"I shall not die, but live; and declare the works of the Lord."
The great lady pointed with a sigh of pleasure to the canvas hung between
a Greuze and a Watteau! "Ah, is there anyone like LeMaury! Alone in the
eighteenth century he had eyes for the world of wood and stream.
You poets and critics, why do you never write of him? Is it true that no
one knows anything of his life?"
The young writer hesitated. "I do not think I exaggerate, madame, when I
say that I alone in Paris know his history. He was a compatriot of mine."
"Oh, come, Mr. Everett, LeMaury an American! With that name!"
"He called himself LeMaury after his protector, the man who brought him
to France. His real name was Everett, like my own. He was cousin to one of
my great-grandfathers."
"Ah, an old family story. That is the best kind. You must tell it to me."
"I will write it for you, madame."
I
At the foot of Hemlock Mountain spring came late that year, now a century
and a half gone by, as it comes late still to the remote back valley,
lying high among the Green Mountains; but when it came it had a savor of
enchantment unknown to milder regions. The first day of spring was no
uncertain date in Hillsboro, then as now. One morning generally about the
middle of May, people woke up with the sun shining in their eyes, and the
feeling in their hearts that something had happened in the night. The
first one of the family dressed, who threw open the house-door, felt the
odor of stirring life go to his head, was the Reverend Mr. Everett
himself. In the little community of Puritans, whose isolation had
preserved intact the rigidity of faith which had begun to soften somewhat
in other parts of New England, there was no one who openly saluted the
miracle of resurrection by more than the brief remark, "Warm weather's
come"; but sometimes the younger men went back and kissed their wives. It
was an event, the first day of spring, in old-time Hillsboro.
In the year of our Lord 1756 this event fell upon a Sabbath, a fact which
the Reverend Mr. Everett commemorated by a grim look out at the budding
trees, and by taking from his store of sermons a different one from that
he had intended to preach. It was his duty to scourge natural man out of
the flock committed to his charge by an angry and a jealous God, and he
had felt deep within him a damnable stirring of sensual pleasure as the
perfumed breath of the new season had blown across his face. If the
anointed of the Lord had thus yielded to the insidious wiles of
unregenerate nature what greater dangers lay in wait for the weaklings
under his care! The face of his son Nathaniel, as he came back from the
brook, his slender body leaning sideways from the weight of the dripping
bucket, told the shepherd of souls that he must be on his guard against
the snares of the flesh.
The boy's thin, dark face, so astonishingly like his father's, was lifted
toward the sky as he came stumbling up the path, but his eyes were
everywhere at once. Just before he reached the door, he set the bucket
down with a cry of ecstasy and darted to the edge of the garden, where the
peas were just thrusting green bowed heads through the crumbling earth. He
knelt above them breathless, he looked up to the maple-twigs, over which a
faint reddish bloom had been cast in the night, beyond to the lower slopes
of the mountain, delicately patterned with innumerable white stems of
young birch-trees, and clasped his hands to see that a shimmer of green
hung in their tops like a mist. His lips quivered, he laid his hand upon a
tuft of grass with glossy, lance-like blades, and stroked it.