Part 23 (1/2)

”And when somebody asks me if you are dead, as some king asked about the author of Butler's 'a.n.a.logy' once, I'll reply, as somebody replied: 'Not dead, but buried.'”

”That is what I want to be,” he had replied. ”Don't you want a copy of my little pocket dictionary? It just fits the vest pocket, you see. You don't know how proud I was when I saw a young man on the train take one from his pocket one day!”

He opened his desk and handed her a copy; Marjorie looked at it and at him in open-eyed wonder. And dared she recite to a teacher who had made a book?

”When is your Speller coming out?”

”In the fall. I'm busy on my Reader now.”

Prudence stepped to his desk and examined the sheets of upright penmans.h.i.+p; it could be read as easily as print.

”And the Arithmetic?”

”Oh, I haven't tackled that yet. That is for winter evenings, when my fire burns on the hearth and the wind blows and n.o.body in the world cares for me.”

”Then it won't be _this_ winter,” said Marjorie, lifting her eyes from the binding of the dictionary.

”Why not?” he questioned.

”Because somebody cares for you,” she answered gravely.

He laughed and shoved his ma.n.u.script into the desk. He was thinking of her as he raised his head from the desk this afternoon and found the sun gone down; he thought of her and remembered that he had promised to call to see her to-night. Was it to take tea? He dreaded tea-parties, when everybody talked and n.o.body said anything. A dim remembrance of being summoned to supper a while ago flashed through his mind; but it hardly mattered--Mrs. Devoe would take her cup of tea alone and leave his fruit and bread and milk standing on the tea-table; it was better so, she would not pester him with questions while he was eating, ask him why he did not take more exercise, and if his room were not suffocating this hot day, and if he did not think a cup of good, strong tea would not be better for him than that bowl of milk!

Mrs. Devoe, a widow of sixty-five, and her cat, Dolly, aged nineteen, kept house and boarded the school-master. Her house was two miles nearer the sh.o.r.e than the school-building, but he preferred the walk in all weathers and he liked the view of the water. Mrs. Devoe had never kept a boarder before, her small income being amply sufficient for her small wants, but she liked the master, he split her wood and his own, locked the house up at night, made no trouble, paid his board, two dollars per week, regularly in advance, never went out at night, often read to her in the evening after her own eyes had given out, and would have been perfect if he had allowed her to pile away his books and sweep his chamber every Friday.

”But no man is perfect,” she had sighed to Mrs. Rheid, ”even my poor husband would keep dinner waiting.”

After a long, absent-minded look over the meadows towards the sea, where the waves were darkening in the twilight, he arose in haste, threw off his wrapper, a gray merino affair, trimmed with quilted crimson silk, that Prudence had given him on a birthday three years ago, and went to the wash-stand to bathe his face and brush back that ma.s.s of black hair.

He did not study his features as Prudence had studied hers that morning; he knew so little about his own face that he could scarcely distinguish a good portrait of himself from a poor one; but Prudence knew it by heart.

It was a thin, delicate face, marred with much thought, the features not large, and finely cut, with deep set eyes as black as midnight, and, when they were neither grave nor stern, as soft as a dove's eyes; cheeks and chin were closely shaven; his hair, a heavy black ma.s.s, was pushed back from a brow already lined with thought or care, and worn somewhat long behind the ears; there was no hardness in any line of the face, because there was no hardness in the heart, there was sin and sorrow in the world, but he believed that G.o.d is good.

The slight figure was not above medium height; he had a stoop in the shoulders that added to his general appearance of delicacy; he was scholarly from the crown of his black head to the very tip of his worn, velvet slipper; his slender hands, with their perfectly kept nails, and even the stain of ink on the forefinger of his right hand, had an air of scholars.h.i.+p about them. His black summer suit was a perfect fit, his boots were s.h.i.+ning, the knot of his narrow black neck tie was a little towards one side, but that was the only evidence that he was careless about his personal appearance.

”I want my boys to be neat,” he had said once apologetically to Mrs.

Devoe, when requesting her to give away his old school suit preparatory to buying another.

All he needed to be perfect was congenial social life, Prudence believed, but that, alas, seemed never to enter his conception. He knew it never had since that long ago day when he had congratulated his brother upon his perfect share of this world's happiness. And, queerly enough, Prudence stood too greatly in awe of him to suggest that his life was too one-sided and solitary.

”Some people wonder if you were ever married,” Mrs. Devoe said to him that afternoon when he went down to his late supper. Mrs. Devoe never stood in awe of anybody.

”Yes, I was married twenty years ago--to my work,” he replied, gravely; ”there isn't any John Holmes, there is only my work.”

”There is something that is John Holmes to me,” said the widow in her quick voice, ”and there's a John Holmes to the boys and girls, and I guess the Lord thinks something of you beside your 'work,' as you call it.”

Meditatively he walked along the gra.s.sy wayside towards the brown farmhouse:

”Perhaps there _is_ a John Holmes that I forget about,” he said to himself.