expressions of gratitude, had he felt like uttering them, would have
been wasted. Tom went to his room, thumping his feet defiantly on the
stairs. He made a bundle of his clothes, while his uncle sneaked out of
the house to avoid a collision with his little daughter, the only person
of whom he was afraid.
Tom told his Aunt Charlotte good-bye with a high head; but when it came
to Janet, he put both arms about the child and drew her to him with a
fond embrace.
"You shan't go away, Tom," she said, disengaging herself. "What are you
going for? Did they say you must?" By "they" Janet meant her parents,
whom she regarded as the allied foes of poor Tom. She looked indignantly
at her mother, who had turned her back on this scene of parting.
"I'm going to help my mother," said Tom; "she's poor, and I oughtn't to
have left her."
He again embraced the child, who began to cry bitterly. "What _shall_ I
do when you're gone?" she sobbed on his shoulder. "This house won't be
fit to live in. _Such a lot of old pokes!_" And she stamped her feet and
looked poutingly at her mother.
Tom disengaged himself from her intermittent embraces, and went out with
his bundle in his hand.
He went first to the law-office, and sat his bundle on a chair, and
addressed himself to Blackman, who had already arrived, and who was
apparently much preoccupied with his writing.
"Mr. Blackman, I've made a fool of myself by gambling, and Uncle Tom has
concluded I can't stay with him any longer. I don't much wonder at it
either. But I do hate to give up the study. Couldn't you give me
something to do, so that I could earn my board at your house?"
"No," said the lawyer, looking off horizontally, but not at Tom. "I was
just going to tell you I couldn't keep you in the office. You've got
altogether too much gunpowder for a lawyer. Better get into the regular
army, Tom; that would suit your temper better." Then, after a moment's
pause, he added: "I've got young sons, and your example might ruin them
if you should come to my house to live." And he leaned forward as though
he would resume his writing. These were sound and logical reasons that
Blackman gave for not keeping Tom, and the lawyer was sincere as far as
he went. But had he discovered by this time that Tom's mind was clearer
and more acute than his own, and that if Tom should come to the bar
with his uncle's backing he would soon be a formidable rival?
"Besides," resumed the lawyer, as Tom turned reluctantly away, "it's
better for you to go to the country. George Lockwood will have you bound
over to keep the peace if you stay, and now you're out with your uncle,
who's going your bail?"
"Always George Lockwood," Tom thought, as he took up his bundle.
"Good-bye, Mr. Blackman!" Tom's voice was husky now. But when he
descended the stairs he went down the village street with a bold front,
telling his old cronies good-bye, answering their questions frankly, and
braving it out to the last. Put the best face upon it he could, his
spirit was bitter, and to a group of old companions who followed him to
the "corporation line," at the edge of the village, he said, almost
involuntarily:
"George Lockwood got me into this scrape to upset me, and he's purty
well done it. If he ever crosses my path, I'm going to get even with
him."
Such vague threats do not bind one to any definite execution, and they
are a relief to the spirit of an angry man.
Having broken with his uncle, Tom must walk the long ten miles to his
mother's farm in Hubbard Township. Before he got there his head was
down; the unwonted fatigue of his journey, the bitter sense of defeat,
the dark picture his imagination made of his mother's disappointment
and of the despair of the ambitious Barbara took all the heart out of
him.
When he reached home he strode into the house and sat down without
saying a word.
"Has Uncle Tom turned you off?" asked Barbara, faltering a little and
putting down her knitting. She had been dreading this end of all her
hopes.
"Yes," said Tom; "and I wish to the Lord I was dead and done for." And
he leaned his head on his left hand.
"Oh, my poor boy!" began Mrs. Grayson, "and you didn't mean no harm
neither. And you're the only boy I've got, too. All the rest dead and
gone. They's no end of troubles in this world!"
Tom's shoulders were heaving with feeling. After a moment or two of
silence, Barbara went over and put her hand on him.
"Pshaw, Tom! what's the use of giving up? You're a splendid fellow in
spite of all, and you'll make your way yet. You only needed a settler,
and now you've got it. It won't look so bad by next week. You'll take a
school next winter, and after that go back to study law again."
Then she quietly went to the clothes-press by the chimney and got out a
hank of yarn, and said to Tom:
"Here, hold this while I wind it. I was just wishing you were here when
I saw my ball giving out. That's like you used to do for me. Don't you
remember? Mother, get Tom something to eat; he's tired and hungry, I
expect."
And choking down the disappointment which involved more than Tom
suspected, the keen, black-eyed girl wound her yarn and made an effort
to chat with Tom as though he had come home on a visit.
As the last strands were wound on the ball, Tom looked at his sister and
said:
"Barbara, you're one of a thousand. But I know this thing's thundering
hard on you. I'm going to try to make it up to you from this time. I
wish to goodness I had half of your steady sense."
VIII
BARBARA'S PRIVATE AFFAIRS
From childhood Barbara's ambition had centered in Tom; it was her plan
that the clever brother should give standing to the family by his
success in life. If Tom could only be persuaded to be steady, he might
come to be a great man. A great man, in her thinking, was a member of
the State legislature, or a circuit judge, for example: to her
provincial imagination the heights above these were hazy and almost
inaccessible. The scheme of a professional career for Tom had been her
own, in conception and management; for though her brother was nearly two
years her senior, she, being prudent and forecasting, had always played
the part of an elder. Tom's undeniable "brightness" was a great source
of pride to her. In spite of his heedless collisions with the masters,
he was always at the head of his classes; and it seemed to Barbara the
most natural thing in the world that she, being a girl, should
subordinate herself to the success of a brother so promising. She had
left school to devote herself to the house and the cares of the farm,
in order that Tom might be educated--in the moderate sense of the word
then prevalent. The brother was far from being ungrateful; if he
accepted his sister's sacrifices without protest, he repaid her with a
demonstrative affection and admiration not often seen in brothers; and
there were times when he almost reverenced in her that prudence and
practical wisdom in which he found himself deficient.
It was only during this summer that Barbara had been seized with
independent aspirations for herself; and perhaps even these were not
without some relation to Tom. If Tom should come to be somebody in the
county, she would sit in a reflected light as his sister. It became her,
therefore, not to neglect entirely her own education. To go to Moscow to
a winter school was out of the question. Every nerve was strained to
extricate the farm from debt and to give a little help, now and then, to
Tom. It chanced, however, that a student from an incipient Western
college, intent on getting money to pay his winter's board bills, had
that summer opened a "pay school" in the Timber Creek district
school-house, which was only two miles from the Grayson farm.
Those who could attend school in the summer were, for the most part,
small fry too young to be of much service in the field, and such girls,
larger and smaller, as could be spared from home. But the appetite for
"schooling" in the new country was always greater than the supply; and
when it was reported that a school was "to be took up" in the Timber
Creek school-house, by a young man who had not only "ciphered plumb
through the Rule of Three," but had even begun to penetrate the far-away
mysteries of Latin and algebra, it came to pass that several young men
and young women, living beyond the district limits, subscribed to the
school, that they might attend it, even if only irregularly;--not that
any of the pupils dreamed of attacking the Latin, but a teacher who had
attained this Ultima Thule of human learning was supposed to know well
all that lay on the hither side of it. The terms of a "pay school," in
that day, were low enough,--a dollar and twenty-five cents was the
teacher's charge for each pupil for thirteen weeks; but the new
schoolmaster had walked from home to avoid traveling expenses, the log
school-house cost him no rent, and he had stipulated that he should
"board 'round" in the families of his patrons, so that the money he
received from twenty pupils was clear profit, and at the price of living
in those primitive times would pay his board at college for six months.
Barbara, for one, had resolved to treat herself to a dollar and a
quarter's worth of additional learning. The Timber Creek school-house
was on the road leading to the village of Moscow; she could therefore
catch a ride, now and then, on the wagon of some farmer bound to the
village, by mounting on top of a load of wood, hay, or potatoes; and
often she got a lift in the evening in a neighbor's empty wagon rattling
homeward from town, or for a part of the way by sitting in the tail of
some ox-cart plying between forest and prairie; but more frequently she
had to walk both in going and coming, besides working early and late at
her household duties.
Hiram Mason was the name of the new teacher whom the pupils found behind
the master's desk on the first day of school. He was the son of a
minister who had come out from New England with the laudable intention
of lending a hand in evangelizing this great strapping West, whose
vigorous and rather boisterous youth was ever a source of bewilderment,
and even a cause of grief, to the minds of well-regulated Down-easters.
The evangelists sent out aimed at the impossible, even at the
undesirable, in seeking to reproduce a New England in communities born
under a different star. Perhaps it was this peninsular trait of mind
that prevented the self-denying missionaries from making any
considerable impression on the country south of the belt peopled by the
current of migration from New England. The civilization of the broad,
wedge-shaped region on the north side of the Ohio River, which was
settled by Southern and Middle State people, and which is the great land
of the Indian corn, has been evolved out of the healthier elements of
its own native constitution. But it was indebted to New England, in the
time of its need, for many teachers of arithmetic and grammar, as well
as for the less-admirable but never-to-be-forgotten clock-peddlers and
tin-peddlers from Connecticut, who also taught the rustics of southern
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois things they had never dreamed of before, and
took high pay for the instruction. Young Mason, though he had mostly
grown up in the new country, and would have scorned the name of Yankee,
had got from his father that almost superstitious faith in the efficacy
of knowledge which, in the North-eastern States, has been handed down
from generation to generation, and which has produced much learning and
some pedantry. Mason was of middle stature, good breadth of shoulder,
prominent, broad forehead, and brows that overhung his eyes, but were
rather high above them. He had a well-set chin and a solid jaw; his
mouth was too large to be handsome and was firmly closed; his gait was
strong, straightforward, resolute, and unhurried. There were little
touches of eccentricity in him: he had a way of looking at an
interlocutor askance, and his habitual expression was one of mingled
shyness and self-contained amusement. The religious enthusiasm of his
father had been transmuted in him to a general earnestness of character,
which was veiled under a keen perception of the droll side of life,
derived from a mother of Southern extraction. His early-and-late
diligence in study was the wonder of the country, but the tastes and
aspirations that impelled him to so much toil rarely found utterance in
any confessions, even to his nearest friends. Reserved as he was, the
people could never complain that he held himself above them. A
new-country youth, the son of a minister on slender pay, Hiram
understood how to extend a helping hand, when occasion required, in any
work that might be going on. At school, when the young master saw the
boys playing at the boisterous and promiscuous "soak about," he would
sometimes catch the contagion of the wild fun, and, thrusting his "Livy"
into the desk, rush out of the door to mix in the confusion, throwing
the yarn ball at one and another with a vigor and an accuracy of aim
that doubled the respect of his pupils for him. But when once he had
extricated himself from the _melee_, and had rapped on the door-frame
with his ruler, crying, "Books, books!" the boy who a minute before had
enjoyed the luxury of giving the master what was known in school-boy
lingo as a "sockdolager," delivered full in the back, or even on the
side of the head, did not find any encouragement to presume on that
experience in school-hours.
The new master's punishments usually had a touch of his drollery in
them; he contrived to make the culprit ridiculous, and so to keep the
humor of the school on his side. A girl who could not otherwise be cured
of munching in school had to stand in front of the master's desk with an
apple in her teeth; a boy who was wont to get his sport by pinching his
neighbors, and sticking them with pins, was forced to make no end of
amusement for the school in his turn, by standing on the hearth with a
cleft stick pinching his nose out of shape. It was soon concluded that
there was no fun in "fooling" with a master who was sure to turn the
joke on the offender.
The older pupils who occupied the "writing bench," in front of a
continuous shelf-like desk fixed along the wall, spent much of their
time in smuggling from one to another fervid little love notes, which,
for disguise, were folded like the "thumb-papers" that served to protect
their books from the wear and tear of their over-vigorous thumbs, and
from soiling. By passing books from one to another, with such
innocent-looking square papers in them, a refreshing correspondence was
kept up. This exchange of smuggled billets-doux was particularly active
when Rachel Albaugh was present. As for the love-letters thus
dispatched, they were fearfully monotonous and not worth the pains of
capture by a schoolmaster. Some were straightforward and shameless
declarations of admiration and affection in prose scrawls, but a very
common sort was composed entirely of one or another of those well-worn
doggerel couplets that have perhaps done duty since the art of writing
became known to the Anglo-Saxons.
"If you love me as I love you,
No knife can cut our love in two,"
was a favorite with the swains of the country school-house; but
"The rose is red, the violet's blue,
Sugar's sweet, and so are you,"
had a molasses-like consistency in its alliterative lines that gave it
the preference over all other love poems extant.
Amongst these unblushing scribblers of love doggerel and patient cutters
and folders of many sorts of thumb-papers, whose fits of studying, like
chills and fever, came on only "by spells," Barbara sat without being
one of them. The last chance for education was not to be thrown away;
and Mason soon singled out this rather under-sized, sharp-eyed girl, not
only as the most industrious and clever of the pupils in the Timber
Creek school, but as a person of quite another sort from the rest of
them. When he was explaining anything to a group of half-listless
scholars, her dark eyes, drawn to beads, almost startled him with their
concentrated interest. She could not be taught in any kind of
classification with the rest; her rate of progress was too rapid. So
finding that Barbara studied all through the recess time, he undertook
to give her extra instruction while the others were on the playground.
The most agreeable minutes of his day were those in which he unfolded to
her the prosaic principles of Vulgar Fractions, of Tare and Tret, and of
the Rule of Three. This last was the great and final goal, and it was
attained by few of those who attended an intermittent country school in
that time. To reach it was to become competent to teach school. Barbara,
with the help of the master, who directed her to save time by omitting
some of the rubbish in Pike's Arithmetic, was soon in sight of this
promised land of the Rule of Three, and it became a question of
reviewing the book once more, when she should be through with it, so as
to take rank among those who would certainly "do every sum in the book."
"Why not take up algebra?" said the teacher to her, during a long noon
recess as they sat side by side at his desk poring over a slate full of
figures.
"Do you think I could learn it?" she asked.
"You could learn anything," he said; and the assurance gave Barbara more
pleasure than any commendation she had ever received. But she did not
know what to reply. To go beyond the arithmetic would be, according to
the standard of the country, to have a liberal education, and she was
ambitious enough to like that. But where would she get the money to buy
a text-book? She didn't wish to confess her scruple of economy. It was
not that she was ashamed of her poverty, for poverty might be said to be
the prevailing fashion in the Timber Creek country; but it would be
bringing to Mason's attention her private affairs, and from that she
shrank with an instinct of delicacy for which she could not have given
any reason. Yet there sat Mason, leaning back and waiting for her to
reply to his question. After a few moments she mustered courage to ask
timidly:
"Would the book cost much?"
"I wouldn't buy any book just now," said the master, seeing the drift of
her thoughts. He went to one corner of the school-room, and, standing on
the bench, pushed aside one of the boards laid loosely over the joists
above. It was here, in the dark loft, that he kept the few articles not
necessary to his daily existence in boarding 'round. Reaching his hand
up above the boards, he found a copy of a school text-book on algebra,
and brought it down with him, rapping it against his hand and blowing
the dust off it.
"Use that for a while," he said.
"Oh, thank you!" said Barbara, taking hold of the book with a curious
sense of reverence, which was greatly increased as she turned the leaves
and regarded the symbols, whose nature and use were quite inconceivable
to her. Here was a knowledge beyond any that she had ever dreamed of
looking into; beyond that of any schoolmaster she had ever known, except
Mason. "It looks hard," she said, regarding him.
"Take it home and try it," he replied, as he took up his ruler to call
the scholars to books.
A closer companionship now grew up between the master and the pupil.
Both of them anticipated with pleasure the coming of recess time, when
the new study could be discussed together. Henceforth the boys looked in
vain for Mason to take a turn with them in playing soak-about.
To a man of high aims nothing is more delightful than to have a devoted
disciple. Even the self-contained Mason could not be quite unmoved in
contemplating this young girl, all of whose tastes and ambitions flowed
in the same channel with his own, listening to him as to an oracle. If
he had not been so firmly fixed in his resolve that he would not allow
any woman to engage his affections before he had completed his college
course, he might have come to fall in love with her. But all such
thoughts he resolutely put aside. Of course, teaching her was a delight;
but who could help feeling delight in teaching such a learner? Moreover,
he was particularly fond of algebra. But he could hardly lay all of his
enjoyment to his liking for algebra, or his pleasure in teaching a
quick-witted pupil. He could not make himself believe that it was his
enjoyment of algebraic generalizations that made his hand tremble
whenever he returned a slate or book to Barbara Grayson.
Barbara, for her part, was too intent on her work to think much about
anything else. She had more than once caught sight of the furtive,
inquiring glance of her teacher on her face before he could turn his
eyes away; she was pleased to note that his voice had a tone in
addressing her that it had not when he spoke to the others; and she took
pleasure in perceiving that she was beyond question the favorite pupil.
But Barbara was averse to building any castles in the air which she had
small chance of being able to materialize.
One evening, as she was going briskly toward home, she was overtaken by
Mason, who walked with her up hill and down dale the whole long rough
new-country road through the woods, carrying her books, and chatting
about trivial things as he had never done before. He contrived, half in
pleasantry, but quite in earnest, to praise her diligence, and even her
mind. She had hardly ever thought of herself as having a mind. That Tom
had such a gift she knew, and she understood how important it was to
cultivate his abilities. But she was only Tom's sister. It seemed to her
a fine thing, however, this having a mind of her own, and she thought a
good deal about it afterward.
When Hiram Mason reached the place where Barbara was accustomed to leave
the main road, in order to reach her home by a shorter path through a
meadow, he got over the fence first and gave her his hand, though he
wondered afterward that he had had the courage to do it. Barbara had
climbed fences and trees too, for that matter, from her infancy, and she
was in the habit of getting over this fence twice a day, without ever
dreaming that she needed help. But a change had come over her in this
two-miles' walk from school. For the first time, she felt a certain
loneliness in her life, and a pleasure in being protected. She let Mason
take her hand and help her to the top of the fence, though she could
have climbed up much more nimbly if she had had both hands free to hold
by. Hiram found it so pleasant helping her up, by holding her hand, that
he took both her hands when she was ready to jump down on the meadow
side of the fence, and then, by an involuntary impulse he retained her
right hand in his left a bare moment longer than was necessary. A little
ashamed, not so much of the feeling he had shown as of that he had
concealed, he finished his adieux abruptly, and, placing his hands on
the top rail, vaulted clean over the fence again into the road. Then he
thought of something else that he wanted to say about Barbara's new
study of algebra,--something of no consequence at all, except in so far
as it served to make Barbara turn and look at him once more. The odd
twinkling smile so habitual with him died out of his face, and he looked
into hers with an eagerness that made her blush, but did not make her
turn away. Blaming himself for what seemed to him imprudence, he left
her at last and started back, only stopping on the next high ground to
watch her figure as she hurried along through the meadow grass, and
across the brook, and then up the slope toward the house.