Part 14 (1/2)
The summer softened into autumn. The maple leaves reddened. The long gra.s.s turned brown and lolled over. A softness and tenderness lurked in the deep blue sky, and the air had a sharp racy fragrance from ripe fruit and grain. Meantime the railroad had been pushed with amazing rapidity nearly to completion. Every day long construction trains went cras.h.i.+ng-across Luke's farm. Pa.s.senger coaches were to be put on in a few days. Luke was the very picture of happiness. He seemed to grow younger every day. His worldly prospects, too, were flattering. A station had been located on his land, around which a town had already begun to spring up. The vast value of Luke's timber, walnut and oak, was just beginning to appear; indeed, immense wealth lay in his hands. But his happiness was of a deeper and purer sort than that generated by simple pecuniary prosperity. Hoiden Pearl was in the focus of all his thoughts; her face lighted his dreams, her voice made the music that charmed him into a wonderland of bliss. He said little about her, even to Betsy, but it needed no sharpness of sight to discover from his face what was going on in his heart. He had even forgotten his pipe. He had not smoked since that first day in the orchard. He had straightened up and looked a span taller.
The girl did not seem to dream of any tender attachment on Luke's part.
In fact he gave her no cause for it. He fed on his love inwardly and never thought of telling it. To be with her was enough. It satisfied all his wants. She was frank and free with him, but tyrannized over him--ordered him about like a servant, scolded him, flattered him, pouted at him, smiled on him, indeed kept him crazy with rapture all the time. Once only she became confidentially communicative. It was one day, sitting on an old mossy log in the Judge's woodland pasture, she told him the story of her past life. How thrillingly beautiful her face became as it sobered down with the history of early orphanage! Her father had died first; then her mother, who left her four years old in the care of Mr. Pearl, her paternal uncle, with whom she had ever since been, going from place to place, as the calls of his nomadic profession made it necessary, from survey to survey, from this State to that, seeing all sorts of people, and receiving her education in small, detached parcels. The story was a sad, unsatisfactory one, breathing neglect, yet full of a certain kind of sprightliness, and touched here and there with the fascination of true romance.
It is hard to say when Luke would have awakened from his tender trance to the strong reality of love. He was too contented for self-questioning, and no act or word of Hoiden's invited him to consider what he was doing or whither he was drifting.
It was well for Luke and the girl, too, that it was a spa.r.s.ely settled neighborhood, for evil tongues might have made much of their constant companions.h.i.+p and childish behavior.
As for the Judge, after it was all over he admitted that he felt some qualms of conscience about allowing such unlimited intimacy to go on, but he excused himself by saying that the girl, when confined to the house, was such an unmitigated nuisance that he was glad for some one to monopolize her company.
”Why,” said he, in his peculiar way, ”she set the whole house by the ears. She made more clatter and racket than a four-horse Pennsylvania wagon coming down a rocky hill. She would go from garret to cellar like a whirlwind and twist things wrong side out as she went----she was a tart!”
But at length, toward the middle of autumn the end came. Luke had business with some hog-buyers in Cincinnati, whither he was gone several days. Meantime the railroad was completed, and Mr. Pearl came to the Judge's early one morning and called for Hoiden. His business with his employers was ended, and he had just finished an arrangement that had long been on foot to go to one of the South American States and take charge of a vast engineering scheme there. The girl was delighted. Such a prospect of travel and adventure was enough to set one of her temperament wild with enthusiasm. She flew to packing her trunk, her face radiant with joy.
Only an hour later Mr. Pearl and Hoiden stood at the new station on Luke's land, waiting for the east-going train. Mr. Pearl happened to think of a business message he wished to leave for Luke, so he went into the depot building and wrote it. When Hoiden saw the letter was for Luke she begged leave to put in a few words of postscript, and she had her way.
The train came and the man and girl were whirled away to New York, and thence they took s.h.i.+p for South America, never to return.
Next day Luke came back, bringing with him a beautifully carved mahogany box mounted in silver. Betsy met him at the door, and, woman-like, told the story of Hoiden's departure almost at the first breath.
”Gone all the way to South America,” she added, after premising that she would never return.
A peculiarly grim, grayish smile mantled the face of Luke. He swallowed a time or two before he could speak.
”Come now, sis” (he always said ”sis” when he felt somewhat at Betsy's mercy), ”come now, sis, don't try to fool me. I'm goin' right over to see the gal now, an' I've got what'll tickle her awfully right here in this 'ere box.”
Out in the yard the blue jays and woodp.e.c.k.e.rs were quarrelling over the late apples heaped up by the cider mill. The sky was clear, but the sunlight, coming through a smoky atmosphere, was pale, like the smile of a sick man. The wind of autumn ran steadily through the shrubby weedy lawn with a sigh that had in it the very essence of sadness.
”I tell you, Luke, I'm not trying to fool you; they've gone clean to South America to stay always,” reiterated Betsy.
Luke gazed for a moment steadily into his sister's eyes, as if looking for a sign. Slowly his stalwart body and muscular limbs relaxed and collapsed. The box fell to the floor with a crash, where it burst, letting roll out great hoops of gold and starry rings and pins--a gold watch and chain, a beautiful gold pen and pencil case, and trinkets and gew-gaw things almost innumerable. They must have cost the full profits of his business trip.
Luke staggered into a chair. Betsy just then happened to think of the letter that had been left for her brother. This she fetched and handed to him. It was the note of business from Mr. Pearl. There was a postscript in a different hand:
”_Good-bye, Goosey!_ _Hoidy Pearl._”
That was all. Luke is more morose and petulant than he used to be. He is decaying about apace with Rackenshack, and he smokes constantly. He is vastly wealthy and unmarried.
Betsy is quiet and kind. Up stairs in her chest is hidden the mahogany coffer full of golden testimonials of her brother's days of happiness and the one dark hour of his despair!
THE PEDAGOGUE.
He was one of the farmer princes of Hoosierdom, a man of more than average education, a fluent talker and ready with a story. Knowing that I was looking up reminiscences of Hoosier life and specimens of Hoosier character, he volunteered one evening to give me the following, vouching for the truth of it. Here it is, as I ”short-handed” it from his own lips. I omit quotation marks.
The study of one's past life is not unlike the study of geology. If the presence of the remains of extinct species of animals and vegetables in the ancient rocks calls up in one's mind a host of speculative thoughts touching the progress of creation, so, as we cut with the pick of retrospection through the strata of bygone days, do the remains of departed things, constantly turning up, put one into his studying cap to puzzle over specimens fully as curious and interesting in their way as the _cephalaspis_.
The first stratum of my intellectual formation contains most conspicuously the remains of dog-eared spelling books, a score or more of them by different names, among which the _Elementary_ of Webster is the best preserved and most clearly defined. It was finding an old, yellow, badly thumbed and dirt soiled copy of Webster's spelling book in the bottom of an old chest of odds and ends, on the fly-leaf of which book was written ”T. Blodgett,” that lately brightened my memory of the things I am about to tell you.
The old time pedagogue is a thing of the past--_pars temporis acti_ is the Latin of it, may be, but I'm not sure--I'm rusty in the Latin now.
When I quit school I could read it a good deal. But of the pedagogue.