PAGE 5
Min
by
Min stood in the doorway and watched the sleigh out of sight down the river road. Then she gave a long, shivering sigh that was almost a moan.
“If I had met that man long ago,” she said slowly, as if groping vaguely in some hitherto unsounded depth of consciousness, “I would never have become what I am. I felt that as I looked at him–it all came over me with an awful sickening feeling–just as if we were standing alone somewhere out of the world where there was no need of words to say things. He doesn’t despise me–he wouldn’t sneer at me, bad as I am, like those creatures up there. He could have helped me if we had met in time, but it’s too late now.”
She locked her hands over her eyes and groaned, swaying her body to and fro as one in mortal agony. Presently she looked out again with hard, dry eyes.
“What a fool I am!” she said bitterly. “How the Corner saints would stare if they saw me! I suppose some of them do–” with a glance at the windows of a neighbouring house. “Yes, there’s Mrs. Rawlings staring out and Rose peeking over her shoulder.”
Her face hardened. The old sway of evil passion reasserted itself.
“She shall never come back here–never. Oh, she was a sweet-spoken cat of a thing–but she had claws. I’ve been blamed for all the trouble. But if ever I had a chance, I’d tell that minister how she used to twit and taunt me in that sugary way of hers–how she schemed and plotted against me as long as she could. More fool I to care what he thinks either! I wish I were dead. If ’twasn’t for the child, I’d go and drown myself at that black spring-hole down there–I’d be well out of the way.”
* * * * *
It was a dull grey afternoon a week afterwards when Allan Telford again walked up the river road to the Palmer place. The wind was bitter and he walked with bent head to avoid its fury. His face was pale and worn and he looked years older.
He paused at the rough gate and leaned over it while he scanned the house and its surroundings eagerly. As he looked, the kitchen door opened and Min, clad in the old overcoat, came out and walked swiftly across the yard.
Telford’s eyes followed her with pitiful absorption. He saw her lead a horse from the stable and harness it into a wood-sleigh loaded with bags of grain. Once she paused to fling her arms about the animal’s neck, laying her face against it with a caressing motion.
The pale minister groaned aloud. He longed to snatch her forever from that hard, unwomanly toil and fold her safely away from jeers and scorn in the shelter of his love. He knew it was madness–he had told himself so every hour in which Min’s dark, rebellious face had haunted him–yet none the less was he under its control.
Min led the horse across the yard and left it standing before the kitchen door; she had not seen the bowed figure at the gate. When she reappeared, he saw her dark eyes and the rose-red lustre of her face gleam out from under the old crimson shawl wrapped about her head.
As she caught the horse by the bridle, the kitchen door swung heavily to with a sharp, sudden bang. The horse, a great, powerful, nervous brute, started wildly and then reared in terror.
The ice underfoot was glib and treacherous. Min lost her foothold and fell directly under the horse’s hoofs as they came heavily down. The animal, freed from her detaining hand, sprang forward, dragging the laden sleigh over the prostrate woman.
It had all passed in a moment. The moveless figure lay where it had fallen, one outstretched hand still grasping the whip. Telford sprang over the gate and rushed up the slope like a madman. He flung himself on his knees beside her.