After the bargain was completed and the timber merchant had gone away,
Jehiel Hawthorn walked stiffly to the pine-tree and put his horny old fist
against it, looking up to its spreading top with an expression of hostile
exultation in his face. The neighbor who had been called to witness the
transfer of Jehiel's woodland looked at him curiously.
"That was quite a sight of money to come in without your expectin', wa'n't
it?" he said, fumbling awkwardly for an opening to the question he burned
to ask.
Jehiel did not answer. The two old men stood silent, looking down the
valley, lying like a crevasse in a glacier between the towering white
mountains. The sinuous course of the frozen river was almost black under
the slaty sky of March.
"Seems kind o' providential, havin' so much money come to you just now,
when your sister-in-law's jest died, and left you the first time in your
life without anybody you got to stay and see to, don't it?" commented the
neighbor persistently.
Jehiel made a vague sign with his head.
"I s'pose likely you'll be startin' aout to travel and see foreign parts,
same's you've always planned, won't you--or maybe you cal'late you be too
old now?"
Jehiel gave no indication that he had heard. His faded old blue eyes were
fixed steadily on the single crack in the rampart of mountains, through
which the afternoon train was just now leaving the valley. Its whistle
echoed back hollowly, as it fled away from the prison walls into the great
world.
The neighbor stiffened in offended pride. "I bid you good-night, Mr.
Hawthorn," he said severely, and stumped down the steep, narrow road
leading to the highway in the valley.
After he had disappeared Jehiel turned to the tree and leaned his forehead
against it. He was so still he seemed a part of the great pine. He stood
so till the piercing chill of evening chilled him through, and when he
looked again about him it was after he had lived his life all through in a
brief and bitter review.
It began with the tree and it ended with the tree, and in spite of the
fever of unrest in his heart it was as stationary as any rooted creature
of the woods. When he was eleven and his father went away to the Civil
War, he had watched him out of sight with no sorrow, only a burning envy
of the wanderings that lay before the soldier. A little later, when it was
decided that he should go to stay with his married sister, since she was
left alone by her husband's departure to the war, he turned his back on
his home with none of a child's usual reluctance, but with an eager
delight in the day-long drive to the other end of the valley. That was the
longest journey he had ever taken, the man of almost three-score thought,
with an aching resentment against Fate.
Still, those years with his sister, filled with labor beyond his age as
they were, had been the happiest of his life. In an almost complete
isolation the two had toiled together five years, the most impressionable
of his life; and all his affection centered on the silent, loving, always
comprehending sister. His own father and mother grew to seem far away and
alien, and his sister came to be like a part of himself. To her alone of
all living souls had he spoken freely of his passion for adventuring far
from home, which devoured, his boy-soul. He was six-teen when her husband
finally came back from the war, and he had no secrets from the young
matron of twenty-six, who listened with such wide tender eyes of sympathy
to his half-frantic outpourings of longing to escape from the dark, narrow
valley where his fathers had lived their dark, narrow lives.
The day before he went back to his own home, now so strange to him, he was
out with her, searching for some lost turkey-chicks, and found one with
its foot caught in a tangle of rusty wire. The little creature had beaten
itself almost to death in its struggle to get away. Kneeling in the grass,
and feeling the wild palpitations of its heart under his rescuing hand, he
had called to his sister, "Oh, look! Poor thing! It's 'most dead, and yet
it ain't really hurt a mite, only desperate, over bein' held fast." His
voice broke in a sudden wave of sympathy: "Oh, ain't it _terrible_ to feel
so!"
For a moment the young mother put her little son aside and looked at her
brother with brooding eyes. A little later she said with apparent
irrelevance, "Jehiel, as soon as you're a man grown, I'll help you to get
off. You shall be a sailor, if you like, and go around the world, and
bring back coral to baby and me."
A chilling premonition fell on the lad. "I don't believe it!" he said,
with tears in his eyes. "I just believe I've got to stay here in this hole
all my life."
His sister looked off at the tops of the trees. Finally, "Surely He shall
deliver thee from the snare of the fowler," she quoted dreamily.
When she came to see him and their parents a few months later, she brought
him a little square of crimson silk, on which she had worked in tiny
stitches, "Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler." She
explained to her father and mother that it was a "text-ornament" for
Jehiel to hang up over his desk; but she drew the boy aside and showed him
that the silk was only lightly caught down to the foundation.
"Underneath is another text," she said, "and when your day of freedom
comes I want you should promise me to cut the stitches, turn back the
silk, and take the second text for your motto, so you'll remember to be
properly grateful. This is the second text." She put her hands on his
shoulders and said in a loud, exultant voice, "My soul is escaped as a
bird out of the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and I am
escaped."
For answer the boy pulled her eagerly to the window and pointed to a young
pine-tree that stood near the house.
"Sister, that tree's just as old as I be. I've prayed to God, and I've
promised myself that before it's as tall, as the ridge-pole of the house,
I'll be on my way."
As this scene came before his eyes, the white-haired man, leaning against
the great pine, looked up at the lofty crown of green wreathing the
giant's head and shook his fist at it. He hated every inch of its height,
for every inch meant an enforced renunciation that had brought him
bitterness and a sense of failure.
His sister had died the year after she had given him the double text, and
his father the year after that. He was left thus, the sole support of his
ailing mother, who transferred to the silent, sullen boy the irresistible
rule of complaining weakness with which she had governed his father. It
was thought she could not live long, and the boy stood in terror of a
sudden death brought on by displeasure at some act of his. In the end,
however, she died quietly in her bed, an old woman of seventy-three,
nursed by her daughter-in-law, the widow of Jehiel's only brother. Her
place in the house was taken by Jehiel's sister-in-law, a sickly, helpless
woman, alone in the would except for Jehiel, and all the neighbors
congratulated him on having a housekeeper ready to his hand. He said
nothing.
By that time, indeed, he had sunk into a harsh silence on all topics. He
went through the exhausting routine of farming with an iron-like
endurance, watched with set lips the morning and afternoon trains leave
the valley, and noted the growth of the pine-tree with a burning heart.
His only recreation was collecting time-tables, prospectuses of steamship
companies, and what few books of travel he could afford. The only society
he did not shun was that of itinerant peddlers or tramps, and occasionally
a returned missionary on a lecture tour.
And always the pine-tree had grown, insolent in the pride of a creature
set in the right surroundings. The imprisoned man had felt himself dwarfed
by its height. But now, he looked up at it again, and laughed aloud. It
had come late, but it had come. He was fifty-seven years old, almost
three-score, but all his life was still to be lived. He said to himself
that some folks lived their lives while they did their work, but he had
done all his tasks first, and now he could live. The unexpected arrival of
the timber merchant and the sale of that piece of land he'd never thought
would bring him a cent--was not that an evident sign that Providence was
with him. He was too old and broken now to work his way about as he had
planned at first, but here had come this six hundred dollars like rain
from the sky. He would start as soon as he could sell his stock.
The thought reminded him of his evening chores, and he set off for the
barn with a fierce jubilation that it was almost the last time he would
need to milk. How far he wondered, could he go on that money? He hurried
through his work and into the house to his old desk. The faded
text-ornament stood on the top shelf, but he did not see it, as he hastily
tumbled out all the time tables and sailing-lists. The habit of looking at
them with the yearning bitterness of unreconciled deprivation was still so
strong on him that even as he handled them eagerly, he hated them for the
associations of years of misery they brought back to him.
Where should he go? He was dazed by the unlimited possibilities before
him. To Boston first, as the nearest seaport. He had taken the trip in his
mind so many times that he knew the exact minute when the train would
cross the State line and he would be really escaped from the net which had
bound him all his life. From Boston to Jamaica as the nearest place that
was quite quite different from Vermont. He had no desire to see Europe or
England. Life there was too much like what he had known. He wanted to be
in a country where nothing should remind him of his past. From Jamaica
where? His stiff old fingers painfully traced out a steamship line to the
Isthmus and thence to Colombia. He knew nothing about that country. All
the better. It would be the more foreign. Only this he knew, that nobody
in that tropical country "farmed it," and that was where he wanted to go.
From Colombia around the Cape to Argentina. He was aghast at the cost, but
instantly decided that he would go steerage. There would be more real
foreigners to be seen that way, and his money would go twice as far.
To Buenos Ayres, then. He did not even attempt to pronounce this name,
though its strange, inexplicable look on the page was a joy to him. From
there by muleback and afoot over the Andes to Chile. He knew something
about that trip. A woman who had taught in the Methodist missionary school
in Santiago de Chile had taken that journey, and he had heard her give a
lecture on it. He was the sexton of the church and heard all the lectures
free. At Santiago de Chile (he pronounced it with a strange distortion of
the school-teacher's bad accent) he would stay for a while and just live
and decide what to do next. His head swam with dreams and visions, and his
heart thumped heavily against his old ribs. The clock striking ten brought
him back to reality. He stood up with a gesture of exultation almost
fierce. "That's just the time when the train crosses the State line!" he
said.
He slept hardly at all that night, waking with great starts, and imagining
himself in strange foreign places, and then recognizing with a scornful
familiarity the worn old pieces of furniture in his room. He noticed at
these times that it was very cold, and lifelong habit made him reflect
that he would better go early to the church because it would be hard to
get up steam enough to warm the building before time for service. After he
had finished his morning chores and was about to start he noticed that the
thermometer stood at four above zero.
That was certainly winter temperature; the snow lay like a heavy shroud on
all the dead valley, but the strange blind instinct of a man who has lived
close to the earth stirred within him. He looked at the sky and the
mountains and held up his bare palm. "I shouldn't be surprised if the
spring break-up was near," he said. "I guess this is about the last winter
day we'll get."
The church was icy cold, and he toiled in the cellar, stuffing wood into
the flaming maw of the steam-heater, till it was time to ring the bell. As
he gave the last stroke, Deacon Bradley approached him. "Jehiel, I've got
a little job of repairing I want you should do at my store," he said in
the loud, slow speech of a man important in the community. "Come to the
store to-morrow morning and see about it." He passed on into his pew,
which was at the back of the church near a steam radiator, so that he was
warm, no matter what the weather was.
Jehiel Hawthorn went out and stood on the front steps in the winter
sunshine and his heart swelled exultingly as he looked across at the
deacon's store. "I wish I'd had time to tell him I'd do no repairs for him
to-morrow, nor any time---that I'm going to travel and see the world."
The last comers disappeared in the church and the sound of singing came
faintly to Jehiel's ears. Although he was the sexton he rarely was in
church for the service, using his duties as an excuse for absence. He felt
that it was not for him to take part in prayer and thanksgiving. As a boy
he had prayed for the one thing he wanted, and what had it come to?
A penetrating cold wind swept around the corner and he turned to go inside
to see about the steam-pipes. In the outer hall he noticed that the
service had progressed to the responsive readings. As he opened the door
of the church the minister read rapidly, "Praised be the Lord who hath not
given us over for a prey unto their teeth."
The congregation responded in a timid inarticulate gabble, above which
rose Deacon Bradley's loud voice,--"Our soul is escaped even as a bird out
of the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and we are escaped." He
read the responses in a slow, booming roar, at least half a sentence
behind the rest, but the minister always waited for him. As he finished,
he saw the sexton standing in the open door. "A little more steam,
Jehiel," he added commandingly, running the words on to the end of the
text.
Jehiel turned away silently, but as he stumbled through the dark,
unfinished part of the cellar he thought to himself, "Well, that's the
last time he'll give me an order for _one_ while!"
Then the words of the text he had heard came back to his mind with a
half-superstitious shock at the coincidence. He had forgotten all about
that hidden part of the text-ornament. Why, now that had come true! He
ought to have cut the stitches and torn off the old text last night. He
would, as soon as he went home. He wished his sister were alive to know,
and suddenly, there in the dark, he wondered if perhaps she did know.
As he passed the door to the rooms of the Ladies' Auxiliary Society he
noticed that it was ajar, and saw through the crack that there was a
sleeping figure on the floor near the stove--a boy about sixteen. When
Jehiel stepped softly in and looked at him, the likeness to his own sister
struck him even before he recognized the lad as his great-nephew, the son
of the child he had helped his sister to care for all those years ago.
"Why, what's Nathaniel doin' here?" he asked himself, in surprise. He had
not known that the boy was even in town, for he had been on the point of
leaving to enlist in the navy. Family matters could not have detained him,
for he was quite alone in the world since both his father and his mother
were dead and his stepmother had married again. Under his great-uncle's
gaze the lad opened his eyes with a start and sat up confused.
"What's the matter with you, Nat?" asked the older man not ungently. He
was thinking that probably he had looked like that at sixteen. The boy
stared at him a moment, and then, leaning his head on a chair, he began to
cry. Sitting thus, crouched together, he looked like a child.
"Why, Natty, what's the trouble?" asked his uncle alarmed.
"I came off here because I couldn't hold in at home any longer," answered
the other between sobs. "You see I can't go away. Her husband treats her
so bad she can't stay with him. I don't blame her, she says she just
_can't!_ So she's come back and she ain't well, and she's goin' to have a
baby, and I've got to stay and support her. Mr. Bradley's offered me a
place in his store and I've got to give up goin' to the navy." He suddenly
realized the unmanliness of his attitude, rose to his feet, closing his
lips tightly, and faced the older man with a resolute expression of
despair in his young eyes.
"Uncle Jehiel, it does seem to me I _can't_ have it so! All my life I've
looked forward to bein' a sailor and goin' around the world, and all. I
just hate the valley and the mountains! But I guess I got to stay. She's
only my stepmother, I know, but she was always awful good to me, and she
hasn't got anybody else to look after her."
His voice broke, and he put his arm up in a crook over his face. "But it's
awful hard! I feel like a bird that's got caught in a snare."
His uncle had grown very pale during this speech, and at the last words he
recoiled with an exclamation of horror. There was a silence in which he
looked at his nephew with the wide eyes of a man who sees a specter. Then
he turned away into the furnace-room, and picking up his lunch-box brought
it back. "Here, you," he said roughly, "part of what's troublin' you is
that you ain't had any breakfast. You eat this and you'll feel better.
I'll be back in a minute."
He went away blindly into the darkest part of the cellar. It was very
black there, but his eyes stared wide before him. It was very cold, but
drops of sweat stood on his forehead as if he were in the hay-field. He
was alone, but his lips moved from time to time, and once he called out in
some loud, stifled exclamation which resounded hollowly in the vault-like
place. He was there a long time.
When he went back into the furnace cellar, he found Nathaniel sitting
before the fire. The food and warmth had brought a little color into his
pale face, but it was still set in a mask of tragic desolation.
As his uncle came in, he exclaimed, "Why, Uncle Jehiel, you look awful
bad. Are you sick?"
"Yes, I be," said the other harshly, "but 'tain't nothin'. It'll pass
after a while. Nathaniel, I've thought of a way you can manage. You know
your uncle's wife died this last week and that leaves me without any house
keeper. What if your stepmother sh'd come and take care of me and I'll
take care of her. I've just sold a piece of timber land I never thought to
get a cent out of and that'll ease things up so we can hire help if she
ain't strong enough to do the work."
Nathaniel's face flushed in a relief which died quickly down to a somber
hopelessness. He faced his uncle doggedly. "Not _much_, Uncle Jehiel!" he
said heavily, "I ain't a-goin' to hear to such a thing. I know all about
your wantin' to get away from the valley--you take that money and go
yourself and I'll---"
Hopelessness and resolution were alike struck out of his face by the fury
of benevolence with which the old man cut him short. "Don't you dare to
speak a word against it, boy!" cried Jehiel in a labored anguish. "Good
Lord! I'm only doin' it for you because I _have_ to! I've been through
what you're layin' out for yourself an' stood it, somehow, an' now I'm
'most done with it all. But 'twould be like beginnin' it all again to see
you startin' in."
The boy tried to speak, but he raised his voice. "No, I couldn't stand it
all over again. 'Twould cut in to the places where I've got calloused."
Seeing through the other's stupor the beginnings of an irresolute
opposition, he flung himself upon him in a strange and incredible appeal,
crying out, "Oh, you must! You _got_ to go!" commanding and imploring in
the same incoherent sentence, struggling for speech, and then hanging on
Nathaniel's answer in a sudden wild silence. It was as though his next
breath depended on the boy's decision.
It was very still in the twilight where they stood. The faint murmur of a
prayer came down from above, and while it lasted both were as though held
motionless by its mesmeric monotony. Then, at the boom of the organ, the
lad's last shred of self-control vanished. He burst again into muffled
weary sobs, the light from the furnace glistening redly on his streaming
cheeks. "It ain't right, Uncle Jehiel. I feel as though I was murderin'
somethin'! But I can't help it. I'll go, I'll do as you say, but----"
His uncle's agitation went out like a wind-blown flame. He, too, drooped
in an utter fatigue. "Never mind, Natty," he said tremulously, "it'll all
come out right somehow. Just you do as Uncle Jehiel says."
A trampling upstairs told him that the service was over. "You run home now
and tell her I'll be over this afternoon to fix things up."
He hurried up the stairs to open the front doors, but Deacon Bradley was
before him. "You're late, Jehiel," he said severely, "and the church was
cold."
"I know, Deacon," said the sexton humbly, "but it won't happen again. And
I'll be around the first thing in the morning to do that job for you." His
voice sounded dull and lifeless.
"What's the matter?" asked the deacon. "Be you sick?"
"Yes, I be, but 'tain't nothin'. 'Twill pass after a while."
That evening, as he walked home after service, he told himself that he had
never known so long a day. It seemed longer than all the rest of his life.
Indeed he felt that some strange and racking change had come upon him
since the morning, as though he were not the same person, as though he had
been away on a long journey, and saw all things with changed eyes. "I feel
as though I'd died," he thought with surprise, "and was dead and buried."
This brought back to his mind the only bitter word he had spoken
throughout the endless day. Nathaniel had said, as an excuse for his haste
(Jehiel insisted on his leaving that night), "You see, mother, it's really
a service to Uncle Jehiel, since he's got nobody to keep house for him."
He had added, in the transparent self-justification of selfish youth, "And
I'll pay it back to him every cent." At this Jehiel had said shortly, "By
the time you can pay it back what I'll need most will be a tombstone. Git
a big one so's to keep me down there quiet."
But now, walking home under the frosty stars, he felt very quiet already,
as though he needed no weight to lie heavy on his restless heart. It did
not seem restless now, but very still, as though it too were dead. He
noticed that the air was milder, and as he crossed the bridge below his
house he stopped and listened. Yes, the fine ear of his experience caught
a faint grinding sound. By tomorrow the river would begin to break up. It
was the end of winter. He surprised himself by his pleasure in thinking of
the spring.
Before he went into the house after his evening chores were done, he
stopped for a moment and looked back at the cleft in the mountain wall
through which the railroad left the valley. He had been looking longingly
toward that door of escape all his life, and now he said goodby to it.
"Ah, well, 'twan't to be," he said, with an accent of weary finality; but
then, suddenly out of the chill which oppressed his heart there sprang a
last searing blast of astonished anguish. It was as if he realized for the
first time all that had befallen him since the morning. He was racked by a
horrified desolation that made his sturdy old body stagger as if under an
unexpected blow. As he reeled he flung his arm about the pine-tree and so
stood for a time, shaking in a paroxysm which left him breathless when it
passed. For it passed as suddenly as it came. He lifted his head and
looked again at the great cleft in the mountains, with new eyes. Somehow,
insensibly, his heart had been emptied of its fiery draught by more than
mere exhaustion. The old bitter pain was gone, but there was no mere void
in its place. He felt the sweet, weak light-headedness of a man in his
first lucid period after a fever, tears stinging his eyelids in confused
thanksgiving for an unrecognized respite from pain.
He looked up at the lofty crown of the pine-tree, through which shone one
or two of the brightest stars, and felt a new comradeship with it. It was
a great tree, he thought, and they had grown up together. He laid his
hardened palm on it, and fancied that he caught a throb of the silent
vitality under the bark. How many kinds of life there were! Under its
white shroud, how all the valley lived. The tree stretching up its head to
the stars, the river preparing to throw off the icy armor which compressed
its heart--they were all awakening in their own way. The river had been
restless, like himself, the tree had been tranquil, but they passed
together through the resurrection into quiet life.
When he went into the house, he found that he was almost fainting with
fatigue. He sat down by the desk, and his head fell forward on the pile of
pamphlets he had left there. For the first time in his life he thought of
them without a sore heart. "I suppose Natty'll go to every one of them
places," he murmured as he dropped to sleep.
He dreamed strange, troubled dreams that melted away before he could seize
on them, and finally he thought his sister stood before him and called.
The impression was so vivid that he started up, staring at the empty room.
For an instant he still thought he heard a voice, and then he knew it was
the old clock striking the hour. It was ten o'clock.
"Natty's just a-crossin' the State line," he said aloud The text-ornament
caught his eye. Still half asleep, with his sister's long-forgotten voice
ringing in his ears, he remembered vaguely that he had meant to bring the
second text to light. For a moment he hesitated, and then, "Well, it's
come true for Natty, anyhow," he thought.
And clumsily using his heavy jackknife, he began to cut the tiny stitches
which had so long hidden from his eyes the joyous exultation of the
escaped prisoner.