A Dozen Ways Of Love by Lily Dougall (lightweight ebook reader txt) 📕

it's just you that have been telling me that the very thing you dislike most in this world is change. And there are other advantages, too, in having kith and kin, for it's lonesome without when you're old; and just think how beautiful for a wife to weep over you when you're a-dying--and she'll do all that, Miss Blakely will, sir; I'm sure, as her friend, I can answer for it.'

'The wills above be done,' murmured the schoolmaster, 'but I would fain die a dry death.'

Time pressed; the schoolmaster procrastinated; the very evening before the widow's departure had arrived, and yet nothing was done. Then it happened, as is frequently the case when the mind is balancing between two opinions, that a very small circumstance determined him to write the all-important note. The circumstance was none other than his having a convenient opportunity of sending it; for to him, as to many other unpractical minds, the small difficulties in the way of any action had as great a deterring power as more important considerations. Miss Blakely happened to live on the other side of the town, and though the master walked much farther than that himself every day, he felt that in this case it would hardly be dignified to be his own messenger.

It was early in the evening, and the master's window was open to the soft spring air that came in full of the freshness of young leaves and the joyous splash of the flooded river. Two of his schoolboys were loitering under the window, wishing to speak to him, yet too bashful; he got up and sat on the window-sill, smiled at them, and they smiled back. They had a tale to tell; but, as it was of a somewhat delicate nature and hard to explain, he had to listen very patiently. They had a dollar--a brown and green paper dollar--which they gave him with an air of solemn importance. They said that they and some of their comrades had been a long way from home gathering saxifrage, and that they had met one of the young ladies of the town. She had her arms full of flowers, and her pocket quite full of moss, so full that she had had to take her purse and handkerchief out and hold them in her hand with the flowers because the moss was wet. When she came upon them, they were trying to get some saxifrage that was on a ledge of rock; they could only climb half-way up the rock, and were none of them tall enough to reach it; so she put down all her flowers and things and climbed up and got it for them; but in the meantime one of them opened the purse and took out the dollar. She never found it out, and went away.

'Not either of you?' said the schoolmaster.

'No, sir; one of the other fellows did it. But he's sorry, and wants to give it back; so we said that we would tell you, and perhaps you would give it to her.'

'Why couldn't you go and give it to her, just as you have given it to me?'

'Because we knew you'd b'lieve us that it was just the way we said; and her folks, you know, might think we'd done it when we said we hadn't. Or, mother said, if you didn't want to be troubled, perhaps you'd just write a line to say how it was, and we'll go and leave it at the house after dark and come away quick.'

The master had no objection to this; so he brought the boys in and got out his best note-paper--he was fastidious about some things--and wrote a note beginning 'Dear Madam,' telling in a few lines that the money had been stolen and restored.

'What is the lady's name?' he asked, taking up the envelope.

'It was Eelan Reid, sir; Mr. Reid's daughter that keeps the shop.'

So the schoolmaster wrote 'Miss Eelan Reid' in a fair round hand, and then he paused for a moment. He was making up his mind to the all-decisive action.

'Perhaps you can wait for another note and take that for me at the same time,' he said. He gave them some picture papers to look at. Then he wrote the note of such moment to himself, beginning, as before, 'Dear Madam,' and doing his best to follow the many instructions which the faithful Mrs. Sims had given him. It was a curious specimen of literature, in which a truly elegant mind and warm heart were veiled, but not hidden, by an embarrassed attempt at conventional phrases--a letter that most women would laugh at, and that the best women would reverence. He addressed that envelope too, and sealed the notes and sent away the boys.

There was no sleep for the schoolmaster that night. With folded arms he paced his room in restless misery. Now that the die was cast, the ideal Miss Blakely faded from his mind; he felt instinctively that she was mythical. He saw clearly that he had forfeited the best possibilities of life for the sake of temporary convenience, that he had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.

The long night passed at length, as all nights pass. The sun rose over purple hills to glow upon the spring-stirred forest and to send golden shafts deep down into the clear heart of lake and stream. The fallen beauty of past woodland summers had tinged the water till it glowed like nut-brown wine; so brown it was that the pools of the river, where it swirled and rushed past the schoolhouse bend, seemed to greet the sun with the soft dark glances of fawn-eyed water-sprites. The glorious sky, the tender colours of the budding wood, the very dandelions on the untrimmed bank, contrived their hues to accord and rejoice with the laughing water, and the birds swelled out its song. In the rapture of spring and of morning there was no echo of grief; for the unswerving law of nature, moving through the years, had set each thing in its right home. It is only the perplexed soul that is forced to choose its own way and suffer from the choice, and the song of our life is but set to the accompaniment of a sad creed if we may not trust that, above our human wills, there is a Power able to overrule the mistakes of true hearts, to lead the blind by unseen paths, and save the simple from their own simplicity.

Very early in the morning the schoolmaster, haggard and worn, slipped out of his own door to refresh himself in the sunlight that gleamed down upon his bit of green through the budding willow trees that grew by the river-side. He stood awhile under the bending boughs, watching the full stream as it tossed its spray into the lap of the flower-fringed shore. He looked, as he stood there, like a ghost of the preceding night, caught against his will and embraced by the joyous morning. Just then he had a vision.

A girl came towards him across the grass and stood a few paces distant. The slender willow twigs, with their hanging catkins and tiny golden leaves, made a sort of veil between them. She was very beautiful, at least so the schoolmaster thought; perhaps she was the personification of the morning, perhaps she was a wood-nymph--it did not matter much; he felt, in his excitement and exhaustion, that her beauty and grace were not real, but only an hallucination of moving sun and shade. She took the swaying willow-twigs in her pretty hands and looked through them at him and stroked the downy flowers.

'Why did you send me that letter?' she said at last, with a touch of severity in her voice.

'The letter,' he stammered, wondering what she could mean.

He remembered, with a sort of dull return of consciousness, that he _was_ guilty of having sent a letter--terribly guilty in his own estimation--but it was sent to Miss Blakely, and this was not Miss Blakely. That one letter had so completely absorbed all his mind that he had quite forgotten any others that he might have written in the course of his whole life.

'Do not be angry with me,' he said imploringly. He had but one idea, that was, to keep this radiant dream of beauty with him as long as possible.

'I'm not angry; I am not angry at all--indeed'--and here she looked down at the twigs in her hand and began pulling the young leaves rather roughly--'I am not sure but that I am rather pleased. I have so often met you in the woods, you know; only I didn't know that you had ever noticed me.'

'I never did,' said the schoolmaster; but happily his nervous lips gave but indistinct utterance to the words, and his tone was pathetic. She thought he had only made some further pleading.

'I--I--I like you very much,' she said. 'I suppose, of course, everybody will be very much surprised, and mother may not be pleased, you know, just at first; but she's good and dear, mother is, in spite of what she says; and father will be glad about anything that pleases me.'

He did not understand what she said; but he felt distressed at the moment to notice that she was twisting the tender willow leaves, albeit he saw that she only did so because, in her embarrassment, her fingers worked unconsciously. He came forward and took her hands gently, to disentangle them from the twigs. She let them lie in his, and looked up in his face and smiled.

'I will try to be a good wife, and manage all the common things, and not tease you to be like other men, if you will sometimes read your books to me and explain to me what life means, and why it is so beautiful, and why things are as they are.'

'I'm afraid I don't understand these matters myself very well,' he said; 'but we can talk about them together.'

While he held her hands, she drooped her head till it touched his shoulder.

He had kissed no one since his mother died, and the great joy that took possession of his heart brought, by its stimulus, a sudden knowledge of what had really happened to his mind. In a marvellously tender way, for a man who could not go a-courting, he put his hand under the pretty chin and looked down wonderingly, reverently, at the serious upturned face. 'And this is bonnie Eelan Reid?'

Then Eelan, thinking that he was teasing her gently for being so easily won when she had gained the reputation of being so proud, cast down her eyes and blushed.

So they were married, and lived happily, very happily, although they had their sorrows, as others have. The schoolmaster was man enough to keep the knowledge of his blunder a secret between himself and God.

As for Miss Blakely, she never quite understood who had stolen the dollar, or when, or where; but she was glad to get it back. She never forgave Mrs. Sims for having managed her trust so ill, although the widow declared, with tears in her eyes, that she had done her best.

'He would have taken in the knowingest person, he would indeed, Ann Blakely; and, to my notion, a straightforward woman like you is well quit of a man who, while he looked so innocent, could act so deep.'


III

THRIFT

The end of March had come. The firm Canadian snow roads had suddenly changed their surface and become a chain of miniature rivers,