Delphi complete works of.., p.92
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 92
Egeria briefly told her story, and ended with a prayer for a night’s shelter. “Just let us sit by your fire. We won’t trouble you, and in the morning we will go on.”
The woman did not change countenance. “You hain’t any of them that’s escaped from the reform school?” she demanded, in a high, frightened voice.
Egeria again explained their case. “I don’t know where the reform school is. This is my father, and we are honest people!” she added indignantly.
“Well,” said the woman, in the same key as before, and clinging to her preconception, “I guess you better go back. The off’cers is sure to catch you.”
“Oh, and won’t you let us in?”
“Why, I couldn’t, you know, — I couldn’t. You just keep right along. It’s early yet, and there’s a tavern up this road, — well, it ain’t more ‘n four mile, if it’s that; you can put up there.”
“Is this the road to Vardley?” asked Boynton.
“Yes, yes, — straight along,” said the woman, who had been making the aperture between them smaller and smaller; she now finally closed the door with a quick bang, and bolted it.
“What shall we do?” whispered Egeria.
“I don’t know,” her father faltered, in reply.
“Let us go back to the station,” said the girl. “They will let us stay there, and then in the morning we can take the train — Oh, but we haven’t any money to pay our way back!” She broke out into a wild sobbing.
“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” said her father, soothingly. “We will walk on. Some one must receive us. Or, if not, we can’t starve in a single night, and at this season we can’t perish of cold.” As they resumed their way, something struck lightly in their faces. “Rain?” said Boynton, stretching out his hand.
“No,” answered Egeria, “snow.”
Neither spoke as they entered the deep shadow of the forest, which in this part of Massachusetts covers miles of country, where the farmer has ceased to coax his wizened crops from the sterile soil and has abandoned it in despair to the wilderness from which his ancestors conquered it.
The road before the wanderers began to whiten. “Oh, when shall we come to a house?” moaned the girl, shrinking closer to her father, and clinging more heavily to his arm.
She started at the sound of voices and the red glare that came from a sheltered hollow of the woods beside the valley into which the road descended. Around a large fire crouched a party of tramps: one held a tilted bottle to his mouth, and smother clutched at it; the rest were shouting and singing. As Egeria and her father came into the range of the firelight, the men saw them. They yelled to them to stop and have a drink. The one who had the bottle snatched up a brand from the fire with his left hand and ran towards them. His foot must have caught in some root or vine; he fell, rolling over his bottle and torch, and while he screamed out that he was burning up, and the rest rushed upon him with laughter for his mishap and curses for the loss of his bottle, Egeria and her father fled into the shadows beyond the light.
Terror gave her force, but when she felt herself safe her strength began to fail.
“I can’t go any farther,” she said, releasing her hand from her father’s arm, and sinking upon the wayside bank. “We will wait here till morning.”
He made her no answer, but stood looking up and down the road. “Egeria,” he said at last, “I fancy that it’s lighter ahead of us than it is behind, and that we ‘re near the edge of the woods. Try to come a few steps farther.” He lifted her to her feet, and they moved painfully forward. It was as he said: in a little while the woods broke away on either hand, and they stood in the middle of crossroads; on one corner was a house. But as they drew near the verge of the open, the sound of voices stayed them; they were the voices of young men and young girls laughing and calling to one another, as they issued from this house on the corner. “It’s a school-house,” said her father; “they’ve had some sort of frolic there.”
“Well, you won’t get the Unabridged for spelling merry, Jim!” shouted one of the youths to another.
“Oh, how does he spell it?” cried one of the girls.
“He spells it M-a-r-y!”
The laugh that followed repeated itself in the woods.
“That’s a good joke for hoot-owls!” retorted some one who might be Jim.
“A spelling match,” Boynton interpreted.
A noise of joyous screaming and scuffling came from within the house as a light was quenched there, with cries of “I should think you’d be ashamed!” and “Now, you stop!” and the like; and a bevy of young people came scurrying from the door.
“Hello!” shouted one of the young men, “what about the books?”
“I don’t know,” answered another. “Guess nobody’ll hurt the books before morning.”
“I wish they’d steal mine!” said the gay voice of a girl.
“But the fire, — we’ve left a roaring fire.”
“Well, let it burn the old thing down.”
“All right!”
They hurried forward, shouting to the party ahead, who answered with a medley of derisive noises.
When they were all gone, and their voices had died away, the wanderers crept to the door of the school-house, which they tried anxiously. It opened, and they entered. A gush of mellow light from the stove door, left open to let the fire die soon, softly illumined the interior. They drew some benches close to the stove, and sank away from the sense of all their misery.
X.
THE last thing of which Egeria had been aware before she fell asleep was her own shadow thrown by the firelight against the school-house door. She thought it was this when she looked again. But the door melted away from around the shadow, and the shadow took feature and expression. Rousing herself with a start, she saw that it was a young girl, cloaked and hooded, standing in the open doorway. The pale, bluish light of a snowy morning filled the school-room. The girl stood still, and looked at Egeria with a stony gaze of fear. The past came back to her; the situation realized itself. Her father, a shabby, disreputable heap of crumpled clothing and tumbled hair, was still asleep; her own beautiful hair had fallen down her shoulder.
“We will go, — we will go,” she whispered to the girl in the door-way, with a face as frightened as her own. “It’s my father. We were walking to Vardley; we didn’t know where we were, and we found the school-house door unlocked, and we came in.” She caught at the wandering coils of her hair, and twisted them into place, and tied on her bonnet.
The girl in the door-way looked as if she would like to run away, but she came in, gasping, and shut the door behind her. “You ‘re not tramps?” she made out to ask.
“Oh, no, no, no!” replied Egeria, and she incoherently poured out the story of their misadventure.
The other girl drew a long breath. “And you were going to Vardley Station?”
“Yes.”
“That’s more than three miles from here.” Egeria did not say anything, but she turned to wake her father. “Oh, don’t wake him!” cried the other girl, with a new start of terror, and a partial flight towards the door. “I mean,” she added, coming back with a blush, “let him sleep. I — I’m the teacher; and I’ve come to build the fire. You can warm by it before you go. The scholars won’t be here yet for an hour.” Every word was visibly a conquest from fear, a fulfillment of duty.
The teacher took off her water-proof, the hood of which she had drawn up over her head, and showed herself a short, plain girl, with a homely face full of sense and goodness. Her hair, cut short, clung about her large head in tight rings. She looked at Egeria’s ethereal beauty and the masses of her hair, not enviously, but with a kind of compassionate admiration.
The fire had gone down in the stove, and there was still imbedded in the ashes a line of live embers keeping the shape of the original maple stick. She raked the coals forward, laid on some splinters and bark, and then logs, and closed the door; the fire shouted and roared within.
The teacher sat down on a bench across the stove from Egeria, took into her lap the tin pail she had brought with her, and raised the lid, discovering a smaller pail within, packed round with pieces of mince-pie, doughnuts, and biscuit with slices of cold meat between the buttered halves. She lifted this out, and set it on the stove; she tore some leaves out of a copy-book, and laying them on the iron put the slices of pie on them. She did not say anything to Egeria, who had no authority to interfere with her proceedings. “I’m sorry it isn’t coffee,” she said, looking into the pail on the stove; “but I can’t drink coffee; so it’s only cracked cocoa. Now wake him.”
But the stir of garments, the low voices, and the fragrant smell of the cocoa and mince-pie had already roused Boynton. He lifted himself, looked at Egeria, and stared at the teacher, to whom presently he made a courteous bow. She replied by pouring some of the cocoa into a saucer, which she took from the bottom of the larger pail, and handing it to him.
“I beg your pardon?” he said sweetly.
“There’s another saucer,” said the teacher evasively; “but you’ll have to eat your pie out of them afterwards.”
Her father saw Egeria supplied with cocoa, and then drank with the simple greed of a child.
“This — this lady is the teacher, father,” said Egeria. Boynton, brightened by his draught, bowed again, and the teacher gravely acknowledged his salutation. “I’ve told her how we came here.”
“Yes, yes,” said Boynton; “most disagreeable coincidence. I can assure you that in a somewhat checkered career I have never met with a more painful experience. At times, really I have hardly been able to recognize my own identity. But it’s well for once, no doubt, to find ourselves in the position in which we have often contemplated others.”
The teacher took the pie from the smoking paper and slid a piece into each saucer. “I presume it isn’t very wholesome,” she said, “but I’ve beard that Mr. Emerson says, if you will eat it, you’d best eat it for breakfast, so that you can have the whole day to digest it in.”
“Emerson,” said the doctor, receiving his saucer with one hand, while he opened his handkerchief and spread it on his knees with the other, “is a very receptive mind. I fancy that there is a social principle in these matters which isn’t clearly ascertained yet. Where whole communities eat pie, as ours do, there must be an unconscious cooperative force in its digestion.”
The teacher looked at him, but answered nothing. “I’m afraid,” said Egeria ruefully, “that it’s your dinner.”
“The children always want me to eat part of theirs,” the teacher explained. “I couldn’t think of your asking at a house for your breakfast. The country is overrun with tramps, and they might suppose” — She stopped and blushed, and then she added with rigid self-justice, “ Well, I don’t know as it was so strange I should.”
“No,” said Egeria, “you couldn’t have thought anything else. That’s what they took us for everywhere.” She spoke with patience and without bitterness, but she did not eat her breakfast with the hungry relish of the outcast she had been mistaken for.
The teacher sat looking at them, and a new sense of their forlornness seemed to flash upon her. “Why, you have no outside things!”
“No,” said Egeria; “they all went off on the train we lost.”
The teacher said, like one thinking aloud, “If you are not telling me the truth about yourselves, it will be your loss, and not mine.” Then she added, “I don’t want you should try to walk to Ayer; it would kill you, in this snow. You must take the cars at Vardley Station.” She drew out her purse. “There,” she said, handing Egeria some bits of scrip, “it’s ten cents apiece to the Junction; and here,” she continued, thriftily putting the biscuit together in a scrap of paper, “is something for your lunch on the cars.”
Egeria made no reply. From time to time she had lapsed from all apparent sense of what was going on. She now looked blankly at the teacher.
Her father was not so helpless. “My dear young lady,” he exclaimed, “you are perfectly right in your estimate of the consequences and penalties! If we were deceiving you, we should be the sufferers, and not you. There is a law in these things which no individual will can abrogate. In the end, truth and good always triumph.” He had finished his pie, and he now took a draught of cocoa. “Have you many pupils?” he asked.
“No,” replied the teacher, “not many. The old people say there used to be forty or fifty, but now there are only sixteen.”
Boynton shook his head. “Yes, it is this universal tendency to the cities and the large towns which is ruining us. Well, Egeria, shall we be going?” He had eaten and drunken to his apparent refreshment, and he was now ready to push on.
Egeria cast a look out of the window, and rose languidly.
“I’d ask you to stay,” said the teacher, taking note of her weariness, “but the children will be coming very soon, and” —
“Oh, no, no! we couldn’t stay. We must go.” The teacher took down her water-proof from the peg on which she had hung it, and, eying it a moment thoughtfully, handed it to Egeria. “I want you should wear this. You’ll take your death if you go out that way. You can give it to the depot man at Vardley Station, and tell him it’s Miss Thorn’s. He’ll send it back by the stage this afternoon, and I’ll get it in plenty of time.” Egeria did not reply, but stood looking at the teacher with a jaded and wondering regard.
“I will take it for her, Miss Thorn,” said the doctor, advancing with a sprightly air, and receiving the cloak. “I will see that it is duly returned. And let me thank you,” he added, “for your kindness at a time when, really, we should have been embarrassed without it. My name is Boynton, — Dr. Boynton. Though you can scarcely have heard of it.”
“No,” said the teacher, reluctantly, but firmly.
“Ah!” returned the doctor. But he did not attempt to enlighten her ignorance. He said, “Come, Egeria,” and led the way to the door. The girl turned and looked vaguely at the teacher; but no words of farewell or of thanks passed between them.
The doctor issued cheerfully, even gayly, from the school-house door. The wind had changed, and was blowing from the south. Whiffs of white cloud were sailing far overhead in the vast expanse of blue, from which poured a mellow sunshine. The snow, translucent in the light, and dark blue in the shadow, clung lazily to the trees and the eaves, from which at times the breeze detached it, and tossed it away in soft, large clots. Some unseen crows made themselves heard in the distance; near by, on the fence, a little bird stooped and sang.
“A bluebird!” cried Boynton.
“Yes,” answered the teacher; “there were a good many yesterday, before the weather changed. Robins, too.”
He made her an airy bow, and Egeria looked back at her over her shoulder as they walked out into the road. “Why, the snow-plow has gone by!” he exclaimed, with simple delight in the effect, and the teacher saw him stop and point out to Egeria the drift, massively broken, and flung on either side in moist blocks by the plow. She watched them from the school-house door-way till a turn of the road hid them from sight. Then she went within, and cast a doubtful glance at the peg where her water-proof had hung. But her face changed as her eye fell to the staunch and capacious rubber-boots standing in order below the peg. “I don’t believe that girl had the sign of a rubber!” she mused aloud, in the excess of her compassion.
XI.
THE adventure of the day before and the exercise of their night-walk, with the good breakfast he had eaten, seemed to have brightened Boynton past recollection of all the sorrows he had known. He went forward, discoursing hopefully, and developing a plan he had for leaving Egeria with her grandfather, and returning to this region in order to look up the Shaker community, with which he intended to unite for the purpose of spiritual investigation on the true basis. For some time he did not observe that she responded more languidly and indifferently than her wont; then he asked abruptly, “What is the matter, Egeria?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. I am not very well.”
“You ought to be, in such air as this. Let me see.” He caught up her wrist. “Rather a quick pulse; it may be the walking. Are you hot?”
“My feet are cold, — they’re wet.”
He looked down at her shoes, and shook his head in a perplexed fashion. “We must stop somewhere and dry your feet.”
“They wouldn’t let us,” said Egeria, in a dull way.
“We will stop at that tavern. Perhaps we can get a lift there with some one going to the station.” He took her hand under his arm, and helped her on. She did not complain, nor did she show any increasing weariness.
They had been passing through a long reach of woodland that stretched away on either side of the road, when they came to a wide, open plateau, high and bare. It looked old, and like a place where there had once been houses, though none were now in sight; from time to time, in fact, the ruinous traces of former habitations showed themselves by the wayside. A black fringe of pines and hemlocks bordered the plain where it softly rounded away to the eastward; a vast forest of oak and chestnut formed its western boundary. At its highest point they came in sight of a house on its northern slope, a large, square mansion of brick; an enormous elm almost swept the ground with its boughs, on its eastern side; before it stood an old-fashioned sign-post, and westward, almost in the edge of the forest, lay its stabling.
“That must be the tavern,” said Boynton, instinctively making haste towards it. As they drew near, they saw a light buggy standing at the door, and a man who seemed to unite the offices of host and ostler holding the horse by the head. He turned from smoothing the animal’s nose, and called to some one within, “Come, hurry up, in there!” A red-faced man, in the faded and misshapen clothes which American manufacture and the clothing store supply to our poor country-folks, issued from the door, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and slouched away down the road. Then a girl, dressed in extreme fashion, of the sort that never convinces of elegance, nor ever mistakes itself for it, with her large hands cased in white gloves, came out and waited to be helped into the buggy. The thick, hard bloom on her somewhat sunken cheeks was incomparably artificial, till the dyed mustache of the man following her showed itself; this was of a purple so bold that if his hair had been purple too, and not of a light sandy color, it could not have looked falser. They had a little squabble, half jocose, which the man at the horses head admired, before he lifted her to the seat. The landlord handed him the reins.
