Andrew was eager to see Miss Moore again,--although he felt a masculine
irritation against her for taking umbrage at well-meant and thoroughly
sensible advice. Perhaps at the bottom of this there lay a _soupçon_
of annoyance with himself, that he had spoken so abruptly to her upon
the subject, mingled with a compassionate remembrance of what Mr.
Morris had told him of her delicacy. He was very glad to find an
excuse to go up to his woods, where they stretched past the Morris
house; and a pretence that he was looking for suitable trees to cut
down for foundations for his hay-stacks, justified him in his own eyes
for strolling among his trees in very leisurely, but apparently
disinterested fashion. He must, however, have been paying some
attention to the house on his right, for when Mrs. Morris ran out from
the old orchard behind the house to the barns, calling, "Father,
Father, where are you? Come here, quick, do, hey Father!" Andrew
promptly responded, leaping over the fence and speedily reaching her
side.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"Land of love! But I'm glad you've come, if she did call you
long-legged: all the better for her now if you be. I hope she ain't
fell by this time. Wonder where Father is. I never seen such a man;
always gone when he's wanted. I declare it beats me where he gets to.
It's enough to drive--"
"What is it, Mrs. Morris?" demanded Andrew, his heart misgiving him.
"Can't I help?"
"'Deed you can! And to think of her calling you long-legged, and the
very next day having to depend on you for her life, may be, or to save
one of her own legs being broke--"
Mrs. Morris got no further. A little faint cry struck Andrew's ears,
coming from the direction of the orchard.
"For heaven's sake, come on, and show me what's wrong," he cried.
"Don't stand there palavering."
"Why, sakes alive! Don't you know? Miss Moore got up in a tree and--"
But by this time they were in the orchard. A glance explained the
situation to Andrew.
High up on an apple-tree branch stood Miss Moore, clinging with both
arms round a limb above her, her face white as death, her eyes dilated
with fear. A ladder's head was within six inches of her feet. Andrew
was up it in an instant. He knew the trouble. Only last year a hired
man of his had ascended a tree to pick fruit. He was seized with this
ague of dizzy fear, and flinging himself against a stout limb, had held
on like grim death. It took two men to get him down; his terror made
him clasp the tree convulsively. It was days before he was well again.
Miss Moore had evidently not seen him, nor heard his coming. As he
slipped his arms about her, she gave a great start, and turned to look
at him with eyes which seemed to expect some tangible shape of horror,
evolved out of her illogical and intangible fear.
When she saw who it was, her eyes filled and her lips trembled.
"Oh, take me down. Do take me down."
"Yes, indeed, I will," said Andrew, with quiet assurance. "Let go of
the branch."
She shuddered. The spell of the vertigo was yet upon her. Her arms
tightened upon the bough.
"Do take me down," she pleaded childishly. "I'm frightened."
"My dear, you must loose your hold," said Andrew, steadily.
Then, with one arm about her, he reached up and one by one undid the
clinging fingers, gathering them into his palm as he did so. With a
force that seemed cruel, he pulled down the slender wrist and placed
her hand upon his shoulder. Her face expressed the agony of dizziness.
With blind instinct she put her other arm about his neck and clasped it
close. He felt her form relax, and braced himself in time to sustain
her dead weight as she fainted.
The descent of the ladder was easy enough. Andrew had carried many a
bag of wheat up and down his steep granary stairs. The principle of
balancing an inert woman is much the same. He carried her into the
house and laid her down upon the broad home-made couch, covered with
dark brown calico, that stood in the kitchen. Mrs. Morris had talked
volubly during these proceedings, but only after he laid Judith down,
did Andrew begin to hear what she was saying.
"She does look gashly!" said Mrs. Morris. "Whatever would I do if she
was to be took! And this minute she looks fit for laying out."
"Goodness alive," said Andrew. "Can't you do anything to bring her to?
Bathe her face, or something?"
Mrs. Morris flew for water and brought it, trembling. "I say, Andrew,
can't you do it? I'm so shook--I never could bear to touch corpses,
and--"
Andrew gave her a venomous look, dipped his handkerchief in the water,
and began clumsily to bathe the girl's brow. Her senses were already
reasserting themselves. She put up her hands to her face: they
fluttered nervously. Andrew caught one of them and held it between his
own brown ones, noting that her wrists were red, almost bruised,
creased in rough outline of the apple-tree's bark.
"Will you give me some water?" she asked.
Mrs. Morris brought a blue and white cup. Andrew, kneeling on the
braided mat before the couch, slipped his arm under Judith and put the
cup to her lips. She took a mouthful, and fell into a shivering fit of
cold.
Mrs. Morris rose to this emergency. Ague was an old familiar friend;
"shakes" had no terrors for her. In a moment she had found a thick
coverlet and placed it over Judith.
"You stay by her," she said to Andrew, "and I'll make her a draught of
hot elderberry syrup in two shakes."
Then she was off to the lean-to kitchen, and they heard her rattling
among her kettles. Andrew still knelt upon the mat holding Judith's
hand with praiseworthy absent-mindedness.
"Are you better now?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, her chin quivering as she tried to keep her teeth from
chattering. "It was so good of you to take me down. So awfully good.
I'm very stupid, but I couldn't help it."
"Of course you couldn't. I had a man who behaved much worse than you
did in the same situation. Ever so much. Indeed, you behaved very
well."
There was silence; then Judith began: "Mr. Cutler, I--er--called you a
name to Mrs. Morris the other day."
"Did you? What did you call me?"
"Will you forgive me?"
"Tell me what you called me first."
"Oh!"
"Forgiveness is worth that, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes. I called you--long-legged, and--I think, I said you were
rude."
Andrew suppressed an inclination to laugh, being minded not to belittle
the value of his absolution.
"Well," he said, "I'll forgive the first part of it because you see
it's so awfully true, and as for the second, well--I think you meant
'sensible'; anyhow, I forgive you for it all."
Miss Moore experienced a mental sensation she would have called
"curling up." A pretty cool specimen, this young farmer! She had
thought he would have fallen into faltering excuses. She was really
ill, though faint--cold. Mrs. Morris came in with the steaming cup of
black syrup. Judith had forgotten till that moment that Andrew held
her hand: of course, Andrew had been unconscious of it all along. But
as Mrs. Morris appeared in the door a swift intuition of the state of
affairs came to Judith. She gave a little gesture of withdrawal, and
Andrew released her lingers slowly, rising with praiseworthy calmness
to get himself a chair.
While Judith tried to drink the hot syrup, Mrs. Morris explained that
Miss Moore had never seen a bird's nest with eggs in it, and there
being an oriole's nest in the apple-tree, "Father" had put up the
ladder for her to see it, and--Andrew knew the rest.
"Tree fright is a lot worse than stage fright," said Miss Moore:
oracularly, but this was a dark saying to both her listeners. Mrs.
Morris talked and talked. Miss Moore had long since lain back on the
big brown pillow; her face was flushed, her eyes sleepy. Andrew would
have listened to Mrs. Morris forever, provided he could have watched
Miss Moore at the same time. But at length Mrs. Morris rose and moved
towards her summer kitchen, intimating that her chores needed tending
to, so Andrew perforce had to take his leave.
"Good-bye, just now," he said. "May I come back and take you to see
some birds' nests nearer the ground?"
"Oh, do," she said. "And I haven't thanked you half enough for helping
me to-day."
"Indeed you have. Good-bye, just now."
"Good-bye," she said softly.
He was just at the door, when a soft but interrogative "Ahem" from the
couch attracted his attention. He turned. Miss Judith Moore did not
look at him, but with cautious precision she drew the dark blue
coverlet up a tiny bit. His eyes became riveted upon the point of a
bronze slipper that gradually grew from the shadow of the covering
until a whole foot was revealed--a foot at a defiant pose and wearing a
little bronze slipper with an exaggeratedly high heel. Andrew's eyes
grew daring, and he half turned.
Miss Moore seemed to telescope, for head and foot disappeared beneath
the coverlet at once. He paused a moment, and then departed.
As he went across the fields he thought of the little scene he had
left, and, more shame to him, his thoughts were not concerned wholly
with the bad effects of wearing high heels, nor yet of the impropriety
of Miss Moore's retaliation for his high and mighty granting of
forgiveness. Indeed, as he sat for a moment kicking his heels on the
top bar of the first fence, he was speculating solely as to whether
"they" were open-work or not! He was thinking he would have given his
best gun to be able to tell, and summed up his reflections with a
dissatisfied little growl, "Of all the mean, miserable, stingy
glimpses!"
As he walked along, his face changed. After climbing the hill-side to
his garden wall, he passed an apple-tree in hill bloom at the gate. He
paused beneath it. His face was pale and serious, his eyes tender. He
thought of Judith's russet head as it had leaned upon his shoulder: he
looked down at his old velvet coat, where it had rested, and fancied
some vague perfume rose from it to his face. He remembered he had held
her in his arms, and recalled the red marks upon her delicate wrists.
Those wrists had been curved about his neck.
He could not realize the full height and depth of what had come to him,
but his whole being groped for the truth even as he stood beneath the
tree.
As he walked slowly up the narrow bricked walk to the house, he noticed
how the chestnut roots and the frost together had heaved up the bricks
and rendered the walk irregular. He wondered anxiously if she could
walk over it in those shoes, and as he reached his door, which stood
open under its old-fashioned porch, revealing a dusky cool vista
beyond, he suddenly saw, as in a vision, a woman's shape stand between
the lintels, waiting for him!--a woman with slender hands outstretched
in welcome, grave grey eyes, soft hair, tender lips: the woman he
loved: _his own_. As this last thought, the sweetest thought man's
heart holds, formulated itself in his mind, Andrew knew the truth. He
turned down the path, past the apple-tree, through the lindens again,
and across his fields, until once more he looked upon the house wherein
she rested. He looked at it long from the shelter of his trees, his
whole existence resolved into a chaos of uncertain self-communings,
until a voice like an angel's seemed to whisper of comfort and to sing
of hope.
Then he went home, and at four o'clock betook himself to the
school-house to attend the meeting in regard to appointing a new
teacher.
The village school-house stood at the end of the street farthest away
from the Cutler homestead. It was a bleak, stone building, with a
wooden porch--a gaunt, bare, uninviting-looking building, with none of
those picturesque adjuncts of climbing vines and overarching trees,
associated so often with thoughts of a country school.
It had a perky, self-satisfied little bell-house on top, and its date,
1865, was rudely carved on a big stone in the peak of the north gable.
It had eight windows--three at each side, two at one end. In winter,
the wood for the box stove was always piled up outside before these.
There were always complaints of the school-house being dark in winter,
yet it never occurred to any one to select a different site for the
wood-pile.
The interior of the school-house corresponded in dinginess to the
outside. The plaster walls were sadly soiled, particularly beneath the
broad window seats, where the children sat kicking their heels whilst
they ate their lunches at noon, for the scholars were drawn principally
from the outlying farm-houses. A long length of irregularly jointed
pipes led the smoke from the box stove at the end to an exit over the
teacher's desk. Little tin pails were hung at intervals along this, to
catch the black liquid distilled from the soot. The other adornments
of the room consisted of a long blackboard, a globe, and some big
lettered tablets, round which the teacher was wont to gather the infant
class and teach them their letters.
In the politics of a little village like Ovid, the smallest public
measures became magnified to grotesque importance. The usual custom
was for the school trustees to sit in private session first, when any
particular business was to be arranged, say, the selection of a
teacher, and when this was arranged the doors were flung wide and the
meeting was "open." These open school meetings were always well
attended. They were the classes in which embryotic statesmen acquired
the political alphabet, the ABC of political procedure, the manner of
putting a motion, taking a vote, making a nomination, and the correct
order of precedence governing the motions and amendments. There too,
was acquired the first great requisite of a politician,--the art of
saying non-committal things in a most convincing tone of voice, and of
treating with much politeness those whom one held in secret abhorrence.
There were two offices, those of school trustee and pathmaster, and
these two were equal in power and glory. True, they were barren
honours, but they ofttimes led to better things. The school trustee
had the higher position in one respect: he was chosen by the people at
first hand. The pathmaster, upon the contrary, was appointed by the
Council. It is needless to say the school trustee smiled in calm
superiority at the pathmaster, and the latter in turn felt the making
of the roads wherein the whole community walked, was as holy an office
as the task of guiding the juvenile wanderers into the school, and
seeing that when there, they trod the common road to knowledge, it
being well known that there is no royal road thereto.
When Andrew arrived at the school-house, the other two trustees, Hiram
Green who kept the village store, and Hen Braddon, were present. They
immediately entered upon a discussion of the teacher question. The
application of Sam Symmons' Suse lay upon the table, written out upon
foolscap paper, in big round hand, with many flourishing capitals,
rejoicing in "shaded" heads and beautifully involved tails.
"I tell you Suse is a good list with a pen," said Hen Braddon, with
conviction, and the other two agreed. "She ain't no slouch at spelling
either," said Hiram Green. The other two agreed with this also. Then
Andrew took up his parable.
"Yes," he said, "Suse is quite smart, and being bred right here in Ovid
seems to give her a claim to the school. I suggest we just appoint
her."
"Well, it's as well to be cautious," said Hiram Green.
"It'll save advertising," said Hen Braddon.
"Suppose we just decide on it then," said Andrew.
"Well," said Hiram Green, "well, I ain't got no objections to Suse as
Suse, but what I think is, two hundred and fifty is enough to pay a
woman for what a man got three hundred."
Andrew sneered. He didn't have a sweet expression when he did that.
"Don't you think," he said, gravely--"don't you think Suse might
include cleaning the school-house and lighting the fires in winter for
the two-fifty, being she's a woman?"
"No," said Hiram, reflectively; "old Mrs. Slick has done it so long."
"But it would save twenty-five dollars," argued Andrew, with meek
persuasion.
"Well," said Hiram, "Mrs. Slick needs that. She's owin' already, and
she might's well draw the money off the school taxes as off the
council."
"Oh, Mrs. Slick is owing, is she?" queried Andrew, with solicitude. "I
hope she pays you all right. Well, about Suse. Being she's a woman,
don't you think you could fix it so's she'd chop the wood for winter?
That would save twelve dollars."
A nasty red flickered up to Hiram's face. He had thought Andrew's
proposition about the taking care of the school thoroughly genuine.
"Oh," he said, "I ain't particular whether she gets the three hundred
or the two-fifty, though I hope you won't deny when nomination comes
round that you deliberately threw away fifty dollars of the people's
money."
"You maybe quite sure I won't deny anything that's true," said Andrew,
hotly. "And as for throwing away the people's money, well--some of the
teachers, so far as I can recollect, got their salaries raised pretty
frequently. Of course, I wasn't on the School Board then, so I only
_heard_ why it was done. I can't say of my own knowledge."
The fact was that Mr. Hiram Green had several unappetizing daughters,
and, as he had been school trustee almost ever since any one
remembered, it seemed good in his sight that the teachers, over whom he
wielded such paternal authority in such a parental way, should return
the compliment by adopting a filial _rôle_, and become sons not only in
spirit but in name. But, alas, for the vanity of human wishes! the
perfidious teachers had accepted all Hiram's kindness, had slept in the
best bedroom and partaken of his best fruit, had ridden by him to town
and accompanied the Misses Green to tea-meetings and festivals, had
abode in the Green household over Sundays, had gone with them to
church, and at choir practice had faithfully served them, and then,
with the extra money they had been able to save through Hiram's
hospitality and the fortuitous "raise" in their salaries, they had
shaken the dust of Ovid from off their feet, and departed to fresh
fields and pastures new, to marry the girls they had been engaged to
all along or to study for one of the higher professions. Never a one
of them all left a love gauge with a Miss Green, and in the bosom of
the Green family many were the revilings cast upon those teachers, who,
with a goodly countenance and a better appetite, had devoured Mrs.
Green's layer cakes and preserves, feasted upon Hiram's peaches and
driven his horses upon the false pretences of "intentions." However,
in fairness to the teachers, one must remember that "some have
greatness thrust upon them." Foolish, indeed, would be the man who
deliberately offended his trustees, and Hiram's hospitality was usually
somewhat pressingly proffered.
This last teacher--bad luck to him!--had described himself in his
application as a single man, when at the beginning of the summer
vacation he sent in his certificates for consideration in response to
Hiram's advertisement, and before these holidays had passed he married
and came alone to Ovid to take up school in the autumn, and had eaten
five teas and two dinners at Hiram Green's before he asked the eldest
daughter, with whom he frequently found himself alone, where she
thought he could rent a suitable house for himself and wife.
"This is very sudden," murmured Miss Green.
"Well, I don't know," he said, in a practical tone of voice, "I've been
nearly two weeks away from her now, and I can't stand it much longer."
Miss Green gathered his meaning then, and never another tea did that
teacher sit down to in Hiram Green's, and indeed the atmosphere of Ovid
had been made so frigid for the little smooth-haired, blue-eyed girl he
had married, that he soon sent her away, and finding he could not do
without her, finally sent in his own resignation. The Greens had a big
family connection, and Ovid was made a cold place for those whom they
did not like. The Cutler house on the hill and poor old Sam's stubborn
door were about the only portals in Ovid that an enemy of the Greens
might pass.
Henry Braddon acted as a soft, effective buffer between Hiram and
Andrew, who both always wanted their own way, and wanted it at once.
"Best let Suse have the three hundred," said he: "old Reilly will be
foreclosing on Sam soon if he don't raise the money somehow." Now,
Reilly was the local usurer, the one hard-hearted, close-fisted old
Shylock so often found in rural districts; the one man within a radius
of twenty miles who had made a fortune. He was reputedly worth seventy
or eighty thousand dollars; possibly he was worth fifty thousand. But
when that is divided into mortgages, ranging from two or three hundred
dollars up to, perhaps, one or two of five thousand, one can realize
what a power he was in the country side; how many heart-strings he had
tangled in his grasping fingers; from how many couches his shadowy
outstretched hand banished sleep; at how many tables his hollow, gaping
palm was seen, as the children put out their hands for food; before how
many hearths his spectral presence ever sat with a look of anticipatory
proprietorship. He was as cruel as the grave, and as relentless as
time. Not one ten minutes of grace did ever any one get from old
Reilly. The children looked at him with awe as he drove past in his
old-fashioned buggy, a hatchet-faced old man, thin, cold-blooded, with
big knuckly hands holding the reins. Hen Braddon knew what he was
doing when he referred to him. The week before, Hiram Green's brother
had been turned neck and crop out of his farm by this same Reilly. No
fear that Hiram would let him get another "haul" off old Sam if he
could help it.
"That's so," said Hiram, with alacrity. "Andrew, you just make out the
appointment, will you? and you post it, Hen, when you go home."
Andrew having gained his point, was generously sorry that he had
twitted Hiram about the salary matter, so in the subsequent open
meeting he let Hiram do all the talking, looking the while at a dark
stain on the ceiling, which a coat of whitewash, put on yearly since he
was a boy, had failed to obliterate. He would never forget how that
ink went up, and that might be the very same old box stove over in the
corner, the one upon which he set that tightly corked bottle of frozen
ink to thaw, taking precaution at the same time to be out of the road
when it exploded. It had been a particularly brilliant "go off"
that--straight up to the ceiling and down in a shower of black
spatters. Andrew could see the fun of it yet, and found himself
involuntarily looking at his palms, as though some traces of the
blisters the teacher's rawhide had raised might still be there. Andrew
recalled many other such like exploits, and looked at his smooth, brown
palms, thinking how many thorough thrashings he had had, when suddenly
a line of poetry he had read some days before, came into his head:
"Lay thy sweet hands in mine, and trust to me."
He sat through the meeting quite oblivious of what was going on,
missing what was one of the finest oratorical flights of Hiram Green's
career. He was speaking of the departing teacher, and he made many
scathing remarks anent the legends and pictures upon the walls, which,
as he brilliantly put it, "indicated an entire and deplorable lack of
discipline upon the part of the present teacher." The said teacher
smiled and said nothing. Had Hiram looked closely at the pictures he
would have found that a good many of the drawings were caricatures of
himself and his family. In one rude picture the four Misses Green were
represented as having hold of a man, who struggled in the midst. By
means of certain facial peculiarities, exaggerated as only a genius or
a school-boy would dare exaggerate, any one in Ovid could have
identified the Misses Green and their victim, a former teacher. One of
the ladies held a coat sleeve she had rent off; another a portion of a
coat-tail; and over this group the artist had printed in fair round
script, "For his garment they cast lots." Under the circumstances the
applicability of this would have been a credit to Du Maurier, and be it
said in defence of the school-boy artist, it was probably written with
no thought of being impious. Your school-boy caricaturist catches the
spirit of the times.
The participants in the school meeting were just departing from the
school-house doors, when to them came old Sam Symmons. He had just
been told by Suse of her application, and an almost stifling eagerness
was filling his heart. If she got it, it meant so much: but he
presented his usual suave, smiling old face to Hen Braddon and Hiram
Green, and said nothing. As Andrew passed the old man looked at him.
That look of age to green manhood, how pitiful it is! Andrew paused a
moment. "We're going to have an Ovid teacher this time," he said.
"You'll tell Suse, won't you, Mr. Symmons, that her appointment is in
the mails?"
Poor old Sam! It was harder for him to carry off good fortune with
nonchalance than it was to remain impassive in the face of bad. He had
had so much more practice in the latter form of self-control. He drew
his breath deeply, and his lips quivered a little. Andrew saw this.
"Don't forget to tell her, Mr. Symmons," he added, and went on his way.
Forget!
"Meeting over, Mr. Braddon? Meeting over?" Sam queried, falling into
the irregular ranks of the moving men. "Well, well I remember the time
your grandfather and I were school trustees, and he was a shoemaker,
and a better man with lasts than letters. In his young days he used to
go about from house to house making the shoes. He had regular places
for calling; two pairs a year was the allowance--well, that custom has
long gone by. Anyhow, we were both trustees, and one day we went out
to the Beechwood School, section No. 6 now. Well, the minister was
there, too, and Squire Harkness--both long dead now--brothers they
were. One of the children handed up her slate for your grandfather to
look at, and he, holding it in front of him at arm's length, said, with
consideration seemingly to its merits, 'Fair, very fair,' which was
right enough truly; but when your grandfather held it over to the rest
of us, 'twas plain to be seen he had had the slate upside down. Yes,
he was ambitious, too, your grandfather was, and got on well in the
world; he even bought him a big silver watch. Watches weren't so
plentiful in those days. You didn't get a watch in the pocket of every
suit of clothes you bought then, as the papers would show you do now.
And when we asked your grandfather what time it was, as we would
frequently do, being minded to please him, he would take out his watch,
look at it with consideration, and hold it out to us saying, 'Who'd ha'
thought 'twas that time o' day,' in surprise seemingly, which was right
smart, for he never learned to read time, your grandfather didn't. But
a good business man he was, and a good neighbour, as many a poor body
knew."
Old Sam and his following straggled in twos and threes up the street,
past Bill Aikins' house, where Bill stood in the doorway smoking,
having just helped his wife Kate, _née_ Horne, hang up the day's
washing, school meetings being in his wife's opinion too provocative of
idleness, the idleness which the devil improves, to be indulged in by
Bill.
Bill's house, albeit small, had a particularly aggressive look. It had
a door in the centre, and a window with red-painted sash on either
side. These windows always shone effulgently clean. Whether this
brilliancy of pane or the vermilion paint produced the effect, it is
difficult to say, but certain it is that Bill's house always looked as
though it were about to spring on the road, which was, figuratively,
much the same as the attitude of Bill's wife towards him.
Bill Aikins had originally been a boy brought out by one of the
benevolent English societies, which gather up the scum of their own
cities and trust to the more sparkling atmosphere of the New World to
aerate it into "respectable and useful citizens." Bill Aikins had
taken French leave of the minister with whom the Horne had placed him.
A plenitude of prayers and a paucity of what Bill had called "hot
wittles," decided him upon this step. He wandered to Ovid, and for
many years had been "hired man" to the various farmers within ten miles
of the village. He was a good worker, but lacked ballast, and was
rapidly degenerating into a sot when Kate Horne married him, and, as
the boys expressed it, "brought him up standing."
The men greeted Bill pleasantly, and Bill responded genially, trying to
look as if he was unconscious of Kate's criticisms upon the men
passing--a somewhat difficult thing to accomplish, as Kate spoke so
loudly from the room behind that her remarks were perfectly audible to
the subjects of them.
One by one the crowd dwindled away, and then old Sam "putting his best
foot foremost," as he would have said, hurried home and told Suse of
her good fortune. She was very elated, was Suse, and kept murmuring to
herself, "I'll just show them Greens what's what."
* * * * * *
Long after the last light had twinkled out in the village, a shaft of
light streamed across the old garden of the house on the hill. For all
the calm of Andrew's heart was gone. The peace of the first acceptance
of the fact that he loved this stranger girl had vanished. He got down
on his knees, reached under the bed and pulled out an old,
old-fashioned little chest, covered with untanned cowhide, whose brown
and white patches were studded with rows of big brass nails. It held
the books over which his mother's pretty dark head had bent so often,
close by that other proud one, which soon lay humbly enough in its
kindred dust. It was no unusual thing for Andrew to spend half the
night poring over these books. There was a fat little copy of
Shakespeare, with ruinously small print; a quaint little leather volume
of Francis Quarles, George Herbert's poetry; Suckling's and a
subscription copy of the Queen's Wake, "dedicated to the Princess
Charlotte by a shepherd in the Highlands of Scotland." These, with a
few others, had formed his mother's library. Getting them out, he
looked for certain passages he knew well--passages that had wrung his
heart before this with their description of unattainable sweetness and
love--passages that had almost made him despair, and yet, not wholly,
for he had dreamed a dream of one day going forth to seek and _find_ a
Beatrice, a Juliet, a Desdemona, a Rosalind--all in one divine
combination of womanhood, worthy to have been addressed in the immortal
sonnets. And, lo! the spring had brought her--would the summer give
her to him? The kindly summer that gives the flower to the bee, the
sun to the flower, the blue sky to the sun, and all the earth to joy.
Surely--and but a mile away Judith slept, dreaming, but not of song.
And over the waters that quickened with insect life, through the air
all astir with the scents and savours of spring, athwart the earth that
was quivering with the growth of all things green--summer came one day
nearer.