The Fortunes of Oliver Horn Part 20

It was not long before the bare rooms of the Academy School--owing to the political situation, which necessitated the exercise of economies in every direction--began to suffer.

One night the students found the gas turned out and a small card tacked on the door of the outer hall. It read--

SCHOOL CLOSED FOR WANT OF

FUNDS. WILL PERHAPS BE

OPENED IN THE AUTUMN.

Signs of like character were not unusual in the history of the school.

The wonder was, considering the vicissitudes through which the Academy had pa.s.sed, that it was opened at all. From the inst.i.tution's earlier beginnings in the old house on Bond Street, to its flight from the loft close to Grace Church and then to the abandoned building opposite the old hotel near Washington Square, where Amos Cobb always stayed when he came to New York, and so on down to its own home on Broadway, its history had been one long struggle for recognition and support.

This announcement, bitter enough as it was to Oliver, was followed by another even more startling, when he reached the office next day, and Mr. Slade called him into his private room.

"Mr. Horn," said his employer, motioning Oliver to a seat and drawing his chair close beside him so that he could lay his hand upon the young man's knee, "I am very sorry to tell you that after the first of June we shall be obliged to lay you off. It is not because we are dissatisfied with your services, for you have been a faithful clerk, and we all like you and wish you could stay, but the fact is if this repudiation goes on we will all be ruined. I am not going to discharge you; I'm only going to give you a holiday for a few months. Then, if the war-scare blows over we want you back again. I appreciate that this has come as suddenly upon you as it has upon us, and I hope you will not feel offended when, in addition to your salary, I hand you the firm's check for an extra amount. You must not look upon it as a gift, for you have earned every cent of it."

These two calamities were duly reported in a ten-page letter to his mother by our young hero, sitting alone, as he wrote, up in his sky-parlor, crooning over his dismal c.o.ke fire. "Was he, then, to begin over again the weary tramping of the streets?" he said to himself. "And the future! What did that hold in store for him? Would the time ever come when he could follow the bent of his tastes? He was getting on so well--even Miss Grant had said so--and it had not interfered with his work at the store, either. The check in his pocket proved that."

His mother's answer made his heart bound with joy.

"Take Mr. Slade at his word. He is your friend and means what he says.

Find a place for the summer where you can live cheaply and where the little money which you now have will pay your way. In the fall you can return to your work. Don't think of coming home, much as I should like to put my arms around you. I cannot spare the money to bring you here now, as I have just paid the interest on the mortgage. Moreover, the whole of Kennedy Square is upset and our house seems to be the centre of disturbance. Your father's views on slavery are well known, and he is already being looked upon with disfavor by some of our neighbors. At the club the other night he and Judge Bowman had some words which were very distressing to me. Mr. Cobb was present, and was the only one who took your father's part. Your father, as you may imagine, is very anxious over the political situation, but I cannot think our people are going to fight and kill each other, as Colonel Clayton predicts they will before another year has pa.s.sed."

Oliver's heart bounded like a loosened balloon as he laid down his mother's letter and began pacing the room. Neither the political outlook, nor club discussions, nor even his mother's hopes and fears, concerned him. It was the sudden loosening of all his bonds that thrilled him. Four months to do as he pleased in; the dreadful mortgage out of the way for six months; his mother willing, and he with money enough in his pocket to pay his way without calling upon her for a penny! Was there ever such luck! All care rolled from his shoulders--even the desire to see his mother and Sue and those whom he loved at home was forgotten in the rosy prospect before him.

The next day he told Mr. Slade of his plans, and read him part of his mother's letter.

"Very sensible woman, your mother," his employer answered, with his bluff heartiness. "Just the thing for you to do; and I've got the very spot. Go to Ezra Pollard's. He lives up in the mountains at a little place called East Branch, on the edge of a wilderness. I fish there every spring, and I'll give you a letter to him."

Long before his day of departure came he had dusted out his old hair trunk--there were other and more modern trunks to be had, but Oliver loved this one because it had been his father's--gathered his painting materials together--his easel, brushes, leather case, and old slouch hat that he wore to fish in at home--and spent his time counting the days and hours when he could leave the world behind him and, as he wrote Fred, "begin to live."

He was not alone in this planning for a summer exodus. The other students had indeed all cut their tether-strings and disappeared long before his own freedom came. Jack Bedford had gone to the coast to live with a fisherman and paint the surf, and Fred was with his people away up near the lakes. As for the lithographers, sign-painters, and beginners, they were spending their evenings somewhere else than in the old room under the shaded gas-jets. Even Margaret, so Mother Mulligan told him, was up "wid her folks, somewheres."

"And she was that broken-hearted," she added, "whin they shut up the school--bad cess to 'em! Oh, ye would a-nigh kilt yerself wid grief to a-seen her, poor darlint."

"Where is her home?" asked Oliver, ignoring the tribute to his sympathetic tendencies. He had no reason for asking, except that she had been the only woman among them, and he accordingly felt that a certain courtesy was due her even in her absence.

"I've bothered me head loose tryin' to remimber, but for the soul o'

me, I can't. It's cold enough up there, I know, to freeze ye solid, for Miss Margaret had wan o' her ears nipped last time she was home."

And so one fine morning in June, with Oliver bursting with happiness, the hair trunk and the leather case and sketching umbrella were thrown out at a New England way-station in the gray dawn from a train in which Oliver had spent the night curled up on one of the seats.

Just as he had expected, the old coach that was to carry him was waiting beside the platform. There was a rush for top seats, and Oliver got the one beside the driver, and the trunk and traps were stored in the boot under the driver's seat--it was a very small trunk and took up but little room--and Marvin cracked his whip and away everybody went, the dogs barking behind and the women waving their ap.r.o.ns from the porches of the low houses facing the road.

And it was a happy young fellow who filled his lungs with the fresh air of the morning and held on to the iron rail of the top seat as they b.u.mped over the "Thank ye marms," and who asked the driver innumerable questions which it was part of the noted whip's duty and always his pleasure to answer. The squirrels darted across the road as if to get a look at the enthusiast and then ran for their lives to escape the wheels; and the crows heard the rumble and rose in a body from the spa.r.s.e cornfields for a closer view; and the big trees arched over his head, cooling the air and casting big shadows, and even the sun kept peeping over the edge of the hills from behind some jutting rock or clump of pines or hemlock as if bent on lighting up his face so that everybody could see how happy he was.

As the day wore on and the coach rattled over the big open bridge that spanned the rushing mountain-stream, Oliver's eye caught, far up the vista, the little dent in the line of blue that stood low against the sky. The driver said this was the Notch and that the big hump to the right was Moose Hillock, and that Ezra's cabin nestled at its feet and was watered by the rushing stream, only it was a tiny little brook away up there that anybody could step over.

"'Tain't bigger'n yer body where it starts out fresh up in them mountings," the driver said, touching his leaders behind their ears with the lash of his whip. "Runs clean round Ezra's, and's jest as chuckfull o' trout, be gosh, as a hive is o' bees."

And the swing and the freedom of it all! No office-hours to keep; no boxes to nail up and roll out--nothing but sweetness and cool draughts of fresh mountain-air, and big trees that he wanted to get down and hug; and jolly laughing brooks that ran out to meet him and called to him as he trotted along, or as the horses did, which was the same thing, he being part of the team.

And the day! Had there ever been such another? And the sky, too, filled with soft white clouds that sailed away over his head--the little ones far in advance and already crowding up the Notch, which was getting nearer every hour.

And Marvin the driver--what a character he was and how quaint his speech. And the cabins by the road, with their trim fences and winter's wood piled up so neatly under the sheds--all so different from any which he had seen at the South and all so charming and exhilarating.

Never had he been so happy!

And why not? Twenty-three and in perfect health, without a care, and for the first time in all his life doing what he wanted most to do, with opportunities opening every hour for doing what he believed he could do best.

Oh, for some planet where such young saplings can grow without hinderance from the ignorant and the unsympathetic; where they can reach out for the sun on all sides and stretch their long arms skyward; where each vine can grow as it would in all the luxuriance of its nature, free from the pruning-knife of criticism and the straitlaced trellis of conventionality--a planet on which the Puritan with his creeds, customs, fads, issues, and dogmas, and the Cavalier with his traditions and time-honored notions never sat foot. Where every round peg fits a round hole, and men toil with a will and with unclouded brows because their hearts find work for their hands and each day's task is a joy.

If the road and the country on each side of it, and the giant trees, now that they neared the mountains, and the deep ravines and busy, hurrying brooks had each inspired some exclamation of joy from Oliver, the first view of Ezra's cabin filled him so full of uncontrollable delight that he could hardly keep his seat long enough for Marvin to rein in his horses and get down and swing back the gate that opened into the pasture surrounding the house.

"Got a boarder for ye, Ezra," Marvin called to Oliver's prospective host, who had come down to meet the stage and get his empty b.u.t.ter-pails. Then, in a lower tone: "Sezs he's a painter chap, and that Mr. Slade sent him up. He's goin' to bunk in with ye all summer, he sezs. Seems like a knowin', happy kind er young feller."

They were pulling the pails from the rear boot, each one tied up in a wheat-sack, with a card marked "Ezra Pollard" sewed on the outside to distinguish it from the property of other East Branch settlers up and down the road.

Oliver had slipped from his seat and was tugging at his hair trunk. He did not know that the long, thin, slab-sided old fellow in a slouch hat, hickory shirt crossed by one suspender, and heavy cowhide boots was his prospective landlord. He supposed him to be the hired man, and that he would find Mr. Pollard waiting for him in the little sitting-room with the windows full of geraniums that looked so inviting and picturesque.

"Marve sez you're lookin' fur me. Come along. Glad ter see ye."

"Are you Mr. Pollard?" His surprise not only marked the tones of his voice but the expression of his face.

"No, jes' Ezry Pollard, that's all. Hope Mr. Slade's up and hearty?"

Mr. Slade was never so "up and hearty" as was Oliver that next morning.

Up with the sun he was, and hearty as a young buck out of a bed of mountain-moss.

"Time to be movin', ain't it?" came Ezra Pollard's voice, shouting up the unpainted staircase, "Hank's drawed a bucket out here at the well for ye to wash in. Needn't worry about no towel. Samanthy's got one fur ye, but ye kin bring yer comb."

At the sound of Ezra's voice Oliver sprang from the coa.r.s.e straw mattress--it had been as eider-down to his stage-jolted body--pushed open the wooden blind and peered out. The sun was peeping over the edge of the Notch and looking with wide eyes into the saucer-shaped valley in which the cabin stood. The fogs which at twilight had stolen down to the meadows and had made a night of it, now startled into life by the warm rays of the sun, were gathering up their skirts of shredded mist and tiptoeing back up the hill-side, looking over their shoulders as they fled. The fresh smell of the new corn watered by the night dew and the scent of pine and balsam from the woods about him, filled the morning air. Songs of birds were all about, a robin on a fence-post and two larks high in air, singing as they flew.

Below him, bounding from rock to rock, ran the brook, laughing in the sunlight and tossing the spray high in the air in a mad frolic. Across this swirling line of silver lay a spa.r.s.e meadow strewn with rock, plotted with squares of last year's crops--potatoes, string-beans, and cabbages, and now combed into straight green lines of early buckwheat and turnips. Beyond this a ragged pasture, fenced with blackened stumps, from which came the tinkle of cow-bells, and farther on the grim, silent forest--miles and miles of forest seamed by a single road leading to Moose Hillock and the great Stone Face.

Oliver slipped into his clothes; ran down the stairs and out into the fresh morning air. As he walked toward the well his eyes caught sight of Hank's bucket tilted on one edge of the well-curb, over which hung the big sweep, its lower end loaded with stone. On the platform stood a wooden bench sloppy with the drippings of the water-soaked pail. This bench held a tin basin and half a bar of rosin soap. Beside it was a single post sprouting hickory p.r.o.ngs, on which were hung as many cleanly scoured milk-pails glittering in the sun. On this post Hank had nailed a three-cornered piece of looking-gla.s.s--Hank had a sweetheart in the village below--a necessity and useful luxury, he told Oliver afterward, "in slickin' yerself up fer meals."

Once out in the sunshine Oliver, with the instinct of the painter suddenly roused, looked about him. He found that the cabin which had delighted him so in the glow of the afternoon, was even more enchanting in the light of the morning. To the plain, every-day, practical man it was but a long box with a door in the middle of each side, front and back--one opening into a sitting-room, which again opened into a bedroom in which Ezra and his wife slept, with the windows choked with geraniums, their red cheeks pressed against the small panes, and the other opening into a kitchen, connecting with a pantry and a long, rambling woodshed. To our young Raphael the simple cabin, from its homely sagging door to its broken-backed roof, covered with rotting shingles, was nothing less than an enchanted palace.

He remembered the shingles. He had reached up in the night and touched them with his hands. He remembered, too, the fragrance they gave out--a hot, dry, spicy smell. He remembered also the dried apples spread out on a board beside his bed, and the broken spinning-wheel, and the wasp's nest. He was sure, too, there were many other fascinating relics stored away in this old attic. But for the sputtering tallow-candle, which the night before was nearly burnt out, he would have examined everything else about him before he went to sleep.

Then his eye fell on the woodshed and the huge pile of chips that Hank's axe had made in supplying Samanthy's stove, and the rickety, clay-plastered buggy and buckboard that had never known water since the day of their birth. And the two muskrat skins nailed to the outside planking--spoils of the mill-dam, a mile below.

Yes; he could paint here!