His Family Part 17

Roger barely slept that night. He felt the city clamoring down into his very soul. "Speed!" he muttered viciously. "Speed--speed! We need more speed!" The words beat in like a savage refrain. At last with a sigh of impatience he got up in his nightshirt and walked about. It was good to feel his way in the dark in this cool silent house which he knew so well.

Soon his nerves felt quieter. He went back to his bed and lay there inert.

How good it would be to get up to the farm.

The next Sat.u.r.day evening, with Deborah, he started for the mountains. And Bruce came down to see them off.

"Remember, son," said Roger, as the two walked on the platform. "Come up this year for a month, my boy. You need it." The train was about to start.

"Oh, I'll be all right," was the answer. "My friend the Judge, who has hay fever, tells me he has found a cure."

"d.a.m.n his cure! You come to us!"

"Hold on a minute, live and learn. The Judge is quite excited about it.

You drink little bugs, he says, a billion after every meal. They come in tall blue bottles. We're going to dine together next week and drink 'em till we're all lit up. Oh, we're going to have a h.e.l.l of a time. _His_ wife left town on Tuesday."

"Bruce," said Roger sternly, as the train began to move, "leave bugs alone and come up and breathe! And quit smoking so many cigarettes!" He stepped on the car.

"Remember, son, a solid month!" Bruce nodded as the train moved out.

"Good luck--good-bye--fine summer--my love to the wife and the kiddies--"

and Bruce's dark, tense, smiling face was left behind. Roger went back into the smoker.

"Now for the mountains," he thought. "Thank G.o.d!"

CHAPTER XIV

A few hours later Roger awakened. His lower berth was still pitch dark. The train had stopped, and he had been roused by a voice outside his window.

Rough and slow and nasal, the leisurely drawl of a mountaineer, it came like balm to Roger's ears. He raised the curtain and looked out. A train hand with a lantern was listening to a dairy man, a tall young giant in top boots. High overhead loomed a shadowy mountain and over its rim came the glow of the dawn. With a violent lurch the train moved on. And Roger, lying back on his pillow, looked up at the misty mountain sides all mottled in the strange blue light with patches of firs and birches and pines. In the narrow valley up which the train was thundering, were small herds of grazing cattle, a lonely farmhouse here and there. From one a light was twinkling. And the city with its heat and noise, its nervous throb, its bedlam nights, all dropped like a fever from his soul.

Now, close by the railroad track, through a shallow rocky gorge a small river roared and foamed. Its cool breath came up to his nostrils and gratefully he breathed it in. For this was the Gale River, named after one of his forefathers, and in his mind's eye he followed the stream back up its course to the little station where he and Deborah were to get off.

There the narrowing river bed turned and wound up through a cleft in the hills to the homestead several miles away. On the dark forest road beside it he pictured George, his grandson, at this moment driving down to meet them in a mountain wagon with one of the two hired men, a lantern swinging under the wheels. What an adventure for young George.

Presently he heard Deborah stirring in the berth next to his own.

At the station George was there, and from a thermos bottle which Edith had filled the night before he poured coffee piping hot, which steamed in the keen, frosty air.

"Oh, how good!" cried Deborah. "How thoughtful of your mother, George. How is she, dear?"

"Oh, she's all right, Aunt Deborah." His blunt freckled features flushed from his drive, George stood beaming on them both. He appeared, if anything, tougher and scrawnier than before. "Everything's all right," he said. "There ain't a sick animal on the whole farm."

As Roger sipped his coffee he was having a look at the horses. One of them was William, his cob.

"Do you see it?" inquired his grandson.

"What?"

"The boil," George answered proudly, "on William's rump. There it is--on the nigh side. Gee, but you ought to have seen it last week. It was a whale of a boil," said George, "but we poulticed him, me and Dave did--and now the swelling's nearly gone. You can ride him to-morrow if you like."

Luxuriously Roger lit a cigar and climbed to the front seat with George. Up the steep and crooked road the stout horses tugged their way, and the wagon creaked, and the Gale River, here only a brook, came gurgling, dashing to meet them--down from the mountains, from the farm, from Roger's youth to welcome him home. And the sun was flashing through the pines. As they drew near the farmhouse through a grove of sugar maples, he heard shrill cries of, "There they come!" And he glimpsed the flying figures of George's brothers, Bob and Tad. George whipped up the horses, the wagon gained upon the boys and reached the house but a few rods behind the little runners.

Edith was waiting by the door, fresh and smiling, blooming with health.

How well this suited her, Roger thought. Amid a gay chorus of greetings he climbed down heavily out of the wagon, looked about him and drew a deep breath. The long lazy days on the farm had begun.

From the mountain side the farm looked down on a wide sweeping valley of woods and fields. The old house straggled along the road, with addition after addition built on through generations by many men and women. Here lay the history, unread, of the family of Roger Gale. Inside there were steps up and down from one part to another, queer crooks in narrow pa.s.sageways.

The lower end was attached to the woodshed, and the woodshed to the barn.

Above the house a pasture dotted with gray boulders extended up to a wood of firs, and out of this wood the small river which bore the name of the family came rushing down the field in a gully, went under the road, swept around to the right and along the edge of a birch copse just below the house. The little stream grew quieter there and widened into a mill pond.

At the lower end was a broken dam and beside it a dismantled mill. Here was peace for Roger's soul. The next day at dawn he awakened, and through the window close by his bed he saw no tall confining walls; his eye was carried as on wings out over a billowy blanket of mist, soft and white and cool and still, reaching over the valley. From underneath to his sensitive ears came the numberless voices of the awakening sleepers there, cheeps and tremulous warbles from the birch copse just below, c.o.c.ks crowing in the valley, and ducks and geese, dogs, sheep and cattle faintly heard from distant farms.

Just so it had been when he was a boy. How unchanged and yet how new were these fresh hungry cries of life. From the other end of the house he heard Edith's tiny son l.u.s.tily demanding his breakfast, as other wee boys before him had done for over a hundred years, as other babies still unborn would do in the many years to come. Soon the cry of the child was hushed. Quiet fell upon the house. And Roger sank again into deep happy slumber.

Here was nothing new and disturbing. Edith's children? Yes, they were new, but they were not disturbing. Their growth each summer was a joy, a renewal of life in the battered old house. Here was no huge tenement family crowding in with dirty faces, clamorous demands for aid, but only five delightful youngsters, clean and fresh, of his own blood. He loved the small excitements, the plans and plots and discoveries, the many adventures that filled their days. He spent hours with their mother, listening while she talked of them. Edith did so love this place and she ran the house so beautifully. It was so cool and fragrant, so clean and so old-fashioned.

Deborah, too, came under the spell. She grew as lazy as a cat and day by day renewed her strength from the hills and from Edith's little brood.

Roger had feared trouble there, for he knew how Edith disapproved of her sister's new ideas. But although much with the children, Deborah apparently had no new ideas at all. She seemed to be only listening. One balmy day at sunset, Roger saw her lying on the gra.s.s with George sprawled by her side.

Her head upon one arm, she appeared to be watching the cattle in the sloping pasture above. Slowly, as though each one of them was drawn by mysterious unseen chains, they were drifting down toward the barn where it was almost milking time. George was talking earnestly. She threw a glance at him from time to time, and Roger could see how intent were her eyes.

Yes, Deborah knew how to study a boy.

Only once during the summer did she talk about her work. On a walk with her father one day she took him into a small forlorn building, a mere cabin of one room. The white paint had long been worn away, the windows were all broken, half the old shingles had dropped from the roof and on the flagpole was no flag. It was the district schoolhouse where for nearly half his life Deborah's grandfather had taught a score of pupils. Inside were a blackboard, a rusty stove, a teacher's desk and a dozen forms, grown mouldy and worm-eaten now. A torn and faded picture of Lincoln was upon one wall, half hidden by a spider's web and by a few old dangling rags which once had been red, white and blue. Below, still clinging to the wall, was an old sc.r.a.p of paper, on which in a large rugged hand there had been written long ago a speech, but it had been worn away until but three words were legible--"conceived and dedicated--"

"Tell me about your school," she said. "All you can remember." Seated at her grandfather's desk she asked Roger many questions. And his recollections, at first dim and hazy, began to clear a little.

"By George!" he exclaimed. "Here are my initials!"

He stooped over one of the benches.

"Oh, dearie! Where?" He pointed them out, and then while he sat on the rude old bench for some time more she questioned him.

"But your school was not all here," she said musingly at last, "it was up on the farm, besides, where you learned to plough and sow and reap and take care of the animals in the barn, and mend things that were broken, and--oh, turn your hand to anything. But millions of children nowadays are growing up in cities, you see."

Half frowning and half smiling she began to talk of her work in town. "What is there about her," Roger asked, "that reminds me so of my mother?" His mind strayed back into the past while the low quiet voice of his daughter went on, and a wistful expression crept over his face. What would she do with the family name? What life would she lead in those many years?...

"What a mother she would make." The words rose from within him, but in a voice which was not his own. It was Deborah's grandmother speaking, so clearly and distinctly that he gave a start almost of alarm.

"And if you don't believe they'll do it," Deborah was saying, "you don't know what's in children. Only we've got to help bring it out." What had she been talking about? He remembered the words "a new nation"--no more. "We've got to grope around in the dark and hunt for new ways and learn as we go.

And when you've once got into the work and really felt the thrill of it all--well, then it seems rather foolish and small to bother about your own little life."

Roger spent much of his time alone. He took long rides on William along crooked, hilly roads. As the afternoon drew to its end, the shadows would creep up the mountain sides to their summits where glowed the last rays of the sun, painting the slate and granite crags in lovely pink and purple hues. And sometimes mighty banks of clouds would rear themselves high overhead, gigantic mountains of the air with billowy, misty caverns, cliffs and jagged peaks, all shifting there before his eyes. And he would think of Judith his wife. And the old haunting certainty, that her soul had died with her body, was gone. There came to him the feeling that he and his wife would meet again. Why did this hope come back to him? Was it all from the glory of the sun? Or was it from the presence, silent and invisible, of those many other mortals, folk of his own flesh and blood, who at their deaths had gone to their graves to put on immortality? Or was this deepening faith in Roger simply a sign of his growing old age?

He frowned at the thought and shook it off, and again stared up at the light on the hills. "You will live on in our children's lives." Was there no other immortality?

He often thought of his boyhood here. On a ride one day he stopped for a drink at a spring in a grove of maples surrounding a desolate farmhouse not more than a mile away from his own. And through the trees as he turned to go he saw the stark figure of a woman, poorly clad and gaunt and gray. She stood motionless watching him with a look of sullen bitterness. She was the last of "the Elkinses," a mountain family run to seed. As he rode away he saw in the field a boy with a pitchfork in his hands, a meager ragged little chap. He was staring into the valley at a wriggling, blue smoke serpent made by the night express to New York. And something leaped in Roger, for he had once felt just like that! But the woman's harsh voice cut in on his dream, as she shouted to her son below, "Hey! Why the h.e.l.l you standin' thar?" And the boy with a jump of alarm turned back quickly to his work. At home a few days later, George with a mysterious air took his grandfather into the barn, and after a pledge of secrecy he said in swift and thrilling tones, "You know young Bill Elkins? Yes, you do--the boy up on the Elkins place who lives alone with his mother. Well, look here!"

George swallowed hard. "Bill has cleared out--he's run away! I was up at five this morning and he came hiking down the road! He had a bundle on his back and he told me he was off for good! And was he scared? You bet he was scared! And I told him so and it made him mad! 'Aw, you're scared!' I said.

'I ain't neither!' he said. He could barely talk, but the kid had his nerve! 'Where you going?' I asked. 'To New York,' he said. 'Aw, what do you know of New York?' I said. And then, by golly, he busted right down. 'Gee!'

he said, 'Gee! Can't you lemme alone?' And then he beat it down the road!

You could hear the kid breathe, he was hustling so! He's way off now, he's caught the train! He wants to be a cabin boy on a big ocean liner!" For a moment there was silence. "Well?" the boy demanded, "What do you think of his chances?"