_ BOOK THREE
CHAPTER XXVI. THE LITTLE SCHOOL-TEACHER
On a warm day in May, a day which opens the crab-apple blossoms and sets the bees humming, and the children longing for a chance to pull off shoes and stockings and go wading in the brook; on such a day the door of the little schoolhouse stood open and the sunlight lay in a long patch across the floor toward the "teacher's desk," and the breeze came in and tossed a stray curl about her forehead, and the children turned their heads often to look at the round clock on the wall, watching for the slowly moving hands to point to the hour of four.
It was a mixed school. Children of all ages were there, from naughty little Johnnie Cole of five to Mary Burt and Hilton Le Moyne of seventeen and nineteen, who were in algebra and the sixth reader. It was well known by the rest of the children why Hilton Le Moyne lingered in the school this year all through May and June, instead of leaving in April, as usual, to help his uncle on the farm. It was "Teacher." He was in love with her, and always waited after school, hoping for a chance to walk home with her.
Poor boy! Black haired, red cheeked, and big hearted, he knew his love was hopeless, for he was younger than she--not so much; but there was Tom Howard who was also in love with her, and he had a span of sorrel horses which he had raised and broken himself, and they were his own, and he could come at any time--when she would let him--and take her out riding.
Ah, that was something to aspire to! Such a team as that, and "Teacher" to sit by his side and drive out with him, all in her pretty flat hat with a pink rose on it and green ribbons flying, and her green parasol over her head--sitting so easily--just leaning forward a bit and turning and laughing at what he was saying, and all the town seeing her with him, and his harness shining and new, making the team look as splendid as the best livery in town, and his buggy all painted so bright and new--well! The time would come when he too would have such an outfit. It would. And Teacher would see that Tom Howard was not the only one who could drive up after her in such style.
Little Teacher was tired to-day. The children had been restless and noisy, and her heart had been heavy with a great disappointment. She had been carefully saving her small salary that she might go when school closed and take a course at the "Art Institute" in "Technique." For a long time she had clung to the idea that she would become an illustrator, and a great man had told her father that "with a little instruction in technique" his daughter had "a fortune at the tips of her fingers." Only technique! Yes, if she could get it!
Father could help her, of course, only father was a painter in oils and not an illustrator--and then--he was so driven, always, and father and mother both thought it would be best for her to take the course of study recommended by the great man. So it was decided, for there was Martha married and settled in her home not far away from the Institute, and Teacher could live with her and study. Ah, the long-coveted chance almost within her reach! Then--one difficulty after another intervened, beginning with a great fire in the fall which swept away Martha's home and all they had accumulated, together with her husband's school, rendering it necessary for the young couple to go back to Leauvite for the winter.
"Never mind, Betty, dear," Martha had encouraged her. "We'll return in the spring and start again, and you can take the course just the same."
But now a general financial stringency prevailed all over the country. "It always seems, when there's a 'financial stringency,' that portraits and paintings are the things people economize on first of all," said Betty.
"Naturally," said Mary Ballard. "When people need food and clothing--they want them, and not pictures. We'll just have to wait, dear."
"Yes, we'll have to wait, Mary." Saucy Betty had a way of calling her mother "Mary." "Your dress is shabby, and you need a new bonnet; I noticed it in church,--you'd never speak of that, though. You'd wear your winter's bonnet all summer."
Yes, Betty must see to it, even if it took every bit of the fund, that mother and Janey were suitably dressed. "Never mind, Mary, I'll catch up some day. You needn't look sorry. I'm all right about my own clothes, for Martha gave me a rose for my hat, and the new ribbons make it so pretty,--and my green parasol is as good as new for all I've had it three years, and--"
Betty stopped abruptly. Three years!--was it so long since that parasol was new--and she was so happy--and Richard came home--? The family were seated on the piazza as they were wont to be in the evening, and Betty walked quietly into the house, and up to her room.
Bertrand Ballard sighed, and his wife reached out and took his hand in hers. "She's never been the same since," he said.
"Her character has deepened and she's fine and sweet--"
"Yes, yes. I have three hundred dollars owing me for the Delong portrait. If I had it, she should have her course. I'll make another effort to collect it."
"I would, Bertrand."
Julien Thurbyfil and his wife walked down the flower-bordered path side by side to the gate and stood leaning over it in silence. Practical Martha was the first to break it.
"There will be just as much need for preparatory schools now as there was before the fire, Julien."
"Yes, dear, yes."
"And, meanwhile, we are glad of this sweet haven to come to, aren't we? And it won't be long before things are so you can begin again."
"Yes, dear, and then we'll make it up to Betty, won't we?"
But Julien was distraught and somber, in spite of brave words. He had not inherited Mary Ballard's way of looking at things, nor his father-in-law's buoyancy.
All that night Betty lay wakeful and thinking--thinking as she had many, many a time during the last three years, trying to make plans whereby she might adjust her thoughts to a life of loneliness, as she had decided in her romantic heart was all she would take. How could there be anything else for her since that terrible night when Richard had come to her and confessed his guilt--his love and his renunciation! Was she not sharing it all with him wherever he might be, and whatever he was doing? Oh, where was he? Did he ever think of her and know she was always thinking of him? Did he know she prayed for him, and was the thought a comfort to him? Surely Peter was the happier of the two, for he was not a sorrowing criminal, wandering the earth, hiding and repenting. So all her thoughts went out to Richard, and no wonder she was a weary little wight at the end of the school day.
Four o'clock, and the children went hurrying away, all but Hilton Le Moyne, who lingered awhile at his desk, and then reluctantly departed, seeing Teacher did not look up from her papers except to give him a nod and a fugitive little smile of absent-minded courtesy. Left thus alone, Betty lifted the lid of her desk and put away the school register and the carefully marked papers to be given out the next day, and took from a small portfolio a packet of closely written sheets. These she untied and looked over, tossing them rapidly aside one after another until she found the one for which she searched.
It was a short poem, hastily written with lead pencil, and much crumpled and worn, as if it had been carried about. Now she straightened the torn edges and smoothed it out and began scanning the lines, counting off on her fingers the rhythmic beats; she copied the verses carefully on a fresh white sheet of paper and laid them aside; then, shoving the whole heap of written papers from her, she selected another fresh sheet and began anew, writing and scanning and writing again.
Steadily she worked while an hour slipped by. A great bumblebee flew in at one window and boomed past her head and out at the other window, and a bluebird perched for an instant on the window ledge and was off again. She saw the bee and the bird and paused awhile, gazing with dreamy eyes through the high, uncurtained window at drifting clouds already taking on the tint of the declining sun; then she stretched her arms across her wide desk, and putting her head down on them, was soon fast asleep. Tired little Teacher!
The breeze freshened and tumbled her hair and fanned her flushed cheek, and it did more than that; for, as the drifting clouds betokened, the weather was changing, and now a gust of wind caught at her papers and took some of them out of the window, tossing and whirling them hither and thither. Some were carried along the wayside and lost utterly. One fluttered high over the tree tops and out across the meadow, and then suddenly ceased its flight and drifted slowly down like a dried leaf, past the face of a young man who sat on a stone, moodily gazing in the meadow brook. He reached out a long arm and caught it as it fluttered by, just in time to save it from annihilation in the water.
For a moment he held the scrap of paper absently between his fingers, then glancing down at it he spied faintly written, half-obliterated verses and read them; then, with awakened interest, he read them again, smoothing the torn bit of paper out on his knee. The place where he sat was well screened from the road by a huge basswood tree, which spread great limbs quite across the stream, and swept both its banks with drooping branches and broad leaves. Now he held the scrap on his open palm and studied it closely and thoughtfully. It was the worn piece from which Betty had copied the verses.
"Oh, send me a thought on the winds that blow.
On the wing of a bird send a thought to me;
For the way is so long that I may not know,
And there are no paths on the troubled sea.
"Out of the darkness I saw you go,--
Into the shadows where sorrows be,--
Wounded and bleeding, and sad and slow,--
Into the darkness away from me.
"Out of my life and into the night,
But never out of my heart, my own.
Into the darkness out of the light,
Bleeding and wounded, and walking alone."
Here the words were quite erased and scratched over, and the pathetic bit of paper looked as if it had been tear-stained. Carefully and smoothly he laid it in his long bill book. The book was large and plethoric with bank notes, and there beside them lay the little scrap of paper, worn and soiled, yet tear washed, and as the young man touched it tenderly he smiled and thought that in it was a wealth of something no bank note could buy. With a touch of sentiment unsuspected by himself, he felt it too sacred a thing to be touched by them, and he smoothed it again and laid it in a compartment by itself.
Then he rose, and sauntered across the meadow to the country road, and down it past the schoolhouse standing on its own small rise of ground with the door still wide open, and its shadow, cast by the rays of the now setting sun stretched long across the playground. The young man passed it, paused, turned back, and entered. There at her desk Betty still slept, and as he stepped softly forward and looked down on her she stirred slightly and drew a long breath, but slept on.
For a moment his heart ceased to beat, then it throbbed suffocatingly and his hand went to his breast and clutched the bill book where lay the tender little poem. There at her elbow lay the copy she had so carefully made. The air of the room was warm and drowsy, and the stillness was only broken by the low buzzing of two great bluebottle flies that struggled futilely against the high window panes. Dear little tired Betty! Dreaming,--of whom? The breath came through her parted lips, softly and evenly, and the last ray of the sun fell on her flushed cheek and brought out the touch of gold in her hair.
The young man turned away and crossed the bare floor with light steps and drew the door softly shut after him as he went out. No one might look upon her as she slept, with less reverent eyes. Some distance away, where the road began to ascend toward the river bluff, he seated himself on a stone overlooking the little schoolhouse and the road beyond. There he took up his lonely watch, until he saw Betty come out and walk hurriedly toward the village, carrying a book and swinging her hat by the long ribbon ties; then he went on climbing the winding path to the top of the bluff overlooking the river.
Moodily he paced up and down along the edge of the bluff, and finally followed a zigzag path to the great rocks below, that at this point seemed to have hurled themselves down there to do battle with the eager, dominating flood. For a while he stood gazing into the rushing water, not as though he were fascinated by it, but rather as if he were held to the spot by some inward vision. Presently he seemed to wake with a start and looked back along the narrow, steep path, and up to the overhanging edge of the bluff, scanning it closely.
"Yes, yes. There is the notch where it lay, and this may be the very stone on which I am standing. What an easy thing to fall over there and meet death halfway!" He muttered the words under his breath and began slowly to climb the difficult ascent.
The sun was gone, and down by the water a cold, damp current of air seemed to sweep around the curve of the bluff along with the rush of the river. As he climbed he came to a warmer wave of air, and the dusk closed softly around him, as if nature were casting a friendly curtain over the drowsing earth; and the roar of the river came up to him, no longer angrily, but in a ceaseless, subdued complaint.
Again he paced the top of the bluff, and at last seated himself with his feet hanging over the edge, at the spot from which the stone had fallen. The trees on this wind-swept place were mostly gnarled oaks, old and strong and rugged, standing like a band of weather-beaten life guardsmen overlooking the miles of country around. Not twenty paces from where the young man sat, half reclining on his elbow, stood one of these oaks, and close to its great trunk on its shadowed side a man bent forward intently watching him. Whenever the young man shifted his position restlessly, the figure made a darting movement forward as if to snatch him from the dangerous brink, then recoiled and continued to watch.
Soon the young man seemed to be aware of the presence and watchful eye, and looked behind him, peering into the dusk. Then the man left his place and came toward him, with slow, sauntering step.
"Hullo!" he said, with an insinuating, rising inflection and in the soft voice of the Scandinavian.
"Hallo!" replied the young man.
"Seek?"
"Sick? No." The young man laughed slightly. "What are you doing here?"
"Oh, I yust make it leetle valk up here."
"Same with me, and now I'll make it a little walk back to town." The young man rose and stretched himself and turned his steps slowly back along the winding path.
"Vell, I tank I make it leetle valk down town, too," and the figure came sauntering along at the young man's side.
"Oh, you're going my way, are you? All right."
"Yas, I tank I going yust de sam your way."
The young man set the pace more rapidly, and for a time they walked on in silence. At last, "Live here?" he asked.
"Yas, I lif here."
"Been here long?"
"In America? Yes. I guess five--sax--year. Oh, I lak it goot."
"I mean here, in this place."
"Oh, here? Yas, two, t'ree year. I lak it goot too."
"Know any one here?"
"Oh, yas. I know people I vork by yet."
"Who are they?"
"Oh, I vork by many place--make garten--und vork wit' horses, und so. Meesus Craikmile, I vork by her on garten. She iss dere no more."
The young man paused suddenly in his stride. "Gone? Where is she gone?"
"Oh, she iss by ol' country gone. Her man iss gone mit." They walked on.
"What! Is the Elder gone, too?"
"Yas. You know heem, yas?"
"Oh, yes. I know everybody here. I've been away for a good while."
"So? Yas, yust lak me. I was gone too goot wile, bot I coom back too, yust lak you."
Here they came to a turn in the road, and the village lights began to wink out through the darkness, and their ways parted.
"I'm going this way," said the young man. "You turn off here? Well, good night."
"Vell, goot night." The Swede sauntered away down a by-path, and the young man kept on the main road to the village and entered its one hotel where he had engaged a room a few hours before. _