His Family by Ernest Poole (popular ebook readers txt) 📕

dawn. With a violent lurch the train moved on. And Roger, lying back on his pillow, looked up at the misty mountain sides all mottled in the strange blue light with patches of firs and birches and pines. In the narrow valley up which the train was thundering, were small herds of grazing cattle, a lonely farmhouse here and there. From one a light was twinkling. And the city with its heat and noise, its nervous throb, its bedlam nights, all dropped like a fever from his soul.

Now, close by the railroad track, through a shallow rocky gorge a small river roared and foamed. Its cool breath came up to his nostrils and gratefully he breathed it in. For this was the Gale River, named after one of his forefathers, and in his mind’s eye he followed the stream back up its course to the little station where he and Deborah were to get off. There the narrowing river bed turned and wound up through a cleft in the hills to the homestead several miles away. On the dark forest road beside it he pictured George, his grandson, at this moment driving down to meet them in a mountain wagon with one of the two hired men, a lantern swinging under the wheels. What an adventure for young George.

Presently he heard Deborah stirring in the berth next to his own.

At the station George was there, and from a thermos bottle which Edith had filled the night before he poured coffee piping hot, which steamed in the keen, frosty air.

“Oh, how good!” cried Deborah. “How thoughtful of your mother, George. How is she, dear?”

“Oh, she’s all right, Aunt Deborah.” His blunt freckled features flushed from his drive, George stood beaming on them both. He appeared, if anything, tougher and scrawnier than before. “Everything’s all right,” he said. “There ain’t a sick animal on the whole farm.”

As Roger sipped his coffee he was having a look at the horses. One of them was William, his cob.

“Do you see it?” inquired his grandson.

“What?”

“The boil,” George answered proudly, “on William’s rump. There it is⁠—on the nigh side. Gee, but you ought to have seen it last week. It was a whale of a boil,” said George, “but we poulticed him, me and Dave did⁠—and now the swelling’s nearly gone. You can ride him tomorrow if you like.”

Luxuriously Roger lit a cigar and climbed to the front seat with George. Up the steep and crooked road the stout horses tugged their way, and the wagon creaked, and the Gale River, here only a brook, came gurgling, dashing to meet them⁠—down from the mountains, from the farm, from Roger’s youth to welcome him home. And the sun was flashing through the pines. As they drew near the farmhouse through a grove of sugar maples, he heard shrill cries of, “There they come!” And he glimpsed the flying figures of George’s brothers, Bob and Tad. George whipped up the horses, the wagon gained upon the boys and reached the house but a few rods behind the little runners. Edith was waiting by the door, fresh and smiling, blooming with health. How well this suited her, Roger thought. Amid a gay chorus of greetings he climbed down heavily out of the wagon, looked about him and drew a deep breath. The long lazy days on the farm had begun.

From the mountain side the farm looked down on a wide sweeping valley of woods and fields. The old house straggled along the road, with addition after addition built on through generations by many men and women. Here lay the history, unread, of the family of Roger Gale. Inside there were steps up and down from one part to another, queer crooks in narrow passageways. The lower end was attached to the woodshed, and the woodshed to the barn. Above the house a pasture dotted with gray boulders extended up to a wood of firs, and out of this wood the small river which bore the name of the family came rushing down the field in a gully, went under the road, swept around to the right and along the edge of a birch copse just below the house. The little stream grew quieter there and widened into a mill pond. At the lower end was a broken dam and beside it a dismantled mill. Here was peace for Roger’s soul. The next day at dawn he awakened, and through the window close by his bed he saw no tall confining walls; his eye was carried as on wings out over a billowy blanket of mist, soft and white and cool and still, reaching over the valley. From underneath to his sensitive ears came the numberless voices of the awakening sleepers there, cheeps and tremulous warbles from the birch copse just below, cocks crowing in the valley, and ducks and geese, dogs, sheep and cattle faintly heard from distant farms. Just so it had been when he was a boy. How unchanged and yet how new were these fresh hungry cries of life. From the other end of the house he heard Edith’s tiny son lustily demanding his breakfast, as other wee boys before him had done for over a hundred years, as other babies still unborn would do in the many years to come. Soon the cry of the child was hushed. Quiet fell upon the house. And Roger sank again into deep happy slumber.

Here was nothing new and disturbing. Edith’s children? Yes, they were new, but they were not disturbing. Their growth each summer was a joy, a renewal of life in the battered old house. Here was no huge tenement family crowding in with dirty faces, clamorous demands for aid, but only five delightful youngsters, clean and fresh, of his own blood. He loved the small excitements, the plans and plots and discoveries, the many adventures that filled their days. He spent hours with their mother, listening while she talked of them. Edith did so love this