Part 9 (2/2)
The men outside the porch closed in around the windows to listen. The women in the back rows of chairs in the adjoining room leaned forward eagerly. Those farthest away caught only a faltering sentence now and then.
”A hospitality as warm as his own hearthstone, as wide as his broad acres.... No man can point to him and say he ever knowingly hurt or hindered a fellow creature.... He never measured out to any man a scant bushel. Be it grain or good-will, it was ever an overflowing measure....” But those who could not hear all that was said could make the silent places eloquent with their own recollections, for he had taken a father's interest in them all, and manifested it by a score of kindly deeds, too kindly to ever be forgotten.
It was a perfect autumn day, sunny and golden and still, save for the patter of dropping nuts and the dry rustle of fallen leaves. A purple haze rested on the distant horizon like the bloom on a ripened grape.
Down through the orchard, when the simple service was over, they carried their old friend to the family burying-ground, and, although voices had choked, and eyes overflowed before, there was neither sob nor tear, when the light of the sunset struck across the low mound, heaped with its covering of glowing autumn leaves. For if grief has no part in the sunset glory that ends the day, or in the perfect fulness of the autumn time, then it must indeed stand hushed, when a life comes both to its sunset and its harvest, in such royal fas.h.i.+on.
That evening at the Cross-Roads, Bowser lighted the first fire of the season in the rusty old stove, for the night was chilly. One by one the men accustomed to gather around it dropped in and took their usual places. The event of the day was all that was spoken of.
”Do you remember what he said last Thanksgiving, nearly a year ago?”
asked Bowser. ”It came back to me as I stood and looked at him to-day, and if I'd never believed in immortality before, I'd 'a' had to have believed in it then. The words seemed to fairly s.h.i.+ne out of his face.
He said '_The best comes after the harvest, when the wheat goes to make up blood and muscle and brain; when it's raised to a higher order of life in man. And it's the same with me. At eighty-five, when it looks as if I'd about reached the end, I've come to believe that ”the best is yet to be._”'”
There was a long pause, and Cy Akers said, slowly, ”Somehow I can't feel that he is dead. Seems as if he'd just gone away a while. But Lord!
how we're going to miss him here at the store.”
”No, don't say that!” exclaimed Bud Hines, with more emotion than he had ever been known to show before. ”Say, how we're going to feel him! I can't get him out of my mind. Every time I turn around, most, seems to me I can hear him laugh, and say, 'Don't cross your bridge till you come to it, Bud.' That saying of his rings in my ears every time I get in the dumps. Seems like he could set the calendar straight for us, all the year around. The winters wasn't so cold or the summers so hard to pull through, looking at life through his eyes.”
Perkins's oldest crept up unnoticed. He added no word, but deep in his heart lay an impression that all the years to come could never erase; the remembrance of a kindly old man who had given him a new gospel, in that one phrase, ”A brother to Santa Claus;” who had taught him to go out against his Philistines with simple directness of aim and whatever lay at hand; who had left behind him the philosophy of a cheerful optimist, and the example of a sweet simple life, unswerving in its loyalty to duty and to truth.
Over in the old homestead, Polly, standing in the firelight, fair and slender in her black gown, looked up at the tall young fellow beside her, and placed two little books in his hands. The old house was not her only heritage. The little atlas of the heavens was hers also. Standing there in the room where the beloved presence seemed to have left its benediction, Polly told the story of the love that had outlived Death.
Then across the yellowed page of the old grammar where the faded violets lay, two hands met in the same sure clasp that had joined the souls of those older lovers, who somewhere beyond the stars were still repeating the old conjugation--”we love--_for ever_!”
THE END.
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