Jersey Street and Jersey Lane Part 4

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE LABORERS ... FOUND IT AND TOOK IT"]

By and by the regular wayfarers found it out--the peddlers, the colporteurs, the wandering portrait-painters, the tinkers and clock-menders, the runaway apprentices, and all the rest of the old-time gentry of the road. And they carried the path on still farther--down the river to Newark.

It is not wholly to be told, "The Story of the Path." So many people had to do with its making in so many ways that no chronicle could tell all the meanings of its twists and turns and straight lines. There is one little jog in its course to-day, where it went around a tree, the stump of which rotted down into the ground a quarter of a century ago. Why do we walk around that useless bend to-day? Because it is a path, and because we walk in the way of human nature.

The life of a tree may be a hundred years or two hundred years and yet be long life. But the days of the age of a man are threescore and ten, and though some be so strong that they come to fourscore, yet the strong man may be stricken down in the flower of his strength, if it be the will of the Lord.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

When William Turnbull came to die he was but twoscore years and five, but for all he was so young the people of the towns.h.i.+p gathered from far and near, for he had been a helpful man all his days, and those whom he had helped remembered that he would help them no more. Four men and four women sat up with the dead, twice as many as the old custom called for. One of the men was a Judge, two had been Chosen Freeholders, and the fourth was his hired man. There was no cemetery in the towns.h.i.+p, and his tomb had been built at the bottom of the hill, looking out on the meadows which he had just made his own--the last purchase of his life.

There were two other pall-bearers to carry him on their shoulders to the place beyond which no man goes. These two, when they left the house on the night before the funeral, walked slowly and thoughtfully down the path together. They looked over every step of the way with to-morrow's slow and toilsome march in their minds. When they came to the turn by Pelatiah's mound they paused.

"We can't never get him round that bend," said one. "That ain't no way to start down the hill. Best is I come here first thing in the morning and cut a way through this bull-brier straight across the angle, then we can see ahead where we're going. Put them two light men behind, and you and me at the head, and we can manage it. My! what a man _he_ was, though! Why, I seen him take the head of a coffin all by himself once."

This man was a near neighbor of the Turnbulls, for now they had a number of neighbors; Reuben Levi Dodd had been selling small farms off his big farm--somehow he had never made the big farm a success. There are many services of men to man that country neighbors make little of, though to the dwellers in great cities they might seem strange burdens. At five o'clock the next morning Warren Freeman, the pall-bearer, went out and mowed and hacked a path through the tangled field from midway of old Pelatiah's trail down to a shortcut made by the doctor's charity boy, who was to-day a Judge. This Judge came out of the silent house, released by the waking hour, from his vigil with the dead. He watched his fellow pall-bearer at work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I USED TO GO DOWN THAT PATH ON THE DEAD RUN"]

"I used to go down that path on the dead run twenty years ago," said he, "when I was working for Dr. Van Wagener and he used to send me up here gathering herbs."

"You'll go down it on the dead walk to-morrow, Jedge," said the other, pausing in his work, "and you want to step mighty careful, or one fun'l will breed another."

Life, death, wedlock, the lingering of lovers, the waywardness of childish feet, the tread of weary toil, the slow, swaying walk of the mother, with her babe in her arms, the measured steps of the bearer of the dead, the light march of youth and strength and health--all, all have helped to beat out the strange, wandering line of the old path; and to me, who love to find and to tread its turns, the current of their human life flows still along its course, in the dim s.p.a.ces under the trees, or out where the suns.h.i.+ne and the wind are at play upon the broad, bright meadows.

THE LOST CHILD

The best of life in a great city is that it breeds a broad and tolerant catholicity of spirit: the best of country life is that it breeds the spirit of helpful, homely, kindly neighborliness. The suburban-dweller, who shares in both lives, is perhaps a little too ready to pride himself in having learned the lesson of the great metropolis, but the other and homelier lesson is taught so gradually and so un.o.btrusively, that he often learns it quite unconsciously; and goes back, perhaps, to his old existence in the city, only to realize that a certain charm has gone out of life which he misses without knowing just what he has lost. He thinks, perhaps, it is exercise he lacks. And it is, indeed--the exercise of certain gentle sympathies, that thrive as poorly in the town's crowded life as the country wild-flowers thrive in the flower-pots of tenement-house windows.

It was between three and four o'clock of an August night--a dark, warm, hazy night, breathless, heavy and full of the smell of gra.s.s and trees and dew-moistened earth, when a man galloped up one of those long suburban streets, where the houses stand at wide intervals, each behind its trim lawn, or old-fas.h.i.+oned flower-garden, relieved, even in the darkness, against a great rear-wood screen of lofty trees. Up the driveway of one of these he turned, his horse's hoof-beats dropping clear and sharp on the hard macadam. He reined up at the house and rapped a loud tattoo with the stock of his whip on a pillar of the veranda.

It was a minute or two before the noise, loud as it was, had reached the ears of two sleepers in the bedroom, just above his head. A much less startling sound would have awakened a whole city household; but slumber in the country has a slumber of its own: in summer time a slumber born of night-air, laden with the odors of vegetation, and silent except for the drowsy chirp of birds that stir in vine and tree. The wife awoke first, listened for a second, and aroused her husband, who went to the window. He raised the screen and looked out.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"Who is it?" he said, without nervousness or surprise, though ten years before in his city home such a summons might have shaken his spirit with anxious dread.

"I'm Latimer," said the man on the horse, briefly. "That boy of Penrhyn's--the little one with the yellow hair--is lost. He got up and slipped out the house, somehow, about an hour ago, they think, and they've found one of his playthings nearly half a mile down the Romneytown Road."

"Where shall I meet you?" asked the man at the window.

"At the Gun-Club grounds on the hill," replied Latimer; "we've sent a barrel of oil up there for the lanterns. So long, Halford. Is Dirck at home?"

"Yes," said Halford; and without another word Latimer galloped into the darkness, and in a minute the sound of his tattoo was heard on the hollow pillars of the veranda of the house next door.

This was the summons--a bare announcement of an event without appeal, request, suggestion, or advice. None of these things was needed. Enough had been said between the two men, though they knew each other only as distant neighbors. Each knew well what that summons meant, and what duty it involved.

The rat-tat of Latimer's crop had hardly sounded before a cheery young voice rang out on the air.

"All right, old man! I heard you at Halford's. Go ahead."

It was Dirck's voice. Dirck had another name, a good long, Holland-Dutch one, but everybody, even the children, called him by his Christian name, and as he had lived to thirty without getting one day older than eighteen, we will consider the other Dutch name unnecessary. Dirck and Halford were close friends and close neighbors. They were two men who had reached a point of perfect community of tastes and inclinations, though they came together in two widely different starting-places--though they were so little alike to outward seeming that they were known among their friends as "the mismates." Though one was forty and the other but thirty, each had closed a career, and was somewhat idly seeking a new one. As Dirck expressed it, "We two fellows had played our games out, and were waiting till we strike another that was high enough for our style. We ain't playing limit games."

Two very different games they had been, but neither had been a small one. Dirck had started in with a fortune to "do" the world--the whole world, nothing else would suit him. He had been all over the globe. He had lived among all manner of peoples. He had ridden everything ridable, shot everything shootable, climbed everything climbable, and satisfied himself, as he said, that the world was too small for any particular use. At the end of his travels he had a little of his fortune left, a vast amount of experience, the const.i.tution of a red Indian, and a vocabulary so vast and so peculiar that it stunned and fascinated the stranger. Halford was a New York lawyer, gray, clean-shaven, and sharp of feature. His "game" had made him famous and might have made him wealthy, but he cared neither for fame nor wealth. For twenty years he had fought a host of great corporations to establish one single point of law. His antagonists had vainly tried to bribe him, and as vainly to bully him. He had been a.s.saulted, his life had been threatened, and altogether, as he admitted, the game had been lively enough to keep him interested; but having once won the game he tired of that style of play altogether. He picked out a small but choice practice which permitted him to work or be idle pretty much as the fancy took him. These were two odd chums to meet in a small suburban town, there to lead quiet and uneventful lives, and yet they were the two most contented men in the place.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Halford was getting into his clothes, but really with a speed and precision which got the job over before his impetuous next-door neighbor had got one leg of his riding-breeches on. Mrs. Halford sat up in bed and expressed her feeling to her husband, who had never been known to express his.

"Oh, Jack," she said, "isn't it awful? Would you ever have thought of such a thing! They must have been awfully careless! Oh, Jack, you will find him, won't you? Jack, if such a thing happened to one of our children I should go wild; I'll never get over it myself if he isn't found. Oh, you don't know how thankful I am that we didn't lose our Richard that way! Oh, Jack, dear, isn't it too horrible for anything!"

Jack simply responded, with no trace of emotion in his voice:

"It's the h.e.l.l!"

And yet in those three words Jack Halford expressed, in his own way, quite as much as his wife had expressed in hers. More, even, for there was a grim promise in his tone that comforted her heart.

Mrs. Halford's feelings being expressed and in some measure relieved, she promptly became practical.

"I'll fill your flask, of course, dear. Brandy, I suppose? And what shall we women take up to the Gun Club besides blankets and clean clothes?"

Mrs. Halford's husband always thought before he spoke, and she was not at all surprised that he filled his tobacco-pouch before he answered.

When he did speak he knew what he had to say.

"First something to put in my pocket for Dirck and me to eat. We can't fool with coming home to breakfast. Second, tell the girls to send up milk to the Gun Club, and something for you women to eat."

"Oh, I sha'n't want anything to eat," cried Mrs. Halford.

"You must eat," said her husband, simply, "and you must make the rest of them eat. You might do all right without it, but I wouldn't trust the rest of them. You may need all the nerve you've got."

"Yes, dear," said his wife, submissively. She had been with her husband in times of danger, and she knew he was a leader to be followed. "I'll have sandwiches and coffee and tea; I can make them drink tea, anyway."

"Third," went on Jack Halford, as if he had not been interrupted, "bring my field-gla.s.s with you. Dirck and I will range together along the river. If I put up a white handkerchief anywhere down there, you stay where you are and we will come to you. If I put up this red one, come right down with blankets and brandy in the first carriage you can get hold of. Get on the north edge of the hill and you can keep a line on us almost anywhere."

"Couldn't you give us some signal, dear, to tell us if--if--if it's all right?"

"If it was all wrong," replied the husband, "you wouldn't want the mother to learn it that way. I'll signal to you privately, however. If it's all right, I'll wave the handkerchief; if I move it up and down, you'll understand."

Two minutes later he bade her good-by at the door.

"Now remember," he said, "white means wait, red means ride."

And having delivered himself of this simple mnemonic device, he pa.s.sed out into the darkness.

At the next gate he met Dirck and the two swung into step together, and walked up the street with the steady stretching tread of men accustomed to walking long distances. They said "h.e.l.lo!" as they met, and their further conversation was brief.