The Deliverance Part 30

"If you take my advice, you'll leave Molly Peterkin alone," he wrote in his big, unformed hand, "for as far as I can see you are too good a match to get on well together. She's a fool, you know, and from the way you're going on just now it looks very much as if you were one also. At any rate, I'm not your man for gallantries. I'd rather hunt hares than women, any day--and game's plentiful just now."

It was a long winter that year, and for the first time since her terrible illness Mrs. Blake was forced to keep her bed during a bitter spell of weather, when the raw winds whistled around the little frame house, entering the cracks at the doors and the loosened sashes of the windows. Cynthia grew drawn and pinched with a sickly, frost-bitten look, and even Lila's rare bloom drooped for a while like that of a delicate plant starving for the suns.h.i.+ne. Christopher, who, as usual, was belated in his winter's work, was kept busy hauling and chopping wood, shovelling the snow away from the porch and the paths that led to the well, the stable, and the barn. Once a day, most often after breakfast, Jim Weatherby appeared, smiling gaily beneath his powdering of snow; and sometimes, in defiance of Cynthia, he would take Lila for a sleigh-ride, from which she would return blossoming like a rose.

Mrs. Blake, from her tester bed, complained bitterly of the cold, and drew from the increasing severity of the winters, which she declared became more unbearable each year, warrant for her belief in the gradual "decline of the world as a dwelling-place."

"You may say what you please, Tucker," she remarked one morning when she had awakened with an appet.i.te to find that her eggs had frozen in the kitchen, "but you can hardly be so barefaced as to compliment this weather. I'm sure I never felt anything like it when I was young."

"Well, at least I have a roof over my head now, and I didn't when I marched to Romney with old Stonewall," remarked Tucker from the hearth, where he was roasting an apple before the big logs.

"Many's the morning I waked then with the snow frozen stiff all over me, and I had to crack through it before I could get up."

The old lady made a peevish gesture.

"It may sound ungrateful," she returned, "but I'm sometimes tempted to wish that you had never marched to Romney, or that General Jackson had been considerate enough to choose a milder spell. I really believe when you come to die you will console yourself with the recollection of something worse that happened in the war."

Tucker laughed softly to himself as he watched the apple revolving in the red heat on its bit of string. "Well, I'm not sure that I shan't, Lucy," he said.

"Habit's mighty strong, you know, and when you come to think of it there's some comfort in knowing that you'll never have to face the worst again. A man doesn't duck his head at the future when he's learned that, let be what will; it can't be so bad as the thing he's gone through with and yet come out on top. It gives him a pretty good feeling, after all, to know that he hasn't funked the hardest knock that life could give. Well, my birds are hungry, I reckon, and I'll hobble out and feed 'em while this apple is roasting to the core."

Raising himself with difficulty, he got upon his crutches and went to scatter his crumbs from the kitchen window.

By the first of March the thaw came, and the snow melted in a day beneath the lavish spring suns.h.i.+ne. It was a week later that Christopher, coming from the woods at midday, saw Tucker sitting on his old bench by the damask rose-bush, in which the sap was just beginning to swell. The sun shone full on the dead gra.s.s, and the old soldier, with his chin resting in the crook of his crutch, was gazing straight down upon the earth. The expression of his large, kindly face was so radiant with enjoyment that Christopher quickened his steps and slapped him affectionately upon the shoulder.

"Is Fletcher dead, Uncle Tucker?" he inquired, laughing.

"No, no; n.o.body's dead that I've heard of," responded Tucker in his cheerful voice; "but something better than Bill Fletcher's death has happened, I can tell you. Why, I'd been sitting out here an hour or more, longing for the spring to come, when suddenly I looked down and there was the first dandelion--a regular miracle--blooming in the mould about that old rose-bush."

"Well, I'll be hanged!" exclaimed Christopher, aghast. "Mark my words, you'll be in an asylum yet."

The other chuckled softly.

"When you put me there you'll shut up the only wise man in the county," he returned. "If your sanity doesn't make you happy, I can tell you it's worth a great deal less than my craziness. Look at that dandelion, now--it has filled two hours chock full of thought and colour for me when I might have been puling indoors and nagging at G.o.d Almighty about trifles. The time has been when I'd have walked right over that little flower and not seen it, and now it grows yellower each minute that I look at it, and each minute I see it better than I did the one before. There's nothing in life, when you come to think of it--not Columbus setting out to sea nor Napoleon starting on a march--more wonderful than that brave little blossom putting up the first of all through the earth."

"I can't see anything in a dandelion but a nuisance," observed Christopher, sitting down on the bench and baring his head to the suns.h.i.+ne; "but you do manage to get interest out of life, that's certain."

"Interest! Good Lord!" exclaimed Tucker. "If a man can't find something to interest him in a world like this, he must be a dull fellow or else have a serious trouble of the liver. So long as I have my eyes, and there's a different sky over my head each day, and earth, and trees, and flowers all around me, I don't reckon I'll begin to whistle to boredom. If I were like Lucy, now, I sometimes think things would be up with me, and yet Lucy is one of the very happiest women I've ever known. Her brain is so filled with pleasant memories that it's never empty for an instant."

Christopher's face softened, as it always did at an allusion to his mother's blindness.

"You're right," he said; "she is happy."

"To be sure, she's had her life," pursued Tucker, without noticing him. "She's been a beauty, a belle, a sweetheart, a wife, and a mother--to say nothing of a very spoiled old woman; but all the same, I don't think I have her magnificent patience.

Oh, I couldn't sit in the midst of all this and not have eyes to see."

With a careless smile Christopher glanced about him--at the bright blue sky seen through the bare trees, at the dried carrot flowers in the old field across the road, at the great pine growing on the little knoll.

"I hardly think she misses much," he said, and added after a moment, "Do you know I'd give twenty--no forty, fifty years of this for a single year of the big noisy world over there. I'm dog-tired of stagnation."

"Well, it's natural," admitted Tucker gently. "At your age I doubtless felt the same. The young want action, and they ought to have it, because it makes the quiet of middle age seem all the sweeter. You've missed your duels and your flirtations and your pomades, and you've been put into breeches and into philosophy at the same time. Why, one might as well stick a brier pipe in the mouth of a boy who is crying for his first gun and tell him to go sit in the chimney-corner and be happy. When I was twenty-five I travelled all the way to New York for the latest Parisian waistcoat, but I can't remember that I ever strolled round the corner to see a peach-tree in full bloom. I'm a lot happier now, heaven knows, in my homespun coat, than I was then in that waistcoat of satin brocade, so I sometimes catch myself wis.h.i.+ng that I could see again the people I knew then--the men I quarrelled with and the women I kissed. I'd like to apologise for the young fool of thirty years ago."

Christopher stirred restlessly, and, clasping his hands behind his head, stared at a small white cloud drifting slowly above the great pine.

"Well, it's the fool part I envy you, all the same," he remarked.

"You're welcome to it, my boy," answered Tucker; then he paused abruptly and bent his ear. "Ah, there's the bluebird! Do you hear him whistling in the meadow? G.o.d bless him; he's a hearty fellow and has spring in his throat."

"I pa.s.sed one coming up," said Christopher.

"The same, I reckon. He'll be paying me a visit soon, and I've got my crumbs ready." He smiled brightly and then sat with his chin on his crutch, looking steadily across the road. "You haven't had your chance, my boy," he resumed presently; "and a man ought to have several chances to look round him in this world, for otherwise the things he misses will always seem to him the only things worth having. I'm not much of a fellow to preach, you'll say--a hundred and eighty pounds of flesh that can't dress itself nor hobble about without crutches that are strapped on- -but if it's the last word I speak I wouldn't change a day in my long life, and if it came to going over it again I'd trust it all in the Lord's hands and start blindfolded. And yet, when I look back upon it now, I see that it wasn't much of a life as lives go, and the two things I wanted most in it I never got."

Christopher turned quickly with a question.

"Oh, you think I have always been a contented, prosaic chap,"

pursued Tucker, smiling, "but you were never more mistaken since you were born. Twice in my life I came mighty near blowing out my brains--once when I found that I couldn't go to Paris and be an artist, and the second time when I couldn't get the woman I wanted for my wife. I wasn't cut out for a farmer, you see, and I had always meant from the time I was a little boy to go abroad and study painting. I'd set my heart on it, as people say, but when the time came my father died and I had to stay at home to square his debts and run the place. For a single night I was as clean crazy as a man ever was. It meant the sacrifice of my career, you know, and a career seemed a much bigger thing to me then than it does to-day."

"I never heard that," said Christopher, lowering his voice.

"There's a lot we don't know even about the people we live in a little house with. You never heard, either, I dare say, that I was so madly in love once that when the woman threw me over for a better man I shut myself up in a cabin in the woods and did not speak to a human being for six months. I was a rare devil, sure enough, though you'd never believe it to see me now. It took two blows like that, a four years' war, and the surgeon's operating table to teach me how to be happy."

"It was Miss Matoaca Bolling, I suppose?" suggested Christopher, with a mild curiosity.

The old soldier broke into his soft, full laugh.

"Matoaca! Bless your soul, no. But to think that Lucy should have kept a secret for more than thirty years! Never talk to me again about a woman's letting anything out. If she's got a secret that it mortifies her to tell it will be buried in the grave with her, and most likely it will never see the light at judgment Day. Lucy was always ashamed of my being jilted, you know."

"It's a new story then, is it?"

"Oh, it's as old as the hills by now. What's the funny part, though, is that Lucy has always tried to persuade herself it was really Matoaca I cared for. You know, I sometimes think that a woman can convince herself that black is white if she only keeps trying hard enough--and it's marvellous that she never sees the difference between wanting to believe a thing and believing it in earnest. Now, if Matoaca had been the last woman on this earth, and I the last man, I could never have fallen in love with her, though I may as well confess that I had my share of fancies when I was young. It's no use attempting to explain a man's feelings, of course. Matoaca was almost as great a belle as Lucy, and she was the handsomest creature you ever laid eyes on--one of those big, managing women who are forever improving things around them.

Why, I don't believe she could stay two seconds in a man's arms without improving the set of his cravat. Some men like that kind of thing, but I never did, and I often think the reason I went so mad about the other woman was that she came restful after Matoaca. She was the comforting kind, who, you might be sure, always saw you at your best; and no matter the mood you were in, she never wanted to pat and pull you into shape. Lucy always said she couldn't hold a candle to Matoaca in looks, and I suppose she was right; but, pretty or plain, that girl had something about her that went straight to my heart more than thirty years ago and stays there still. Strange to say, I've tried to believe that it was half compa.s.sion, for she always reminded me of a little wild bird that somebody had caught and shut up in a cage, and it used to seem to me sometimes that I could almost hear the fluttering of her soul. Well, whatever it was, the feeling was the sort that is most worth while, though she didn't think so, of course, and broke her great heart over another man. She married him and had six children and died a few years ago. He was a fortunate fellow, I suppose, and yet I can't help fancying that I've had the better part and the Lord was right. She was not happy, they said, and he knew it, and yet had to face those eyes of hers every day. It was like many other marriages, I reckon; he got used to her body and never caught so much as a single glimpse of her soul. Then she faded away and died to him, but to me she's just the same as when I first saw her, and I still believe that if she could come here and sit on this old bench I should be perfectly happy. It's a lucky man, I tell you, who can keep the same desire for more than thirty years."

He shook his head slowly, smiling as he listened to the bluebird singing in the road. "And now I'll be fetching my crumbs," he added, struggling to his crutches.

When he had helped Tucker to the house, Christopher came back and sat down again on the bench, closing his eyes to the suns.h.i.+ne, the spring sky, and the dandelion blooming in the mould. He was very tired, and his muscles ached from the strain of heavy labour, yet as he lingered there in the warm wind it seemed to him that action was the one thing he desired. The restless season worked in his blood, and he felt the stir of old impulses that had revived each year with the quickening sap since the first pilgrimage man made on earth. He wanted to be up and away while he was still young, and his heart beat high, and at the moment he would have found positive delight in any convulsion of the natural order, in any excuse for a headlong and impetuous plunge into life.

He heard the door open again, and Tucker shuffled out into the path and began scattering his crumbs upon the gravel. When Christopher pa.s.sed a moment later, on his way to the house, the old soldier was merrily whistling an invitation to a glimpse of blue in a tree-top by the road.

The spring dragged slowly, and with June came the transplanting of the young tobacco. This was the busiest season of the year with Christopher, and so engrossed was he in his work that for a week at the end of the month he did not go down for the county news at Tom Spade's store. Fletcher was at home, he knew, but he had heard nothing of Will, and it was through the storekeeper at last that he learned definitely of the boy's withdrawal from the university. Returning from the field one afternoon at sunset, he saw Tom sitting beside Tucker in the yard, and in response to a gesture he crossed the gra.s.s and stopped beside the long pine bench.

"I say, Mr. Christopher, I've brought you a bit of news," called the storekeeper at the young man's approach.

"Well, let's have it," returned Christopher, laughing. "If you're going to tell me that Uncle Tucker has discovered a rare weed, though, I warn you that I can't support it."

"Oh, I'm not in this, thank heaven," protested Tucker; "but to tell the truth, I'm downright sorry for the boy--Fletcher or no Fletcher,"

"Ah," said Christopher under his breath, "so it's Will Fletcher?"

"He's in a jolly sc.r.a.pe this time, an' no mistake," replied Tom.

"He's been leadin' a wild life at the university, it seems, an'

to-day Fletcher got a telegram saying that the boy had been caught cheatin' in his examinations. The old man left on the next train, as mad as a hornet, I can tell you. He swore he'd bring the young scamp back an' put him to the plough. Well, well, thar are worse dangers than a pretty gal, though Susan won't believe it."