In the year 183-, Mr. Maverick writes to his friend Johns that the
disturbed condition of public affairs in France will compel him to
postpone his intended visit to America, and may possibly detain him for
a long time to come. He further says,--"In order to prevent all possible
hazards which may grow out of our revolutionary fervor on this side of
the water, I have invested in United States securities, for the benefit
of my dear little Adele, a sum of money which will yield some seven
hundred dollars a year. Of this I propose to make you trustee, and
desire that you should draw so much of the yearly interest as you may
determine to be for her best good, denying her no reasonable requests,
and making your household reckoning clear of all possible deficit on her
account.
"I am charmed with the improved tone of her letters, and am delighted to
see by them that even under your grave regimen she has not lost her old
buoyancy of spirits. My dear Johns, I owe you a debt in this matter
which I shall never be able to repay. Kiss the little witch for me; tell
her that 'Papa' always thinks of her, as he sits solitary upon the green
bench under the arbor. God bless the dear one, and keep all trouble from
her!"
She, gaining in height now month by month, wins more and more upon the
grave Doctor,--wins upon Rose, who loves her as she loves her
sisters,--wins upon Phil, whose liking for her is becoming demonstrative
to a degree that prompts a little jealousy in the warm-blooded Reuben,
and that drives out all thought of the pink cheeks and fat arms of Suke
Boody. Miss Johns still regards her with admiring eyes, and shows all
her old assiduity in looking after her comforts and silken trappings.
Day after day, in summer weather, Rose and she idle together along the
embowered paths of the village; the Tew partners greet the pair with
smiles; good Mistress Elderkin has always a cordial welcome; the stout
Squire stoops to kiss the little Jesuit, who blushes at the tender
affront through all the brownness of her cheek, like a rose. Day after
day the rumble of the mill breaks on the country quietude; and as autumn
comes in, burning with all its forest fires, the farmer's flails beat
time together, as they did ten years before.
At the academy, Phil and Reuben plot mischief, and they cement their
friendship with not a few boyish quarrels.
Thus, Reuben, in the way of the boyish pomologists of those days, has
buried at midsummer in the orchard a dozen or more of the finest
windfalls from the early apple-trees, that they may mellow, away from
the air, into good eating condition, and he has marked the spot in his
boyish way with a little pyramid of stones. Strolling down the orchard a
few days later, he sees Phil coming away from that locality, with his
pockets bulging out ominously, and munching a great apple with
extraordinary relish. Perhaps there is a thought that he may design a
gift out of the stolen stores for Adele; at any rate, Reuben flies at
him.
"I say, Phil, that's doosed mean now, to be stealing my apples!"
"Who's stole your apples?" says Phil, with a great roar of voice.
"You have," says Reuben; and having now come near enough to find his
pyramid of stones all laid low, he says more angrily,--"You're a thief!
and you've got 'em in your pocket!"
"Thief!" says Phil, looking threateningly, and throwing away his apple
half-eaten, "if you call me a thief, I say you're a----you know what."
"Well, blast you," says Reuben, boiling with rage, "say it! Call me a
liar, if you dare!"
"I do dare," says Phil, "if you accuse me of stealing your apples; and I
say you're a liar, and be darned to you!"
At this, Reuben, though he is the shorter by two or three inches, and no
match for his foe at fisticuffs, plants a blow straight in Philip's
face. (He said afterward, when all was settled, that he was ten times
more mortified to think that he had done such a thing in his father's
orchard.)
But Phil closed upon him, and kneading him with his knuckles in the
back, and with a trip, threw him heavily, falling prone upon him.
Reuben, in a frenzy, and with a torrent of much worse language than he
was in the habit of using, was struggling to turn him, when a sharp,
loud voice, which they both knew only too well, came down the
wind,--"Boys! boys!" and presently the Doctor comes up panting.
"What does this mean? Philip, I'm ashamed of you!" he continues; and
Philip rises.
Reuben, rising, too, the instant after, and with his fury unchecked,
dashes at Phil again; when the Doctor seizes him by the collar and drags
him aside.
"He struck me," says Phil.
"And he stole my apples and called me a liar," says Reuben, with the
tears starting, though he tries desperately to keep them back, seeing
that Phil shows no such evidence of emotion.
"Tut! tut!" says the Doctor,--"you are both too angry for a straight
story. Come with me."
And taking each by the hand, he led them through the garden and house,
directly into his study. There he opens a closet-door, with the sharp
order, "Step in here, Reuben, until I hear Philip's story." This Phil
tells straight-forwardly,--how he was passing through the orchard with a
pocketful of apples, which a neighbor's boy had given, and how Reuben
came upon him with swift accusation, and then the fight. "But he hurt me
more than I hurt him," says Phil, wiping his nose, which showed a little
ooze of blood.
"Good!" says the Doctor,--"I think you tell the truth."
"Thank you," says Phil,--"I know I do, Doctor."
Next Reuben is called out.
"Do you _know_ he took the apples?" asks the Doctor.
"Don't know," says Reuben,--"but he was by the place, and the stones
thrown down."
"And is that sufficient cause, Reuben, for accusing your friend?"
At which, Reuben, shifting his position uneasily from one foot to the
other, says,--
"I believe he did, though."
"Stop, Sir!" says the Doctor in a voice that makes Reuben sidle away.
"Here," says Phil, commiserating him in a grand way, and beginning to
discharge his pockets on the Doctor's table, "he may have them, if he
wants them."
Reuben stares at them a moment in astonishment, then breaks out with a
great tremor in his voice, but roundly enough,--
"By George! they're not the same apples at all. I'm sorry I told you
that, Phil."
"Don't say 'By George' before me, or anywhere else," says the Doctor,
sharply. "It's but a sneaking oath, Sir; yet" (more gently) "I'm glad of
your honesty, Reuben."
At the instigation of the parson they shake hands; after which he leads
them both into his closet, beckoning them to kneel on either side of
him, as he commends them in his stately way to Heaven, trusting that
they may live in good-fellowship henceforth, and keep His counsel, who
was the great Peacemaker, always in their hearts.
Next morning, when Reuben goes to reconnoitre the place of his buried
treasure, he finds all safe, and taking the better half of the fruit, he
marches away with a proud step to the Elderkin house. The basket is for
Phil. But Phil is not at home; so he leaves the gift, and a message,
with a short story of it all, with the tender Rose, whose eyes dance
with girlish admiration at this stammered tale of his, and her fingers
tremble when they touch the boy's in the transfer of his little burden.
Reuben walks away prouder yet; is not this sweet-faced girl, after all,
Amanda?
There come quarrels, however, with the academy teacher not so easily
smoothed over. The Doctor and the master hold long consultations.
Reuben, it is to be feared, has bad associates. The boy makes interest,
through Nat Boody, with the stage-driver; and one day the old ladies are
horrified at seeing the parson's son mounted on the box of the coach
beside the driver, and putting his boyish fingers to the test of
four-in-hand. Of course he is a truant that day from school, and toiling
back footsore and weary, after tea, he can give but a lame account of
himself. He brings, another time, a horrid fighting cur, (as Miss Eliza
terms it in her disgust,) for which he has bartered away the new muffler
that the spinster has knit. He thinks it a splendid bargain. Miss Johns
and the Doctor do not.
He is reported by credible witnesses as loitering about the tavern in
the summer nights, long after prayers are over at the parsonage, and the
lights are out: thus it is discovered, to the great horror of the
household, that by connivance with Phil he makes his way over the roof
of the kitchen from his chamber-window to join in these night forays.
After long consideration, in which Grandfather Handby is brought into
consultation, it is decided to place the boy for a while under the
charge of the latter for discipline, and with the hope that removal from
his town associates may work good. But within a fortnight after the
change is made, Grandfather Handby drives across the country in his
wagon, with Reuben seated beside him with a comic gravity on his face;
and the old gentleman, pleading the infirmities of age, and giving the
boy a farewell tap on the cheek, (for he loves him, though he has
whipped him almost daily,) restores him to the paternal roof.
At this crisis, Squire Elderkin--who, to tell truth, has a little fear
of the wayward propensities of the parson's son in misleading
Phil--recommends trial of the discipline of a certain Parson Brummem,
who fills the parish-pulpit upon Bolton Hill. This dignitary was a tall,
lank, leathern-faced man, of incorruptible zeal and stately gravity, who
held under his stern dominion a little flock of two hundred souls, and
who, eking out a narrow parochial stipend by the week-day office of
teaching, had gained large repute for his subjugation of refractory
boys.
A feeble little invalid wife cringed beside him along the journey of
life; and it would be pitiful to think that she had not long ago
entered, in way of remuneration, upon paths of pleasantness beyond the
grave.
Parson Brummem received Brother Johns, when he drove with Reuben to the
parsonage-door, on that wild waste of Bolton Hill, with all the unction
of manner that belonged to him; but it was so grave an unction as to
chill poor Reuben to the marrow of his bones. A week's experience only
dispersed the chill when the tingle of the parson's big rod wrought a
glow in him that was almost madness. Yet Reuben chafed not so much at
the whippings--to which he was well used--as at the dreariness of the
new home, the melancholy waste of common over which March winds blew all
the year, the pinched faces that met him without other recognition than,
"One o' Parson Brummem's b'ys." Nor indoors was the aspect more
inviting: a big red table, around which sat six fellow-martyrs with
their slates and geographies; a tall desk, at which Brummem indited his
sermons; and from time to time a little side-door opening timidly,
through which came a weary woman's voice, "Ezekiel, dear, one minute!"
at which the great man strides thither, and lends, his great ear to the
family council.
Ah, the long, weary mornings, when the sun, pouring through the
curtainless south windows a great blaze upon the oaken floor, lights up
for Reuben only the cobwebbed corners, the faded roundabouts of
fellow-martyrs, the dismal figures of Daboll, the shining tail-coat of
Master Brummem, as he stalks up and down from hour to hour, collecting
in this way his scattered thoughts for some new argumentative thrust of
the quill into the sixthly or the seventhly of his next week's sermon!
And the long and weary afternoons, when the sun with a mocking bounty
pours through the dusty and curtainless windows to the west, lighting
only again the gray and speckled roundabouts of the fagging boys, the
maps of Malte-Brun, and the shining forehead of the Brummem!
There is a dismal, graceless, bald air about town and house and master,
which is utterly revolting to the lad, whose childish feet had pattered
beside the tender Rachel along the embowered paths of Ashfield. The lack
of congeniality affronts his whole nature. In the keenness of his
martyrdom, (none the less real because fancied,) the leathern-faced,
gaunt Brummem takes the shape of some Giant Despair with bloody maw and
mace,--and he, the child of some Christiana, for whose guiding hand he
gropes vainly: she has gone before to the Celestial City!
The rod of the master does not cure the chronic state of moody rebellion
into which Reuben lapses, with these fancies on him. It drives him at
last to an act of desperation. The lesson in Daboll that day was a hard
one; but it was not the lesson, or his short-comings in it,--it was not
the hand of the master, which had been heavy on him,--but it was a
vague, dismal sense of the dreariness of his surroundings, of the
starched looks that met him, of the weary monotony, of the lack of
sympathy, which goaded him to the final overt act of rebellion,--which
made him dash his leathern-bound arithmetic full into the face of the
master, and then sit down, burying his face in his hands.
The stern doctrines of Parson Brummem had taught him, at least, a rigid
self-command. He did not strike the lad. But recovering from his
amazement, he says, "Very well, very well, Master Reuben, we will sleep
upon this"; and then, tapping at the inner door, "Keziah, make ready the
little chamber over the hall for Master Johns: he must be by himself
to-night: give him a glass of water and a slice of dry bread: nothing
else, Sir," (turning to Reuben now,) "until you come to me to-morrow at
nine, in this place, and ask my pardon"; and he motions him to the door.
Reuben staggers out,--staggers up the stairs into the dismal chamber. It
looks out only upon a bald waste of common. Shortly after, a slatternly
maid brings his prison fare, and, with a little kindly discretion, has
added secretly a roll of gingerbread. Reuben thanks her, and says,
"You're a good woman, Keziah; and I say, won't you fetch me my cap,
there's a good un; it's cold here." The maid, with great show of
caution, complies; a few minutes after, the parson comes, and, looking
in warningly, closes and locks the door outside.
A weary evening follows, in which thoughts of Adele, of nights at the
Elderkins', of Phil, of Rose, flash upon him, and spend their richness,
leaving him more madly disconsolate. Then come thoughts of the morning
humiliation, of the boys pointing their fingers at him after school.
"No, they sha'n't, by George!"
And with this decision he dropped asleep; with this decision ripened in
him, he woke at three in the morning,--waited for the hall clock to
strike, that he might be sure of his hour,--tied together the two sheets
of Mistress Brummem's bed, opened the window gently, dropped out his
improvised cable, slid upon it safely to the ground, and before day had
broken or any of the townsfolk were astir, had crossed all the more open
portion of the village, and by sunrise had plunged into the wooded
swamp-land which lay three miles westward toward the river.