Howard smiled. "Gimme a hold on that fork, and I'll show you. I'm not so
soft as I look, now you bet."
He laid hold upon the fork in Grant's hands, who released it sullenly
and stood back sneering. Howard struck the fork into the pile in the old
way, threw his left hand to the end of the polished handle, brought it
down into the hollow of his thigh, and laid out his strength till the
handle bent like a bow. "Oop she rises!" he called laughingly, as the
whole pile began slowly to rise, and finally rolled upon the high load.
"Oh, I ain't forgot how to do it," he laughed, as he looked around at
the boy, who was eyeing the tennis suit with a devouring gaze.
Grant was studying him, too, but not in admiration.
"I shouldn't say you had," said the old man, tugging at the forkful.
"Mighty funny to come out here and do a little of this. But if you had
to come here and do it all the while, you wouldn't look so white and
soft in the hands," Grant said, as they moved on to another pile. "Give
me that fork. You'll be spoiling your fine clothes."
"Oh, these don't matter. They're made for this kind of thing."
"Oh, are they? I guess I'll dress in that kind of a rig. What did that
shirt cost? I need one."
"Six dollars a pair; but then it's old."
"And them pants," he pursued; "they cost six dollars, too, didn't they?"
Howard's face darkened. He saw his brother's purpose. He resented it.
"They cost fifteen dollars, if you want to know, and the shoes cost
six-fifty. This ring on my cravat cost sixty dollars, and the suit I had
on last night cost eighty-five. My suits are made by Breckstein, on
Fifth Avenue, if you want to patronize him," he ended brutally, spurred
on by the sneer in his brother's eyes. "I'll introduce you."
"Good idea," said Grant, with a forced, mocking smile. "I need just such
a get-up for haying and corn-ploughing. Singular I never thought of it.
Now my pants cost eighty-five cents, s'spenders fifteen, hat twenty,
shoes one-fifty; stockin's I don't bother about."
He had his brother at a disadvantage, and he grew fluent and caustic as
he went on, almost changing places with Howard, who took the rake out of
the boy's hand, and followed, raking up the scatterings.
"Singular we fellers here are discontented and mulish, ain't it?
Singular we don't believe your letters when you write, sayin', 'I just
about make a live of it'? Singular we think the country's goin' to hell,
we fellers, in a two-dollar suit, wadin' around in the mud or sweatin'
around in the hay-field, while you fellers lay around New York and smoke
and wear good clothes and toady to millionaires?"
Howard threw down the rake and folded his arms. "My God! you're enough
to make a man forget the same mother bore us!"
"I guess it wouldn't take much to make you forget that. You ain't put
much thought on me nor her for ten years."
The old man cackled, the boy grinned, and Howard, sick and weak with
anger and sorrow, turned away and walked down toward the brook. He had
tried once more to get near his brother, and had failed. Oh, God! how
miserably, pitiably! The hot blood gushed all over him as he thought of
the shame and disgrace of it.
He, a man associating with poets, artists, sought after by brilliant
women, accustomed to deference even from such people, to be sneered at,
outfaced, shamed, shoved aside, by a man in a stained hickory shirt and
patched overalls, and that man his brother! He lay down on the bright
grass, with the sheep all around him, and writhed and groaned with the
agony and despair of it.
And worst of all, underneath it was a consciousness that Grant was right
in distrusting him. He had neglected him; he had said, "I guess they're
getting along all right." He had put them behind him when the invitation
to spend summer on the Mediterranean or in the Adirondacks, came.
"What can I do? What can I do?" he groaned.
The sheep nibbled the grass near him, the jays called pertly, "Shame,
shame," a quail piped somewhere on the hillside, and the brook sung a
soft, soothing melody that took away at last the sharp edge of his pain,
and he sat up and gazed down the valley, bright with the sun and
apparently filled with happy and prosperous people.
Suddenly a thought seized him. He stood up so suddenly that the sheep
fled in affright. He leaped the brook, crossed the flat, and began
searching in the bushes on the hillside. "Hurrah!" he said, with a
smile.
He had found an old road which he used to travel when a boy--a road that
skirted the edge of the valley, now grown up to brush, but still
passable for footmen. As he ran lightly along down the beautiful path,
under oaks and hickories, past masses of poison-ivy, under hanging
grapevines, through clumps of splendid hazel-nut bushes loaded with
great sticky, rough, green burs, his heart threw off part of its load.
How it all came back to him! How many days, when the autumn sun burned
the frost of the bushes, had he gathered hazel-nuts here with his boy
and girl friends--Hugh and Shelley McTurg, Rome Sawyer, Orrin McIlvaine,
and the rest! What had become of them all? How he had forgotten them!
This thought stopped him again, and he fell into a deep muse, leaning
against an oak tree, and gazing into the vast fleckless space above. The
thrilling, inscrutable mystery of life fell upon him like a blinding
light. Why was he living in the crush and thunder and mental unrest of a
great city, while his companions, seemingly his equals in powers, were
milking cows, making butter, and growing corn and wheat in the silence
and drear monotony of the farm?
His boyish sweethearts! their names came back to his ear now, with a
dull, sweet sound as of faint bells. He saw their faces, their pink
sunbonnets tipped back upon their necks, their brown ankles flying with
the swift action of the scurrying partridge. His eyes softened, he took
off his hat. The sound of the wind and the leaves moved him almost to
tears.
A woodpecker gave a shrill, high-keyed, sustained cry, "Ki, ki, ki!" and
he started from his revery, the dapples of the sun and shade falling
upon his lithe figure as he hurried on down the path.
He came at last to a field of corn that ran to the very wall of a large
weather-beaten house, the sight of which made his breathing quicker. It
was the place where he was born. The mystery of his life began there. In
the branches of those poplar and hickory trees he had swung and sung in
the rushing breeze, fearless as a squirrel. Here was the brook where,
like a larger kildee, he with Grant had waded after crawfish, or had
stolen upon some wary trout, rough-cut pole in hand.
Seeing someone in the garden, he went down along the corn-row through
the rustling ranks of green leaves. An old woman was picking berries, a
squat and shapeless figure.
"Good-morning," he called cheerily.
"Morgen," she said, looking up at him with a startled and very red face.
She was German in every line of her body.
"Ich bin Herr McLane," he said, after a pause.
"So?" she replied, with a questioning inflection.
"Yah; ich bin Herr Grant's Bruder."
"Ach, so!" she said, with a downward inflection. "Ich no spick Inglish.
No spick Inglis."
"Ich bin durstig," he said. Leaving her pans, she went with him to the
house, which was what he really wanted to see.
"Ich bin hier geboren."
"Ach, so!" She recognized the little bit of sentiment, and said some
sentences in German whose general meaning was sympathy. She took him to
the cool cellar where the spring had been trained to run into a tank
containing pans of cream and milk; she gave him a cool draught from a
large tin cup, and at his request went with him upstairs. The house was
the same, but somehow seemed cold and empty. It was clean and sweet, but
it showed so little evidence of being lived in. The old part, which was
built of logs, was used as best room, and modelled after the best rooms
of the neighboring "Yankee" homes, only it was emptier, without the
cabinet organ and the rag-carpet and the chromos.
The old fireplace was bricked up and plastered--the fireplace beside
which, in the far-off days, he had lain on winter nights, to hear his
uncles tell tales of hunting, or to hear them play the violin, great
dreaming giants that they were.
The old woman went out and left him sitting there, the centre of a swarm
of memories, coming and going like so many ghostly birds and
butterflies.
A curious heartache and listlessness, a nerveless mood came on him. What
was it worth, anyhow--success? Struggle, strife, trampling on some one
else. His play crowding out some other poor fellow's hope. The hawk eats
the partridge, the partridge eats the flies and bugs, the bugs eat each
other, and the hawk, when he in his turn is shot by man. So in the world
of business, the life of one man seemed to him to be drawn from the life
of another man, each success to spring from other failures.
He was like a man from whom all motives had been withdrawn. He was sick,
sick to the heart. Oh, to be a boy again! An ignorant baby, pleased with
a block and string, with no knowledge and no care of the great unknown!
To lay his head again on his mother's bosom and rest! To watch the
flames on the hearth!--
Why not? Was not that the very thing to do? To buy back the old farm?
It would cripple him a little for the next season, but he could do it.
Think of it! To see his mother back in the old home, with the fireplace
restored, the old furniture in the sitting room around her, and fine new
things in the parlor!
His spirits rose again. Grant couldn't stand out when he brought to
him a deed of the farm. Surely his debt would be cancelled when he had
seen them all back in the wide old kitchen. He began to plan and to
dream. He went to the windows, and looked out on the yard to see how
much it had changed.
He'd build a new barn and buy them a new carriage. His heart glowed
again, and his lips softened into their usual feminine grace--lips a
little full and falling easily into curves.
The old German woman came in at length, bringing some cakes and a bowl
of milk, smiling broadly and hospitably as she waddled forward.
"Ach! Goot!" he said, smacking his lips over the pleasant draught.
"Wo ist ihre goot mann?" he inquired, ready for business.