CHAPTER XII
“THERE’S a man I could easily find it in my heart to envy,” Humphrey Meadowcroft said to himself one evening a fortnight later as he sat alone in his room in the almost empty house. Mrs. Phillips and the servants had already gone to her place at Gloucester for the summer, but he had waited until he should have settled certain details connected with Rose Harrow’s entering the high school at Paulding. He and Herbie were to leave next day.
Mrs. Harrow had been so charmed by Meadowcroft’s personality that she would in any event have been as wax in his hands. But he had been more than usually deferential as he exerted himself to make her see the wisdom of not only allowing but urging her daughter to be as nearly normal as it was possible to be in all her relations, and had convinced her readily. She saw the folly of her fears, entered into the anticipations of Rose and Betty almost as eagerly as they, and helped Rose make up what she had lost since Christmas so that she could take examinations in the fall.
Meadowcroft had been driven over to Paulding to-day to arrange with Mr. Appleton, principal of the high school, for Rose to take oral examinations and to discuss her course of study with him. It was of the school-master he was thinking when he made the remark that his was an enviable lot.
On the face of it, however, nothing could have seemedmore absurd than for the rich man of leisure to envy the poor over-worked school-master. The lot of the latter would have seemed such as to elicit pity rather than covetousness. Worn, tired-looking, stooping, shabby, domestic care added to the strain of teaching had bent Mr. Appleton’s thin shoulders and streaked his sandy hair prematurely with gray so that he looked ten years older than his five and forty years. His salary was meager; the high school, which received pupils from two villages outside Paulding proper, large; and he had only one assistant. His wife, who was ailing and fretful, reckoned the time spent in their lodgings in Paulding (which was his life) merely as so much dreary waiting for the vacations which they spent with her family in the town in another state where both had grown up.
None the less, as he talked eagerly and enthusiastically of his work that afternoon to a rarely sympathetic listener, he acted as if he hadn’t a care in the world. A scholar, a lover of mankind and particularly of youth, his happiness in his work, which was almost his whole life, was truly sufficient to make him appear singularly fortunate to the thoughtful observer.
Meadowcroft went straight to Mr. Appleton’s lodgings. The business was readily concluded. Mr. Appleton agreed to go over to South Paulding the week before the high school should open to give Rose her examinations. She could then enter with her class and pursue the regular course with the exception of algebra, which they agreed would be out of the question. Meadowcroft spoke of the two other children in whom he was especially interested, assuring the school-master that he would enjoy Betty Pogany’s singularly mature intelligence andlovely disposition and Tommy Finnemore’s piquant oddity.
Mr. Appleton proposed that his guest might like to see the high school, and Meadowcroft eagerly assenting, they drove over in the carriage. It was the first time Mr. Appleton had ever ridden in a victoria, and he frankly enjoyed the novel pleasure. He felt a trifle guilty as he realized how much his wife would have liked it; but Mr. Meadowcroft hadn’t proposed asking her and certainly he couldn’t speak of it. And if she had gone she would have monopolized the conversation—Mrs. Appleton was always a great talker and particularly so with strangers, who were at her mercy—and it was certainly so rare a treat to have such a gentleman as Meadowcroft to himself that his regret for her didn’t trouble him deeply.
At the school-house, which was a place of fascination for Humphrey Meadowcroft, who had never attended public school, the two talked long—about books, about boys and, to a lesser extent, about girls. Appleton had taught for twenty years, the last twelve here in Paulding, and some of his boys and girls were already men and women out in the world. Maude Harrow, who had been graduated ten years ago, must have been this Rose’s aunt, for she had come from the South village. And there were children in the lower schools of all three villages now who would be coming to him within a few years just as their fathers and mothers had done before them. And lean, homely, spectacled, awkward, though he was, as he talked the school-master reminded his guest of some gentle mediæval saint to whom each human being represents a marvelous, immortal soul.
And now as he sat alone musing, Humphrey Meadowcroft told himself that the man’s life was truly ideal. To know boys and girls so well—particularly, these genuine, unsophisticated country boys and girls—to love them so simply and frankly, to be such a power among them, to be so happy in imparting the knowledge dear to himself as to be insensible of the toil and drudgery involved, to lead them on and on and higher and higher in his endeavor to prepare them for whatever was to come after they should have passed from his mild sway—what satisfaction could compare with a life like that? It was a lot to have chosen out of ten thousand!
Had he himself been poor, perchance he might have been forced into a position which held all these potentialities. It was, perhaps, the one thing which a lame man of his tastes might have done. And how very different his life would have been from the lonely, empty, useless existence he had thus far dragged out. He might not have made of it what Appleton had made of his life, but for all that he might not have been a failure.