Kitobni o'qish: «Rancho Del Muerto and Other Stories of Adventure from «Outing» by Various Authors», sahifa 15

“An’ they’re poor now,” muttered Silas, visions of Jim and his family to support coming to him.

“Hush!” cried Maria. “Tell me, sir, was there children? Oh, the heart hunger I’ve had for the sound of a child’s voice, the touch of baby hands. You an’ me grandpa and grandma, Sile! an’, my God! you think of money now.”

“Set calm,” pleaded Brown, “for I must hev courage to tell ye all.”

“An’ they sent ye to tell us they was comin’?” asked Silas, judging of their prosperity from the shabby herald.

“They asked me to come, an’ I swore it. There’s a queer blight as creeps inter our country, which without thet might be like everlasting Paradise. Ourn is a land of summer an’ flowers, but up here in this ice-bound region, the air is like water in runnin’ brooks, it puts life an’ health in ye.”

“There’s the blight o’ consumption here. We’re foreordained to suffer all over this airth,” muttered the woman.

“But there it comes in waves of trouble – in awful haste – an’ takes all at once, an’ them that’s well flees away and the sick dies alone. So the yellow fever come creepin’ inter my home, fur Minnie was my child – the daughter I’d keered fur; an’ fust the baby went from her arms, an’ then little Silas (arter you, sir). Then Minnie sickened, an’ her laugh is only an echo in my heart, for she died and was berried, the baby in her arms, and Jim was took next – an’ he says” (only the ticking of the clock sounded now, never so loud before): “‘I want you, dad,’ (he called me dad) ‘to go to my old home in Maine. I want you to tell my father I named my dead boy for him, and I thought of his frugal, saving life with pain, and yet I am proud that his name is respected as that of an honest man, whose word is his bond. I’ll never go up the old lane again,’ says Jim, ‘nor see mother standing in the door with her bright eyes and red cheeks that I used to think was like winter apples. And the old horse, she said she’d care for, I won’t see him again, nor hear the bells. In this land of summer I only long for winter, and dad, if I could hear those hoarse old jolly bells I’d die in peace. Queer, ain’t it? And I remember some rides I took mother; she wan’t afraid of the colt, and looked so pretty, a white hood over her dark hair. You go, dad, and say I was sorry, and I’d planned to come some day prosperous and happy, but it’s never to be. Tell mother to think of me when she goes a Sunday afternoon to the buryin’-ground, as she used to with me, and by those little graves I fek her mother’s heart beat for me, her living child, and I knew, though she said nothing, she cared for me.’ He died tell-in’ me this, marm, an’ was berried by my girl, an’ I think it was meant kind they went together, for both would a pined apart. So I’ve come all the way from Texas, trampin’ for weary months, for I was poor, to give you Jim’s words.”

“Dead! Jim dead!” cried Silas, in a queer, dazed way. “M’ri,” querulously, “you alius sed he was so helthy!”

She went to him and laid her hand on his bowed head.

“An’ we’ve saved an’ scrimped an’ pinched fur strangers, M’ri, fur there ain’t no Lowell to have the prop’ty, an’ I meant it all fur Jim. When he was to come back he’d find he was prosperous, an’ he’d think how I tried to make him so.”

“The Lord don’t mean all dark clouds in this life,” said the stranger. “Out of that pestilence, that never touched her with its foul breath, came a child, with Minnie’s face and laugh, but Jim’s own eyes – a bit of mother an’ father.”

The old people were looking at him with painful eagerness, dwelling on his every word.

“It was little May; named Maria, but we called her May for she was borned three year ago in that month; a tiny wee thing, an’ I stood by their graves an’ I hardened my heart. ‘They drove her father out; they sha’n’t crush her young life,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep her.’ But I knowed I couldn’t. Poverty was grinding me, and with Jim’s words directin’ me, I brought her here.”

“Brought her here!” cried the poor woman.

“Ay! She’s a brave little lass, an’ I told her to lie quiet in the basket till I told her to come out, fur mebbe you wan’t kind an’ would send us both out, but I found your hearts ready fur her – ”

With one spring Maria reached the basket and flung open the lid, disclosing a tiny child wrapped in a ragged shawl, sleeping peacefully in her cramped bed, but with tears on her long lashes, as if the waiting had tried her brave little soul.

“Jest as gritty,” said Brown, “an’ so good to mind; poor lass!”

Maria lifted her out, and the child woke up, but did not cry at the strange face that smiled on her with such pathetic eagerness. “Oh, the kitty!” cried May. “I had a kitty once!” That familiar household object reconciled her at once. She ate the cake eagerly and drank the milk, insisting on feeding the ham to the cat.

“Him looks hungry,” she said.

“We’ve all been starved!” cried Maria, clasping the child to her heart.

Such a beautiful child, with her merry eyes and laugh and her golden curls, a strange blossom from a New England soil, yet part of her birthright was the land of flowers and sunshine. Somehow that pathetic picture of the past faded when the mother saw a blue and gilt vase in the baby’s hand – Jim’s baby’s.

“It’s pitty; fank you!” said the little creature. Then she got down to show her new dress and her shoes, and made excursions into the pantry, opening cupboard doors, but touching nothing, only exclaiming, “Dear me, how pitty!” at everything. Then she came back, and at Brown’s request, with intense gravity, began a Spanish dance she had learned when they stopped at San Antonio, from watching the Mexican senoritas. She held up her little gown on one side and gravely made her steps while Dexter whistled. The fire leaped up and crackled loudly, as if it would join her, the cat purred, the tea-kettle sung from the back of the stove, and little snowflakes, themselves hurrying, skurrying in a merry dance, clung to the win dow-pane and called other little flakes to hasten and see such a pretty sight. Maria watched in breathless eagerness, and Silas, carried beyond himself, forgetting his scruples, cried out: “Wal, ef that don’t beat all I ever see! Come here, you little chick!” holding out his silver watch.

With a final pirouette she finished with a grave little courtesy, then ran to Silas: “Is there birdie in der?” and he caught her up and kissed her.

When the old lane is shady in summertime, and golden-rod and daisies crowd the way, and raspberries climb the stonewall, and merry squirrels chatter and mock the red-breasted robins, and bees go humming through the ordorous air, there comes a big white horse that looks like Washington’s in the picture; and how carefully he walks and bears himself, for he brings a little princess who has made the old house a home. Such a fairylike little thing, who from her sunshine makes everybody bright and happy, and Silas’ grim old face is smiling as he leads the horse, and Maria, with her basket of berries, is helped over the wall by Dexter Brown, who always says he must go but never does, for they love him, and he and Silas work harmoniously together. And grandma’s eyes are brighter than ever and her cheeks as red.

“What comfortable folks they air gittin’ to be,” say the neighbors, “kinder livin’, but I dunno but goin’ a berryin’ a hull arternoon is right down shiftless.”

Winter is over and forever gone from that household on the hill; the coming of gracious, smiling spring in a sweet child’s presence has made eternal sunshine in those ice-bound hearts.

CYNTHY’S JOE, By Clara Sprague Ross

I DON’T think he’ll be sech a fool as to p’int fer home the fust thing he does.” The speaker, a young man with a dull, coarse face and slouching air, knocked the ashes from a half-smoked cigar with his little finger, which was heavily ornamented with a large seal ring, and adjusted himself to a more comfortable position.

“I dun’no which p’int o’ the compass he’d more naterally turn to,” observed another; an elderly man with a stoop in his shoulders, and a sharp, thin face that with all its petty shrewdness was not without its compensating feature – a large and kindly mouth. The third man in the little group was slowly walking back and forth on the platform that ran across the station, rolling and unrolling a small red flag which he held in his hands. He turned with a contemptuous “umph” to the young man, remarking as he did so, “‘Tain’t mostly fools as goes to prison. Joe Atherton prob’ly has as many friends in this section o’ the kentry as some who hain’t been away so much.”

“Joe was a good little boy,” pursued the old station-master; “he wuz allers kind to his mother. I never heard a word ag’in him till that city swell came down here fer the summer and raised blazes with the boy.”

“If there ain’t the Squire!” exclaimed a hitherto silent member; “he’s the last man as I should jedge would come to the deepo to welcome Joe Atherton.”

A stout, florid, pompous individual slowdy mounted the platform steps, wiping his forehead with a flaming red silk handkerchief, which he had taken from his well-worn straw hat. “Warm afternoon, friends,” he suggested, with an air of having vastly contributed to the information of the men, whose only apparent concern in life was an anxiety to find a shady corner within conversational distance of each other.

The Squire seated himself in the only chair of which the forlorn station boasted; he leaned back until his head was conveniently supported, and furtively glanced at a large old-fashioned watch which he drew from his vest pocket.

“Train’s late this a’ternoon, Squar’,” said the man with the red flag. “I reckon ye’ll all hev to go home without seein’ the show; ‘tain’t no ways sartin Joe’ll come to-day. Parson Mayhew sed his time was up the fust week in September, but there’s no tellin’ the day as I knows on.”

A sustained, heavy rumble sounded in the distance. Each man straightened himself and turned his head to catch the first glimpse of the approaching engine, With a shriek and only a just perceptible lessening of its speed, the mighty train rushed by them without stopping, and was out of sight before the eager watchers regained the power of speech.

Five minutes later the red flag was in its place behind the door, its keeper turned the key and hastened to overtake his neighbor, who had reached the highway. Hearing the hurrying footsteps behind him, the man turned, saying triumphantly, “I’m right-down, glad he didn’t come.”

“So be I; there’s an express late this evenin’ that might bring him down. I shall be here if Louisy’s so as I kin leave her.”

“Wa’al,” returned the other, “I shan’t be over ag’in to-night, but you jest tell Joe, fer me, to come right ta my house; he’s welcome. Whatever he done as a boy, he’s atoned fer in twenty years. I remember jest how white and sot his face was the day they took him away; he was only a boy then, he’s a man now, gray-headed most likely; the Athertons turned gray early, and sorrow and sin are terrible helps to white hair.”

The old man’s voice faltered a little; he drew the back of his hard, brown hand across his eyes. Something that neither of the men could have defined prompted them to shake hands at the “Corners”; they did so silently, and without looking up.

Joe came that night. The moon and the stars were the silent and only witnesses of the convict’s return. It was just as Joe had hoped it might be; yet there was in the man’s soul an awful sense of his loneliness and isolation The eager, wistful light faded out of his large blue eyes, the lines about his firm, tightly-drawn mouth deepened, the whole man took on an air of sullen defiance. Nobody cared for him, why should he care? He wondered if “Uncle Aaron,” as the boys used to call him, still kept the old station and signaled the trains. Alas! it was one of “Louisy’s” bad nights; her husband could not leave her, and so Joe missed forever the cordial hand old Aaron would have offered him, and the kind message he was to give him, for his neighbor.

Sadly, wearily, Joe turned and walked toward the road, lying white and still in the moonlight. His head dropped lower and lower upon his breast; without lifting it he put out his hand, at length, and raised the latch of a dilapidated gate that opened into a deep, weed-entangled yard. His heart was throbbing wildly, a fierce, hot pain shot through his eyes. Could he ever look up? He knew the light of the home he was seeking had gone out in darkness years before. The only love in the world that would have met him without question or reproach was silent forever; but here was her home – his home once – the little white house with its green blinds and shady porch.

He must look up or his heart would burst. With a cry that rang loud and clear on the quiet night, he fell upon his face, his fingers clutching and tearing the long, coarse grass. There was no house – no home – only a mass of blackened timbers, a pile of ashes, the angle of a tumbling wall. Hardly knowing what he did, Joe crept into the shelter of the old stone wall. With his face buried in his hands he lived over again, in one short half-hour, the life he hoped he had put away when the prison doors closed behind him. All through the day there had struggled in his heart a faint, unreasoning faith that life might yet hold something fair for him; one ray of comfort, one word of kindness, and faith would have become a reality. As the man, at last lifted his pale, agonized face to the glittering sky above him he uttered no word of prayer or entreaty, but with the studied self-control that years of repression had taught him, he rose from the ground and walked slowly out of the yard and down the cheerless road again to the station. Life hereafter could mean nothing to him but a silent moving-on. Whenever or wherever he became known, men would shrink and turn away from him. There was no abiding-place, no home, no love for him in all God’s mighty world. He accepted the facts; there was only one relief – somewhere, some time, a narrow bed would open for him and the green sod would shelter the man and his sin till eternity.

He hastily plucked a bit of golden-rod that nodded by the roadside; then taking a small, ragged book from a pocket just over his heart, he opened it and put the yellow spray between the leaves. As he did so a bit of paper fluttered to the ground. Joe stooped and picked it up. It was a letter he had promised to deliver from a fellow-prisoner to his mother in a distant town.

Not very far away an engine whistled at a crossing. A slowly moving freight and accommodation train pulled up at the depot a few moments later. Joe entered the dark, ill-smelling car at the rear and turned his face once more to the world.

It was in the early twilight of the next evening that Joe found himself in the hurry and confusion of a large manufacturing town. As he passed from the great depot into the brilliantly lighted street, he was bewildered for a moment and stood irresolute, with his hand shading his eyes. At one corner of the park that lay between the station and the next street, a man with a Punch-and-Judy theatre had drawn around him a crowd of men, women, and children. Joe mechanically directed his steps that way, and unconsciously became a part of the swaying, laughing audience.

“Hold me up once more, do Mariar, I can’t see nothin’,” begged a piping, childish voice at Joe’s knee.

“I can’t, Cynthy; my arms is most broke now holdin’ of ye; ef you don’t stop teasin’ I’ll never take ye nowheres again,” replied a tall, handsome girl, to whom the child was clinging.

Joe bent without a word, and picking up the small, ill-shaped morsel of human longing and curiosity, swung her upon his broad shoulder, where she sat watching the tiny puppets and listening to their shrill cries, oblivious of all else in the world. Once she looked down into the man’s face with her great, dark, fiery eyes and said softly, “Oh, how good you are!” A shiver ran through Joe’s frame; these were the first words that had been addressed to him since he said good-bye to the warden in that dreary corridor, which for this one moment had been forgotten. The little girl, without turning her eyes from the dancing figures before her, put one arm about Joe’s neck and nestled a little closer to him. Joe could have stood forever. The tall, dark girl, however, had missed Cynthy’s tiresome pulling at her skirts and the whining voice. She looked anxiously about and called “Cynthy! Cynthy! where are you? I’ll be thankful if ever I gets you back to your grandmother.” The fretful words aroused Joe from his happy reverie; he hurriedly placed the child on the pavement, and in an instant was lost in the crowd.

He set out upon his quest the following morning and had no difficulty in finding the old woman he was seeking. At one of a dozen doors marking as many divisions of a long, low tenement building near the river, he had knocked, and the door had opened into a small, clean kitchen, where a bright fire burned in a tiny stove, and a row of scarlet geraniums in pots ornamented the front window. The woman who admitted him he recognized at once as the mother of the man in that far-away prison, whose last hold-upon love and goodness was the remembrance of the aged, wrinkled face so wonderfully like his own. In a corner behind the door there stood an old-fashioned trundle-bed. As Joe stepped into the room a child, perhaps ten years old, started up from it, exclaiming “That’s the man, Granny; the man who put me on his shoulder, when Mariar was cross. Come in! come in, man,” she urged.

“Be still, Cynthy,” retorted the grandmother, not unkindly, as she placed a chair for Joe, who was walking over to the little bed from which the child was evidently not able to rise alone. Two frail hands were outstretched to him, two great black eyes were raised to his full of unspoken gratitude. Joe took the soiled letter from its hiding-place and gave it to the woman without a word. She glanced at the scarcely legible characters, and went into an adjoining room, her impassive face working convulsively.

“What’s the matter with Granny, was she crying? I never seen her cry before,” said Cynthy. “Granny’s had heaps o’ trouble. I’m all thet’s left of ten children and a half-dozen grandchildren. She says I’m the poorest of the lot, too, with the big bone thet’s grow’d out on my back; it aches orful nights, and makes my feet so tired and shaky mornin’s. Granny’s kind o’ queer; some days she just sets and looks into the fire fer hours without speakin’, and it’s so still I kin a’most hear my heart beat; and I think, and think, and never speak, neither, till Granny comes back and leans over me and kisses me; then it’s all right ag’in, an’ Granny makes a cup o’ tea an’ a bite o’ toast and the sun comes in the winder, and I forget ‘bout the pain, an’ go out with Mariar, when she’ll take me, like I did last night.”

The child’s white, pinched features flushed feverishly, her solemn, dusky eyes burned like coals. She had been resting her chin in her hands, and gazing up into Joe’s face with a fascinated intensity. She fell back wearily upon the pillows as the door opened, and her grandmother returned and put her hand on Joe’s shoulder, saying brokenly, “You’ve been very kind.” The little clock on the shelf over the kitchen table ticked merrily, and the tea-kettle hummed, as if it would drown the ticking, while Joe and Cynthy’s grandmother discussed and planned for the future.

It was finally settled that Joe should look for work in Danvers, and if he found it, his home should be with the old woman and Cynthy. He did not try to express the joy that surged over and through his heart, that rushed up into his brain, until his head was one mad whirl; but with a firm, quick step and a brave, calm look on his strong face, he went out to take his place in the busy, struggling world – a man among men.

Two months passed; months of toil, of anxiety, sometimes of fear; but Joe was so gladdened and comforted by Cynthy’s childish love and confidence, that, little by little, he came out of the shadow that had threatened to blacken his life, into the sunshine and peace of a homely, self-sacrificing existence in “Riverside Row.”

Cynthy’s ideas of heaven were very vague, and not always satisfactory, even to herself, but she often wondered, since Joe came, if heaven ever began here and she was not tasting some of its minor delights. Of course, she did not put it in just this way; but Cynthy’s heaven was a place where children walked and were never tired, where above all things they wore pretty clothes and had everything that was denied them on earth. Joe had realized so many of the child’s wild dreams, had made possible so many longed-for or unattainable pleasures, had so brightened and changed her weary, painful life, that to Cynthy’s eyes there was always about his head a halo as in the pictures of Granny’s saints; goodness, kindness, generosity – love, were for her spelled with three letters, and read – Joe. Out of the hard-earned wages the man put into Granny’s hand every Saturday night, there was always a little reserved for Cynthy. Her grandmother sometimes fretted or occasionally remonstrated; but Joe was firm. Alas! human life, like the never-resting earth, of which it is a part, swings out of the sunlight into the shadow, out of the daytime into the darkness through which the moon and the stars do not always shine.

One night, a bitter, stormy night in November, he was a little late in leaving his work. He had to pass, on his way out of the building, a knot of men who were talking in suppressed voices. They did not ask him to join them, but the words “prison-scab,” “jail-bird”, fell on his ever-alert ear. With a shudder he hurried on.

Granny was stooping over the trundle-bed in a vain attempt to quiet the child, who was tossing upon it, in pain and delirium. Cynthy had slipped upon a piece of ice a few days before, and now she was never free from the torturing, burning pain in her back. Sometimes it was in her head, too, and then with shrill, harsh cries, she begged for Joe, until Granny thanked God when the factory-whistle blew and she heard the man’s quick, short step on the pavement. Joe warmed himself at the fire for a moment, then taking Cynthy in his tired arms, he walked slowly up and down the room. Through the long, dreary night he patiently carried the moaning child. If he attempted, never so carefully, to lay her down, she clung to him so wildly or cried so wearily that Joe could only soothe her and take lip the tiresome march again. Granny, thoroughly worn out, sat sleeping in her large chair. Cynthy grew more restless. Once she nearly sprang from Joe’s arms, screaming, “Go way, Mariar; you’re a hateful thing! I won’t listen; ‘tain’t true; Joe is good,” and dropping back heavily, she whispered, “I love you, Joe.” She knew, then! Joe thought his heart would never throb again.

He listened for the early morning whistles. One by one they sounded on the clear, keen air, but never the one for which he waited. As soon as it was light, he peered through the ice-covered window at the tall chimneys just beyond the “Row.” They rose grim and silent, but no smoke issued from them. The end had come. Joe knew a strike was on.

Sometime in the afternoon of that day Cynthy suffered herself to be placed on the small, white bed; but she was not willing Joe should leave her, and was quiet only when he held her feeble hand in his close grasp. No sound escaped the man’s white lips. Only God and the angels watched his struggle with the powers of darkness. As night came on again, Cynthy sank into a heavy sleep, and Joe, released, took his hat and went out very softly.

He stopped after a long walk at the massive doors of a “West End” palace. He followed with downcast eyes the servant who answered his ring into a small but elegant reception-room, where he was told he might wait for the master of the house, the owner of the large manufactory where he was employed. Into the patient ear of this man, whom he had never seen before, Joe poured the story of his life. The sin, the shame, the agony of despair, his salvation through Cynthy.

“I will call my son,” said the sympathizing old gentleman as Joe rose to go; “he is one of Danvers’ best physicians. He will go with you and see what can be done for the little girl.”

An hour later the two men were bending over the sick child. “She is very ill,” said the young doctor, in reply ta Joe’s mute, appealing face. “This stupor may end in death, or it may result in a sleep which will bring relief. You must be brave, my friend. A few hours to-night will decide. You may hope.” Joe’s weary limbs faltered beneath him. He fell upon his knees breathing a wordless prayer that the child might be spared to bless and comfort hi& lonely, aching heart; while all unseen the Angel of Life hovered over the little bed.