Hillsboro People. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ My folks ain't, as a general thing."

      There was so long a silence that the girl inside the house wondered if they were gone, when Mrs. Pritchard's voice began again: "I do like to come up here! It 'minds me of him an' me livin' here when we was young. We had a good time of it!"

      "I never could see," commented the other, "how you managed when he went away t' th' war."

      "Oh, I did the way you do when you have to! I'd felt he ought to go, you know, as much as he did, so I was willin' to put in my best licks. An' I was young too—twenty-three—and only two of the children born then—and I was as strong as a ox. I never minded the work any. 'Twas the days after battles, when we couldn't get no news, that was the bad part. Why, I could go to the very spot, over there where the butternut tree stands—'twas our garden then—where I heard he was killed at Gettysburg."

      "What did you do?" asked the other.

      "I went on hoein' my beans. There was the two children to be looked out for, you know. But I ain't mindin tellin' you that I can't look at a bean-row since without gettin' sick to my stomach and feelin' the goose-pimples start all over me."

      "How did you hear 'twan't so?"

      "Why, I was gettin' in the hay—up there where the oaks stand was our hay-field. I remember how sick the smell of the hay made me, and when the sweat run down into my eyes I was glad to feel 'em smart and sting—well, Abby, you just wait till you hear your ​Nathan'l is shot through the head and you'll know how I was—well, all of a sudden—somebody took the fork out'n my hand—an'—an' said—'here, you drive an I'll pitch—and there—'twas—twas——"

      "Why, Grandma Pritchard! You're——"

      "No, I ain't, either; I ain't such a fool, I hope! Why, see me cry like a old numskull! Ain't it ridic'lous how you can talk 'bout deaths and buryin's all right, and can't tell of how somebody come back from the grave without—where in th' nation is my handkerchief! Why, Abby, things ain't never looked the same to me from that minute on. I tell you—I tell you—I was real glad to see him!

      "Good land, what time o' day do you suppose it can be? Susie! Eddie! Come, git your berries and start home!"

      The two voices began to sound more faintly as the old woman's crutch rang on the stones. "Well, Abby, when I come up here and remember how I farmed it alone for four years, I say to myself that 'twan't only th' men that set the slaves free. Them that stayed to home was allowed to have their share in the good——" The syllables blurred into an indistinguishable hum and there fell again upon the house its old mantle of silence.

      As if aroused by this from an hypnotic spell, the girl on the hay sat up suddenly, pressing her hands over her eyes; but she did not shut out a thousand thronging visions. There was not a sound but the loud throbbing of the pulses at her temples; but never again could there be silence for her in that spot. The air was thick with murmurs which beat against her ears. She was trembling as she slipped down from the hay and, walking unsteadily ​to the door, stood looking half-wildly out into the haunted twilight.

      The faint sound of the brook rose liquid in the quiet evening air.

      There, where the butternut tree stood, had been the garden!

      The white birches answered with a rustling stir in all their lightly poised leaves.

      Up there, where the oaks were, had been the hay-field!

      The twilight darkened. Through the forest, black on the crest of the overhanging mountain, shone suddenly the evening star.

      There, before the door, had stood the waiting wood-sled!

      The girl caught through the gathering dusk a gleam of magenta from the corner of the clearing.

      Two hermit thrushes, distant in the forest, began to send up their poignant antiphonal evening chant.

      The Heyday of the Blood

       Table of Contents

      Layout 2

      ​

      THE HEYDAY OF THE BLOOD

       Table of Contents

      The older professor looked up at the assistant, fumbling fretfully with a pile of papers. "Farrar, what's the matter with you lately?" he said sharply.

      The younger man started, "Why … why … " the brusqueness of the other's manner shocked him suddenly into confession. "I've lost my nerve, Professor Mallory, that's what the matter with me. I'm frightened to death," he said melodramatically.

      "What of?" asked Mallory, with a little challenge in his tone.

      The flood-gates were open. The younger man burst out in exclamations, waving his thin, nervous, knotted fingers, his face twitching as he spoke. "Of myself … no, not myself, but my body! I'm not well … I'm getting worse all the time. The doctors don't make out what is the matter … I don't sleep … I worry … I forget things, I take no interest in life … the doctors intimate a nervous breakdown ahead of me … and yet I rest … I rest … more than I can afford to! I never go out. Every evening I'm in bed by nine o'clock. I take no part in college life beyond my work, for fear of the nervous strain. I've refused to take charge of that summer-school in New York, you know, that would be such an opportunity for me … if I could only sleep! But though I never do anything exciting in the evening … heavens! what nights I have. Black hours of ​seeing myself in a sanitarium, dependent on my brother! I never … why, I'm in hell … that's what the matter with me, a perfect hell of ignoble terror!"

      He sat silent, his drawn face turned to the window. The older man looked at him speculatively. When he spoke it was with a cheerful, casual quality in his voice which made the other look up at him surprised.

      "You don't suppose those great friends of yours, the nerve specialists, would object to my telling you a story, do you? It's very quiet and unexciting. You're not too busy?"

      "Busy! I've forgotten the meaning of the word! I don't dare to be!"

      "Very well, then; I mean to carry you back to the stony little farm in the Green Mountains, where I had the extreme good luck to be born and raised. You've heard me speak of Hillsboro; and the story is all about my great-grandfather, who came to live with us when I was a little boy."

      "Your great-grandfather?" said the other incredulously. "People don't remember their great-grandfathers!"

      "Oh, yes, they do, in Vermont. There was my father on one farm, and my grandfather on another, without a thought that he was no longer young, and there was 'gran'ther' as we called him, eighty-eight years old and just persuaded to settle back, let his descendants take care of him, and consent to be an old man. He had been in the War of 1812—think of that, you mushroom!—and had lost an arm and a good deal of his health there. He had lately begun to get a pension of twelve dollars a month, so that for an old man he was quite independent ​financially, as poor Vermont farmers look at things; and he was a most extraordinary character, so that his СКАЧАТЬ