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

place and she ran the house so beautifully. It was so cool and fragrant, so clean and so old-fashioned.

Deborah, too, came under the spell. She grew as lazy as a cat and day by day renewed her strength from the hills and from Edith’s little brood. Roger had feared trouble there, for he knew how Edith disapproved of her sister’s new ideas. But although much with the children, Deborah apparently had no new ideas at all. She seemed to be only listening. One balmy day at sunset, Roger saw her lying on the grass with George sprawled by her side. Her head upon one arm, she appeared to be watching the cattle in the sloping pasture above. Slowly, as though each one of them was drawn by mysterious unseen chains, they were drifting down toward the barn where it was almost milking time. George was talking earnestly. She threw a glance at him from time to time, and Roger could see how intent were her eyes. Yes, Deborah knew how to study a boy.

Only once during the summer did she talk about her work. On a walk with her father one day she took him into a small forlorn building, a mere cabin of one room. The white paint had long been worn away, the windows were all broken, half the old shingles had dropped from the roof and on the flagpole was no flag. It was the district schoolhouse where for nearly half his life Deborah’s grandfather had taught a score of pupils. Inside were a blackboard, a rusty stove, a teacher’s desk and a dozen forms, grown mouldy and worm-eaten now. A torn and faded picture of Lincoln was upon one wall, half hidden by a spider’s web and by a few old dangling rags which once had been red, white and blue. Below, still clinging to the wall, was an old scrap of paper, on which in a large rugged hand there had been written long ago a speech, but it had been worn away until but three words were legible⁠—“conceived and dedicated⁠—”

“Tell me about your school,” she said. “All you can remember.” Seated at her grandfather’s desk she asked Roger many questions. And his recollections, at first dim and hazy, began to clear a little.

“By George!” he exclaimed. “Here are my initials!”

He stooped over one of the benches.

“Oh, dearie! Where?” He pointed them out, and then while he sat on the rude old bench for some time more she questioned him.

“But your school was not all here,” she said musingly at last, “it was up on the farm, besides, where you learned to plough and sow and reap and take care of the animals in the barn, and mend things that were broken, and⁠—oh, turn your hand to anything. But millions of children nowadays are growing up in cities, you see.”

Half frowning and half smiling she began to talk of her work in town. “What is there about her,” Roger asked, “that reminds me so of my mother?” His mind strayed back into the past while the low quiet voice of his daughter went on, and a wistful expression crept over his face. What would she do with the family name? What life would she lead in those many years?⁠ ⁠… “What a mother she would make.” The words rose from within him, but in a voice which was not his own. It was Deborah’s grandmother speaking, so clearly and distinctly that he gave a start almost of alarm.

“And if you don’t believe they’ll do it,” Deborah was saying, “you don’t know what’s in children. Only we’ve got to help bring it out.” What had she been talking about? He remembered the words “a new nation”⁠—no more. “We’ve got to grope around in the dark and hunt for new ways and learn as we go. And when you’ve once got into the work and really felt the thrill of it all⁠—well, then it seems rather foolish and small to bother about your own little life.”

Roger spent much of his time alone. He took long rides on William along crooked, hilly roads. As the afternoon drew to its end, the shadows would creep up the mountain sides to their summits where glowed the last rays of the sun, painting the slate and granite crags in lovely pink and purple hues. And sometimes mighty banks of clouds would rear themselves high overhead, gigantic mountains of the air with billowy, misty caverns, cliffs and jagged peaks, all shifting there before his eyes. And he would think of Judith his wife. And the old haunting certainty, that her soul had died with her body, was gone. There came to him the feeling that he and his wife would meet again. Why did this hope come back to him? Was it all from the glory of the sun? Or was it from the presence, silent and invisible, of those many other mortals, folk of his own flesh and blood, who at their deaths had gone to their graves to put on immortality? Or was this deepening faith in Roger simply a sign of his growing old age?

He frowned at the thought and shook it off, and again stared up at the light on the hills. “You will live on in our children’s lives.” Was there no other immortality?

He often thought of his boyhood here. On a ride one day he stopped for a drink at a spring in a grove of maples surrounding a desolate farmhouse not more than a mile away from his own. And through the trees as he turned to go he saw the stark figure of a woman, poorly clad and gaunt and gray. She stood motionless watching him with a look of sullen bitterness. She was the last of “the Elkinses,” a mountain family run to seed. As he rode away he saw in the field a boy with a pitchfork in his hands, a meager ragged little chap. He was staring into the valley at a