Erema - My Father's Sin, Richard Doddridge Blackmore [read me a book TXT] 📗

have calmed his conscience with the reflection, so commonplace and yet so high--that having done our best according to our lights, we must not dwell always on our darkness--if once again, and for the residue of life, there had not been some one to console him--a consolation that need not have, and is better without, pure reason, coming, as that would come, from a quarter whence it is never quite welcome. Enough for me that he never laid hand to a weapon of war again, and never shall unless our own home is invaded.

For after many months--each equal to a year of teaching and of humbling--there seemed to be a good time for me to get away and attend to my duties in England. Of these I had been reminded often by letters, and once by a messenger; but all money matters seemed dust in the balance where life and death were swinging. But now Uncle Sam and his grandson, having their love knit afresh by disaster, were eager to start for the Saw-mill, and trust all except their own business to Providence.

I had told them that, when they went westward, my time would be come for starting eastward; and being unlikely to see them again, I should hope for good news frequently. And then I got dear Uncle Sam by himself, and begged him, for the sake of Firm's happiness, to keep him as far as he could from Pennsylvania Sylvester. At the same time I thought that the very nice young lady who jumped upon his nose from the window, Miss Annie--I forgot her name, or at any rate I told him so--would make him a good straightforward wife, so far as one could tell from having seen her. And that seemed to have been settled in their infancy. And if he would let me know when it was to be, I had seen a thing in London I should like to give them.

When I asked the Sawyer to see to this, instead of being sorry, he seemed quite pleased, and nodded sagaciously, and put his hat on, as he generally did, to calculate.

"Both of them gals have married long ago," he said, looking at me with a fine soft gaze; "and bad handfuls their mates have got of them. But what made you talk of them, missy--or 'my lady,' as now you are in old country, I hear--what made you think of them like that, my dearie?"

"I can't tell what made me think of them. How can I tell why I think of every thing?"

"Still, it was an odd thing for your ladyship to say."

"Uncle Sam, I am nobody's ladyship, least of all yours. What makes you speak so? I am your own little wandering child, whose life you saved, and whose father you loved, and who loses all who love her. Even from you I am forced to go away. Oh, why is it always my fate--my fate?"

"Hush!" said the old man; and I stopped my outburst at his whisper. "To talk of fate, my dearie, shows either one thing or the other--that we have no will of our own, or else that we know not how to guide it. I never knew a good man talk of fate. The heathens and the pagans made it. The Lord in heaven is enough for me; and He always hath allowed me my own free-will, though I may not have handled 'un cleverly. And He giveth you your own will now, my missy--to go from us or to stop with us. And being as you are a very grand young woman now, owning English land and income paid in gold instead of greenbacks--the same as our nugget seems likely--to my ideas it would be wrong if we was so much as to ask you."

"Is that what you are full of, then, and what makes you so mysterious? I did think that you knew me better, and I had a right to hope so."

"Concerning of yourself alone is not what we must think of. You might do this, or you might do that, according to what you was told, or, even more, according to what was denied you. For poor honest people, like Firm and me, to deal with such a case is out of knowledge. For us it is--go by the will of the Lord, and dead agin your own desires."

"But, dear Uncle Sam," I cried, feeling that now I had him upon his own tenterhooks, "you rebuked me as sharply as lies in your nature for daring to talk about fate just now; but to what else comes your own conduct, if you are bound to go against your own desire? If you have such a lot of freewill, why must you do what you do not like to do?"

"Well, well, perhaps I was talking rather large. The will of the world is upon us as well. And we must have respect for its settlements."

"Now let me," I said, with a trembling wish to have every thing right and maidenly. "I have seen so much harm from misunderstandings, and they are so simple when it is too late--let me ask you one or two questions, Uncle Sam. You always answer every body. And to you a crooked answer is impossible."

"Business is business," the Sawyer said. "My dear, I contract accordingly."

"Very well. Then, in the first place, what do you wish to have done with me? Putting aside all the gossip, I mean, of people who have never even heard of me."

"Why, to take you back to Saw-mill with us, where you always was so natural."

"In the next place, what does your grandson wish?"

"To take you back to Saw-mill with him, and keep you there till death do you part, as chanceth to all mortal pairs."

"And now, Uncle Sam, what do I wish? You say we all have so much free-will."

"It is natural that you should wish, my dear, to go and be a great lady, and marry a nobleman of your own rank, and have a lot of little noblemen."

"Then I fly against nature; and the fault is yours for filling me so with machinery."

The Sawyer was beaten, and he never said again that a woman can not argue.


CHAPTER LVIII


BEYOND DESERT, AND DESERTS

From all the carnage, havoc, ruin, hatred, and fury of that wicked war we set our little convoy forth, with passes procured from either side. According to all rules of war, Firm was no doubt a prisoner; but having saved his life, and taken his word to serve no more against them, remembering also that he had done them more service than ten regiments, the Federal authorities were not sorry to be quit of him.

He, for his part, being of a deep, retentive nature, bore in his wounded breast a sorrow which would last his lifetime. To me he said not a single word about his bitter fortune, and he could not bring himself to ask me whether I would share it. Only from his eyes sometimes I knew what he was thinking; and having passed through so much grief, I was moved with deep compassion. Poor Firm had been trained by his grandfather to a strong, earnest faith in Providence, and now this compelled him almost to believe that he had been specially visited. For flying in the face of his good grandfather, and selfishly indulging his own stiff neck, his punishment had been hard, and almost heavier than he could bear. Whatever might happen to him now, the spring and the flower of his life were gone; he still might have some calm existence, but never win another day of cloudless joy. And if he had only said this, or thought about it, we might have looked at him with less sadness of our own.

But he never said any thing about himself, nor gave any opening for our comfort to come to him. Only from day to day he behaved gently and lovingly to both of us, as if his own trouble must be fought out by himself, and should dim no other happiness. And this kept us thinking of his sorrow all the more, so that I could not even look at him without a flutter of the heart, which was afraid to be a sigh.

At last, upon the great mountain range, through which we now were toiling, with the snow little more than a mantle for the peaks, and a sparkling veil for sunrise, dear Uncle Sam, who had often shown signs of impatience, drew me apart from the rest. Straightforward and blunt as he generally was, he did not seem altogether ready to begin, but pulled off his hat, and then put it on again, the weather being now cold and hot by turns. And while he did this he was thinking at his utmost, as every full vein of his forehead declared. And being at home with his ways, I waited.

"Think you got ahead of me? No, not you," he exclaimed at last, in reply to some version of his own of my ideas, which I carefully made a nonentity under the scrutiny of his keen blue eyes. "No, no, missy; you wait a bit. Uncle Sam was not hatched yesterday, and it takes fifty young ladies to go round him."

"Is that from your size, Uncle Sam, or your depth?"

"Well, a mixture of both, I do believe. Now the last thing you ever would think of, if you lived to be older than Washington's nurse, is the very thing I mean to put to you. Only you must please to take it well, according to my meaning. You see our Firm going to a shadow, don't you? Very well; the fault of that is all yourn. Why not up and speak to him?"

"I speak to him every day, Uncle Sam, and I spare no efforts to fatten him. I am sure I never dreamed of becoming such a cook. But soon he will have Suan Isco."

"Old Injun be darned! It's not the stomach, it's the heart as wants nourishment with yon poor lad. He looketh that pitiful at you sometimes, my faith, I can hardly tell whether to laugh at his newings or cry at the lean face that does it."

"You are not talking like yourself, Uncle Sam. And he never does any thing of the kind. I am sure there is nothing to laugh at."

"No, no; to be sure not. I made a mistake. Heroic is the word, of course--every thing is heroic."

"It is heroic," I answered, with some vexation at his lightness. "If you can not see it, I am sorry for you. I like large things; and I know of nothing larger than the way poor Firm is going on."

"You to stand up for him!" Colonel Gundry answered, as if he could scarcely look at me. "You to talk large of him, my Lady Castlewood, while you are doing of his heart into small wittles! Well, I did believe, if no one else, that you were a straightforward one."

"And what am I doing that is crooked now?"

"Well, not to say crooked, Miss 'Rema; no, no. Only onconsistent, when squared up."

"Uncle Sam, you're a puzzle to me to-day. What is inconsistent? What is there to square up?"

He fetched a long breath, and looked wondrous wise. Then, as if his main object was to irritate me, he made a long stride, and said, "Soup's a-bilin now."

"Let it boil over, then. You