The Greatest Christmas Tales & Poems in One Volume (Illustrated). О. Генри

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СКАЧАТЬ knitting--she's the perpetual motion ready found, Mis' Pitkin is."

      "Want ter know," said the auditor, as a sort of musical rest in this monotone of talk. "Ain't she smart, though!"

      "Smart! Well, I should think she was. She's over and into everything that's goin' on in that house. The deacon wouldn't know himself without her; nor wouldn't none of them boys, they just live out of her; she kind o' keeps 'em all up."

      "Wal, she ain't a hefty woman, naow," said the interlocutor, who seemed to be possessed by a dim idea that worth must be weighed by the pound.

      "Law bless you, no! She's a little crittur; nothin' to look to, but every bit in her is _live_. She looks pale, kind o' slips round still like moonshine, but where anything's to be done, there Mis' Pitkin is; and her hand allers goes to the right spot, and things is done afore ye know it. That are woman's kind o' still; she'll slip off and be gone to heaven some day afore folks know it. There comes the deacon and Jim over the hill. Jim walked home from college day 'fore yesterday, and turned right in to-day to help get in the taters, workin' right along. Deacon was awful grouty."

      "What was the matter o' the deacon?"

      "Oh, the mortgage kind o' works him. The time to pay comes round putty soon, and the deacon's face allers goes down long as yer arm. 'Tis a putty tight pull havin' Jim in college, losin' his work and havin' term bills and things to pay. Them are college folks charges _up_, I tell you. I seen it works the deacon, I heard him a-jawin' Jim 'bout it."

      "What made Jim go to college?" said Abner with slow wonder in his heavy face.

      "Oh, he allers was sot on eddication, and Mis' Pitkin she's sot on't, too, in her softly way, and softly women is them that giner'lly carries their p'ints, fust or last.

      "But _there's_ one that _ain't_ softly!" Biah suddenly continued, as the vision of a black-haired, bright-eyed girl suddenly stepped forth from the doorway, and stood shading her face with her hands, looking towards the sunset. The evening light lit up a jaunty spray of golden rod that she had wreathed in her wavy hair, and gave a glow to the rounded outlines of her handsome form. "There's a sparkler for you! And no saint, neither!" was Biah's comment. "That crittur has got more prances and capers in her than any three-year-old filly I knows on. He'll be cunning that ever gets a bridle on her."

      "Some says she's going to hev Jim Pitkin, and some says it's Bill," said Abner, delighted to be able to add his mite of gossip to the stream while it was flowing.

      "She's sweet on Jim while he's round, and she's sweet on Bill when Jim's up to college, and between um she gets took round to everything that going. She gives one a word over one shoulder, and one over t'other, and if the Lord above knows what's in that gal's mind or what she's up to, he knows more than I do, or she either, else I lose my bet."

      Biah made this admission with a firmness that might have been a model to theologians or philosophers in general. There was a point, it appeared, where he was not omniscient. His universal statistical knowledge had a limit.

      --

Chapter III.

       The Shadow

       Table of Contents

      There is no moment of life, however festive, that does not involve the near presence of a possible tragedy. When the concert of life is playing the gayest and airiest music, it requires only the change of a little flat or sharp to modulate into the minor key.

      There seemed at first glance only the elements of joyousness and gayety in the surroundings at the Pitkin farm. Thanksgiving was come--the family, healthy, rosy, and noisy, were all under the one roof-tree. There was energy, youth, intelligence, beauty, a pair of lovers on the eve of betrothal--just in that misty, golden twilight that precedes the full sunrise of avowed and accepted love--and yet behind it all was walking with stealthy step the shadow of a coming sorrow.

      "What in the world ails James?" said Diana as she retreated from the door and surveyed him at a distance from her chamber window. His face was like a landscape over which a thunder-cloud has drifted, and he walked beside his father with a peculiar air of proud displeasure and repression.

      At that moment the young man was struggling with the bitterest sorrow that can befall youth--the breaking up of his life-purpose. He had just come to a decision to sacrifice his hopes of education, his man's ambition, his love, his home and family, and become a wanderer on the face of the earth. How this befell requires a sketch of character.

      Deacon Silas Pitkin was a fair specimen of a class of men not uncommon in New England--men too sensitive for the severe physical conditions of New England life, and therefore both suffering and inflicting suffering. He was a man of the finest moral traits, of incorruptible probity, of scrupulous honor, of an exacting conscientiousness, and of a sincere piety. But he had begun life with nothing; his whole standing in the world had been gained inch by inch by the most unremitting economy and self-denial, and he was a man of little capacity for hope, of whom it was said, in popular phraseology, that he "took things hard." He was never sanguine of good, always expectant of evil, and seemed to view life like a sentinel forbidden to sleep and constantly under arms.

      For such a man to be harassed by a mortgage upon his homestead was a steady wear and drain upon his vitality. There were times when a positive horror of darkness came down upon him--when his wife's untroubled, patient hopefulness seemed to him like recklessness, when the smallest item of expense was an intolerable burden, and the very daily bread of life was full of bitterness; and when these paroxysms were upon him, one of the heaviest of his burdens was the support of his son in college. It was true that he was proud of his son's talents and sympathized with his love for learning--he had to the full that sense of the value of education which is the very vital force of the New England mind--and in an hour when things looked brighter to him he had given his consent to the scheme of a college education freely.

      James was industrious, frugal, energetic, and had engaged to pay the most of his own expenses by teaching in the long winter vacations. But unfortunately this year the Mapleton Academy, which had been promised to him for the winter term, had been taken away by a little maneuver of local politics and given to another, thus leaving him without resource. This disappointment, coming just at the time when the yearly interest upon the mortgage was due, had brought upon his father one of those paroxysms of helpless gloom and discouragement in which the very world itself seemed clothed in sack-cloth.

      From the time that he heard the Academy was gone, Deacon Silas lay awake nights in the blackness of darkness. "We shall all go to the poorhouse together--that's where it will end," he said, as he tossed restlessly in the dark.

      "Oh no, no, my dear," said his wife, with those serene eyes that had looked through so many gloomy hours; "we must cast our care on God."

      "It's easy for women to talk. You don't have the interest money to pay, you are perfectly reckless of expense. Nothing would do but James must go to college, and now see what it's bringing us to!"

      "Why, father, I thought you yourself were in favor of it."

      "Well, I did wrong then. You persuaded me into it. I'd no business to have listened to you and Jim and got all this load on my shoulders."

      Yet Mary Pitkin knew in her own calm, clear head that she had not been reckless of expense. The yearly interest money was ever before her, and her own incessant toils had wrought no small portion of what was needed to pay it. Her butter at the store commanded the very СКАЧАТЬ