AFTER the bargain was
completed and the timber merchant had gone away, Jehiel Hawthorn walked stiffly
to the pine tree and put his horny old fist against it, looking up to its
spreading top with an expression of hostile exultation in his face. The neighbor
who had been called to witness the transfer of Jehiel's woodland looked at him
curiously.
"That was quite a
sight of money to come in without your expectin', wa'n't it?" he said,
fumbling awkwardly for an opening to the question he burned to ask.
Jehiel did not answer.
The two old men stood silent, looking down the valley, lying like a crevasse in
a glacier between the towering white mountains. The sinuous course of the
frozen river was almost black under the slaty sky of March.
"Seems kind o'
providential, havin' so much money come to you just now, when your
sister-in-law's jest died, and left you the first time in your life without
anybody you got to stay and see to, don't it?" commented the neighbor
persistently.
Jehiel made a vague
sign with his head.
"I s'pose likely
you'll be startin' aout to travel and see foreign parts, same's you've always
planned, won't you--or maybe you cal'late you be too old now?"
Jehiel gave no
indication that he had heard. His faded old blue eyes were fixed steadily on
the single crack in the rampart of mountains, through which the afternoon train
was just now leaving the valley. Its whistle echoed back hollowly, as it fled
away from the prison walls into the great world.
The neighbor stiffened
in offended pride. "I bid you good-night, Mr. Hawthorn," he said
severely, and stumped down the steep, narrow road leading to the highway in the
valley.
After he had
disappeared Jehiel turned to the tree and leaned his forehead against it. He
was so still he seemed a part of the great pine. He stood so till the piercing
chill of evening chilled him through, and when he looked again about him it was
after he had lived his life all through in a brief and bitter review.
It began with the tree
and it ended with the tree, and in spite of the fever of unrest in his heart it
was as stationary as any rooted creature of the woods. When he was eleven and
his father went away to the Civil War, he had watched him out of sight with no
sorrow, only a burning envy of the wanderings that lay before the soldier. A
little later, when it was decided that he should go to stay with his married
sister, since she was left alone by her husband's departure to the war, he
turned his back on his home with none of a child's usual reluctance, but with an
eager delight in the day-long drive to the other end of the valley. That was
the longest journey he had ever taken, the man of almost three-score thought,
with an aching resentment against Fate.
Still, those years with
his sister, filled with labor beyond his age as they were, had been the
happiest of his life. In an almost complete isolation the two had toiled
together five years, the most impressionable of his life; and all his affection
centred on the silent, loving, always comprehending sister. His own father and
mother grew to seem far away and alien, and his sister came to be like a part
of himself. To her alone of all living souls had he spoken freely of his
passion for adventuring far from home, of the lust for wandering which devoured
his boy-soul. He was sixteen when her husband finally came back from the war,
and he had no secrets from the young matron of twenty-six, who listened with
such wide tender eyes of sympathy to his half-frantic outpourings of longing to
escape from the dark, narrow valley where his fathers had lived their dark,
narrow lives.
The day before he went
back to his own home, now so strange to him, he was out with her, searching for
some lost turkey-chicks, and found one with its foot caught in a tangle of
rusty wire. The little creature had beaten itself almost to death in its
struggle to get way. Kneeling in the grass, and feeling the wild palpitations
of its heart under his rescuing hand, he had called to his sister, "Oh,
look! Poor thing! It's 'most dead, and yet it ain't really hurt a mite, only
desperate, over bein' held fast." His voice broke in a sudden wave of
sympathy: "Oh, ain't it terrible to feel so!"
For a moment the young
mother put her little son aside and looked at her brother with brooding eyes. A
little later she said with apparent irrelevance, "Jehiel, as soon as
you're a man grown, I'll help you to get off. You shall be a sailor, if you
like, and go around the world, and bring back coral to baby and me."
A chilling premonition
fell on the lad. "I don't believe it!" he said, with tears in his
eyes. "I just believe I've got to stay here in this hole all my
life."
His sister looked off
at the tops of the trees. Finally, "Surely He shall deliver thee from the
snare of the fowler," she quoted dreamily.
When she came to see
him and their parents a few months later, she brought him a little square of
crimson silk, on which she had worked in tiny stitches, "Surely He shall
deliver thee from the snare of the fowler." She explained to her father and
mother that it was a "text-ornament" for Jehiel to hang up over his
desk; but she drew the boy aside and showed him that the silk was only lightly
caught down to the foundation.
"Underneath is
another text," she said, "and when your day of freedom comes I want
you should promise me to cut the stitches, turn back the silk, and take the
second text for your motto, so you'll remember to be properly grateful. This is
the second text." She put her hands on his shoulders and said in a loud,
exultant voice, "My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the
fowler. The snare is broken and I am escaped."
For answer the boy
pulled her eagerly to the window and pointed to a young pine tree that stood
near the house.
"Sister, that
tree's just as old as I be. I've prayed to God, and I've promised myself that
before it's as tall as the ridge-pole of the house, I'll be on my way."
As this scene came
before his eyes, the white-haired man, leaning against the great pine, looked
up at the lofty crown of green wreathing the giant's head and shook his fist at
it. He hated every inch of its height, for every inch meant an enforced
renunciation that had brought him bitterness and a sense of failure.
His sister had died the
year after she had given him the double text, and his father the year after
that. He was left thus, the sole support of his ailing mother, who transferred
to the silent, sullen boy the irresistible rule of complaining weakness with
which she had governed his father. it was thought she could not live long, and
the boy stood in terror of a sudden death brought on by displeasure at some act
of his. In the end, however, she died quietly in her bed, an old woman of
seventy-three, nursed by her daughter-in-law, the widow of Jehiel's only
brother. Her place in the house was taken by Jehiel's sister-in-law, a sickly,
helpless woman, alone in the world except for Jehiel, and all the neighbors
congratulated him on having a housekeeper ready to his hand. He said nothing.
By that time, indeed,
he had sunk into a harsh and repellent silence on all topics. He went through
the exhausting routine of farming with an iron-like endurance, watched with set
lips the morning and afternoon trains leave the valley, and noted the growth of
the pine tree with a burning heart. His only recreation was collecting
time-tables, prospectuses of steamship companies, and what few books of travel
he could afford. The only society he did not shun was that of itinerant
peddlers or tramps, and occasionally a returned missionary on a lecture tour.
And always the pine
tree had grown, insolent in the pride of a creature set in the right
surroundings. The imprisoned man had felt himself dwarfed by its height. But
now, he looked up at it again, and laughed aloud. It had come late, but it had
come. He was fifty-seven years old, almost three-score, but all his life was
still to be lived. He said to himself that some folks lived their lives while
they did their work, but he had done all his tasks first, and now he could
live. The unexpected arrival of the timber merchant and the sale of that piece
of land he'd never thought would bring him a cent--was not that an evident sign
that Providence was with him? He was too old and broken now to work his way
about as he had planned at first, but here had come this six hundred dollars
like rain from the sky. He would start as soon as he could sell his stock.
The thought reminded
him of his evening chores, and he set off for the barn with a harsh jubilation
that it was almost the last time he would need to milk. How far, he wondered,
could he go on that money? He hurried through his work and into the house to
his old desk. The faded text-ornament stood on the top shelf, but he did not
see it, as he hastily tumbled out all the time-tables and sailing-lists. The
habit of looking at them with the yearning bitterness of unreconciled
deprivation was still so strong on him that even as he handled them eagerly, he
hated them for the associations of years of misery they brought back to him.
Where should he go? He
was dazed by the unlimited possibilities before him. To Boston first, as the
nearest seaport. He had taken the trip in his mind so many times that he knew
the exact minute when the train would cross the state line and he would be
really escaped from the net which had bound him all his life. From Boston to
Jamaica as the nearest place that was quite, quite different from Vermont. He
had no desire to see Europe or England. Life there was too much like what he
had known. He wanted to be in a country where nothing should remind him of his
past. From Jamaica where? His stiff old fingers painfully traced out a
steamship line to the Isthmus and thence to Colombia. He knew nothing about
that country. All the better. It would be the more foreign. Only this he knew,
that nobody in that tropical country "farmed it," and that was where
he wanted to go. From Colombia around the Cape to Argentina. He was aghast at
the cost, but instantly decided that he would go steerage. There would be more
real foreigners to be seen that way, and his money would go twice as far.
To Buenos Ayres, then.
He did not even attempt to pronounce this name, though its strange,
inexplicable look on the page was a joy to him. From there by mule-back and
afoot over the Andes to Chile. He knew something about that trip. A woman who
had taught in the Methodist missionary school in Santiago de Chile had taken
that journey, and he had heard her give a lecture on it. He was the sexton of
the church and heard all the lectures free. At Santiago de Chile (he pronounced
it with a strange distortion of the schoolteacher's bad accent) he would stay
for a while and just live and decide what to do next. His head swam with dreams
and visions, and his heart thumped heavily against his old ribs. The clock
striking ten brought him back to reality. He stood up with a gesture of
exultation almost fierce. "That's just the time when the train crosses the
state line!" he said.
He slept hardly at all
that night, waking with great starts, and imagining himself in strange foreign
places, and then recognizing with a scornful familiarity the worn old pieces of
furniture in his room. He noticed at these times that it was very cold, and
lifelong habit made him reflect that he would better go early to the church
because it would be hard to get up steam enough to warm the building before
time for service. After he had finished his morning chores and was about to
start he noticed that the thermometer stood at four above zero.
That was certainly
winter temperature; the snow lay like a heavy shroud on all the dead valley,
but the strange, blind instinct of a man who has lived close to the earth
stirred within him. He looked at the sky and the mountains and put out his bare
palm. "I shouldn't be surprised if the spring break-up was near," he
said. "I guess this is about the last winter day we'll get."
The church was icy
cold, and he toiled in the cellar, stuffing wood into the flaming maw of the
steam-heater, till it was time to ring the bell. As he gave the last stroke,
Deacon Bradley approached him. "Jehiel, I've got a little job of repairing
I want you should do at my store," he said in the loud, slow speech of a
man important in the community. "Come to the store to-morrow morning and
see about it." He passed on into his pew, which was at the back of the
church near a steam radiator, so that he was warm, no matter what the weather
was.
Jehiel Hawthorn went
out and stood on the front steps in the winter sunshine and his heart swelled
exultingly as he looked across at the deacon's store. "I wish I'd had time
to tell him I'd do no repairs for him to-morrow, nor any time--that I'm going
to travel and see the world."
The last comers
disappeared in the church and the sound of singing came faintly to Jehiel's
ears. Although he was the sexton he rarely was in church for the service, using
his duties as an excuse for absence. He felt that it was not for him to take
part in prayer and thanksgiving. As a boy he had prayed for the one thing he
wanted, and what had it come to?
A penetrating cold wind
swept around the corner and he turned to go inside to see about the
steam-pipes. In the outer hall he noticed that the service had progressed to
the responsive readings. As he opened the door of the church the minister read
rapidly, "Praised be the Lord who hath not given us over for a prey unto
their teeth."
The congregation
responded in a timid inarticulate gabble, above which rose Deacon Bradley's
loud voice,--"Our soul is escaped even as a bird out of the snare of the
fowler. The snare is broken and we are escaped." He read the responses in
a slow, booming roar, at least half a sentence behind the rest, but the
minister always waited for him. As he finished, he saw the sexton standing in
the open door. "A little more steam, Jehiel," he added commandingly,
running the words on to the end of the text.
Jehiel turned away
silently, but as he stumbled through the dark, unfinished part of the cellar he
thought to himself, "Well, that's the last time he'll give me an order for
one while!"
Then the words of the
text he had heard came back to his mind with a half-superstitious shock at the
coincidence. He had forgotten all about that hidden part of the text-ornament.
Why, now that had come true! He ought to have cut the stitches and torn off the
old text last night. He would, as soon as he went home. He wished his sister
were alive to know, and suddenly, there in the dark, he wondered if perhaps she
did know.
As he passed the door
to the rooms of the Ladies' Auxiliary Society he noticed that it was ajar, and
saw through the crack that there was a sleeping figure on the floor near the
stove--a boy about sixteen. When Jehiel stepped softly in and looked at him,
the likeness to his own sister struck him even before he recognized the lad as
his great-nephew, the son of the child he had helped his sister to care for all
those years ago.
"Why, what's
Nathaniel doin' here?" he asked himself in surprise. He had not known that
the boy was even in town, for he had been on the point of leaving to enlist in
the navy. Family matters could not have detained him, for he was quite alone in
the world, since both his father and his mother were dead and his stepmother
had married again. Under his great-uncle's gaze the lad opened his eyes with a
start and sat up confused. "What's the matter with you, Nat?" asked
the older man not ungently. He was thinking that probably he had looked like
that at sixteen. The boy stared at him a moment, and then, leaning his head on
a chair, he began to cry. Sitting thus, crouched together, he looked like a
child.
"Why, Natty,
what's the trouble?" asked his uncle, alarmed.
"I came off here
because I couldn't hold in at home any longer," answered the other between
sobs. "You see I can't go away. Her husband treats her so bad she can't
stay with him. I don't blame her, she says she just can't! So she's come back
and she ain't well, and she's goin' to have a baby, and I've got to stay and
support her. Mr. Bradley's offered me a place in his store and I've got to give
up goin' to the navy." He suddenly realized the unmanliness of his
attitude, rose to his feet, closing his lips tightly, and faced the older man
with a resolute expression of despair in his young eyes.
"Uncle Jehiel, it
does seem to me I can't have it so! All my life I've looked forward to bein' a
sailor and goin' around the world, and all. I just hate the valley and the
mountains! But I guess I got to stay. She's only my step-mother, I know, but
she was always awful good to me, and she hasn't got anybody else to look after
her." His voice broke, and he put his arm up in a crook over his face. "But
it's awful hard! I feel like a bird that's got caught in a snare."
His uncle had grown
very pale during this speech, and at the last words he recoiled with an
exclamation of horror. There was a silence in which he looked at his nephew
with the wide eyes of a man who sees a spectre. Then he turned away into the
furnace-room, and picking up his lunch-box brought it back. "Here,
you," he said, roughly, "part of what's troublin' you is that you
ain't had any breakfast. You eat this and you'll feel better. I'll be back in a
minute."
He went away blindly
into the darkest part of the cellar. It was very black there, but his eyes
stared wide before him. It was very cold, but drops of sweat stood on his
forehead as if he were in the hayfield. He was alone, but his lips moved from
time to time, and once he called out in some loud, stifled exclamation which
resounded hollowly in the vault-like place. He was there a long time.
When he went back into
the furnace cellar, he found Nathaniel sitting before the fire. The food and
warmth had brought a little color into his pale face, but it was still set in a
mask of tragic desolation.
As his uncle came in,
he exclaimed,
"Why, Uncle
Jehiel, you look awful bad. Are you sick?"
"Yes, I be,"
said the other harshly, "but 't ain't nothin'. It'll pass after a while.
Nathaniel, I've thought of a way you can manage. You know your uncle's wife
died this last week and that leaves me without any housekeeper. What if your
stepmother sh'd come and take care of me and I'll take care of her. I've just
sold a piece of timber land I never thought to get a cent out of, and that'll
ease things up so we can hire help if she ain't strong enough to do the
work."
Nathaniel's face
flushed in a relief which died quickly down to a sombre hopelessness. He faced
his uncle doggedly. "Not much, Uncle Jehiel!" he said heavily.
"I ain't agoin' to hear to such a thing. I know all about your wantin' to
get away from the valley--you take that money and go yourself and I'll--"
Hopelessness and resolution
were alike struck out of his face by the fury of benevolence with which the old
man cut him short. "Don't you dare to speak a word against it, boy!"
cried Jehiel in a labored anguish. "Good Lord! I'm only doin' it for you
because I have to! I've been through what you're layin' out for yourself an'
stood it, somehow, an' now I'm 'most done with it all. But 'twould be like
beginnin' it all again to see you startin' in."
The boy tried to speak,
but he raised his voice. "No, I couldn't stand it all over again. 'Twould
cut in to the places where I've got calloused." Seeing through the other's
stupor the beginnings of an irresolute opposition, he flung himself upon him in
a strange and incredible appeal, crying out, "Oh, you must! You got to
go!" commanding and imploring in the same incoherent sentence, struggling
for speech, and then hanging on Nathaniel's answer in a sudden wild silence. It
was as though his next breath depended on the boy's decision.
It was very still in
the twilight where they stood. The faint murmur of a prayer came down from
above, and while it lasted both were as though held motionless by its mesmeric
monotony. Then at the boom of the organ, the lad's last shred of self-control
vanished. He burst again into muffled weary sobs, the light from the furnace
glistening redly on his streaming cheeks. "It ain't right, Uncle Jehiel. I
feel as though I was murderin' somethin'! But I can't help it. I'll go, I'll do
as you say, but--"
His uncle's agitation
went out like a wind-blown flame. He, too, drooped in an utter fatigue.
"Never mind, Natty," he said tremulously, "it'll all come out
right somehow. Just you do as Uncle Jehiel says."
A trampling upstairs
told him that the service was over. "You run home now and tell her I'll be
over this afternoon to fix things up."
He hurried up the
stairs to open the front doors, but Deacon Bradley was before him. "You're
late, Jehiel," he said severely, "and the church was cold."
"I know,
Deacon," said the sexton humbly, "but it won't happen again. And I'll
be around the first thing in the morning to do that job for you." His
voice sounded dull and lifeless.
"What's the
matter?" asked the deacon. "Be you sick?"
"Yes, I be, but 't
ain't nothin'. 'Twill pass after a while."
That evening, as he
walked home after service, he told himself that he had never known so long a
day. It seemed longer than all the rest of his life. Indeed he felt that some
strange and racking change had come upon him since the morning, as though he
were not the same person, as though he had been away on a long journey, and saw
all things with changed eyes.
"I feel as though
I'd died," he thought with surprise, "and was dead and buried."
This brought back to
his mind the only bitter word he had spoken throughout the endless day.
Nathaniel had said as an excuse for his haste (Jehiel insisted on his leaving
that night), "You see, mother, it's really a service to Uncle Jehiel,
since he's got nobody to keep house for him." He had added in the
transparent self-justification of selfish youth, "And I'll pay it back to
him every cent." At this Jehiel had said shortly, "By the time you
can pay it back what I'll need most will be a tombstone. Git a big one so's to
keep me down there quiet."
But now, walking home
under the frosty stars, he felt very quiet already, as though he needed no
weight to lie heavy on his restless heart. It did not seem restless now, but
very still, as though it too were dead. He noticed that the air was milder, and
as he crossed the bridge below his house he stopped and listened. Yes, the fine
ear of his experience caught a faint grinding sound. By to-morrow the river
would begin to break up. It was the end of winter. He surprised himself by his
pleasure in thinking of the spring.
Before he went into the
house after his evening chores were done, he stopped for a moment and looked
back at the cleft in the mountain wall through which the railroad left the
valley. He had been looking longingly toward that door of escape all his life,
and now he said good-by to it. "Ah well, 'twan't to be," he said,
with an accent of weary finality; but then, suddenly out of the chill which
oppressed his heart there sprang a last searing blast of astonished anguish. It
was as if he realized for the first time all that had befallen him since the
morning. He was racked by a horrified desolation that made his sturdy old body
stagger as if under an unexpected blow. As he reeled he flung his arm about the
pine tree and so stood for a time, shaking in a paroxysm which left him
breathless when it passed.
For it passed as
suddenly as it came. He lifted his head and looked again at the great cleft in
the mountains, with new eyes. Somehow, insensibly, his heart had been emptied
of its fiery draught by more than mere exhaustion. The old bitter pain was
gone, but there was no mere void in its place. He felt the sweet, weak
light-headedness of a man in his first lucid period after a fever, tears
stinging his eyelids in confused thanksgiving for an unrecognized respite from
pain.
He looked up at the
lofty crown of the pine tree, through which shone one or two of the brightest
stars, and felt a new comradeship with it. It was a great tree, he thought, and
they had grown up together. He laid his hardened palm on it, and fancied that
he caught a throb of the silent vitality under the bark. How many kinds of life
there were! Under its white shroud, how all the valley lived. The tree
stretching up its head to the stars, the river preparing to throw off the icy
armor which compressed its heart--they were all awakening in their own way. The
river had been restless, like himself, the tree had been tranquil, but they
passed together through the resurrection into quiet life.
When he went into the
house, he found that he was almost fainting with fatigue. He sat down by the
desk, and his head fell forward on the pile of pamphlets he had left there. For
the first time in his life he thought of them without a sore heart. "I suppose
Natty'll go to every one of them places," he murmured as he dropped to
sleep.
He dreamed strange,
troubled dreams that melted away before he could seize on them, and finally he
thought his sister stood before him and called. The impression was so vivid
that he started up, staring at the empty room. For an instant he still thought
he heard a voice, and then he knew it was the old clock striking the hour. It
was ten o'clock.
"Natty's just
a-crossin' the state line," he said aloud.
The text-ornament
caught his eye. Still half asleep, with his sister's long-forgotten voice
ringing in his ears, he remembered vaguely that he had meant to bring the
second text to light. For a moment he hesitated, and then, "Well, it's
come true for Natty, anyhow," he thought.
And clumsily using his
heavy jack-knife, he began to cut the tiny stitches which had so long hidden
from his eyes the joyous exultation of the escaped prisoner.