Part 1 (2/2)

Tom, Jack, and Billy are the chaps who come near to us.

Billy was an old bachelor and an Englishman. His family had intended him for the church, and he was educated at Trinity with that end in view.

Although not an irreligious man, he had views on religion that were far from orthodox.

”I found it impossible,” he once remarked, ”to induce the church to change its views, and equally impossible to change my own; so the church and I, each being unreasonably stubborn, agreed to disagree, and I threw over the whole affair, quarrelled with my family, was in turn thrown over by them, and here I am, in the wilderness, very much pleased.”

He lived in the little town of Blue River, and was justice of the peace, postmaster, storekeeper, and occasionally school-teacher. He was small in stature, with a tendency to become rotund as he grew older. He took pride in his dress and was as cleanly as an Englishman. He was reasonably willing to do the duty that confronted him, and loved but three forms of recreation,--to be with his two most intimate friends, Rita and Dic, to wander in the trackless forests, and to play upon his piano. His piano was his sweetheart, and often in the warm summer evenings, when his neighbors were in bed, would the strains of his music lull them to sleep, and float out into the surrounding forests, awakening the whippoorwill to heart-rending cries of anguish that would give a man the ”blues” for a month. I believe many ignorant persons thought that Billy was not exactly ”right in the top,” as they put it, because he would often wander through the forests, night or day, singing to himself, talking to the trees and birds, and clasping to his soul fair nature in her virgin strength and sweetness. He often communed with himself after this fas.h.i.+on: ”I am a fortunate man in the things I love, for I have them to my heart's content. Rita and Dic are children.

I give them knowledge. They give me youth. I touch my piano. It fills my soul with peace. If it gives me a discordant note, the fault is mine. I go to the forest, and sweet Nature takes me in her arms and lulls me to ecstasy.”

Billy Little and I had been college chums, and had emigrated on the same s.h.i.+p. I studied law, entered the practice, married, and have a family.

While my wife and family did not mar the friends.h.i.+p between Little and myself, it prevented frequency of intercourse, for a wife and family are great absorbents. However, he and I remained friends, and from him I have most of the facts const.i.tuting this story.

This friend of Dic's was a great help to the boy intellectually, and at fourteen or fifteen years of age, when other boys considered their education complete if they could spell phthisis and Constantinople, our hero was reading Virgil and Shakespeare, and was learning to think for himself. The knowledge obtained from Billy Little the boy tried to impart to Rita. Tom held learning and books to be effeminate and wasteful of time; but Rita drank in Dic's teaching, with now and then a helpful draught from Billy Little, and the result soon began to show upon the girl.

Thus it was that Dic often went to see Tom, but talked to Tom's sister.

Many an evening, long after Tom had unceremoniously climbed the rude stairway to bed, would the brown-eyed maid, with her quaint, wistful touch of womanhood, sit beside Dic on the ciphering log inside the fireplace, listening to him read from one of Billy Little's books, watching him trace continents, rivers, and mountains on a map, or helping him to cipher a complicated problem in arithmetic. The girl by no means understood all that Dic read, but she tried, and even though she failed, she would clasp her hands and say, ”Isn't it grand, Dic?”

And it was grand to her because Dic read it.

Lamps were unknown to our simple folk, so the light of the fireplace was all they had to read by. It was, therefore, no uncommon sight in those early cabin homes to see the whole family sitting upon the broad hearth, shading their eyes with their hands, while some one--frequently the local school-teacher--sat upon the hearth log and read by the fire that furnished both light and heat. This reading was frequently Dic's task in the Bays home.

One who has seen a large family thus gathered upon the s.p.a.cious hearth will easily understand the love for it that ages ago sprang up in the hearts of men and crickets. At no place in all the earth, and at no time in all its history, has the hearth done more in moulding human character than it did in the wilderness on the north side of the lower Ohio when the men who felled the forest and conquered nature offered their humble devotions on its homely altar.

So it came to pa.s.s that Dic and Rita grew up together on the heart of the hearth; and what wonder that their own hearts were welded by the warmth and light of its cheery G.o.d. Thus the boy grew to manhood and the girl to maidenhood, then to young womanhood, at which time, of course, her troubles began.

Chief among the earlier troubles of our little maid was a growing tenderness for Dic. Of that trouble she was not for many months aware.

She was unable to distinguish between the affection she had always given him and the warming tenderness she was beginning to feel, save in her disinclination to make it manifest. When with him she was under a constraint as inexplicable to her as it was annoying. It brought grief to her tender heart, since it led her into little acts of rudeness or neglect, which in turn always led to tears. She often blamed Dic for the altered condition, though it was all owing to the change in herself.

There was no change in him. He sought the girl's society as frankly as when they were children, though at the time of which I write he had made no effort to ”keep company” with her. She, at fifteen, believing herself to be a young lady, really wished for the advances she feared. Sukey Yates, who was only fourteen, had ”company” every Sunday evening, and went to all the social frolics for miles around. Polly Kaster, not sixteen, was soon to be married to Bantam Rhodes. Many young men had looked longingly upon Rita, who was the most beautiful girl on Blue; but the Chief Justice, with her daughter's hearty approval, drove all suitors away. The girl was wholly satisfied with Dic, who was ”less than kin,” but very much ”more than kind.” He came to see the family, herself included; but when he went out to social functions, church socials, corn-huskings, and dances he took Sukey Yates, or some other girl, and upon such evenings our own little maiden went to bed dissatisfied with the world at large, and herself in particular. Of course, she would not have gone to dances, even with Dic. She had regard for the salvation of her soul, and the Chief Justice, in whom the girl had unquestioning faith, held dancing to be the devil's chief instrument of d.a.m.nation.

Even the church socials were not suitable for young girls, as you will agree if you read farther; and Mrs. Margarita, with a sense of propriety inherited from better days, tried to hold her daughter aloof from the country society, which entertained honest but questionable views on many subjects.

Dic paid his informal visit to the Bays household in the evenings, and at the time of the girl's growing inclination she would gaze longingly up the river watching for him; while the sun, regretful to leave the land, wherein her hero dwelt, sank slowly westward to s.h.i.+ne upon those poor waste places that knew no Diccon. When she would see him coming she would run away for fear of herself, and seek her room in the loft, where she would scrub her face and hands in a hopeless effort to remove the sun-brown. Then she would scan her face in a mirror, for which Dic had paid two beautiful bearskins, hoping to convince herself that she was not altogether hideous.

”If I could only be half as pretty as Sukey Yates,” she often thought, little dreaming that Sukey, although a very pretty girl, was plain compared with her own winsome self.

After the scrubbing she would take from a little box the solitary piece of grandeur she possessed,--a ribbon of fiery red,--and with this around her neck or woven through the waving floods of her black hair, she felt she was bedecked like a veritable queen of hearts. But the ribbon could not remove all doubts of herself, and with tears ready to start from her eyes she would stamp her foot and cry out: ”I hate myself. I am an ugly fool.” Then she would slowly climb down the rude stairway, and, as we humble folk would say, ”take out her spite” against herself on poor Dic.

She was not rude to him, but, despite her inclination, she failed to repay his friendliness in kind as of yore.

Tom took great pleasure in teasing her, and chuckled with delight when his indulgent mother would tell her visiting friends that he was a great tease.

One evening when Rita had encountered more trouble than usual with the sun-brown, and was more than ever before convinced that she was a fright and a fool, she went downstairs, wearing her ribbon, to greet Dic, who was sitting on the porch with father, mother, and Tom. When she emerged from the front door, Tom, the teaser, said:--

”Oh, just look at her! She's put on her ribbon for Dic.” Then, turning to Dic, ”She run to her room and spruced up when she saw you coming.”

Dic laughed because it pleased him to think, at least to hope, that Tom had spoken the truth. Poor Rita in the midst of her confusion misunderstood Dic's laughter; and, smarting from the truth of Tom's words, quickly retorted:--

<script>