"Happened! Why, what should have happened?" he inquired with attempted lightness."Good Lord! After a day's work like mine you can hardly expect me to dance a hornpipe.Since sunrise I've done a turn at fall ploughing, felled and chopped a tree, mended the pasture fence, brought the water for the washing, tied up some tobacco leaves, and looked after the cattle and the horses--and now you find fault because I haven't cut any extra capers!""Not find fault, dear," she answered, and the hopeless courage in her face smote him to the heart.In a bitter revulsion of feeling he felt that he could not endure her suffering tenderness.
"Find fault with you! Oh, Christopher! It is only that you have been so different of late, so brooding, and you seem to avoid us at every instant.Even mother has noticed it, and she imagines that you are in love.""In love!" he threw back his head with a loud laugh."Oh, I'm tired, Cynthia--dog-tired, that's the matter.""I know, I know," replied Cynthia, rubbing her eyes hard with the back of her hand."And the worst is that there's no help for it--absolutely none.I think about it sometimes until I wonder that I don't go mad."He turned at this from the window through which he had been gazing and fixed upon her a perplexed and moody stare.The wistful patience in her face, like the look he had seen in the eyes of overworked farm animals, aroused in him a desire to prod her into actual revolt--into any decisive rebellion against fate.
To accept life upon its own terms seemed to him, at the instant, pure cowardliness--the enforced submission of a weakened will;and he questioned almost angrily if the hereditary instincts were alive in her also? Did she, too, have her secret battles and her silent capitulations? Or was her pious resignation, after all, only a new form of the old Blake malady--of that fatal apathy which seized them, like disease, when events demanded strenuous endeavour? Could the saintly fortitude he had once so envied be, when all was said, merely the outward expression of the inertia he himself had felt--of the impulse to drift with the tide, let it carry one where it would?
"Well, I'm glad it's no worse," said Cynthia, with a sigh of relief, as she turned toward the door."Since you are not sick, dear, things are not so bad as they might be.I'll let mother fancy you have what she calls 'a secret sentiment.' It amuses her, at any rate.And now I'm going to stir up some buckwheat cakes for your breakfast.We've got a jug of black molasses.""That's pleasant, at least," he returned, laughing; and then as she reached the door he went toward her and laid his hand awkwardly upon her shoulder."Don't worry about me, Cynthia," he added; "there's a lot of work left in me yet, and a change for the better may come any day, you know.By next year the price of tobacco may shoot skyhigh."Her face brightened and a flush smoothed out all the fine wrinkles on her brow, but with the pathetic shyness of a woman who has never been caressed she let his hand fall stiffly from her arm and went hurriedly from the room.
For a few minutes Christopher stood looking abstractedly at the closed door.Then shaking his head, as if to rid himself of an accusing thought, he turned away and began rapidly to undress.He had thrown off his coat, and was stooping to remove his boots, when a slight noise at the window startled him, and straightening himself instantly he awaited attentively a repetition of the sound.In a moment it came again, and hastily crossing the room and raising the sash, he looked out into the full moonlight and saw Will Fletcher standing in the gravelled path below.At the first glance surprise held him motionless, but as the boy waved to him he responded to the signal, and, catching up his coat from the bed, ran down the staircase and out into the yard.
"What in the devil's name--" he exclaimed, aghast.
Will was trembling from exhaustion, and his face glimmered like a pallid blotch under the shadow of the aspen.When the turkeys stirred on an overhanging bough above him he started nervously and sucked in his breath with a hissing sound.He was run to death; this Christopher saw at the first anxious look.
"Get me something to eat," said the boy; "I'm half starved--but bring it to the barn, for I'm too dead tired to stand a moment.
Yes, I ran away, of course," he finished irritably."Do I look as if I'd come in grandpa's carriage?"With a last spurt of energy he disappeared into the shadows behind the house, and Christopher, going into the kitchen, began searching the tin safe for the chance remains of supper.On the table was the bowl of buckwheat which Cynthia had been preparing when she was called away by some imperious demand of her mother's, and near it he saw the open prayer-book from which she had been reading.From the adjoining room he heard Tucker's voice--those rich, pleasant tones that translated into sound the courageous manliness of the old soldier's face--and for an instant he yearned toward the cheerful group sitting in the firelight beyond the whitewashed wall--toward the blind woman in her old oak chair, listening to the evening chapter from the Scriptures.Then the feeling passed as quickly as it had come, and securing a plate of bread and a dried ham-bone, he filled a glass with fresh milk, and, picking up his lantern, went out of doors and along the little straggling path to the barn.
The yard was frosted over with moonlight, but when he reached the rude building where the farm implements and cattle fodder were sheltered he saw that it was quite dark inside, only a few scattered moonbeams crawling through the narrow doorway.To his first call there was no answer, and it was only after he had lighted his lantern and swung it round in the darkness that he discovered Will lying fast asleep upon a pile of straw.
As the light struck him full in the face the boy opened his eyes and sprang up.
