Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

HERCULES: A HERO.

N a bright and mild early he had a holiday which took him out of range November afternoon, a of a sarcastic father conscious of his son's limyoung man who had itations. This holiday he was about to spend alighted from a train at in shooting over his two handsome young setthe Welshtown station was ters, presumably now highly accomplished, walking up and down and Jerry having had them in his care for some whistling on the otherwise time. Dog-training was not, however, Jereempty platform. He was miah Hand's profession; he had a small farm, a tall, fresh-colored, brown-mustached young which he lazily cultivated. His wants were fellow, dressed in a well-made business suit; few, his inertia great, and wringing subsisthe had set down a hand-bag of alligator-leather ence from the soil was a harshness not to be and a neatly incased gun. Presently, finding charged upon him; the soil would have given that whistling had its boundaries as a resource, much more than he took. He loved gunning, he consulted a large gold watch. Frank Mal- dogs, companionship, tobacco, and the narlard had indeed everything handsome about ration around the fire of rambling, pointless him; you may imagine what a completely and fictions. Frank had heard of him and his sagaadmirably equipped person he appeared to city in matters canine from a person who kept the countryman for whom he was waiting. the grounds of the athletic club to which he You are not, however, to suppose that this (Frank) belonged, an intimate whom he individual's admiration was other than the called "Cholley." Jerry had been summoned unenvious tribute of one who felt himself at to the city expressly that he might take Flash root an equal. He now came in sight, driving and Fan to his own home for tuition. Frank a pensive old sorrel horse; the once white top was proud of his ownership of these pretty of his rickety wagon much besplashed with creatures, who derived their descent, as he mud. He checked his not impetuous ani- never tired of explaining, from that famous mal at a little distance from the platform, and old prize-winner, Mr. Ramford's Flame. slowly inquired, moving his whip dreamily, Their master had not till now partaken of and fixing upon Frank the healthy stare of his trainer's hospitality. The red winding his light-blue eyes: road, full of "thank-you-ma'ams," along which they were passing, was new to him. The woods were not yet bare ruined choirs: here stood a maple, which still kept something of its brightness; here a rich brown and there a blood-red oak; now again, Corot-like, black branched, yellow-gray, a ghostly willow; and now a slender birch, its little light-golden leaves, dancing and twinkling along the silver stem, all a-tiptoe to fly away, as though the tree bore butterflies.

[graphic]

"We-ell; so ye did git down, Mr. Mallard ?"

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Hello, Jerry!" cried Frank in his hearty way, picking up the bag and gun. "You're a punctual man, you are!" These voices rang out pleasantly in the slumberous stillness. "How's the pups?" asked the younger man ungrammatically, as Jerry leaned out to greet him with a violent sawing shake of the hand. "We-ell," said Jerry thoughtfully, "the puppies is werry thin wer-ry thin. I don't disguise it from you, Mr. Mallard." He grasped his conscience, which he found inclined to slide away from the fact, with some sternness. Frank laughed; he had hardly heard Jerry's answer. He felt joyous; the scent of moist leaves, the broad and peaceful though now lessening autumn light possessed him, though he could not have expressed the feeling. He should indeed have been happy. He was twenty-four years old, good-looking, in perfect health, swimming in the easy business success which to one's wonder sometimes seems the native element of otherwise stupid men, and

"The old woman, she said you would n't come," said Jerry, "but I told her, ye-es; ye-es. Lord, women folks hain't got no notion what sport is to a man. Now, my Sarer,you hain't seen my Sarer,- she says to me,

Why, father, what d'ye find in 't?' And I jest says, 'Sarer,' says I, 'you're a nice girl, a nice girl; but when all 's said and done, you 're merely a woman!'-Wot's your gun, Mr. Mal-lard?"

Jerry made a spondee of Frank's name, which seemed to taste well to his tongue. Further peculiarities of his speech were, that when deliberating he would break a monosyl

lable in two softly, which gave a fine effect of fair-minded consideration; but the letter was to him ever uncompromising as a chestnut-burr.

"My gun?- -a Parker. She's a beauty!" said Frank, affectionately.

66

"Britch-loader, hey?" said Jerry, a slight shade of doubt clouding his open features. He thrust his sandy chin-beard out argumentatively. 'We-ell, there's advantages to the old-fashioned guns, sir. Yes, sir. There's a man lives over here"- he gave his whip a generously comprehensive flourish-"has got a gun. I jest wisht you could see the working of that gun! It 's a' old-fashioned gun, Mr. Mallard; muzzle-loader; but, Man!" Jerry often apostrophized abstract humanity. He paused now in silent contemplation of the absent gun's virtues.

Frank laughed with good-natured derision. "Who's your friend ? he asked.

"Herc'less, Herc'less Jimpson, is the name of that man, sir," said Jerry; "and he kin shoot! He's a kind of re-lated to me, too, afar off."

"What's his name?" said Frank. "Herc'less. Cureyus, ain't it? I been told the original Herc'less was a Heer-O. That's what he was; but I do' know the partic'lars. Name sounds forren, don't it? I must keep it in mind t' ask Sarer."

Frank's classical knowledge extended to Hercules, who had given a name to the athletic association formerly mentioned; and he found Jerry's dimness on the subject delightful. She'll know, will she?" he inquired, grinning.

[ocr errors]

"We-ell, she knows the most of things, sir," said Jerry, modestly. He said "sir" simply as an embellishment to conversation. "Her mother is a remarkable woman; but she 's gone beyond her, 'way beyond her. He-er

we are!"

They had come to a short lane, from the opening of which was visible an unpainted and shackly dwelling; and now out ran Jerry's own shabby, slapping-gaited old setter Sam, and following him the aristocratic Flash and Fan, as lively as they were lean.

"Sarer" was not absolutely untraceable as Jerry's daughter; her long features had a hint of his. Her abundant hair was of a light redbronze color, her complexion fair and pure, her eyes a warm, lucent brown. Mrs. Hand was a sallow, smiling, dark-eyed person with defective teeth; the kind of country-woman whose appearance carries the suggestion of a garden with marigolds and zinnias, and a low house with a best parlor smelling damp. Her horizon, originally wider than Jerry's, had narrowed with years; the last traces of the

"smartness " predicated of her when a girl were to be found in an occasional touch of asperity towards her inactive husband, and in her insistence that Sarah should have "advantages." The girl had accordingly been sent to sojourn with her mother's relations in a distant village, where for a while she attended school. She was able to give her father some information on the subject of the "Heer-O" after whom their kinsman had been called, which kinsman's name she continued, in spite of her advantages, to pronounce according to tradition, "Herc'less." While she was instructing Jerry, somewhat vaguely, it must be owned, he looked at Frank meaningly, as though he would say, You and I understand it 's nonsense, Mr. Mal-lard; but Lord! I'm proud to have her know it." Frank, however, was not observing him. He uttered softly to himself, as Sarah went out of the room, the sentence which he had lately applied to his gun, "She's a beauty!"

[ocr errors]

For her part, Sarah noticed that evening that the head their guest bent over a cracked cup of inexplicably bluish tea shone sleekly in the lamp-light with the hue of a brown oak-leaf. What a manly, easy way he had! With what mellow chest tones he spoke! What a neat large hand, wearing a wonderful ring with a dark carved stone!

Frank found, next morning, the action of his dogs quite promising; Jerry was wonderstruck by the performance of Frank's gun; and a number of quails departed this pleasant life with unanticipated suddenness. At perhaps twelve o'clock, Jerry's old game-bag and the pockets of his guest's corduroy coat having been fed fat by the ancient grudge man bears his brute fellow-creatures, they left the woods and came to a small old farm-house standing lonely among fields, the faint blue of its rising smoke adding a picturesque touch to the autumnal russet of far-blended foliage. This was the home of Herc'less, who came to meet them from the rudely built barn. He was of middle height, with a slouching walk and slight stoop; he wore a coat of that varied olive which is obviously the long result of time. His demeanor was passive while he and Frank were put through the cumbrous form of country introduction, and so continued during a meal of his own preparing, of which he lifelessly invited them to partake; Frank falling to with the appetite that glorifies plain fare. Herc'less even received the result of a trial of skill and shot-guns, in which he and his superannuated muzzle-loader were worsted, rather as a decree of fate, to be accepted with resignation, than with the heat of annoyance and flurry of ingenious explanation to be expected of mankind under the circumstances.

Frank looked at him with curiosity; what coldblooded creature was this? The face he scrutinized had a sightless side, the expression of which was utterly depressed; but Herc'less suddenly turned his head, and met Frank with his single mild, honest, blue-gray eye; it was like the sudden letting of light into a room. "That gun of yourn," he said with more cordiality than he had yet shown, "is a dum good gun; that 's what it is!"

As Frank and Jerry tramped homeward in the mist of evening, after some hours less successfully spent than their agreeably destructive forenoon, the young man's thought returned to this face of the defeated Herc'less, with its neutral-brown hair that turned up at the ends, and spiritless flow of untrimmed beard.

“Live man, your friend is, Jerry!" he said with not ill-natured irony, as he snapped one of the forked seeds called "two-legged angels" from his shooting-coat.

"Herc'less," said Jerry, chewing a raw turnip, "has had his sorrers, and grievious to bear. And he hain't never cheered up. Never. That is to say, fully and completely. But," he added, half interrogatively, "he kin make a wer-ry good rabbit stew.”

"I'll swear to that," cried Frank heartily. "But what happened to him, Jerry?"

"We-ell, ye see, Herc'less," said Jerry, pausing for recollection after stating the subject of his tale, as though he had read its title," he was a volunteer in '61. A Zoo-av. There was a man down here had a notion of raising one of them flapping-legged reg'ments. He was wer-ry loyal, Herc'less. Not that I liked the yunerform of them Zoo-avs." He frowned slightly. "It was a little too, as you might say, galliant and gay."

The idea of Herc'less ever having had a gay and gallant appearance sent Frank into a fit of loud laughter, during which Jerry stared at him, evidently meditating. "He's got a bullet into him!" he said suddenly, with a flash of pride in his kinsman.

"That so?" gasped Frank, still stabbed with mirth.

"We-ell," resumed Jerry, "he was sparking before the war, and they was a-going to be married. She wa' n't pretty," he admitted impartially, "but a wer-ry nice disposition. They was both great Meth'dists. Man, they was pious! Well, she says Go, and he went."

"Went where?" said Frank, getting over a fence.

"To the seat of war, sir," answered Jerry ornamentally. "She jest cried her eyes out."

"Why, you said she sent him," said Frank stupidly.

"The women folks," explained Jerry, with

66

the deep look of an astronomer stating starry phenomena, was unusually queer about '61. Well, jest at the time Herc'less was in the hospital with his left eye and his bullet,— you re-marked his left eye, of course,— Mirandy she up and died."

"Oh! Is that all?" asked Frank. "That was a long time ago."

"That's all," said Jerry with a shade of surprise. The events of a bare life take perhaps larger proportion in the open than among tall crowded city buildings. I guess Herc'less thought 't 'd about do. He hain't never, as I say, fully cheered up."

66

Frank here refreshed himself with a mouthful of spicy turnip, and while ruminating on it decided that the course of Herc'less was weak and unlike a man. Frank had a rather clumsily drawn ideal picture which he called "A Man." He was made a by-word among his associates by certain informal lectures on current topics invariably beginning, "A man, you know, he don't," or, "he does," as the occasion might demand.

"But he's a-coming around now grajuly — grajuly; 'n' he could n't have took a better way, sir, than what he has took, if I do say it. What d' ye think -" Jerry broke off suddenly. "Lord, Mr. Mal-lard," he said in an agitated whisper, "if Van Brunt hain't let his bull git outer that field ag'in! That's a dangerous bull, sir! Man! Hear him ro-ar?" A sound by no means inviting came upon the wind. Frank walked on gingerly in the dusk, looking around him like a boy who has heard ghost stories. He had a fair amount of physical courage, yet felt no stern joy in the prospect of encountering this highly recommended animal. Jerry followed him with his mouth drawn down demurely, "'sh!"-ing occasionally with loud force, and laboring to suppress his chuckles. He had no fear of the bull, but, hearing him "ro-ar," had indulged the impulse to embody his idea of a joke at the expense of a man with so unnaturally perfect a gun. Hence Frank lost the opportunity of learning by what course the bereaved Herc'less was likely to be "completely cheered up.”

"I s'pose you been tellin' all you know, as usual," remarked Jerry's helpmate severely the same night.

"All I know?" repeated Jerry, aghast. He had suffered from low domestic temperature all the evening.

"Hain't you told him about Sarer?" asked his wife, fixing him with her glittering eye.

"I was jest getting to it," owned Jerry feebly. "Well, you better not get to it, I think. I never see," she remarked with seeming irrelevance," anybody without a particle of discreetion! Everybody's got to know everything

all about the fam'ly, right off. I should n't think you'd like to!

Jerry quailed, attributing the bad taste of his conduct to his general inferiority as compared with this "remarkable woman." His mind had a liberality not always found in men of more liberal education; he could conceive the legitimate existence of feelings he by no means understood. He dutifully kept silence on the prohibited subject. But who knows whether it was really a fine sense of the sacredness of "family" matters, or a desire that her daughter should enjoy to the full certain further "advantages," that edged the protesting tongue of Mrs. Hand?

Frank saw Herc'less but once more during his stay; the latter was shy, and inclined to avoid Jerry's hearth while a guest sat thereby. He had on the occasion of their second meeting the same uninterested demeanor; walking, talking, even laughing, though he rarely laughed, all as if he were tired. It seemed impossible that this cold-looking, dull-colored life had had any part in the hot glow of the war; yet it was a gray crumbling ash, not a stone. This man had hoped, had exulted, had burned with courage, with fervid religion, with love; it was all over now, one would have said; the fire quite out. Yet sometimes a little bloom of orange light creeps along the side of a whitened ember that is blown upon; and had Frank chanced to note Herc'less turning his face towards the pleasant sound of Sarah's voice, he might have perceived a somewhat similar effect.

But while this voice was speaking, the young man was noting little except the brilliant red lips whence it came. Decidedly Jerry's daughter had sufficient rounded and warm-tinted beauty to impart to the ugliest lines of stiff calico some "grace and glimmer of romance"; and to such beauty one is not slow in surrendering unconditionally, if he have a love for rosy cheeks and an admiration for coral lips, unhampered by the possession of any intellectual ideal of his "not impossible she."

This dull young fellow was ill at ease in the society of the dainty maidens constituting the set into which his father pushed him. He was not disliked by these young ladies, whose complexities so bewildered him; they simply felt that he was not of their world, and he often, in red and hot humiliation, felt it too. But to Sarah Hand honest Frank was a Prince Charming,— here his narratives of boat-races and regatta-dinners and sparring-matches were fresh and fascinating; here he warmed himself-he stretched out his spiritual soles to the congenial fire of admiration, and was straightway singed. Sarah had no ambition; she had inherited Jerry's sweet, easy, drifting

nature; but had she " gone beyond" her mother in "management" as well as in "booklearning," she could not have builded better than she now did unconsciously, on the foundation-stone of Frank's boyish egotism.

He made another though necessarily a brief visit to Welshtown in November; and some ten days before Christmas ran down again, to get, he said, "a last crack at the birds before the law was up." But if this was what he wished, he was unfortunate; for on the evening of his arrival a heavy snow-storm began, continuing several days: to clinch the necessity of his remaining indoors, Frank had taken a severe cold. Yet under these afflictions he was singularly patient, and bore like a martyr the moldy anecdotes brought from the crypt of Jerry's memory. He had a number of delicious interviews with Sarah: it was the longest of these talks that was interrupted by the entrance of Jerry, stamping, shaking, and presently steaming plenteously, one afternoon when he had gone, from a superstitious compunction, to look up Herc'less. Jerry, who rarely dreamed, had had the night before an uncanny vision concerning his kinsman, which he had elaborately described in the morning, so that the family had breakfasted full of horrors. He had found Herc'less suffering from rheumatism, and as usual without society more inspiriting than that of Peter Slade, the taciturn, loutish fellow who helped him on the small farm. There was a pathos about this uncomplaining Herc'less that melted Jerry's heart in one spot, and somehow correspondingly hardened it in another. Why, Frank's cold was being most considerately treated: at the very moment when Jerry burst in upon that cozy kitchen. chat, a little saucepan of "stewed Quaker," prepared by Sarah at the suggestion of the thoughtful Mrs. Hand, was bubbling on the stove; and close to this same stove- and consequently not very far from each other-these two young people were sitting, the flickering candle light, for it was now near supper-time, sufficing to show in their faces the peculiar expression which indicates that its wearers are on an enchanted island together, and must cross, startled, to you at your hail, for you cannot go to them. Jerry's eyebrows came together in a frown.

He was far from any conception of the situation based upon, or even including, the idea of a social inequality between his daughter and Frank Mallard. He had, moreover, a thoroughly trustful liking for the hearty-mannered young man. It was the manifest unfairness of things that afflicted him. "Now where, I want to know," his thought ran, " does Herc'less's rights come in?" This consideration wrought him up to a resolve; it seemed para

mount even to his duty towards those exceedingly delicate scruples on the part of his superior wife which he had heretofore respected.

At supper Jerry dwelt much upon the wretched condition of the lonely Herc'less, looking hard at Sarah as he spoke. A wildrose color grew in the girl's cheeks. Mrs. Hand eyed him movelessly, in a dreadful stony condemnation.

"Lord! if I was him," said Jerry with apparent innocence, "how I would look for'd to spring! Man!"

"Yes, he won't have no more rheumatiz when it gits warm," said his wife with great presence of mind. "Mr. Mallard, do have some fat meat." But this forlorn hope of drawing off Frank's attention failed. He rejected the singularly oleaginous delicacy offered, and stared heavily at Jerry.

"Ye-es," said Jerry genially. "Ye-es; but 'tain't altergether that—not altergether-is it, Sarer? There'll be some one to ca-er for him then, as I may say," he continued with great meaning.

But having developed this point, he delivered a fresh cargo of nourishment with his knife and relapsed into a masterly inactivity, influenced, not by the discouraging front of his wife, but by a single quick, appealing glance from Sarah's light-brown eyes,- a glance that had sought him like a frightened bird.

He stubbornly outsat, that evening, his wife and daughter, who would remain upon the scene, the former determined, as long as they could. Frank was moody, and shied nervously from one of the disinterred anecdotes. Jerry fell to his last resource, the slow and hard-breathing perusal of a book — Sarah's, of course. Her few books were principally works of fiction, representing love as a pleasant adjunct to strictly orthodox religion. Jerry generally stigmatized them as "tomfoolishness." But this night he sat holding one firmly, with his great horny thumbs uppermost; his respiration gradually became louder; his head dropped by degrees; his lips opened.

"I think," said his wife sarcastically, as he straightened himself with a Jack-in-the-box movement, "if I was beat out I'd go to bed, and not set gappin' like a catfish and snorin'

[blocks in formation]

heat might comfort his feet, clad in huge blue woolen socks. "As for me, I wan't even asleep," he said in an injured tone rare with him, "let alone snore."

His wife withdrew her forces. The door once shut, Frank, who had sat, with his chair tilted back, abstractedly smoking a cigar, now looked hard at Jerry. Jerry glanced up calmly at him.

"I hain't never told you," he said slowly, "not supposing 't 'd interrest you, that Herc'less and Sarer was a-going to git married next spring." Frank said nothing.

66

"I s'pose you 're surprised. We-ell, I will say," continued Jerry fairly, "that when he first began coming around with a' apparient view to mattermony, I was supprised. And Mrs. H- she was supprised; and she did n't favor it largely. But when she see Sarer's mind was sot" (Frank's teeth clinched on his cigar), " she says, wait till spring; so they 've waited. She says, says Mrs. H-, 't was all Sarer's soft-heartedness; and I hain't denyin' it, Sarer has got a soft heart. Durn a young woman that hain't! But she was sot; and I wan't sorry. It's a good thing for him, sir; and as I see it, it's a good thing for her."

"Why?" said Frank explosively.

"We-ell," said Jerry sagaciously, "you hain't seen much of Herc'less; I 've re-marked that he staid away while you was he-er. He hain't no hand to make acquaintances. But I know Herc'less wer-ry well. He's a square man, sir; a square man." He nodded with a pleasant sense of his grasp of character.

"Is that a reason," cried Frank irritably, "to hand over a pretty girl like Sarah to a man fifteen years older-fifteen years!". his voice broke like an angry boy's; his face was a bright pink,-" and all broke down as he is?"

Jerry pondered upon Frank with his big light-blue eyes. "All that ails Herc'less, sir," he declared, slapping his knee, "is that he hain't completely cheered up yet." He always clung to this expression in a kind of surprise at his own acuteness in having invented anything so comprehensive. "And he's wer-ry well fixed; wer-ry well; wot 's he had to spend fur? He kin afford, sir, to take unto himself a wife; and Man!" He paused to let his not rapid imagination present an agreeable fireside picture.

Frank rose, with a savage, inarticulate sound of protest, flung down the remains of the cigar he had bitten in two, and stalking to the other side of the room began to examine his breechloader, which he had brought downstairs that afternoon. He glowered at it for some minutes before it seemed borne in upon him what

« AnteriorContinuar »