_ Early in the following November, Jim Weatherby, returning from
the cross-roads one rainy afternoon, brought Christopher a long,
wailing letter from Will.
"Oh, I've had to walk a chalk-line, sure enough," he wrote,
"since that awful day we left home in a pouring rain, with
grandpa wearing a whole thunderstorm on his forehead. It has been
cram, cram, cram ever since, I can tell you, and here I am now,
just started at the university, with my head still buzzing with
the noise of those confounded ancients. If grandpa hadn't gone
when he did, I declare I believe he would have ended by driving
me clean crazy. Since he left I've had time to take a look about
me, and I find there's a good deal of fun to be got here, after
all. How I'll manage to mix it in with Greek I don't see, but
luck's with me, you know--I've found that out--so I shan't
bother.
"By the way, I wish you would make Molly Peterkin understand how
it was I came away so hastily. Tell her I haven't forgotten her,
and give her the little turquoise pin I'm sending. It just
matches her eyes. Be sure to let me know if she's as pretty as
ever."
By the next mail the turquoise brooch arrived, and Christopher,
putting it in his pocket, went over to Sol Peterkin's to bear the
message to the girl. As it happened, she was swinging on the
little sagging gate when he came up the lane, and at sight of him
her eyebrows shot up under her flaxen curls, which hung low upon
her forehead. She was a pretty, soulless little animal, coloured
like peach-blossoms, and with a great deal of that soft
insipidity which is usually found in a boy's ideal of maiden
innocence.
"Why, I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw you," she said,
arranging her curls over her left shoulder with a conscious
simper.
The old Blake gallantry rose to meet her challenging eyes, and he
regarded her smilingly a moment before he answered.
"Well, I could hardly believe mine, you know," he responded
carelessly. "I thought for an instant that a big butterfly had
alighted on the gate."
She pouted prettily.
"Won't you come in?" she asked after a moment, with an
embarrassed air, as she remembered that he was one of the "real
Blakes" for whom her father used to work.
A light retort was on his lips, but while he looked at her a
little weary frown darkened her shallow eyes, and with the
peculiar sympathy for all those oppressed by man or nature which
was but one expression of his many-sided temperament he quickly
changed the tone of his reply. At the instant it seemed to him
that Molly Peterkin and himself stood together defrauded of their
rightful heritage of life; and as his thought broadened he felt
suddenly the pathos of her forlorn little figure, of her foolish
blue eyes, of her trivial vanities, of her girlish beauty, soiled
and worn by common handling. A look very like compassion was in
his face, and the girl, seeing it, reddened angrily and kicked at
a loose pebble in the path. When he went away a moment later he
left a careless message for Sol about the tobacco crop, and the
little white box containing the turquoise brooch was still in his
pocket.
That afternoon the trinket went back to Will with a curt letter.
"If you take my advice, you'll leave Molly Peterkin alone," he
wrote in his big, unformed hand, "for as far as I can see you are
too good a match to get on well together. She's a fool, you know,
and from the way you're going on just now it looks very much as
if you were one also. At any rate, I'm not your man for
gallantries. I'd rather hunt hares than women, any day--and
game's plentiful just now."
It was a long winter that year, and for the first time since her
terrible illness Mrs. Blake was forced to keep her bed during a
bitter spell of weather, when the raw winds whistled around the
little frame house, entering the cracks at the doors and the
loosened sashes of the windows. Cynthia grew drawn and pinched
with a sickly, frost-bitten look, and even Lila's rare bloom
drooped for a while like that of a delicate plant starving for
the sunshine. Christopher, who, as usual, was belated in his
winter's work, was kept busy hauling and chopping wood,
shovelling the snow away from the porch and the paths that led to
the well, the stable, and the barn. Once a day, most often after
breakfast, Jim Weatherby appeared, smiling gaily beneath his
powdering of snow; and sometimes, in defiance of Cynthia, he
would take Lila for a sleigh-ride, from which she would return
blossoming like a rose.
Mrs. Blake, from her tester bed, complained bitterly of the cold,
and drew from the increasing severity of the winters, which she
declared became more unbearable each year, warrant for her belief
in the gradual "decline of the world as a dwelling-place."
"You may say what you please, Tucker," she remarked one morning
when she had awakened with an appetite to find that her eggs had
frozen in the kitchen, "but you can hardly be so barefaced as to
compliment this weather. I'm sure I never felt anything like it
when I was young."
"Well, at least I have a roof over my head now, and I didn't when
I marched to Romney with old Stonewall," remarked Tucker from the
hearth, where he was roasting an apple before the big logs.
"Many's the morning I waked then with the snow frozen stiff all
over me, and I had to crack through it before I could get up."
The old lady made a peevish gesture.
"It may sound ungrateful," she returned, "but I'm sometimes
tempted to wish that you had never marched to Romney, or that
General Jackson had been considerate enough to choose a milder
spell. I really believe when you come to die you will console
yourself with the recollection of something worse that happened
in the war."
Tucker laughed softly to himself as he watched the apple
revolving in the red heat on its bit of string. "Well, I'm not
sure that I shan't, Lucy," he said.
"Habit's mighty strong, you know, and when you come to think of
it there's some comfort in knowing that you'll never have to face
the worst again. A man doesn't duck his head at the future when
he's learned that, let be what will; it can't be so bad as the
thing he's gone through with and yet come out on top. It gives
him a pretty good feeling, after all, to know that he hasn't
funked the hardest knock that life could give. Well, my birds are
hungry, I reckon, and I'll hobble out and feed 'em while this
apple is roasting to the core."
Raising himself with difficulty, he got upon his crutches and
went to scatter his crumbs from the kitchen window.
By the first of March the thaw came, and the snow melted in a day
beneath the lavish spring sunshine. It was a week later that
Christopher, coming from the woods at midday, saw Tucker sitting
on his old bench by the damask rose-bush, in which the sap was
just beginning to swell. The sun shone full on the dead grass,
and the old soldier, with his chin resting in the crook of his
crutch, was gazing straight down upon the earth. The expression
of his large, kindly face was so radiant with enjoyment that
Christopher quickened his steps and slapped him affectionately
upon the shoulder.
"Is Fletcher dead, Uncle Tucker?" he inquired, laughing.
"No, no; nobody's dead that I've heard of," responded Tucker in
his cheerful voice; "but something better than Bill Fletcher's
death has happened, I can tell you. Why, I'd been sitting out
here an hour or more, longing for the spring to come, when
suddenly I looked down and there was the first dandelion--a
regular miracle--blooming in the mould about that old rose-bush."
"Well, I'll be hanged!" exclaimed Christopher, aghast. "Mark my
words, you'll be in an asylum yet."
The other chuckled softly.
"When you put me there you'll shut up the only wise man in the
county," he returned. "If your sanity doesn't make you happy, I
can tell you it's worth a great deal less than my craziness. Look
at that dandelion, now--it has filled two hours chock full of
thought and colour for me when I might have been puling indoors
and nagging at God Almighty about trifles. The time has been when
I'd have walked right over that little flower and not seen it,
and now it grows yellower each minute that I look at it, and each
minute I see it better than I did the one before. There's nothing
in life, when you come to think of it--not Columbus setting out
to sea nor Napoleon starting on a march--more wonderful than that
brave little blossom putting up the first of all through the
earth."
"I can't see anything in a dandelion but a nuisance," observed
Christopher, sitting down on the bench and baring his head to the
sunshine; "but you do manage to get interest out of life, that's
certain."
"Interest! Good Lord!" exclaimed Tucker. "If a man can't find
something to interest him in a world like this, he must be a dull
fellow or else have a serious trouble of the liver. So long as I
have my eyes, and there's a different sky over my head each day,
and earth, and trees, and flowers all around me, I don't reckon
I'll begin to whistle to boredom. If I were like Lucy, now, I
sometimes think things would be up with me, and yet Lucy is one
of the very happiest women I've ever known. Her brain is so
filled with pleasant memories that it's never empty for an
instant."
Christopher's face softened, as it always did at an allusion to
his mother's blindness.
"You're right," he said; "she is happy."
"To be sure, she's had her life," pursued Tucker, without
noticing him. "She's been a beauty, a belle, a sweetheart, a
wife, and a mother--to say nothing of a very spoiled old woman;
but all the same, I don't think I have her magnificent patience.
Oh, I couldn't sit in the midst of all this and not have eyes to
see."
With a careless smile Christopher glanced about him--at the
bright blue sky seen through the bare trees, at the dried carrot
flowers in the old field across the road, at the great pine
growing on the little knoll.
"I hardly think she misses much," he said, and added after a
moment, "Do you know I'd give twenty--no forty, fifty years of
this for a single year of the big noisy world over there. I'm
dog-tired of stagnation."
"Well, it's natural," admitted Tucker gently. "At your age I
doubtless felt the same. The young want action, and they ought to
have it, because it makes the quiet of middle age seem all the
sweeter. You've missed your duels and your flirtations and your
pomades, and you've been put into breeches and into philosophy at
the same time. Why, one might as well stick a brier pipe in the
mouth of a boy who is crying for his first gun and tell him to go
sit in the chimney-corner and be happy. When I was twenty-five I
travelled all the way to New York for the latest Parisian
waistcoat, but I can't remember that I ever strolled round the
corner to see a peach-tree in full bloom. I'm a lot happier now,
heaven knows, in my homespun coat, than I was then in that
waistcoat of satin brocade, so I sometimes catch myself wishing
that I could see again the people I knew then--the men I
quarrelled with and the women I kissed. I'd like to apologise for
the young fool of thirty years ago."
Christopher stirred restlessly, and, clasping his hands behind
his head, stared at a small white cloud drifting slowly above the
great pine.
"Well, it's the fool part I envy you, all the same," he remarked.
"You're welcome to it, my boy," answered Tucker; then he paused
abruptly and bent his ear. "Ah, there's the bluebird! Do you hear
him whistling in the meadow? God bless him; he's a hearty fellow
and has spring in his throat."
"I passed one coming up," said Christopher.
"The same, I reckon. He'll be paying me a visit soon, and I've
got my crumbs ready." He smiled brightly and then sat with his
chin on his crutch, looking steadily across the road. "You
haven't had your chance, my boy," he resumed presently; "and a
man ought to have several chances to look round him in this
world, for otherwise the things he misses will always seem to him
the only things worth having. I'm not much of a fellow to preach,
you'll say--a hundred and eighty pounds of flesh that can't dress
itself nor hobble about without crutches that are strapped on-
-but if it's the last word I speak I wouldn't change a day in my
long life, and if it came to going over it again I'd trust it all
in the Lord's hands and start blindfolded. And yet, when I look
back upon it now, I see that it wasn't much of a life as lives
go, and the two things I wanted most in it I never got."
Christopher turned quickly with a question.
"Oh, you think I have always been a contented, prosaic chap,"
pursued Tucker, smiling, "but you were never more mistaken since
you were born. Twice in my life I came mighty near blowing out my
brains--once when I found that I couldn't go to Paris and be an
artist, and the second time when I couldn't get the woman I
wanted for my wife. I wasn't cut out for a farmer, you see, and I
had always meant from the time I was a little boy to go abroad
and study painting. I'd set my heart on it, as people say, but
when the time came my father died and I had to stay at home to
square his debts and run the place. For a single night I was as
clean crazy as a man ever was. It meant the sacrifice of my
career, you know, and a career seemed a much bigger thing to me
then than it does to-day."
"I never heard that," said Christopher, lowering his voice.
"There's a lot we don't know even about the people we live in a
little house with. You never heard, either, I dare say, that I
was so madly in love once that when the woman threw me over for a
better man I shut myself up in a cabin in the woods and did not
speak to a human being for six months. I was a rare devil, sure
enough, though you'd never believe it to see me now. It took two
blows like that, a four years' war, and the surgeon's operating
table to teach me how to be happy."
"It was Miss Matoaca Bolling, I suppose?" suggested Christopher,
with a mild curiosity.
The old soldier broke into his soft, full laugh.
"Matoaca! Bless your soul, no. But to think that Lucy should have
kept a secret for more than thirty years! Never talk to me again
about a woman's letting anything out. If she's got a secret that
it mortifies her to tell it will be buried in the grave with her,
and most likely it will never see the light at judgment Day. Lucy
was always ashamed of my being jilted, you know."
"It's a new story then, is it?"
"Oh, it's as old as the hills by now. What's the funny part,
though, is that Lucy has always tried to persuade herself it was
really Matoaca I cared for. You know, I sometimes think that a
woman can convince herself that black is white if she only keeps
trying hard enough--and it's marvellous that she never sees the
difference between wanting to believe a thing and believing it in
earnest. Now, if Matoaca had been the last woman on this earth,
and I the last man, I could never have fallen in love with her,
though I may as well confess that I had my share of fancies when
I was young. It's no use attempting to explain a man's feelings,
of course. Matoaca was almost as great a belle as Lucy, and she
was the handsomest creature you ever laid eyes on--one of those
big, managing women who are forever improving things around them.
Why, I don't believe she could stay two seconds in a man's arms
without improving the set of his cravat. Some men like that kind
of thing, but I never did, and I often think the reason I went so
mad about the other woman was that she came restful after
Matoaca. She was the comforting kind, who, you might be sure,
always saw you at your best; and no matter the mood you were in,
she never wanted to pat and pull you into shape. Lucy always said
she couldn't hold a candle to Matoaca in looks, and I suppose she
was right; but, pretty or plain, that girl had something about
her that went straight to my heart more than thirty years ago and
stays there still. Strange to say, I've tried to believe that it
was half compassion, for she always reminded me of a little wild
bird that somebody had caught and shut up in a cage, and it used
to seem to me sometimes that I could almost hear the fluttering
of her soul. Well, whatever it was, the feeling was the sort that
is most worth while, though she didn't think so, of course, and
broke her great heart over another man. She married him and had
six children and died a few years ago. He was a fortunate fellow,
I suppose, and yet I can't help fancying that I've had the better
part and the Lord was right. She was not happy, they said, and he
knew it, and yet had to face those eyes of hers every day. It was
like many other marriages, I reckon; he got used to her body and
never caught so much as a single glimpse of her soul. Then she
faded away and died to him, but to me she's just the same as when
I first saw her, and I still believe that if she could come here
and sit on this old bench I should be perfectly happy. It's a
lucky man, I tell you, who can keep the same desire for more than
thirty years."
He shook his head slowly, smiling as he listened to the bluebird
singing in the road. "And now I'll be fetching my crumbs," he
added, struggling to his crutches.
When he had helped Tucker to the house, Christopher came back and
sat down again on the bench, closing his eyes to the sunshine,
the spring sky, and the dandelion blooming in the mould. He was
very tired, and his muscles ached from the strain of heavy
labour, yet as he lingered there in the warm wind it seemed to
him that action was the one thing he desired. The restless season
worked in his blood, and he felt the stir of old impulses that
had revived each year with the quickening sap since the first
pilgrimage man made on earth. He wanted to be up and away while
he was still young, and his heart beat high, and at the moment he
would have found positive delight in any convulsion of the
natural order, in any excuse for a headlong and impetuous plunge
into life.
He heard the door open again, and Tucker shuffled out into the
path and began scattering his crumbs upon the gravel. When
Christopher passed a moment later, on his way to the house, the
old soldier was merrily whistling an invitation to a glimpse of
blue in a tree-top by the road.
The spring dragged slowly, and with June came the transplanting
of the young tobacco. This was the busiest season of the year
with Christopher, and so engrossed was he in his work that for a
week at the end of the month he did not go down for the county
news at Tom Spade's store. Fletcher was at home, he knew, but he
had heard nothing of Will, and it was through the storekeeper at
last that he learned definitely of the boy's withdrawal from the
university. Returning from the field one afternoon at sunset, he
saw Tom sitting beside Tucker in the yard, and in response to a
gesture he crossed the grass and stopped beside the long pine
bench.
"I say, Mr. Christopher, I've brought you a bit of news," called
the storekeeper at the young man's approach.
"Well, let's have it," returned Christopher, laughing. "If you're
going to tell me that Uncle Tucker has discovered a rare weed,
though, I warn you that I can't support it."
"Oh, I'm not in this, thank heaven," protested Tucker; "but to
tell the truth, I'm downright sorry for the boy--Fletcher or no
Fletcher,"
"Ah," said Christopher under his breath, "so it's Will Fletcher?"
"He's in a jolly scrape this time, an' no mistake," replied Tom.
"He's been leadin' a wild life at the university, it seems, an'
to-day Fletcher got a telegram saying that the boy had been
caught cheatin' in his examinations. The old man left on the next
train, as mad as a hornet, I can tell you. He swore he'd bring
the young scamp back an' put him to the plough. Well, well, thar
are worse dangers than a pretty gal, though Susan won't believe
it."
"Then he'll bring him home?" asked Christopher, blinking in the
sunlight. At the instant it seemed to him that sky and field
whirled rapidly before his eyes, and a strange noise started in
his ears which he found presently to be the throbbing of his
arteries.
"Oh, he's been given a hard push down the wrong road," answered
Tom, "an' it's more than likely he'll never pull up till he gits
clean to the bottom." _