Hiram Winthrop's emancipation had come a little earlier, and it had come after this fashion.
It was early spring along the lake shore, and Hiram had wandered out, alone as usual, into the dense marshy scrub that fringed the Creek, near the spot where it broadens and deepens into a long blue bay of still half-frozen and spell-bound Ontario. The skunk-cabbage was coming into flower! It was early spring, and the boy's heart was glad within him, as though the deacon, and the cord-wood, and the coming drudgery of hoeing and weeding had never existed. Perhaps, now, he should see the trappers again. He wandered on among the unbroken woods, just greening with the wan fresh buds, and watched the whole world bursting into life again after its long wintry interlude; as none have ever seen it waken save those who know the great icy lake country of North America. The signs of quickening were frequent in the underbrush. The shrillpeepof the tree-frog came to him from afar through the almost silent woodland. The drumming of the redheaded woodpecker upon the hickory trunks showed that the fat white grubs were now hatching and moving underneath the bark Close to the water's edge he scared up a snipe; and then, again, a little farther, he saw a hen hawk rise with sudden flappings from the clam-shell mound. Hark, too; that faint, swelling, distant beat! surely it was a partridge! He looked up into the trees, and searched for it diligently: and there true enough, settling, after the transatlantic manner, on a tall butternut (oh, heterodox bird!), he caught a single glimpse of the beautiful fluttering creature, as it took its perch lightly upon the topmost branches.
It was so delightful, all of it, that Hiram never thought of the time or his dinner, but simply wandered on, as a boy will, for hour after hour in that tangled woodland. What did he care, in the joy of his heart, for the coming beating? His one idea was to see the trappers. At last, he saw an unwonted sight through the trees—two men actually pushing their way along beside the river. His heart beat fast within him: could they be the trappers? Spurred on by that glorious possibility, he crept up quickly and noiselessly behind them. The men were talking quite loud to one another: no, they couldn't be trappers: trappers always go softly, and speak in a whisper. But if they weren't trappers, what on earth could they be do down here in the unbroken forest? Not felling wood, that was clear; for they had no axes with them, and they walked along without ever observing the lie of the timber. Not going to survey wild lands, for they had none of those strange measuring things with them (Hiram was innocent of the name theodolite) that surveyors are always peeping and squinting through. Not gunning either, for they had no guns, but only simple stout walking-sticks. 'Sech a re-markable, on-common circumstance I never saw, and that's true as Judges,' Hiram said to himself, as he watched them narrowly. He would jest listen to what they were sayin', and see if he could make out what on airth they could be doin' down in them woods thar.
'When I picked him up,' one of the men was saying to the other, in a clear, distinct, delicate tone, such as Hiram had never heard before, 'I saw it was a wounded merganser, winged by some bad shot, and fallen into the water to die alone. I never saw anything more beautiful than its long slender vermilion bill, the very colour of red sealing wax; and its clean bright orange legs and feet; and its pure white breast just tinged at the tip of each feather with faint salmon, or a dainty buff inclining to salmon. I was sorry I hadn't got my colours with me: I'd have given anything to be able to paint him, then and there.'
Hiram could hardly contain himself with mingled awe, delight, and astonishment. He wanted to call out on the spur of the moment 'I know that thar bird. I know him. 'Tain't called that name you give him, down our section, though. We call him a fisherman diver.' But he didn't dare to in his perfect transport of surprise and amazement. It wasn't the strange person's tone alone that pleased him so much, though he felt, in a vague indefinable way, that there was something very beautiful and refined and exquisitely modulated in it—the voice being in fact the measured, clearly articulate voice of a cultivated New England gentleman, such as he had never before met in his whole lifetime: it wasn't exactly that, though that was in itself sufficiently surprising: it was the astounding fact that there was a full-grown, decently clad man, not apparently a lunatic or an imbecile, positively interesting himself in such childish things as the very colours and feathers of a bird, just the same as he, Hiram Winthrop, might have done in the blackberry bottom. The deacon never talked about the bill of a merganser! The deacon never noticed the dainty buff on the breast, inclining to salmon! The deacon never expressed any burning desire to pull out his brushes and paint it! All the men he had ever yet seen in Geauga County would have regarded the colours on the legs of a bird as wholly beneath their exalted and dignified adult consideration. Corn and pork were the objects that engaged their profound intellects, not birds and insects. Hiram had always imagined that an interest in such small things was entirely confined to boys and infants. That grown men could care to talk about them was an idea wholly above his limited experience, and almost above what the deacon would have called his poor finite comprehension.
'Yes,' the other answered him, even before Hiram could recover from his first astonishment. 'It's a lovely bird. I've tried to sketch him myself more than once. And have you ever noticed, Audouin, the peculiar way the tints are arranged on the back of the neck? The crest's black, you know, glossed with green; but the nape's white; and the colours don't merge into one another, as you might expect, but cease abruptly with quite a hard line of demarcation at the point of junction.'
'Jest for all the world as ef they was sewed together,' Hiram murmured to himself inaudibly, still more profoundly astonished at this incredible and totally unexpected phenomenon. Then there were two distinct and separate human beings in the world, it seemed, who were each capable of paying attention to the coloration of a common merganser. As Hiram whispered awestruck to his own soul, 'most mirac'lous!'
He followed them up a little farther, hanging anxiously on every word, and to his continued astonishment heard them notice to one another such petty matters as the flowering of the white maples, the twittering of the red-polls among the fallen pine-needles, the wider and ever wider circles on the water where the pickerel had leaped, nay, even the tracks left upon the soft clay that marked the nightly coming and going of the stealthy wood-chuck. Impossible: unimaginable: utterly un-diaconal: but still true! Hiram's spirit was divided within him. At last the one who was addressed as Audouin said casually to his companion, 'Let's sit down here, Professor, and have our lunch. I love this lunching in the open woods. It brings us nearer to primitive nature. I suppose the chord it strikes within us is the long latent and unstruck chord of hereditary habit and feeling. It's centuries since our old English ancestors lived that free life in the open woods of the Teutonic mainland; but the unconscious memory of it reverberates dimly still, I often think, through all our nature, and comes out in the universal love for escape from conventionality to the pure freedom of an open-air existence.'
'Perhaps so,' the Professor answered with a laugh: 'but if you'll leave your Boston philosophy behind, my dear unpractical Audouin, and open your sandwich-case, you'll be doing a great deal more good in the cause of hungry humanity than by speculating on the possible psychological analysis of the pleasure of picnicking.'
Hiram didn't quite know what all that meant; but from behind the big alder he could, at least, see that the sandwiches looked remarkably tempting (by the way, it was clearly past dinner-time, to judge by the internal monitor), and the Professor was pouring something beautifully red and clear into a metal cup out of the wicker-covered bottle. It wasn't whisky, certainly; nor spruce beer, either: could it really be that red stuff, wine, that people used to drink in Bible times, according to the best documentary authorities?
'Don't, pray, reproach me with the original sin of having been born in Boston,' Audouin answered, with a slight half-affected little shiver. 'I can no more help that, of course, than I can help the following of Adam, in common with all the rest of our poor fallen humanity.' (Why, that was jest like the deacon!) 'But at least I've done my very best to put away the accursed thing, and get rid, for ever, of our polluted material civilisation. I've tried to flee from man (except always you, my dear Professor), and take refuge from his impertinent inanity in the bosom of my mother nature. From the haunts of the dry-goods man and the busy throng of drummers, I've come into the woods and fields as from a solitary desert into society. I prefer to emphasise my relations to the universe, rather than my relations to the miserable toiling ant-hill of petty humanity.'
'Really, Audouin,' the Professor put in, as he passed his friend the claret, 'you're growing positively morbid; degenerating into a wild man of the woods. I must take you back for a while to the city and civilisation. I shall buy you a suit of store clothes, set you up in a five-dollar imported hat, and make you promenade State Street, afternoons, keeping a sharp eye on the Boston ladies and the Boston fashions.'
'No, no, Professor,' Audouin answered, with a graceful flourish of his small white hand: (Hiram noticed that itwassmall and white, though the dress the stranger actually wore was not a 'store suit.' but a jacket and trousers of the local home-spun); 'no, no; that would never do. I refuse to believe in your civilisation. I abjure it: I banish it. What is it? A mere cutting down of trees and disfiguring of nature, in order to supply uninteresting millions with illimitable pork and beans. The object of our society seems to be to provide more and more luxuriously for our material wants, and to shelve all higher ideals of our nature for an occasional Sunday service and a hypothetical future existence. I turn with delight, on the other hand, from cities and railroad cars to the forest and the living creatures. They are the one group of beautiful things that the great Anglo-Saxon race, in civilising and vulgarising this vast continent, has left us still undesecrated.Theyare not conventionalised;theydon't go to the Old Meeting House in European clothes Sunday mornings; they speak always to me in the language of nature, and tell me our lower wants must be simplified that the higher life may be correspondingly enriched. The only true way of salvation, after all, Professor, lies in perfect fidelity to one's own truest inner promptings.'
0134m
Hiram listened still, all amazed. He didn't fully understand it all; some of it sounded to him rather affectedly sentimental and finnikin; but on the whole what struck him most was the strange fact that this fine-spoken town-bred gentleman seemed to have ideas about the world and nature—differently expressed, but fundamentally identical—such as he himself felt but never knew before anybody else in the whole world was likely to share with him. 'That's pretty near jest what I'd have said myself,' the boy thought wonderingly, 'if I'd knowed how: only I shouldn't ever have bin able to say it so fine and high-falutin.' They finished their lunch, and sat talking a while together under the shadow of the leafless hickories. The boy still stopped and watched them, spell-bound. At last Audouin pulled a head of flowers from close to the ground, and looked at it pensively, with his head just a trifle theatrically on one side. 'That's a curious thing, Professor,' he said, eyeing it at different distances in his hand: 'what do you call it now? I don't know it.'
'I'm sure I can't tell you, the Professor answered, taking it from him carelessly. I don't pretend to be much of a botanist, you see, and I'm out of my element down here among the lake-side flora.'
Hiram could contain himself no longer.
'It's skunk-cabbage,' he cried, in all the exultation of boyish knowledge, emerging suddenly from behind the big alder. 'Skunk-cabbage, the trappers call it. Ain't it splendid? You kin hear the bees hummin' an' buzzin' around it, fine days in spring, findin it out close to the ground, and goin' into it, one at a time, before the willows has begun to blossom. I see lots as I kem along this mornin', putting out their long tongues into it, and scarin' away the flies as they tried to get a bit o' the breakfast.'
Audouin laughed melodiously. 'What's this?' he cried. 'A heaven-born observer dropped suddenly upon us from the clouds!
You seem to know all about it, my young friend. Skunk-cabbage, is it? But surely the bees aren't out in search of honey already, are they?'
''Tain't honey they get from it,' the boy answered quickly. 'It's bee-bread. Jest you see them go in, and watch 'em come out again, and thar you'll find they've all got little yaller pellets stickin' right on to the small hairs upon their thighs. That's bee-bread, that is, what they give to the maggots. All bees is born out of maggots.'
Audouin laughed again. 'Why, Professor,' he said briskly, 'this is indeed a phenomenon. A country-bred boy who cares for and watches nature! Boston must have set her mark on me deep, after all, for I'm positively surprised to find a lover of nature born so far from the hub of the universe. Skunk-cabbage, you call it; so quaint a flower deserves a rather better name. Do you know the tassel-flower, my young fellow-citizen? (we're both citizens of the woods, it seems). Do you know tassel-flower? is it out yet? I want to find some.'
'I know it, some,' Hiram answered, delighted, 'but it ain't out yet; it comes a bit later. But I kin draw it for you, if you like, so's you can know it when it comes into blossom.' And he felt in his pocket for some invisible object, which he soon produced in the visible shape of a small red jasper arrowhead. The boy was just beginning to scratch a figure with it on a flat piece of water-rolled limestone when Audouin's quick eye caught sight, sideways, of the beautifully chipped implement.
'Ha, ha,' he cried, taking it from Hiram suddenly, 'what have we here, eh? The red man: his mark: as plain as printing. The broad arrow of the aboriginal possessor of all America! Why, this is good; this is jasper. Where on earth did you get this from?'
'Whar on airth, 'Hiram echoed, astonished anew; 'why jest over thar: I picked it up as I kem along this morning. Thar's lots about, 'specially in spring time.'Pears as if the Injuns shot 'em off at painters and bars and settlers and things, and missed sometimes, and lost 'em. Then they lie thar in the ground a long time till some hard winter comes along to uncover 'em. Hard winters, the frost throws 'em up; and when the snow melts, the water washes 'em out into the furrers. I've got crowds of 'em to home; arrowheads and tommyhawks, and terbacker pipes, an' all sorts. I pick 'em up every spring, reglar.' Audouin looked at the boy with a far more earnest and searching glance for a moment; then he turned quickly to the Professor. 'There's something in this,' he said, in a serious tone, very different from his previous half-unreal banter. 'The bucolic intelligence evidently extends deeper than its linguistic faculties might at first lead one to suspect.' He spoke intentionally in hieroglyphics, aiming his words above the boy's head; but Hiram caught the general sense notwithstanding, and flushed slightly with ingenuous pride. 'Well, let's see your drawing,' Audouin went on, with a gracious smile, handing the boy back his precious little bit of pointed jasper.
Hiram took the stone weapon between finger and thumb, and scratching the surface of the waterworn pebble lightly with its point in a few places, produced in a dozen strokes a rough outline of the Canadian tassel-flower. Audouin looked at the hasty sketch in evident astonishment. It was his turn now to be completely surprised. 'Why, look here, Professor,' he said very slowly: 'this is—yes, this is—actually a drawing.'
The Professor took the pebble from his hands, and scanned it closely. 'Why, yes,' he said, in some surprise. 'There's certainly a great deal of native artistic freedom about the leaf and flower. It's excellent; in fact, quite astonishing. I expected a diagrammatic representation; this is really, as you say, Audouin, a drawing.'
Hiram looked on in perfect silence: but the colour came hot and bright in his cheek with very unwonted pleasure and excitement. To hear himself praised and encouraged for drawing was indeed a wonder. So very unlike the habits and manners of the deacon.
'Do you ever draw with a pencil?' Audouin asked after a moment's pause, 'or do you always scratch your sketches like this on flat bits of pebble?'
'Oh, I hev a pencil and book in my pocket,' Hiram answered shyly; 'only I kinder didn't care to waste the paper on a thing like that; an' besides, I was scar't that you two growed-ups mightn't think well of my picturs that I've drawed in it.'
'Produce the pictures,' Audouin said in a tone of authority, leaning back against the trunk of the hickory.
Hiram drew them from his pocket timidly.
'Thar they are,' he murmured, with a depreciatory gesture. 'They ain't much, but they're all the picturs I knowed how to draw.'
Audouin took the book in his hand—Sam Churchill's ten-cent copybook—and turned over the well-filled pages with a critical eye. The Professor, too, glanced at it over his shoulder. Hiram stood mute and expectant before them, with eyes staring blankly, and in the expressive uncouth attitude of a naïf shamefaced American country boy.
At last Audouin came to the last page.
'Well, Professor'—he said inquiringly.
'Something in them, isn't there, eh? This boy'll make a painter, I surmise, won't he?' The Professor answered only by opening a small portfolio, and taking out a little amateur water-colour drawing. 'Look here, my son,' he said, holding it up before Hiram. 'Do you think you could do that sort of thing?'
'I guess I could,' Hiram answered, with the unhesitating confidence of inexperienced youth. 'ef I'd on'y got the right sort of colours to do it with.'
The Professor laughed heartily. 'Then you shall have them, anyhow,' he said promptly. 'Native talent shall not go unrewarded for the sake of a paltry box of Prussian blue and burnt sienna. You shall have them right off and no mistake. Where do you live, Mr. Melibous?'
'My name's Hiram,' the boy answered, a little smartly, for he somehow felt the unknown nickname was not entirely a courteous one: 'Hiram Winthrop, and I live jest t'other side of Muddy Creek deepo.'
'Winthrop,' Audouin put in gaily. 'Winthrop. I see it all now. Good old Massachusetts name, Winthrop: connected with the hub of the universe after all, it seems, in spite of mere superficial appearances to the contrary. But it's a pretty far cry to Muddy Creek dépôt, my friend. You must be hungry, ain't you? Have you had your dinner?'
'No, I ain't.'
'Then you sit down right there, my boy, and pitch into those sandwiches.'
Hiram lost no time in obeying the seasonable invitation.
'How do you find them?' asked Audouin.
'Real elegant,' Hiram answered.
'Have some wine?'
'I never tasted none,' the boy replied:
'But it looks real nice. I don't mind ef I investigate it.'
Audouin poured him out a small cupful. The boy took it with the ease of a freeborn citizen, very unlike the awkwardness of an English plough-boy—an awkwardness which shows itself at once the last relic of original serfdom. 'Tain't bad,' he said, tasting it. 'So that's wine, then! Nothing so much to go gettin' mad about either. I reckon the colour's the best thing about it, any way.'
They waited till the boy had finished his luncheon, and then Audouin began asking him a great many questions, cunningly devised questions to draw him out, about the plants, and the animals, and the drawings, and the neighbourhood, and himself, till at last Hiram grew quite friendly and confidential. He entered freely into the natural history and psychology of the deacon. He told them all his store of self-acquired knowledge. He omitted nothing, from the cuffs and reprobation to Sam Churchill and the bald-headed eagles. At each fresh item Audouin's interest rose higher and higher. 'Have you gone to school, Hiram?' he asked at last.
'Common school,' Hiram answered briefly. 'Learnt much there?'
'Headin', writin', spellin', 'rithmetic, scrip-tur', jography, an' hist'ry an' const'tooshun of the United States,' Hiram replied, with the sharp promptitude begotten of rote learning.
Audouin smiled a sardonic Massachusetts smile. 'A numerous list of accomplishments, indeed,' he answered, playing with his watch-chain carelessly. 'The history of the United States in particular must be intensely interesting. But the Indians—you learnt aboutthemyourself, I suppose—that's so, isn't it, Hiram? What we learn of ourselves is always in the end the best learning. Well, now look here, my boy; how'd you like to go to college, and perhaps in time teach school yourself?'
'I'd like that fust-rate,' Hiram answered; 'but I think I'd like best of all to go to sea, or to be a painter.'
'To be a painter,' Audouin murmured softly; 'to be a painter. Our great continent hasn't produced any large crop of prominent citizens who wanted to be painters. This one might, after all, be worth trying. Well, Hiram, do you think if I were to ask your father, there's any chance that he might possibly be willing to let you go to college?'
'Nary chance at all,' Hiram answered vigorously. 'Why, father couldn't spare me from the peppermint an' the pertaters; an' as to goin' to college, why, it ain't in the runnin' any way.'
'Professor,' Audouin said, 'this boy interests me. He's vital: he's aboriginal: he's a young Antæus fresh from the bare earth of the ploughed fields and furrows. Let's till him; without cutting down all the trees, let's lay him out in park and woodland. I'll have a try, anyhow, with this terrible father of yours, Hiram. Are you going home now?'
'I reckon I must,' the boy answered with a nod. 'He'll be mad enough with me as it is for stopping away so long from him.'
'You'll get a thrashing, I'm afraid, when you go home?'
'I guess that's jest the name of it.'
'Professor,' Audouin said, rising resolutely, 'this means business. We must see this thing right through immediately to the very conclusion. The boy must not have his thrashing. I'll go and see the father—beard the Geauga County agriculturist in his very lair: dispute his whelp with him: play lambent lightning round him: save the young Antæus from sinking in the natural course of things into one more pickier of pork and contented devourer of buttered buckwheat pancakes. There's a spark in him somewhere: I'm going to try whether I can manage to blow it up into a full-fed flame.'
Boston has worn itself out. The artificial centre of an unnatural sickly exotic culture ever alien to the American soil, it has gone on studying, criticising, analysing, till all the vigour and spontaneity it may ever have possessed has utterly died out of it from pure inanition. The Nemesis of sterility has fallen upon its head in the second generation. It has cultivated men, fastidious critics, receptive and appreciative intellects by the thousand; but of thinkers, workers, originalities, hardly now a single one.
Lothrop Audouin was the very embodiment of the discontent and mocking intellectual nihilism begotten of this purely critical unoriginative attitude. Reaction against American materialism was the mainspring of his inner being. He felt himself out of harmony with the palace cars on the New York Central Railroad; jarring and conflicting with the big saloons of the Windsor Hotel; unappreciative of the advertising enterprise on the rocks of the Hudson River; at war with mammoth concerns, gigantic newspapers, Presidential booms, State legislatures, pop corn, saw mills, utilisation of water power, and all the other component elements of the great American civilisation. Therefore, being happily endowed by fate and his ancestors with a moderate competence, even as moderate competences go on the other side of the Atlantic, he had fled from Boston and the world to take refuge in the woods and the marshes. For some years he had hidden himself in the western hill district of Massachusetts; but being driven thence by the march of intellect (enthroned on a steam plough), he had just removed to a new cottage on the shore of Muddy Creek, not far from its entry into Lake Ontario. There he lived a solitary life, watching the birds and beasts and insects, sketching the trees and shrubs and flowers, and shunning for the most part his fellow-man, save only his friend, the distinguished ornithologist, Professor Ezra P. Hipkiss, of Harvard College, Massachusetts.
The Professor had left them, intending to return home by himself; and Audouin walked back alone with the boy, noticing at every step his sharp appreciation of all the natural signs and landmarks around him. At last a sudden thought seemed to strike Hiram. He drew back a second in momentary hesitation.
'Say,' he said falteringly, 'you ain't one of Father Noyes's crowd at Oneida, are you?'
Audouin smiled half contemptuously.
Father Noyes is a New Haven fanatic who has established an Agapemone of his own in northern New York; and to Hiram, who had heard the Oneida community spoken of with vague horror by all the surrounding farmers from his babyhood upward, the originally separate and distinct notions of Father Noyes and the Devil had so coalesced that even now in his maturer years they were not completely differentiated or demarcated. 'No, no,' Audouin answered reassuringly: 'I'm not one of the Oneida people, my boy: I'm quite free from any taint of that sort. I'm a Boston man; a Boston man, I said; even in the woods that sticks to me. “Patriæ quis exul,” I think the line runs, “se quoque fugit.”' Hiram didn't understand exactly what he was driving at, but he went along satisfied at least that his strange acquaintance, though he spoke with tongues, was not directly connected either with Father Noyes or the Devil.
By-and-by they reached the high-road, and came at last opposite the bare gate that gave access to Deacon Winthrop's yard. Audouin gazed about him drearily at the dreary prospect. 'A very American view, Hiram,' he said slowly: 'civilisation hard at work here; my boy, we must try to redeem you out of it.'
Hiram looked up in the stranger's face curiously. He had grown up among his native surroundings so unquestioningly, after the fashion of boys, that, though he knew it was all very ugly, hopelessly and hideously ugly, it would never even have occurred to him to say so in so many words. He took it for granted that all the world was of course dull and uninteresting, except the woods, and the weeds, and the marshes, and the vermin. He expected always to find all man's handicraft a continuous course of uglification, and he never suspected that there could by any possibility be anything beautiful except untouched and unpolluted nature. If you had told him about the wonders and glories of art, he would simply have listened to you then in mute incredulity.
Audouin lifted up the latch of the gate and walked into the yard; and the deacon, seeing him approach, strode to meet him, in no very amiable frame of mind, thinking it probable that this was only another one of Hiram's undesirable trapper acquaintances. To say the truth, the misapprehension was a natural one. Audouin was coarsely dressed in rough country clothes, and even when he spoke a nature like the deacon's was hardly of the sort to be much impressed by his quiet cultivated manner. 'Wal, cap'n,' the deacon said, coming towards them, 'what might you be lookin' after this mornin', eh? I presume you air on the look-out for horses?'
Audouin smiled and bowed with a dignity which suited strangely with his rude outer aspect. 'No, sir,' he answered in his bland voice. 'I'm not looking out for horses. I met your son here—a very interesting boy—down by the Creek, and I have come up here with him because his individuality attracted me. I wanted to have a talk with you about him.' As it happened, to speak well of Hiram, and before his face too (the scapegrace!), wasn't exactly the surest path to the deacon's esteem and affection. He coughed nervously, and then inquired in his dry manner, 'Trapper?' 'No, not exactly a trapper,' Audouin replied, smiling again faintly. The faint smile and the 'exactly' both misled and exasperated the deacon.
'Farmer, then?' he continued laconically, after the fashion of the country.
'No, nor farmer either,' the New Englander answered in his soft voice. 'I am Mr. Audouin, of Lakeside Cottage.'
The deacon scanned him contemptuously from head to foot. 'Oh,MisterAudouin,' he said significantly. 'Wal,MisterAudouin, so you've bought up that thar ramshackle place of Hitchcock's, hev you? And what air you goin' to dew with it naow you've got it? Clear off the timber, I reckon, and set up rafting.'
'God forbid,' Audouin replied hastily. (The deacon frowned slightly at such obvious profanity.) 'I've taken the place just because of its very wildness, and I merely wish to live in it and watch and sympathise with nature. I see your son loves nature, too, and that has formed a bond of union between us.'
'Wal,' the deacon murmured meditatively, 'that's all accordin' to taste. Hiram is my own son, an' if the Lord has bin pleased to afflict us in him, mother an' me ain't the ones to say nothin' agin him to casual strangers, anyway. But I don't want to part with him,MisterAudouin; we ain't lookin' out for a place for him yet. Thar's work enough for him to do on this farm, I kin tell you, ef on'y he'd do it. You wasn't in want of any butter or eggs now, was you?'
'No, Mr. Winthrop,' Audouin answered seriously, leaning against the gate as he spoke. 'I see you quite misunderstand me. Allow me a moment to explain the position. I'm a Boston man, a man of independent means, and I've taken Lakeside because I wish to live alone, away from a world in which I have really very little interest. You may possibly know, by name at least, my uncle, Senator Lothrop, of Syracuse;' (that was a horrid bit of snobbery, worthy almost of the old world, Audouin thought to himself as he uttered it; but it was necessary if he was to do anything for Hiram). 'Well, that's my card—some use in civilisation after all—Lothrop Audouin; and I was wandering in the woods by the Creek this morning with my friend, Professor Hipkiss of Harvard, when I happened to fall in quite accidentally with your son here. He charmed us by his knowledge of nature all around, and, indeed, I was so much interested in him that I thought I would just step over and have a little conversation with you about his future.'
The deacon took the little bit of pasteboard suspiciously, and looked with slowly melting incredulity at Audouin's rough dress from head to foot. Even upon his dense, coarse, materialised mind the truth began to dawn slowly that he was dealing with a veritable gentleman. 'Wal, Mr. Audouin,' he said, this time without the ironical emphasis upon the 'Mister,' 'what do yer want to dew with the boy, eh, sir? I don't see as I kin spare him; 'pears to me, ef he's goin anywhar, he may as well go to a good farmer's.'
'You mistake me still,' Audouin went on. 'My meaning is this. Your son has talked to the Professor and myself, and has shown us some of his sketches.' The deacon nodded ominously. 'Now, his conversation is so intelligent and his drawings so clever, that we both think you ought to make an effort to give him a good education. He would well repay it. We have both a considerable influence in educational quarters, and we would willingly exert it for his benefit.'
The deacon opened his eyes with astonishment. That lad intelligent? Why, he was no judge at all of a bullock, and he knew scarcely anythin' more about fall wheat'n a greenhorn that might hev kem out from Ireland by the last steamer. However, he contented himself upon that head with smiling sardonically, and muttered half to himself, 'Edoocation; edoocational influence; not with members of the Hopkinsite connection, I reckon.'
Audouin carefully checked the smile that threatened to pull up the corners of his delicate mouth. He was beginning to understand now what manner of man he had got to deal with, and for Hiram's sake he was determined to be patient. Fancy such a lad living always exposed to the caprices of such a father!
'No,' he said gravely, 'not with the Hopkin-sites, but with the Congregationalists and others, where your boy would not be interfered with in his religious convictions.'
''Tain't entirely satisfactory,' the deacon continued. 'Consider my persition as one set in authority, as it were, in the Hopkinsite connection. Hiram ain't bin nowhar so far, 'ceptin' to common school, an' I dunno as I hev made up my mind ever to send him any-whar else. Boys loses a lot o' time over this here edoocation. But ef I was to, I guess I should send him to Bethabara Seminary. We hev a seminary of our own, sir—we of the Believin' Church, commonly known as the Hopkinsite connection—at Athens in Madison County, which we call Bethabara, because we surmise it's the on'y place in America whar the Gospel is taught on thorough-goin' Baptist principles. We air not only for immersion as agin sprinklin', mister, but also for scriptooral immersion in runnin' water as agin the lax modern practice of or'nary immersion in tanks or reservoyers. That's why we call our seminary Bethabara—Athens bein' sitooated on the Musk-rat river close above its junction with the Jordan; an' that's why, ef I was goin' to send Hiram any whar, I should send him whar he could hear the Gospel expounded accordin' to the expositions an' opinions of Franklin V. Hopkins, of Massachusetts, which air the correck ones.'
'This question will take a little time to thrash out,' Audouin answered with unruffled gravity. 'May I ask, deacon, whether you will courteously permit me to take a chair in your house and talk it over fully with you?'
'Why, certainly,' the deacon answered with a doubtful look that clearly belied his spoken words. 'Hiram, you jest go an' drive up the cows, sonny, an' mind you put up the fence behind you, jest the same as you find it.'
They went together into the dreary living-room, a room such as Audouin had seen in duplicate ten thousand times before, with a bare wooden floor, bare walls, a white pine table, a rocking-chair, a bunk, some cane seats, a stove, and a cheap lithograph of a vacant-looking gentleman in a bag-wig and loose collar, whom an inscription surmounted by a spread eagle declared largely to have been first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. (Lithographs of the sort are common in American farmhouses, and are understood to be posthumous libels on the intelligence and personal appearance of George Washington.) Audouin seated himself humbly on the bunk, and the deacon took his accustomed place in the rocking-chair, where he continued to sway himself violently to and fro during the whole interview.
Audouin began by pleading hard for education for Hiram, and suggesting, as delicately as he was able, that if pecuniary difficulties barred the way, they might perhaps be easily smoothed over. (As a matter of fact, he would willingly have given freely of that dirty paper, stamped with the treasury stamp, that they call money, to free such a lad as Hiram Winthrop from the curse of that material civilisation that they both so cordially detested.) He praised Hiram's intelligence and his wonderful talent for drawing: spoke of the wrongfulness of not allowing full play to his God-given faculties: and even condescended to point out that Hiram educated would probably make a much larger fortune (ugh! how he shuddered over it) than Hiram set to do the drudgery of a farm which he hated and always would hate. The deacon listened, half-wrathful; such open aiding and abetting of sinful rebelliousness and repining was almost too much for him; his only consolation was that Hiram wasn't along to listen to it all and drink in more unfilial sentiments from it.
But Audouin soon made one convert at least. Mrs. Winthrop, with her hard unlovable face, sat silently listening beside the stove, and picking over the potatoes for the spring planting. In her shrivelled mother's heart, she had always been proud of Hiram; proud even of his stubbornness and rebellion, which in some dim, half-unconscious fashion she vaguely knew to be really a higher, nobler sort of thing at bottom than the deacon's stern, unbending fidelity to the principles of Solomon and the Hopkinsite Confession. Somewhere away down in the dark unfathomed depths of Mehitabel Winthrop's stunted personality there lay a certain stifled, undeveloped, long-since-smothered germ of human romance and feminine sympathy which had blossomed out in Hiram into true love of art and of nature. Deadened as it was in her by the cruel toilsome life of Muddy Creek, with its endless round of dull monotonous labour, as well as by the crushing defeat experienced by all her girlish ideals in the awful reality of the married state with Zephaniah Winthrop, the deacon's wife still retained in some half-buried corner of her soul a little smouldering spark of the divine fire which enabled her in a doubtful halffrightened fashion to sympathise with Hiram. It was very wrong and weak of her, she knew: father was right, and Hiram was a no-account, idle loiterer: but still, when he spoke up to father, to his very face, about his novel-reading, and his birds-nesting, and his drawing, Mrs. Winthrop was somehow aware of a sneaking admiration and pride in him which she never felt towards the deacon, even during his most effective and unctuous exhortation. And now, when she heard Audouin praising and speaking well of her boy for those very, things that the deacon despised and rejected, she felt that here was somebody else who could appreciate Hiram, and that perhaps, after all, her own instinct had not in the end entirely misled her.
'Zeph,' she said at last—it was many years since she had called him 'Zeph' habitually, instead of 'Father' or 'Deacon'—'Zeph, I think we might manage to send Hiram to college.'
The deacon started.Et tu, Brute!This was really almost too much for him. He began to wonder whether the universe was turned upside down, and all the powers that be were hereafter to be ranged on the side of rebelliousness and opposition. To say the truth, his godly horror was not altogether feigned. According to his lights, his dusky and feeble lights, the deacon wished and believed himself to be a good father. He held it his clear duty, as set forth in his reading of the prophets and apostles, to knock this idle nonsense out of Hiram, and train him up in the way he should go, to be a respectable corn-raising farmer and shining light of the Hopkinsite connection. These habits of hunting 'coons and making pictures of rattlesnakes, into which the boy had lapsed, were utterly abhorrent to the deacon's mind as idle, loitering, vagabond ways, deserving only of severe castigation His reading of English classics appeared as a crime only one degree less heinous than frequenting taverns, playing cards, or breaking the Sabbath. The boy was a bad boy, a hopelessly bad boy, given him as a thorn in the flesh to prevent spiritual boasting: on that hypothesis alone could the deacon account for such a son of perdition being born of such believing and on the whole (as poor worms go) extremely creditable parents.
And now, here was this fine-spoken, incomprehensible Boston critter, who had took that ramshackle place of Hitchcock's, and didn't even mean to farm it—here was this unaccountable phenomenon of a man positively interested in and pleased with Hiram, just because of these very self-same coon-hunting, snake-drawing, vagabond proclivities. The Deacon's self-love and selfrespect were deeply wounded. Audouin had already been talking with the boy: no doubt he had set him even more agin his own father than ever. No doubt he had told Hiram that there was something fine in his heathenish love for Injun tommy-hawks, in his Bohemian longings for intercourse with ungodly trappers (men to whom the Sabbath was absolutely indifferent), in his wicked yearning after Pickwick's Papers, and the Complete Dramatic Works of William Wakefield. The deacon couldn't bear to stultify himself after all, by sending Hiram to school at the request of this favourer of rebellion, this vile instigator of revolt against paternal authority, this Ahithophel who would lure on a foolish Absalom with guileful counsel to his final destruction.
'Wal, Het,' the Deacon said slowly, 'I dunno about it. We must take time to consider and to wrastle over it.'
But Audouin, now thoroughly in earnest, his sense of plot-interest vividly aroused, would hear of no delay, but that the question must be settled that very evening, he saw the deacon wouldn't entertain the idea of Hiram being sent somewhere to prepare for Yale or Harvard, where Audouin would have liked him to go: and so, with a diplomatic cleverness which the deacon, if he could have read his visitor's mind, would doubtless have characterised as devilish, he determined to shift his ground, and beg only that Hiram might be sent to Bethabara. In a year or two, he said to himself, the boy would be older and would have a mind of his own; and then it would be possible, he thought, to send him to some college where his intellectual and artistic nature might have freer development than at the Hopkinsite Seminary. Bit by bit, the Deacon gave way: he couldn't as a consistent church member and a father with the highest interests of his son at heart, refuse to let him go to Bethabara, when a mere stranger declared he saw in him signs of talent. He yielded ungraciously at last, and told Audouin he wouldn't stand in the way of the boy's receivin' a good edoocation, purvided allus it wa'n't contrary to the principles of Franklin P. Hopkins.
'Very well,' Audouin said with a sigh of relief. 'I'll write and inquire about the matter myself this very evening.'
'Address the Secatary,' Mr. Winthrop put in officially, 'Bethabara Seminary, Athens, N.Y.' Audouin made a note in his memorandum book of the incongruous address with a stifled sigh.
'Mother,' the deacon said, 'call in Hiram.' Mrs. Winthrop obeyed. Hiram, who had been loitering about the wood-shed in wonder at what this long interview could portend, slunk in timidly, and stood with his ragged hat in his hand beside the table.
'Hiram,' said the deacon, solemnly, with the voice and air of a judge publicly addressing a condemned criminal, 'that gentleman thar has been conversin' with mother an' me relatively to the desirability of sendin' you to an edoocational establishment, whar you may, p'raps, be cured from your present oncommonly idle and desultory proclivities. Though you hev allus bin, as I confess with shame, a most lazy lad, sonny, an' hev never done anything to develop your nat'ral talents in any way, that gentleman thar, who has received a college edoocation hisself at one of our leadin' American Universities, an' who is competent by trainin' an' experience to form an opinion upon the subjeck, believes that you dew possess nat'ral talents of which you ain't yet giv any open indication.'Tain't for me to say whether you may hev inherited them or not: it is sufficient to point out that that thar gentleman considers you might, with industry and application, dew credit in time to an edoocational institoot. Such an institoot of our own denomination is Bethabara Seminary, located at Athens, New York. Thar you would receive instruction not at variance with the religious teachin' you hev enjoyed in your own residence an' from your own parents. An eminent Hopkinsite pastor is installed over that institoot as President; I allood to Elder Ezra W. Coffin, with whose commentary on the prophet Ezekiel you air already familiar. Mother an' me has decided, accordingly, that it will be for your good, both temporal and sperritooal we hope, to enter junior at Bethabara Seminary. That gentleman thar will make inquiries relatively to the time when you kin be received into the institootion.
We trust that when you he ventered upon this noo stage in your career, you will drop them habits of idleness an' insubordination for which it has been my dooty on a great many occasions to correck you severely.' Hiram stood there dazed and trembling, listening with blank amazement to the deacon's exhortation (the same as if it was conference), and only vaguely taking in the general idea that he was to be sent away shortly to some school or other somewhere. Andouin saw at a glance the lad's timid hesitation, and added kindly: 'Your father and mother think, Hiram, that it would be well to send you to Bethabara' (he suppressed his rising shudder), 'so that you may have opportunities of learning more about all the things in which you're already so much interested. You'll like it, my boy, I'm sure; and you'll get on there, I feel confident.'
The boy turned to him gratefully: 'That's so, I guess,' he answered, with his awkward country gratitude; 'I shall like it better'n this, anyhow.'
The deacon frowned, but said nothing.
And so, before a week was over, Hiram had said good-bye to his mother and Sam Churchill, and was driving over in the deacon's buggy to Muddy Creek deepo, ong rowt for Athens, Madison County.