Richmond Palladium (Daily), Volume 34, Number 364, 6 November 1909 — Page 6

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THE slow train was jerking along over its single track toward its resting-place for the night Nearly all the passengers had disappeared, stepping to the station platforms in a melancholy, casual manner which is characteristic of the inhabitants of Cape Cod. The rear car was entirely empty, and in the forward car were an elderly woman surrounded by brown-paper parcels, and a brakeman eating an apple in a business-like way, only these two with the important exception of Reuben Reed. He sat in the middle of the car looking out fixedly at the landscape as it lazily crept into view; he had turned over the seat in front of him, and his feet rested on it, while his arms were spread over the back of his own seat As the train crossed a bridge over a small river, Reuben sat up straighten There was the pine grove where they used to have the Sunday-school picnics; there was the field where the huckleberries grew the thickest; there was old man Carver's barn looming high on a sloping hillside. Reuben remembered well how he had helped build that barn, earning his first ten dollars by the job. Just opposite the station was the tavern; Reuben thought it had shrunk since he last saw it, and felt reluctant to trust himself to its hospitality; but needs must in certain combinations in life, so he walked up to its forbidding door, found the landlady, and, having made arrangements for the night, set out on foot along the sandy road that ran beside the track. It was early in May, and the air was biting as sunset drew near. The rare apple-trees in the scanty orchards were not yet in bloom, but there was a pink glow through the branches telling of the sap that already swelled each bud. The steady Cape wind blew in his face, bending easily the long, thin grasses that pushed through the and on the sides of the road. Reuben walked with a swing that soon took him out of the village, and in five minutes more he had gained the schoolhouse, where it stood as far as possible from the center of civilization so as to be within easier reach of the outlying farms. It was a dismal, square wooden building with two doors, one for the girls, the other for the boys. Reuben tried to open the right-hand door, but it was locked. He sat down on the steps and looked at the small playground, bare and grim, trodden hard by many hobnailed boots. Some child had dropped a little bunch of sassafras flowers on the step, and he took them up, holding them thoughtfully in his hand. Here he was, on the threshold of a design planned by him twenty years before, and, till within eighteen months, the moving spring of his existence. He sat in the very place where he had sworn to be revenged on those who had wronged him, a lad of nineteen. All his boyhood had been hard and unlovely, but never had he known the pangs of injustice and disloyalty till that last week at home. His expression was less lowering and more energetic as he started off in the direction of the old home with a swinging step. It was not long before h reached the boundary line of the north acre lot the place where their farm began; and then a feeling, ignored till then, leapt into consciousness the love of land. If Dave had children, they would be the fifth generation of Reeds to live there. It was more than a hundred years since his great-grandfather had bought the place and put up a little two-roomed cabin; he had prospered, and his son had built the large, square rooms where Reuben's father had been born, as well as himself and Dave. Every fibre of his heart responded to the eloquent cry sent forth by the trees along the stone walls, by the grim rocks pushing up their old heads through the short grass, and by the red brick chimneys of the house itself, which now came into sight. This was his as much as Dave's; he would turn out the others and come here with Grace to make their summer home, where his ancestors had toiled and struggled with the obstinate soil ; he would buy out Dave, after he had received back his fifty dollars with twenty years' interest at five per cent. The brute was predominant in his face as he noisily pushed back the garden gate, scowling to notice that one of the hinges was broken, and crunched up the gravel path to the front door. He pulled the glass bell-handle, tut it came out in his hand, and he was forced to rap smartly with his cane. He heard a person moving hastily within, but he did not see a face pressed against the window of the room on the right of the door, as if some one were trying to see who knocked so imperatively. In a moment a bolt was drawn, and a thin, elderly woman, whose faded face was set in anxious lines, stood before Reuben. ) I've come to see Mr. Reed, Mr. David Reed." said Reuben in his authoritative manner. Most people succumbed at once to this manner of his, and it was one of Grace's charms that she only laughed when he domineered. But the woman before him was more than ordinarily impressed; her eyes, of a dim blue, looked like those of a kitten who seeks shelter beneath a bed, and her voice quavered as she replied: "He's not in just now, sir; but if you'd be good enough to watt " She paused, the upward inflection of her voice turning her timid suggestion into a question. "Certainlv, I'll wait. I've not travelled from New York for nothing," Reuben returned grimly. "Would you mind, sir, stepping into the sitting-room? The weather's still cold, and there's no fire in the best parlor." "Will Mr. Reed be long away?" asked Reuben after lie had seated himself. " I think he'll be back in less than an hour now ; my husband's hard to move these days, and he's always for getting home as soon's he can." Her husband! Was this Lucy? Lucy, whose fresh image he had carried with him all these years? He looked hard at her as she took up her work, a stocking she was mending, and tried to find a trace of one who had been so living to his mind. Little by little he found memories of the young school-mistress, but they were as faded as the sassafras flowers he had picked up on the schoolhouse steps. " There's a gentleman come to see father, Lucy," said her mother with a mild reproof in her voice, glancing toward the corner where Reuben had seated himself. The girl started. " Oh, it seems real dark in here after coming in from the sunset," she said apologetically; "I didn't see you at first."' "Don't mention it," said Reuben, looking keenly at this girl, the child of Lucy and Dave. She was pretty, with a fragile prettiness that holds a world of pathos for those who can read the meaning of the over-brilliant eye, and the exquisite wild-rose pink in the cheeks. ReuVen did not understand these signs; he only saw that sht was as lovely as an apple-blossom and had a taking little manner. " Put up your work, mother," she went on ; " it's too dark in here for you to strain your eyes. This is the ouly time in the day when we have the right to rest for moment, and I guess I'll make the most of it." "I've no rifht to test any time," said Mrs. Reed querulously; " 1 srnpose I'd ought to try to do the milkins, since you can t. It goes against me to think of those poor cows having to wait till Rcub gets back, for it may be more'n an hour et " "Well, you sha'n't, and I car."." said the younger Lucy, gaily; "I'm sorry for 'em, too, but I don't see why we should sufTer any more than cov." I used to milk every day when I was a boy,'' said Reuben suddenly; "why won't yrwi let me try my hand now 'hile I'm waiting for your father?"

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Lucy the younger laughed merrily, while Mrs. Reed looked distressed. " Oh, no ; it would never do ; why, I don't know what father'd say," she began, but her daughter interrupted her. " Mother's putting on her old schoolmarm ways when she talks like that. I've a great mind to take Mr. the gentleman, out to the barn, and see if he knows a cow's head from her tail." "Oh, Lucy, I declare!" said the distressed mother, but Reuben laughed. "It's a bargain," he said, standing up and taking off his coat, which he tossed onto a chair. " I can't for the life of me think what father and Reub will say to me for letting you do this," she remarked as a beginning. "I don't see how you could have helped yourself; I wanted to milk, and when I want a thing I generally get it." " That's the way Reub talks ; but he's had to find out, poor fellow, that there's some things he can't ever get, no matter how much he wants 'era. "Is Reub your brother?" "Yes; and he just set his heart on going to college, and we all buckled down and saved and slaved and then, last fall, things went worse than usual with father, and Reub's had to give up. He's real courageous, and he don't say much to any one, but I can see how he feels it."

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"His name's Reuben, is it? That's rather an odd name." " It's rather a family name with us," explained Lucy with a little touch of family pride. "My great-grandfather was named Reuben, and so was father's brother, and it's after him they called my brother." "Is he dead, your father's brother?" asked Reuben, letting his hands rest for a moment while he waited for her answer. "We don't know," said Lucy. "It's been an awful grief to father to have it all so uncertain about my uncle; it's for that he sort of spoiled Reub," she added, inconsequently as it seemed to her listener. " I don't see your reasoning there ; why should your father spoil his son because he felt bad about his brother?" " Well, I'll tell you, though it does seem kind of mixed when you try to put it into words," said Lucy, drawing closer, while Reuben turned sideways to listen, forgetting his task. "You see," she began, "when my grandfather, died he told my father to be a father to Reuben, who was a good deal younger, and father promised, and set about keeping his word the best he knew how. But his idea of a father was of some one real harsh, who would be obliged to be hard and disagreeable, else he'd never get any authority over the other; and he got into the way of speaking quick and masterful, and he forgot his brother was nearly a grown man when the trouble came." "So there was trouble, was there ?w "Oh, yes, awful trouble, and father has told mother over and over again that it was his fault ; he never speaks of this to any one but mother, and she told me, because I fretted about Reub's being so spoiled, and she wanted to kind of excuse father to me. It seems that my uncle had worked on the sly, and had made a big sum of money nearly a hundred dollars, I guess and he wanted to put all this into something that father knew was no good ; it was something that I don't know about myself, but father had heard his father say that he had dropped a lot of money doing the same thing; but father, instead of explaining this gently to his brother, just grabbed hold of the bills and said they shouldn't be used for nonsense. He was mad. too, that he, who worked so hard himself, had never been able to put by ten cents; all he made had to go into housekeeping, and clothes for his brother and their stepmother and manure and fodder; and his brother, who

had no calls on him, had made this extra ; so father was touchy about it, and he took the money away from my uncle and then he never saw or heard of him again." "I should think he'd a-been glad to get rid of him," said Reuben grimly, beginning to milk again. " Oh, no, he wasn't ; and mother, she felt awful ; she loved my uncle just like he'd been her own brother. Once they heard something; he sent by registered mail ten dollars old Mr. Carver had lent him to go to Boston with; but there was only a New York mark on the envelope, and that was all they ever heard." "Did your father ever try to fittd out about him?" " He did all he could; he advertised in a Boston paper, and after this money came in a New York one; but father's had dreadful hard times." "What's gone wrong with him?" "Well, mother lost her health soon after they were married ; Reub and I are the only ones out of six they've raised if you can call me raised," she added in a low voice of bitterness. Again that detested sense of pity crept into Reuben's mind ; he banished it with an abrupt question : " What has all this to do with your brother's being spoiled?" he demanded. "Why, don't you see?" she responded rather impatiently. " It was becauseffather'd been so harsh with his brother that he'd driven him to the bad, so he can't bear to cross Reub in a single thing for fear he'd run away too. Besides, losing all the rest of us has made father

and mother fearful and anxious. Mother will burst out crying times when everything seems all right, thinking how she refused some little teenty' thing to one of the babies, or something like that" Reuben rose and shifted his seat to the second cow, which had been impatiently turning her head for the last five minutes. The barn had grown dark, and when Lucy's voice ceased, the call of the tree-toads in the marsh farther down the road could be plainly heard. Lucy turned and gazed into the gathering gray of the twilight as it folded itself like a clinging garment over rock and tree and field. Reuben milked mechanically, and thought Lucy's words had shifted past events into different relations to each other, and as yet he was unable to see them clearly in this sudden readjustment. He could not picture Dave as an indulgent father or a loving brother, although Grace had told him that his business success was greatly due to his imagination. " You are almost Oriental," she had said to him once, half in earnest, half teasing him. But now Reuben felt that his mind had not taken in all he had heard, but that the brown dusk of the barn was muffling it He longed to feel a keen edge once more to his thinking faculties, and see definitely where he was. Swish, swish, spurted the jets of milk into the pail, and slowly, cogged and hindered, worked Reuben's thoughts. Suddenly Lucy spoke. "I hear wheels, and I guess it's them," she remarked. Then Reuben knew that ideas had come and gone, been rejected or accepted by some subconscious but authoritative ego, for he was saying to himself very positively: "That's the blessing of having gained a woman like Grace; she wouldn't allow me to shirk doing for them, even if we do have to give up some of the things we'd planned for ourselves." "That's about all the milk I can get for you this evening," he said, rising and stretching himself. " Would you mind running along and telling your father that your uncle Reuben's got back from the bad! and that he's waiting here till somebody asks him into the house?" "I guessed it! I guessed it!" cried Lucy triumphantly. "The minute I saw you pick up the milkingstool I just felt sure it was you!" She melted into the gloom before Reuben could say, "By George! women do jump at things like grasshoppers, forty times their own length." " They never knew H, Dave and Lucy didn't, but they really gave me Ml I've got Would I change what I am

to-day with what I should have been if I'd staved here and married Lucy, and had half a dozen children to bring up? No, siree, I guess not! He strode to the door and looked impatiently out into the dusk. He could hear the sound of voices, two or three together, as he stood waiting for a moment: then he picked up the milk-pails and went steadily out of the barn, taking his deliberate way across the yard. The meeting with his brother was before him. and he looked forward to it with no pleasure, though he was far from the idea of shirking it. The voices ceased abruptly as his figure loomed through the twilight ; and then he saw a tall, bent form moving toward him: a hand was held out, and he stopped, putting down the pails, and held out his in return. There was a grasp, herce in its intensity, and then some one was it Dave? said brokenly : " I'm real glad to see ye back, Reuben. There's not much to share here howadays, but you're welcome to vour part of it, anyhow." Reuben felt a queer, painful lump in his throat; he choked, and said not a word for a second ; then, with a forced laugh, he exclaimed, slapping his brother on his bent shoulder. " Well, if you'll give me a share of your supper, it's all I'll ask for just now." The younger ones were standing motionless, watching this meeting, and they proved a welcome diversion to Reuben, who hated the emotion and agitation of the moment with a hearty, masculine hate. "Hello, is this

f y 7 my namesake?" he called oat in his most boisterous manner, going on without waiting for an answer: "Lucy and I are friends already; there's no need of an introduction between us." "Does she does your mother know?" asked Dave suddenly. "No; I haven't seen her since I guessed out in the barn ; she hasn't any notion at all." There was the same absence of outward feeling when Dave broke the news to his wife as there had been in his own case ; care and sorrow had made them both old before their time, and self-centred. " Nothing surprises me now," she said querulously ; " I've been afflicted so sorely that I guess I'm about prepared for anything that may come, except joy; and this is joy, but it don't seem to have much power to stir me. Still, you are welcome, Reuben, as welcome as Lazarus was to his sisters, for you are like one raised from the dead." Reuben the younger was the only one who saved the situation, with his uncle's help; for, after the first embarrassment had passed, their natural spirits rose with a natural reaction. It was Reub who drew out from his uncle the tale of his wanderings as they sat round the hastily supplemented supper-table, and as the returned traveller found that he was listened to with profound interest, he warmed to his task, giving a rapid and vivid sketch of his life during the past twenty years. All his struggles, from the day when old Mr. Carver had lent him the ten dollars, and introduced him to the boss of a shoe factory at Brockton, who happened to be going by the same train, and who engaged the quick-wittrt boy before half their journey was accomplished, to th crowning triumph of his life when he had made money enough to give him the right to ask "the sweetest woman in the world " to be his wife, were related to his attentive audience. " There, that's what I call life ! exclaimed Reub, his eves sparkling with excitement "By jingo, that's what I'd like to do." " Well, that's what you sha'nt do, if I can help it" said his uncle with sudden -ehemence. " You are not going to have the fight I did; it's a toss-up whether a fellow comes out made or marred from that sort of thing. You are going to start into the fight with your gun all loaded, and the right kind of a gun for a chap like you is found m college training. There was a pause round the table ; Reub leaned forward breathing hard, looking his uncle straight in the eye; Dave shook his head mournfully; Lucy the younger

turned her quick, bird-like glances from her brother to Reuben, while her mother sat as if more wrapped in thoughts of another world than in those of this. The children felt instinctively the generosity in the atmosphere of their uncle's personality; their parents had fought too long and too unsuccessfully to have any spring left. At last Dave spoke, and his voice was plaintive: "It ain't but what I'd do anything in God's world to give the boy what he's hankering after, but, Reuben, I haven't got the necessary money for it ; so where' the use of stirring him up just to disappoint him?" No one answered him; the moment bad not come quite yet to tell all that Reuben had in his heart to tell; he wanted to show his brother in figures how much he possessed, and how he had the right as well as the capacity to help in family matters. Mrs. Reed pushed back her chair, saying: "We might just as ell go into the sitting-room; there's a fire there, and I want Lucy should keep warm. Her cough's troublesome, she added, her eyes full of dread as she spoke, "but it's only the leave over after an attack of grip; it's nothing serious." Her voice almost seemed to defy an answer. " I know what's going to cure that cough," said Reuben. He laid his hand on his niece's shoulder as he spoke. They had let the others leave the room before them, and no one could overhear Lucy's low reply: There's nothing but a complete change of air can cure it. Uncle Reuben." she said bravely, " and I might just as well cry for the moon as that I've seen the doctor about it, but I mean to keep them from knowing till it can't be helped any longer." "It's going to be helped, and that before you and I are a week older, and don't you forget it." said Reuben emphatically. Then he pushed her across the entry before she could do more than turn wide, grateful eyes upon him. Dave was standing in the sitting-room at the bookcase between the windows; he had unlocked its doors, and taken out the old family Bible that Reuben remembered well ; the one bright spot on Sunday evenings had been to look at the engravings, and one of his rare, agreeable associations came to him. Before he could speak, Dave beckoned to him to draw near, and laid his gnarled, veined hand on the yellow leather cover. "Reuben, I hate to go back to unpleasantnesses in this hour of reunion and happy feelings, but I must make one allusion to the past; then I promise yon never to mention it again ; it's too full of shame and bitterness for my own blindness for me to want to." " Let's not say anything to-night," urged Reuben uncomfortably ; " I'll come up the first thing in the morning, and it'll be easier to talk it out in the sunlight." " No, Reuben ; what I have to do now has waited twenty years to be done, and that's good deal too long for me to put off an hour more. Ever since too left I've kept that fifty-dollar bill between the leaves of this Bible, ready for you when you should come back. My wife can tell you of more than one night I've laid awake tossing and turning, thinking that maybe you was in cruel want, and that money idle here. Now, I want you should take it, the same I unjustly wrenched from you twenty years ago." Reuben took the bill held out by his brother, and smoothed it on the palm of his hand ; this was the bit I of paper that had changed all bis life ; if he had been . allowed to use it, what would he have been to-day? A i moderately successful farmer, perhaps, and he would never have known that Grace was in the world, waiting for him, for him alone, the one woman made for him. He almost caressed the bank-note; gratitude was in his heart as he pondered on his lot. "I guess I'll keep it and show it to Grace some day; I shall tell her it marks the turning-point in my life, Dave. If you'd let me hold on to this, I'd never a-been the successful man I am." "I didn't know that Reuben." said his brother solemnly: "God is my witness. I never took that fifty dol-j lars for my own profit; but I was full of pride, andthought I knew better than you; and I was too stiffnecked to try and explain matters like an older brother ' should have done. So I turned to my fists, and your going has taken the sweet out of every joy I've ever had, and added bitterness to all my sorrows." " Now, Dave, look here ; and you, too, Locjr you, I mean," he said, giving his sister-in-law a gentle little ; shake that made a quick, rare smile brighten up her i faded face, and called back an echo of the pretty schoolmistress. " As for those two kids there. I don't care a j cent whether they attend to their old uncle or not ; Reub ! (robably thinks he knows it all a big sight better than do, and Lucy's already planning how many gowns I ' mean to give her to take out to Colorado with her." " Reuben ! Reuben !" gasped the mother, shaken out of her apathy. "Now, don't interrupt I've made a good bit of money, and my wife's not poor, so there's plenty to do what I want to with. And there are four things I want to do bad. and. what's more. I mean to do tnem. First. I want little Lucy to get away from here as quick as she can, and you can settle between you who's going with her. There'll be plenty of cash to take the whole lot if you all care to go. Second. Reub is to enter college in the fall ; 111 talk about details with him to-morrow. Third, I assume the mortgage on the farm " Dave winced. "How did you find out there was one?" he asked in his old, harsh voice. " I let it out, Dave ; it was my fault I was so frightened seeing a stranger," faltered his wife. Dave growled a little, but Reuben went on without noticing him, " And fourth, I'm darned if I don't try my hand with the cranberry bog!" he ended. " You can't do a thing with it." said Dave. leaning forward ; " I've heard my father tell more than fifty times how he set in to work it, and how it was just dead loss." "Well I'm not going to be balked by other folks' failures," returned Reuben with increasing warmth. " I've got the plans for getting all the cranberries we could sell out of that bit of land, and I'm going to try it" Dave twisted his lips sullenly ; for a moment the brothers glared at each other as they used to do in the bygone days. Then Reuben's face lighted op. " I've not done talking yet," he said ; " I love to hear my own voice, and I've got a confession on my side to make. No joking. I came here with about as bad feelings in my heart as a man can have. I meant to wring that fifty dollars out of you. Dave, with twenty years interest I wanted my revenge; I had wanted it every second all this time I've toiled and moiled to make a fortune. I never thought of any pleasure to be got out of my money till I met my Grace; she first gave me a glimmer that possession wasn't everything, but that the power to enjoy was more. Still, I held on to my idea of revenue like a dog does to a bone, till I actually came right here and talked with little Lucy out m the bam. Then the thought struck me that, perhaps, there had been a design underlying our past : that yon, Dave, were carrying out some project we couldn't understand when you took this bill from me I'd worked and slaved to get I didn't forgive you. even then ; I only excused you. Bat since you've shown me how j you'd kept this fifty dollars and I thought of all the, times it would have helped you like thunder to use it j and I began to see from hearing young Reub here talk.! how one age always thinks the next pretty near fool ' why. somehow, my idea of revenge has melted away, and all I want is to help along the way I should Hve done five years ago."

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