A few days later David was walking across the fields on his way home:
it was past the middle of the afternoon.
At early candle-light that morning, the huge red stage-coach, leaving
town for his distant part of the country, had rolled, creaking and
rattling, to the dormitory entrance, the same stage that had conveyed
him thither. Throwing up his window he had looked out at the curling
white breath of the horses and at the driver, who, buried in coats and
rugs, and holding the lash of his whip in his mittened fist, peered up
and called out with no uncertain temper.
The lad was ready. He hastily carried down the family umbrella and the
Brussels carpet valise with its copious pink roses, looking strangely
out of season amid all that hoar frost. Then he leaped back upstairs
for something which had been added to his worldly goods since he
entered college--a small, cheap trunk, containing a few garments and
the priceless books. These things the driver stored in the boot of the
stage, bespattered with mud now frozen. Then, running back once more,
the lad seized his coat and hat, cast one troubled glance around the
meaningless room which had been the theatre of such a drama in his
life, went over to the little table, and blew out his Bible Student's
lamp forever; and hurrying down with a cordial "all ready," climbed to
the seat beside the driver and was whirled away.
He turned as he passed from the campus to take a last look at Morrison
College, standing back there on the hill, venerable, majestical,
tight-closed, its fires put out. As he crossed the city (for there were
passengers to be picked up and the mail-bag to be gotten), he took
unspoken leave of many other places: of the bookstore where he had
bought the masterpieces of his masters; of the little Italian
apple-man--who would never again have so simple a customer for his
slightly damaged fruit; of several tall, proud, well-frosted church
spires now turning rosy in the sunrise; of a big, handsome house
standing in a fashionable street, with black coal smoke pouring out of
the chimneys. There the friends of his boyhood "boarded"; there they
were now, asleep in luxurious beds, or gone away for the holidays, he
knew not which: all he did know was that they were gone far away from
him along life's other pathways.
Soon the shops on each side were succeeded by homesteads; gradually
these stood farther apart as farm-houses set back from the highroad;
the street had become a turnpike, they were in open country and the lad
was on his way to his father and mother.
In the afternoon, at one of the stops for watering horses, he had his
traps and trappings put out. From this place a mud road wound across
the country to his neighborhood; and at a point some two miles distant,
a pair of bars tapped it as an outlet and inlet for the travel on his
father's land.
Leaving his things at the roadside farmhouse with the promise that he
would return for them, the lad struck out--not by the lane, but
straight across country.
It was a mild winter day without wind, without character--one of the
days on which Nature seems to take no interest in herself and creates
no interest in others. The sky was overcrowded with low, ragged clouds,
without discernible order or direction. Nowhere a yellow sunbeam
glinting on any object, but vast jets of misty radiance shot downward
in far-diverging lines toward the world: as though above the clouds
were piled the waters of light and this were scant escaping spray.
He walked on, climbing the fences, coming on the familiar sights of
winter woods and fields. Having been away from them for the first time
and that during more than a year, with what feelings he now beheld them!
Crows about the corn shocks, flying leisurely to the stake-and-ridered
fence: there alighting with their tails pointing toward him and their
heads turned sideways over one shoulder; but soon presenting their
breasts seeing he did not hunt. The solitary caw of one of them--that
thin, indifferent comment of their sentinel, perched on the silver-gray
twig of a sycamore. In another field the startled flutter of field
larks from pale-yellow bushes of ground-apple. Some boys out
rabbit-hunting in the holidays, with red cheeks and gay woollen
comforters around their hot necks and jeans jackets full of Spanish
needles: one shouldering a gun, one carrying a game-bag, one eating an
apple: a pack of dogs and no rabbit. The winter brooks, trickling
through banks of frozen grass and broken reeds; their clear brown water
sometimes open, sometimes covered with figured ice.
Red cattle in one distant wood, moving tender-footed around the edge of
a pond. The fall of a forest tree sounding distinct amid the reigning
stillness--felled for cord wood. And in one field--right there before
him!--the chopping sound of busy hemp brakes and the sight of negroes,
one singing a hymn. Oh, the memories, the memories!
By and by he reached the edge of his father's land, climbed to the
topmost rail of the boundary fence and sat there, his eyes glued to the
whole scene. It lay outspread before him, the entirety of that farm. He
had never realized before how little there was of it, how little! He
could see all around it, except where the woods hid the division fence
on one side. And the house, standing in the still air of the winter
afternoon, with its rotting roof and low red chimneys partly obscured
by scraggy cedars--how small it had become! How poor, how wretched
everything--the woodpile, the cabin, the hen-house, the ice-house, the
barn! Was this any part of the great world? It was one picture of
desolation, the creeping paralysis of a house and farm. Did anything
even move?
Something did move. A column of blue smoke moved straight and thin from
the chimney of his father's and mother's room. In a far corner of the
stable lot, pawing and nozzling some remnants of fodder, were the old
horses. By the hay-rick he discovered one of the sheep, the rest being
on the farther side. The cows by and by filed slowly around from behind
the barn and entered the doorless milking stalls. Suddenly his dog
emerged from one of those stalls, trotting cautiously, then with a
playful burst of speed went in a streak across the lot toward the
kitchen. A negro man issued from the cabin, picked out a log, knocked
the ashes out of his pipe in the palm of his hand, and began to cut the
firewood for the night.
All this did not occur at once: he had been sitting there a long
time--heart-sick with the thought of the tragedy he was bringing home.
How could he ever meet them, ever tell them? How would they ever
understand? If he could only say to his father: "I have sinned and I
have broken your heart: but forgive me." But he could not say this: he
did not believe that he had done wrong. Yet all that he would now have
to show in their eyes would be the year of his wasted life, and a trunk
full of the books that had ruined him.
Ah, those two years before he had started to college, during which they
had lived happily together! Their pride in him! their self-denial,
affection--all because he was to be a scholar and a minister!
He fancied he could see them as they sat in the house this moment, not
dreaming he was anywhere near. One on each side of the fireplace; his
mother wearing her black dress and purple shawl: a ball of yarn and
perhaps a tea-cake in her lap; some knitting on her needles; she knit,
she never mended. But his father would be mending--leather perhaps, and
sewing, as he liked to sew, with hog bristles--the beeswax and the awls
lying in the bottom of a chair drawn to his side. There would be no
noises in the room otherwise: he could hear the stewing of the sap in
the end of a fagot, the ticking of one clock, the fainter ticking of
another in the adjoining room, like a disordered echo. They would not
be talking; they would be thinking of him. He shut his eyes, compressed
his lips, shook his head resolutely, and leaped down.
He had gone about twenty yards, when he heard a quick, incredulous bark
down by the house and his dog appeared in full view, looking up that
way, motionless. Then he came on running and barking resentfully, and a
short distance off stopped again.
"Captain," he called with a quivering voice.
With ears laid back and one cry of joy the dog was on him. The lad
stooped and drew him close. Neither at that moment had any articulate
speech nor needed it. As soon as he was released, the dog, after
several leaps toward his face, was off in despair either of expressing
or of containing his joy, to tell the news at the house. David
laggingly followed.
As he stepped upon the porch, piled against the wall beside the door
were fagots as he used to see them. When he reached the door itself, he
stopped, gazing foolishly at those fagots, at the little gray lichens
on them: he could not knock, he could not turn the knob without
knocking. But his step had been heard. His mother opened the door and
peered curiously out.
"Why, it's Davy!" she cried. "Davy! Davy!"
She dropped her knitting and threw her arms around him.
"David! David!" exclaimed his father, with a glad proud voice inside.
"Why, my son, my son!"
"Ah, he's sick--he's come home sick!" cried the mother, holding him a
little way off to look at his face. "Ah! the poor fellow's sick! Come
in, come in. And this is why we had no letter! And to think yesterday
was Christmas Day! And we had the pies and the turkey!"
"My son, are you unwell--have you been unwell? Sit here, lie here."
The lad's face was overspread with ghastly pallor; he had lost control
of himself.
"I have not been sick. I am perfectly well," he said at length, looking
from one to the other with forlorn, remorseful affection. They had
drawn a chair close, one on each side of him. "How are you, mother? How
are you, father?"
The change in HIM!--that was all they saw. As soon as he spoke, they
knew he was in good health. Then the trouble was something else, more
terrible. The mother took refuge in silence as a woman instinctively
does at such times; the father sought relief in speech.
"What is the matter? What happened?"