Westways: A Village Chronicle Part 36

She sat down again. "Thank you." Then with renewed strength, she said, "You won't have them go after him?"

"No, I will not."

He went away to order the carriage, and returning said, "You know, Ellen, that you will always be taken care of."

"Yes, I know, sir-I know. But he took it out of my Bible-out of the book of G.o.d." She was presently helped into the wagon and sent away murmuring incoherently.

"And so, James," said Ann, "she knew too much about the fire. What a tragedy!"

"Yes, she knew. I am glad that he has gone. If he had faced it out and stayed, I must have done something. I suppose it is better for her on the whole. When he was drunk, he was brutal; when he was sober, he kept her worried. I am glad he has gone."

"But," said Ann, "he was her son-"

"Yes, more's the pity."

In a day or two it was known that Peter had disappeared. The town knew very well why and discussed it at evening, when as usual the men gathered for a talk. Pole expressed the general opinion when he said, "It's hard on the old woman, but I guess it's a riddance of bad rubbish." Then they fell to talking politics, the roofing of the chapel and the price of wheat and so Westways settled down again to its every-day quiet round of duties.

The excitement of the fire and Lamb's flight had been unfavourable to literary composition, but now John returned to his letter. He continued:

"The reticule will have to be finished in town. Uncle will take it after the election or send it to you. If you remember your Latin, you will know that reticule comes from reticulus, a net. But this isn't really a net.

"We have had a big excitement. Some one set fire to the parsonage and it burnt down." [He did not tell her who set it on fire, although he knew very well that it was Peter Lamb.] "Lamb has run away, and I think we are well rid of him.

"I do miss you very much. Mr. Rivers says you will be a fas.h.i.+onable young lady when you come back and will never s...o...b..ll any more. I don't believe it.

"Yours truly,

"JOHN PENHALLOW."

Mrs. Penhallow enclosed the letter in one of her own, and no answer came until she gave him a note at the end of October. Leila wrote:

"DEAR JOHN: It is against the rules to write to any one but parents, and I am breaking the rules when I enclose this to you. I do not think I ought to do it, and I will not again.

"You would not know me in my long skirts, and I wear my hair in two plaits. The girls are all from the South and are very angry when they talk about the North. I cannot answer them and am sorry I do not know more about politics, but I do know that Uncle Jim would not agree with them.

"I go on Sat.u.r.days and over Sundays to my cousins in Baltimore. They say that the South will secede if Fremont should be elected. I just hold my tongue and listen.

"Yours sincerely,

"LEILA GREY.

"P.S. I shall be very proud of the bag. I hope you are studying hard."

"Indeed!" muttered John. "Thanks, Miss Grey." There was no more of it.

John Penhallow had come by degrees to value the rare privilege of a walk with the too easily wearied clergyman, who had avenues of ready intellectual approach which invited the adventurous mind of the lad and were not in the mental topography of James Penhallow. The cool, hazy days of late October had come with their splendour of colour-contrasts such as only the artist nature could make acceptable, and this year the autumn was unusually brilliant.

"Do you enjoy it?" asked Rivers.

"Oh, yes, sir. I suppose every one does."

"In a measure, as some people do the great music, and as the poets usually do not. People presume that the ear for rhythm is the same as that for music. They are things apart. A few poets have had both."

"That seems strange," said John. "I have neither," and he was lost in thought until Rivers, as usual easily tired, said, "Let us sit down. How hazy the air is, John! It tenderly flatters these wild colour-contrasts. It is like a November day of the Indian summer."

"Why do they call it Indian summer?" asked John.

"I do not know. I tried in vain to run it down in the dictionaries. In Canada it is known as 'L'ete de St. Martin.'"

"It seems," said John, "as if the decay of the year had ceased, in pity. It is so beautiful and so new to me. I feel sometimes when I am alone in these woods as if something was going to happen. Did you ever feel that, sir?"

Rivers was silent for a moment. The lad's power to state things in speech and his incapacity to put his thoughts in writing had often puzzled the tutor. "Why don't you put such reflections into verse, John? It's good practice in English."

"I can't-I've tried."

"Try again."

"No," said John decidedly. "Do look at those maples, Mr. Rivers-and the oaks-and the variety of colour in the sa.s.safras. Did you ever notice how its leaves differ in shape?"

"I never did, but nothing is exactly the same as anything else. We talked of that once."

"Then since the world began there never was another me or Leila?"

"Never. There is only one of anything."

John was silent-in thought of his unresemblance to any other John. "But I am like Uncle Jim! Aunt says so."

"Yes, outwardly you are; but you have what he has not-imagination. It is both friend and foe as may be. It may not be a good gift for a soldier-at least one form of it. It may be the parent of fear-of indecisions."

"But, Mr. Rivers, may it not work also for good and suggest possibilities-let you into seeing what other men may do?"

The reflection seemed to Rivers not like the thought of so young a man. He returned, "But I said it might be a friend and have practical uses in life. I have not found it that myself. But some men have morbid imagination. Let us walk." They went on again through the quiet splendour of the woodlands.

"Uncle Jim is going away after the election."

"Yes."

"He will see Leila. Don't you miss her?"

"Yes, but not as you do. However, she will grow up and go by you and be a woman while you are more slowly maturing. That is their way. And then she will marry."

"Good gracious! Leila marry!"

"Yes-it is a way they have. Let us go home."

John was disinclined to talk. Marry-yes-when I am older, I shall ask her until she does!

November came in churlish humour and raged in storms of wind and rain, until before their time to let fall their leaves the woods were stripped of their gay colours. On the fourth day of November the Squire voted the Fremont electoral ticket, and understood that with the exception of Swallow and Pole, Westways had followed the master of Grey Pine. The other candidates did not trouble them. The sad case of Josiah and the threat to capture their barber had lost Buchanan the twenty-seven votes of the little town. Mr. Boynton, the carpenter, fastening the last s.h.i.+ngles on the chapel roof remarked to a workman that it was an awful pity Josiah couldn't know about it and that the new barber wasn't up to shaving a real stiff beard.

The Squire wrote to his wife from Philadelphia on the ninth:

"DEAR ANN: We never talk politics because you were born a Democrat and consider Andrew Jackson a political saint. I begin to wish he might be reincarnated in the body of Buchanan. He will need backbone, I fear. He has carried our State by only three thousand majority in a vote of 433,000. I am told that the excitement here was so great that the peacemaking effect of a day of cold drizzle alone prevented riot and bloodshed. Mr. Buchanan said in October, 'We shall hear no more of "Bleeding Kansas."' Well, I hope so. Here we are at one. I should feel more regret at the defeat of my party if I had more belief in Fremont, but your man is, I am sure, elected, and we must hope for the best and try to think that hope reasonable.