defeat and disappointment filled his heart as he drove away.