Bart Ridgeley Part 15

"Satisfactory as far as you went, but then you did not serve out your time."

"Have consideration, I pray, for the minister of justice," bowing to Miss Walters.

"She seemed rather to like it," said Mrs. Ford.

"Indeed I did!" and the young ladies gathered about to congratulate her, and cast admiring glances at her partner.

"Mr. Ridgeley," said Mrs. Markham, "I was not aware that you were an accomplished waltzer."

"You forget," Bart answered mockingly, "that I am travelled; and you know my only apt.i.tude is for the useless."

"I did not say that."

"You are too kind. I sometimes supply words to obvious thoughts."

"And sometimes to those that have no existence."

The floor filled again, and the music struck up. Standing, a moment later, at a window, Julia saw a figure pa.s.s out, pause at the roadway, turn and look up. The full glare of the lamps revealed the face of Bart, from which the light had faded, and its beauty and spirit of expression had departed. He gazed for an instant up at the brilliant and joyous scene, where a moment before he had been a central and applauded figure, and then, m.u.f.fling his face in his cloak, he turned away.

He had not intended to go, and sat melancholy through the darkness of the early night; but somehow, a hungry, intense longing came to him to go and look for a moment upon the loveliness of Julia, as she would stand open to the eyes of all, just for one moment, and then to go away. He felt that he ought not to do it, but he went. He could not help it.

When he reached the place, three miles away, he was annoyed by being recognized and pointed at, and talked at, on account of his late encounter with Grid.

"He ain't a powerful-lookin' chap." "I wouldn't be afeared o' him."

"He's a darned sight harder'n he looks," etc.

When he escaped into the ball-room, the impulse to go into the immediate presence of Julia was followed, and ended by as sudden a retreat. He had not known how utterly weak and helpless he was, and felt angry with himself that he could ever wish for the presence of one who had so scorned him. He was ashamed, also, that the music, the dance, and gay joyance of the scene he had just left, had still such a seductive charm for him, and he recorded a mental resolution to avoid all similar allurements for the future. Having made this resolution, and strong in his faith of keeping it, he merely turned to take final leave, as he fell under the eyes of Julia, and without seeing her.

The night outside was cold, dark, and thick, with a pitiless snow, that was rapidly filling the track along the highway. Bart turned, without the remotest touch of self-pity, to face it, with a heart as cold and dark as the night that swallowed him up. He felt that there was not a heart left behind that would throb with a moment's pain for him--that would miss him, or wonder at his departure; and he was sure that he did not care.

Yet, with what a sweet, remonstrating, expostulating call the music came after him, with its plaining at his desertion! Fainter and sweeter it came, and died out with a wailing sob, as the night, with its storm and darkness, blotted him out!

Mrs. Ford, who may have antic.i.p.ated his attendance at the supper-table, missed him. His late partner in the dance cast her eyes inquiringly through the thronged rooms. She remarked to Julia that she believed Mr. Ridgeley had left, and thought it very strange. Julia said she presumed he had, and did not say what she thought.

Most of the elders left early; the young people danced the music and themselves away, and the gray, belated dawn of the next day looked coldly into the windows of a sacked, soiled, and silent house.

CHAPTER XVII.

BART.

Bart devoted himself unselfishly and unsparingly to his school, to all its duties and to all his scholars, and especially to the children of the poor, and the backward pupils. He went early to the house, and remained late. He was the tender, considerate, elder brother of the scholars, and was astonished at his power to win regard, and maintain order. Order maintained itself after one memorable occasion--one to which he never referred, and of which he did not like to hear. It made his school famous, and drew to it many visitors, and to himself no little curiosity and attention.

He endeavored to carry on his law-reading; but beyond reviewing--and not very thoroughly--Blackstone, he could do little. As usual, he was homesick; and whenever a week was ended he left the school-house for his mother's, and never returned until the following Monday morning.

His kind patrons noticed with surprise that he seemed sad and depressed after the expulsion of Grid, and that this gloominess was deepened about the time of Snow's ball.

Barton came to take a real pleasure in his school. Formed to love everything, and without the power of hating, or of long retaining a resentment, he became attached to his little flock, especially the younger ones, and was loved in return by them, without reserve or doubt. He did much to improve, not alone the minds of the older pupils, but to soften and refine the manners of the young men under his charge; while the young women, always inclined to idealize, found how pleasant it was to receive little acts of gentlemanly attention from him.

In the afternoon of a long, bright, March day--one of those wondrous days, glorious above with sky and sun, and joyous with the first note of the blue-bird--the little red school-house by the margin of the maple-woods was filled with the pupils and their parents, a.s.sembled for the last time. Bart, in a low voice, tremulous with emotion, bade them all good-by, and most of them forever, and taking his little valise, walked with a saddened heart back to his mother. This time he had not failed, and he never was to fail again.

How many events and occurrences linked in an endless series unite to form the sum-total of ordinary human life! Incident to it, they are in fact all ordinary. If any appear extraordinary, it is because they occur in the life of an extraordinary individual, or remarkable consequences flow from them. Like all parts of human life, in and of themselves they are always fragmentary: springing from what precedes them, they have no beginning proper; causing and flowing into others, they have no ending, in effect; and as the dramatic in actual life is never framed with reference to the unities, so results are constantly being produced and worked out by accidents, and the prominent events often contribute nothing to any supposed final catastrophe. Strangers interlope for a moment, and change destinies, coming out for a day, from nothing, and going to nowhere, but marring and misshaping everything.

No plot is to develop as this sketch of old-time life continues, and incidents will be of value only as they tend to mould and develop the character and powers of one, and little will be noticed save that which concerns him. It is, perhaps, already apparent that he is very impressible, that slight forces which would produce little effect on different natures, are capable of changing his shape, will beat him flat, roll him round, or convert him into a cube or triangle, and yet, that certain strong, always acting forces will restore him, with more or less of the mark or impress of the disturbing cause upon him. He has a strong, tenacious nature, unstained with the semblance of a vice. He forms quick resolutions, but can adhere to them. He is tender to weakness, and fanciful to phantasy. His apt.i.tude for sarcasm and ridicule, unsparingly as it had been turned upon everybody, brought upon him general dislike. His indecision and vacillation in adopting and pursuing a scheme in life, lost him the confidence of his acquaintances--ready to believe anything of one who had dealt them so many sharp thrusts. He was sensitive to a fault, and a slight word would have driven him forever from Julia Markham, and turned him back upon himself, as a dissolving and transforming fire. Mentally, he was quick as a flash, with a strong grasp, and a power of ready a.n.a.lysis; and so little did his mental achievements cost him, that his acquirements were doubted. He already paid the penalty of a nervous and brilliant intellect--that of being adjudged not profound. Men are always being deceived as to the real value of things, by their apparent cost.

We see this ill.u.s.trated in the case of some grave and ponderous weakling, who has nothing really in him, and yet who creaks, and groans, and labors, and toils, to get under way, until our sympathy with his painful effort leads us so to rejoice over his final delivery that we have lost all power or disposition to weigh or estimate his half-strangled, commonplace bantling, when it is finally born, and we are rather inclined to wonder over it as a prodigy. No doubt the generation of men who witnessed the mountain in labor, regarded the sickly, hairy little mouse, finally brought forth, as a genuine wonder.

Great is mediocrity! It is the average world, and the majority conspires to do it reverence. Genius, if such a thing there is, may be appreciated by school-boys; the average grown world count it as of no value. If a man has a brilliant intellect, let him bewail it on the mountains, as the daughter of Jephtha did her virginity. If he has wit, let him become Brutus.

Readiness and genius are apt to be arrogant; and, when joined with a lively temper, with an ardent, impetuous nature, they render a young man an object of dread, dislike, or worse. Bart had grave doubts of his being a genius, but it had been abundantly manifest to his sensitive perceptions that he was disliked; and he had in part arrived at the probable cause, and was now very persistently endeavoring to correct it by holding his tongue and temper.

Like all young men bent upon a pursuit where his success must depend upon intellect, he was most anxious to ascertain the quality and extent of his brain-power--a matter of which a young man can form no proper idea. Later in life a man is informed by the estimate of others, and can judge somewhat by what he has done. The youth has done nothing. He has made no manifestation by which an observer can determine; when he looks at himself, he can examine his head and face; but the mind, turned in upon itself, with no mirror, weight, count or measure, feels the hopelessness of the effort.

If some one would only tell him of his capacity and power, of his mental weakness and deficiency, it would not, perhaps, change his course, but might teach him how best to pursue it.

CHAPTER XVIII.

SUGAR MAKING.

The long, cold winter was past; spring had come, and with it sugar making, the carnival season, in the open air, among the trees.

The boys had the preparations for sugar making in an advanced stage. A new camp had been selected on a dry slope, wood had been cut, the tubs distributed, and they were waiting for Bart and a good day. Both came together; and on the day following the close of his school, at an early hour they hurried off to tap the trees.

Spring and gladness were in the air. The trill of the blue-bird was a thrill; and the first song of the robin was full of lilac and apple blossoms. The softened winds fell to zephyrs, and whispered strange mysterious legends to the brown silent trees, and murmured lovingly over the warming beds of the slumbering flowers. Young juices were starting up under rough bark, and young blood and spirits throbbed in the veins of the boys, and loud and repeated bursts of joyous voices gushed with the fulness of the renewing power of the season.

The day, with its eager hope, strength and joyousness, filled Bart to the eyes, and his spirit in exultation breaking from the unnatural thrall that had for many months of darkness and anxious labor overshadowed it, went with a bound of old buoyancy, and he started with laughing, open brow, and springy step, over the spongy ground, to the poetry of life in the woods.

That one day they tapped all the trees. The next, the kettles were hung on the large crane, the immense logs were rolled up, the kettles filled with sap, and the blue smoke of the first fire went curling up gracefully through the tree-tops. What an event, the first fire! Not as in New England, sugar in the West is never made until the winter snow has disappeared, and the surface has become dry, and the woods pleasant, and the opening day at the boiling was as brilliant as its predecessor.

Bart and Edward, with a yoke of steers, gathered the sap towards evening, and George tended the kettles; many curious bright-eyed chickadees boldly ventured up about the works, peeping, flitting, and examining, with head first on one side and then on the other, the funny doings of these humans in their dominions, and searching for the store of raw pork, which, according to their recollection, ought to be hid away somewhere near by.

The boys had pulled down, removed and rebuilt their old snug cabin, with one end open to the broad and roaring fire; in the bottom of which, over its floor, were placed a large quant.i.ty of sweet bright straw, and two or three heavy blankets.

The "run" made it necessary to boil all night; and filling the kettles and adjusting the fires, Bart and the boys, hungry and tired, went up to supper and the ch.o.r.es; after which Bart and Edward, taking the former's rifle, and lighted by a hickory torch, returned to the camp for the night--Edward really to sleep, sweet and unbroken, in the cabin, and Bart to take care of the kettles and fires, to muse and dream, and think bright, strange thoughts, and watch the effects of the lights and shadows, listen to the dropping of the sap into the buckets, and the boding owls, whose melancholy notes harmonized with, rather than interrupted, the solemn effect of deepest night. Man easily reverts to savagery and nature; and this tendency was marked in Bart, whom this new recurrence to old habits of wood-life, so dear to him, filled with such pleasant sensations of joyous unrest, that until near the coming dawn he was disinclined to sleep, and when he did, the first note of an old robin from the topmost twig of a giant old maple awoke him fresh to the labor and enjoyment of another resplendent day.

And so the days followed each other, and the spring deepened. Myriads of flower-beds shot up through the dead leaves, and opened out their frail and wondrously tinted petals for a single day, and faded. Not a new one opened--not a cloud or tint varied the sky--not a note of a bird or tap of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, that was not marked by Bart, to whom Nature had at least given the power to appreciate and love her lighter works.

CHAPTER XIX.