Westways: A Village Chronicle Part 38

"No, sir."

"Well, we do."

James Penhallow was pleased and amazed when he discovered that Mrs. Ann was quietly submissive to the arrangements made for her comfort on the journey. She appeared to have abruptly regained her good temper and, Penhallow thought, was unnaturally and excessively grateful for every small service. Being unused to the ways of sick women, he wondered as the train ran down the descent from the Allegheny Mountains how long a time was required to know any human being entirely. He had been introduced within two weeks to two Ann Penhallows besides the Ann he had lived with these many years. He concluded, as others have done, that people are hard to understand, and thus thinking he ran over in mind the group they left on the platform at Westways Crossing.

There was Billy-apparently a simple character, abruptly capable of doing unexpected things; useful to-day, useless tomorrow. He called up to mind the very competent doctor; John, and his friend-the moody clergyman-beloved of all men. The doctor had said of him, "a man living in the monastery of himself-in our world, but not of it."

"What amuses you, James?" asked his wife.

This good sign of return to her normal curiosity was familiarly pleasant. "I was recalling, Ann, what McGregor said of Rivers after that horrid time of sickness at Westways. You may remember it."

"No, I do not."

"No! He said that Rivers was a round-shouldered angel."

"That does not seem to me amusing, James."

"Round-shouldered he is, Ann, and for the rest you at least ought to recognize your heavenly fellow-citizens when you meet them."

"Is that your poetry or your folly, James Penhallow?"

"Mine, my dear? No language is expansive enough for McGregor when he talks about you."

"Nonsense, James. He knows how to please somebody. We were discussing Mark Rivers."

"Were we? Then here is a nice little dose from the doctor for you. Last Christmas, after you had personally sat up with old Mrs. Lamb when she was so ill, and until I made a row about it-"

"Yes-yes-I know." Her curiosity got the better of her dislike of being praised for what to her was a simple duty, and she added, "Well, what did he say?"

"Oh, that you and Rivers were like angels gone astray in the strange country called earth; and then that imp of a boy, John, who says queer things, said that it was like a bit of verse Rivers had read to him. He knew it too. I liked it and got him to write it out. I have it in my pocket-book. Like to see it?"

"No," she returned-and then-"yes," as she reflected that it must have originally applied to another than herself.

He was in the habit of storing in his pocket-book slips from the papers-news, receipts for stable-medicine, and rarely verse. Now and then he emptied them into the waste basket. He brought it out of his pocket-book and she read it:

As when two angel citizens of Heaven Swift winged on errands of the Master's love Meet in some earthly guise.

"Is that all of it?"

"No, John could not remember the rest, and I did not ask Mark."

"I should suppose not. Thank you for believing it had any application to me. And, James, I have been a very cross angel of late."

"Oh, my dear Ann, Dr. McGregor said-"

"Never mind Dr. McGregor, James. Go and smoke your cigar. I am tired and I must not talk any more-talking on a train always tires me."

Two days after the departure of his aunt and uncle, John persuaded Rivers to walk with him on the holiday morning of Sat.u.r.day. The clergyman caring little for the spring charm of the maiden summer, but much for John Penhallow's youth of promise, wandered on slowly through the woods, with head bent forward, stumbling now and then, lost to a world where his companion was joyfully conscious of the prettiness of new-born and translucent foliage.

Always pleased to sit down, Rivers dropped his thin length of body upon the brown pine-needles near the cabin and settling his back against a fallen tree-trunk made himself comfortable. As usual, when at rest, he began to talk.

"John," he said, "you and Tom McGregor had a quarrel long ago-and a fight."

"Yes, sir," returned John wondering.

"I saw it-I did not interfere at once-I was wrong."

This greatly amused John. "You stopped it just in time for me-I was about done for."

"Yes, but now, John, I have talked to Tom, and-I am afraid you have never made it up."

"No, he was insolent to Leila and rude. But we had a talk about it-oh, a good while ago-before she went away."

"Oh, had you! Well, what then?"

"Oh, he told me you had talked to him and he had seen Leila and told her he was sorry. She never said a word to me. I told him that he ought to have apologized to me-too."

Rivers was amused. "Apologies are not much in fas.h.i.+on among Westways boys. What did he say?"

"Oh, just that he didn't see that at all-and then he said that he was going away this fall to study medicine, and some day when he was a doctor he would have a chance to get even with me, and wouldn't he dose me well. Then we both laughed, and-I shook hands with him. That's all, sir."

"Well, I am pleased. He is by no means a bad fellow, and as you know he is clever-and can beat you in mathematics."

"Yes, but I licked him well, and he knows it."

"For shame, John. I wish my Baptist friend's boy would do better-he is dull."

"But I like him," said John. "He is so plucky."

"There is another matter I want to talk about. I had a long conversation about you with your uncle the night before he left. I heard with regret that you want to go into the army."

"May I ask why?" said John, as he lay on the ground lazily fingering the pine-needles.

"Is it because the hideous business called war attracts you?"

"No, but I like what I hear of the Point from Uncle Jim. I prefer it to any college life. Besides this, I do not expect to spend my life in the service, and after all it is simply a first rate training for anything I may want to do later-care of the mills, I mean. Uncle Jim is pleased, and as for war, Mr. Rivers, if that is what you dislike, what chance of war is there?"

"You have very likely forgotten my talk with Mr. George Grey. The North and the South will never put an end to their differences without bloodshed."

It seemed a strange opinion to John. He had thought so when he heard their talk, but now the clergyman's earnestness and some better understanding of the half-century's bitter feeling made him thoughtful. Rising to his feet, he said, "Uncle Jim does not agree with you, and Aunt Ann and her brother, Henry Grey, think that Mr. Buchanan will bring all our troubles to an end. Of course, sir, I don't know, but"-and his voice rose-"if there ever should be such a war, I am on Uncle Jim's side, and being out of West Point would not keep me out of the fight."

Rivers shook his head. "It will come, John. Few men think as I do, and your uncle considers me, I suspect, to be governed by my unhappy way of seeing the dark side of things. He says that I am a bewildered pessimist about politics. A pessimist I may be, but it is the habitually hopeful meliorist who is just now perplexed past power to think straight."

John's interest was caught for the moment by the word, "meliorist." "What is a meliorist, sir?" he asked. "Oh, a wild insanity of hopefulness. You all have it. I dislike to talk about the sad future, and I wonder men at the North are so blind."

He fell again to mere musings, a self-absorbed man, while John, attracted by a squirrel's gambols and used to the rector's long silences, wandered near by among the pines, with a vagabond mind on this or that, and watching the alert little acrobat of the forest. As he moved about, he recalled his first walks to the cabin with Leila and the wild thing he had said one day-and her reply. One ages fast, at seventeen, and now he wondered if he had been quite wise, and with the wisdom and authority of a year and a half of mental growth punished his foolish boy-past with severity of reproach. He had failed for a time to hear, or at least to hear with attention, the low-voiced soliloquies in which Mr. Rivers sometimes indulged. McGregor, an observant man, said that Rivers's mind jumped from thought to thought, and that his talk had at times no connective tissue and was hard to follow.

Now he spoke louder. "No one, John, no one sees that every new compromise compromises principles and honour. Have you read any of the speeches of a man named Lincoln in Illinois? He got a considerable vote in that nominating convention."

"No, sir."

"Then read it-read him. A prophet of disaster! He says, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand. This government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free.' The man did not know that he was ignorantly quoting George Was.h.i.+ngton's opinion. It is so, and so it will be. I would let them go their way in peace, for the sin of man-owning is ours-was ours-and we are to suffer for it soon or late-a nation's debts have to be paid, and some are paid in blood."