The Voice of the People Part 5

"Is that you, Nick?" she asked. "I declar, I'd jest dropped off to sleep when you woke me comin' down stairs. I never could abide tip-toein', nohow. I don't see how 'tis that I can't get no rest 'thout bein' roused up, when your pa can turn right over and sleep through thunder. Whar you goin' now?"

Nicholas stopped and held a whispered colloquy with her from the back porch. "I'm goin' to drag the land some 'fore pa gets up," he answered.

"Then I'm goin' in to town. You know he said I might."

His stepmother shook her bandaged head peevishly and stood holding the collar of her unbleached cotton gown.

"Oh, I reckon so," she responded. "I was think-in' 'bout goin' in myself and hevin' my tooth out, but I s'pose I can wait on you. The Lord knows I'm used to waitin'."

Nicholas looked at her in perplexity, his arm resting on the little shelf outside, which supported the wooden water bucket and the long-handled gourd.

"You can go when I come back," he said at last, adding with an effort, "or, if it's so bad, I can stay at home."

But, having a.s.serted her supremacy over his inclinations, Marthy Burr relented. "Oh, I don't know as I'll go in to-day," she returned. "I ain't got enough teeth left now to chew on, an' I don't believe it's the teeth, nohow. It's the gums--"

She retreated into the room, whence the shrill voice of Sairy Jane inquired:

"Air you up, ma? Why, 'tain't day!"

Nicholas closed the door and went out upon the porch. The yard looked deserted and desolated, giving him a sudden realisation of his own littleness and the immensity of the hour. It was as if the wheels of time had stopped in the dim promise of things unfulfilled. A broken scythe lay to one side amid the straggling ailanthus shoots; near the wood-pile there was a wheelbarrow half filled with chips, and at a little distance the axe was poised upon a rotten log. From the small coops beside the hen-house came an anxious clucking as the fluffy yellow chickens strayed beneath the uneven edges of their pointed prisons and made independent excursions into the world.

In the far east the day was slowly breaking, and the open country was flooded with pale, washed-out grays, like the background of an impressionist painting. A heavy dew had risen in the night, and as the boy pa.s.sed through the dripping weeds on his way to the stable they left a chill moisture upon his bare feet. His eyes were heavy with sleep, and to his cloudy gaze the familiar objects of the barnyard a.s.sumed grotesque and distorted shapes. The manure heap near the doorway presented an effect of unreality, the pig-pen seemed to have suffered witchery since the evening before, and the haystack, looming vaguely in the drab distance, appeared to be woven of some phantasmal fabric.

He led out the old sorrel mare and followed her into the large ploughed field beyond the cow-pen, where the harrow was lying on one side of the brown ridges. As he pa.s.sed the pen the startled sheep huddled into a far corner, bleating plaintively, and the brindle cow looked after him with soft, persuasive eyes. When he had attached the clanking chains of the plough harness to the single-tree, he caught up the ropes which served for reins and set out laboriously over the crumbling earth, which yielded beneath his feet and made walking difficult.

The field extended from the cow-pen and the bright, green rows of vegetables that were raised for market to the reedy brook which divided his father's land from that belonging to General Battle. The brook was always cool and shady, and silvery with minnows darting over the shining pebbles beneath the clear water. As Nicholas looked across the neutral furrows he could see the feathery branches of willows rising from the gray mist, and, farther still up the sloping hillside, the dew-drenched green of the mixed woodlands.

The land before him had been upturned by shallow ploughing some days since, and it lay now pale and arid, the large clods of earth showing the detached roots of gra.s.s and herbs, and presenting a hint of menacing destruction rather than the prospect of the peaceful art of cultivation. It was the boy's duty to drag the soil free from gra.s.s, after which it would be laid out into rows some three feet apart. When this was done two furrows would be thrown together to give what the farmers called a "rise," the point of which would be finally levelled, when the ground would be ready for the peanut-sowing, which was performed entirely by hand.

The boy worked industriously through the deepening dawn, giving an occasional "gee up, Rhody!" to the mare, and following the track of the harrow with much the same concentration of purpose as that displayed by his four-footed friend. He was strong for his years, lithe as a sapling, and as fearless of elemental changes, and as he walked meditatively across the bare field he might have suggested to an onlooker the possible production of a vast fund of energy.

Presently the gray light was shot with gold and a streak of orange fluttered like a ribbon in the east. In a moment a violet cloud floated above the distant hill, and as its ends curled up from the quickening heat it showed the splendour of a crimson lining. A single ray of sunshine, pale as a spectral finger, pointed past the woodlands to the brook beneath the willows, and the vague blur of the mixed forest warmed into vivid tints, changing through variations from the clear emerald of young maples to the olive dusk of evergreens.

Last of all the ploughed field, which had preserved a neutral cast, blushed faintly in the sunrise, glowing to pale purple tones where the sod was newly turned. From the fugitive richness of the soil a warm breath rose suddenly, filling the air with the genial odour of earth and sunshine. The shining, dark coils of worms were visible like threads in the bright brown clods.

Nicholas raised his head and stared with unseeing eyes at the gorgeous east. A rooster crowed shrilly, and he turned in the direction of the barnyard. Then he flicked the ropes gently and went on, his gaze on the ground. His thoughts, which at first were fixed solely upon the teeth of the harrow, took tumultuous flight, and he reviewed for the hundredth time his conversation with the judge and the vast avenue of the future which was opening before him. He would not be like his father, of this he was convinced--his father, who was always working with nothing to show for it--whose planting was never on time, and whose implements were never in place. His father had never had this gnawing desire to know things, this pa.s.sionate hatred of the work which he might not neglect.

His father had never tried to beat against the barriers of his ignorance and been driven back, and beat again and wept, and read what he couldn't understand. The teacher at the public school had told him that he was far ahead of his years, and yet they had taken him away when he was doing his level best, and put him to dragging the land, and gathering the peanuts, and carrying the truck to market, and marking the sheep with red paint, and bringing up the cows, and doing all the odd, innumerable jobs they could devise. He let the ropes fall for an instant and dug his fist into his eye; then he took them up again and went on stolidly. At last the sun came out boldly above the hill, and the hollows were flooded with light. In the centre of the field the boy's head glowed like some large red insect. A hawk, winging slowly above him, looked down as if uncertain of his species, and fluttered off indifferently.

At six o'clock his stepmother came to the back door and called him to breakfast.

When the meal was over Amos Burr went out to the field, and Nicholas was sent to drive the sheep to the pasture. With vigorous wavings of a piece of brushwood, and many darts from right to left, he succeeded finally in driving them across the road and through the gate on the opposite side, after which he returned to a.s.sist his stepmother about the house. Not until nine o'clock, when he had seen the Battle children going up the road, was he free to set off at a run for Kingsborough.

As he sped breathlessly along, past the wastelands, into the woods, down the road to the hillside, and down the hillside to the road again, he went too rapidly for thought. The fresh air brushed his heated face gently, and, at the edge of the wood, where the shallow puddles lingered, myriads of blue and yellow b.u.t.terflies scattered into variegated clumps of colour at his approach, darting from the moist heaps of last year's leaves to the shining rivulets in the wheel ruts by the way. A partridge whistled from the yellowing green of the wheat, and a rabbit stole noiselessly from the sa.s.safras in the ditch and shot shy glances of alarm; but he did not turn his head, and his hand held no ready stone.

Though he had run half the way, when at last he reached the judge's house, and stood before the little office in the garden where the school was held, his courage misgave him, and he leaned, trembling, against the arbour where a grapevine grew. The sound of voices floated out to him, mingled with bright, girlish laughter, and, looking through the open window, he saw the light curls of a little girl against the darker head of a boy. He choked suddenly with shyness, and would have hesitated there until the morning was over had not the judge's old servant, Caesar, espied him from the dining-room window.

"Look yer, boy, what you doin' dar?" he demanded suspiciously, and then called to some one inside the house. "Ma.r.s.e George, dat ar Burr boy is a-loungin' roun' yo' yawd."

The judge did not respond, but the tutor came to the door of the office and intercepted the boy's retreat. He was a pale, long-faced young man in spectacles, with weak, blue eyes and a short, thin moustache. His name was Graves, and he regarded what he called the judge's "quixotism"

with condescending good-nature.

"Is that you, Nicholas Burr?" he asked in a slightly supercilious voice.

"The judge has told me about you. So you won't be a farmer, eh? And you won't stay in your cla.s.s? Well, come in and we'll see what we can make of you."

Nicholas followed him into the room and sat down at one of the pine desks, while the judge's son, Tom, nodded to him from across the room, and Bernard Battle grinned over his shoulder at his sister Eugenia, and a handsome boy, called Dudley Webb, made a face which convulsed little Sally Burwell, who hid her merriment in her curls. There were several other children in the room, but Nicholas did not see them distinctly.

Something had got before his eyes and there was a lump in his throat. He sat rigidly in his seat, his straw hat, with the shoestring around the crown, lying upon the desk before him. He looked neither to the right nor to the left, keeping his frightened gaze upon the tutor's face.

Mr. Graves asked him a few questions, which he could not answer, and then, giving him a book, turned to the other children. As the lessons went on it seemed to Nicholas that he had never known anything in his life; that he should never know anything; and that he should always remain the most ignorant person on earth--unless that lot fell to Sairy Jane.

The difficulties besetting the path of knowledge appeared to be insurmountable. Even if he had the books and the time he could never learn anything--his head would prevent it.

"Bound Beloochistan, Tom," said the tutor, and Tom, a stout, fair-haired boy with a heavy face, went through the process to the satisfaction of Mr. Graves and to the amazement of Nicholas.

The office was a plain, square room, containing, besides the desks and tables, an old secretary and a corner cupboard of an antique pattern, which held an odd a.s.sortment of cracked china and chemist bottles. There was also a square mahogany chest, called the wine-cellar, which had been sent from the dining-room when the last bottle of Tokay was opened to drink the health of the Confederacy.

Before the war the place had been used by the judge as a general business room, but when the slaves were freed and there were fewer servants it was found to be little needed, and was finally given over entirely to the children's school.

When recess came the tutor left the office, telling Nicholas that he might go home with the little girls if he liked. "I shall try to have the books you need by to-morrow," he said, and, his natural amiability overcoming his a.s.sumed superciliousness, he added pleasantly:

"I shouldn't mind being backward at first. The boys are older than you, but you'll soon catch up."

He went out, and Nicholas had started towards the door, when Tom Ba.s.sett flung himself before him, swinging skilfully over an intervening table.

"Hold up, carrot-head," he said. "Let's have a look at you. Are all heads afire where you come from?"

"He's Amos Burr's boy," explained Bernard Battle with a grin. "He lives 'long our road. I saw him hoeing potatoes day before yesterday. He's got freckles enough to tan a sheepskin!"

In the midst of the laugh which followed Nicholas stood awkwardly, shifting his bare feet. His face was scarlet, and he fingered in desperation the ragged brim of his hat.

"I reckon they're my freckles," he said doggedly.

"And I reckon you can keep 'em," retorted Bernard, mimicking his tone.

"We ain't going to steal 'em. I say, Eugie, here're some freckles for sale!"

The dark little girl, who was putting up her books in one corner, looked up and shook her head.

"Let me alone!" she replied shortly, and returned to her work, tugging at the straps with both hands. Dudley Webb--a handsome, upright boy, well dressed in a dark suit and linen shirt--lounged over as he munched a sandwich.

He looked at Nicholas from head to foot, and his gaze was returned with stolid defiance. Nicholas did not flinch, but for the first time he felt ashamed of his ugliness, of his coa.r.s.e clothes, of his briar-scratched legs, of his freckles, and of the unalterable colour of his hair. He wished with all his heart that he were safely in the field with his father, driving the one-horse harrow across upturned furrows. He didn't want to learn anything any more. He wanted only to get away.

"He's common," said Dudley at last, throwing a crust of bread through the open window. "He's as common as--as dirt. I heard mother say so--"

"Father says he's _un_common," returned Tom doubtfully, turning his honest eyes on Nicholas again. "He told Mr. Graves that he was a most uncommon boy."

"Oh, well, you can play with him if you like," rejoined Dudley resolutely, "but I shan't. He's old Amos Burr's son, anyway, who never wore a whole shirt in his life."

"He had on one yesterday," said Bernard Battle impartially. "I saw it.

It was just made and hadn't been washed."

Nicholas looked up stubbornly. "You let my father alone!" he exclaimed, spurred by the desire to resent something and finding it easier to fight for another than himself. "You let my father alone, or I'll make you!"