"G.o.d bless you, sweetheart," he cried, and kissed her again,--many times. "It"s all right now, isn"t it? I knew my father would give his consent when he found out what you were."
The expression of pain which had troubled him crossed her face again, and she put her hand on his shoulder.
"Listen, dearest," she said, "I love you. I am doing this for you. You must understand that."
"Why, yes, Cynthia, I understand it--of course I do," he answered, perplexed. "I understand it, but I don"t deserve it."
"I want you to know," she continued in a low voice, "that I should have married you anyway. I--I could not have helped it."
"Cynthia!"
"If you were to go back to the locomotive works" tomorrow, I would marry you."
"On ninety dollars a month?" exclaimed Bob.
"If you wanted me," she said.
"Wanted you! I could live in a log cabin with you the rest of my life."
She drew down his face to hers, and kissed him.
"But I wished you to be reconciled with your father," she said; "I could not bear to come between you. You--you are reconciled, aren"t you?"
"Indeed, we are," he said.
"I am glad, Bob," she answered simply. "I should not have been happy if I had driven you away from the place where you should be, which is your home."
"Wherever you are will be my home; sweetheart," he said, and pressed her to him once more.
At length, looking past his shoulder into the street, she saw Lem Hallowell pulling up the Brampton stage before the door.
"Bob," she said, "I must go to Coniston and see Uncle Jethro. I promised him."
Bob"s answer was to walk into the entry, where he stood waving the most joyous of greetings at the surprised stage driver.
"I guess you won"t get anybody here, Lem," he called out.
"But, Bob," protested Cynthia, from within, afraid to show her face just then, "I have to go, I promised. And--and I want to go," she added when he turned.
"I"m running a stage to Coniston to-day myself, Lem, said he "and I"m going to steal your best pa.s.senger."
Lemuel immediately flung down his reins and jumped out of the stage and came up the path and into the entry, where he stood confronting Cynthia.
"Hev you took him, Cynthy?" he demanded.
"Yes, Lem," she answered, "won"t you congratulate me?"
The warm-hearted stage driver did congratulate her in a most unmistakable manner.
"I think a sight of her, Bob," he said after he had shaken both of Bob"s hands and brushed his own eyes with his coat sleeve. "I"ve knowed her so long--" Whereupon utterance failed him, and he ran down the path and jumped into his stage again and drove off.
And then Cynthia sent Bob on an errand--not a very long one, and while he was gone, she sat down at the table and tried to realize her happiness, and failed. In less than ten minutes Bob had come back with Cousin Ephraim, as fast as he could hobble. He flung his arms around her, stick and all, and he was crying. It is a fact that old soldiers sometimes cry. But his tears did not choke his utterance.
"Great Tec.u.mseh!" said Cousin Ephraim, "so you"ve went and done it, Cynthy. Siege got a little mite too hot. I callated she"d capitulate in the end, but she held out uncommon long."
"That she did," exclaimed Bob, feelingly.
"I--I was tellin" Bob I hain"t got nothin" against him," continued Ephraim.
"Oh,, Cousin Eph," said Cynthia, laughing in spite of herself, and glancing at Bob, "is that all you can say?"
"Cousin Eph"s all right," said Bob, laughing too. "We understand each other."
"Callate we do," answered Ephraim. "I"ll go so far as to say there hain"t n.o.body I"d ruther see you marry. Guess I"ll hev to go back to the kit, now. What"s to become of the old pensioner, Cynthy?"
"The old pensioner needn"t worry," said Cynthia., Then drove up Silas the Silent, with Bob"s buggy and his black trotters. All of Brampton might see them now; and all of Brampton did see them. Silas got out,--his presence not being required,--and Cynthia was helped in, and Bob got in beside her, and away they went, leaving Ephraim waving his stick after them from the doorstep.
It is recorded against the black trotters that they made very poor time to Coniston that day, though I cannot discover that either of them was lame. Lem Hallowell, who was there nearly an hour ahead of them, declares that the off horse had a bunch of branches in his mouth. Perhaps Bob held them in on account of the scenery that September afternoon. Incomparable scenery! I doubt if two lovers of the renaissance ever wandered through a more wondrous realm of pleasance-- to quote the words of the poet. Spots in it are like a park, laid out by that peerless landscape gardener, nature: dark, symmetrical pine trees on the sward, and maples in the fulness of their leaf, and great oaks on the hillsides, and, coppices; and beyond, the mountain, the evergreens ma.s.sed like cloud-shadows on its slopes; and all-trees and coppice and mountain --flattened by the haze until they seemed woven in the softest of blues and blue greens into one exquisite picture of an ancient tapestry. I, myself, have seen these pictures in that country, and marvelled.
So they drove on through that realm, which was to be their realm, and came all too soon to Coniston green. Lem Hallowell had spread the well- nigh incredible news, that Cynthia Wetherell was to marry the son of the mill-owner and railroad president of Brampton, and it seemed to Cynthia that every man and woman and child of the village was gathered at the store. Although she loved them, every one, she whispered something to Bob when she caught sight of that group on the platform, and he spoke to the trotters. Thus it happened that they flew by, and were at the tannery house before they knew it; and Cynthia, all unaided, sprang out of the buggy and ran in, alone. She found Jethro sitting outside of the kitchen door with a volume on his knee, and she saw that the print of it was large, and she knew that the book was "Robinson Crusoe."
Cynthia knelt down on the gra.s.s beside him and caught his hands in hers.
"Uncle Jethro," she said, "I am going to marry Bob Worthington."
"Yes, Cynthy," he answered. And taking the initiative for the first time in his life, he stooped down and kissed her.
"I knew--you would be happy--in my happiness," she said, the tears br.i.m.m.i.n.g in her eyes.
"N-never have been so happy, Cynthy,--never have."
"Uncle Jethro, I never will desert you. I shall always take care of you."
"R-read to me sometimes, Cynthy--r-read to me?"
But she could not answer him. She was sobbing on the pages of that book he had given her--long ago.
I like to dwell on happiness, and I am reluctant to leave these people whom I have grown to love. Jethro Ba.s.s lived to take Cynthia"s children down by the brook and to show them the pictures, at least, in that wonderful edition of "Robinson Crusoe." He would never depart from the tannery house, but Cynthia went to him there, many times a week. There is a spot not far from the Coniston road, and five miles distant alike from Brampton and Coniston, where Bob Worthington built his house, and where he and Cynthia dwelt many years; and they go there to this day, in the summer-time. It stands in the midst of broad lands, and the ground in front of it slopes down to Coniston Water, artificially widened here by a stone dam into a little lake. From the balcony of the summer-house which overhangs the lake there is a wonderful view of Coniston Mountain, and Cynthia Worthington often sits there with her sewing or her book, listening to the laughter of her children, and thinking, sometimes, of bygone days.
AFTERWORD.
The reality of the foregoing pages has to the author, at least, become so vivid that he regrets the necessity of having to add an afterword. Every novel is, to some extent, a compound of truth and fiction, and he has done his best to picture conditions as they were, and to make the spirit of his book true. Certain people who were living in St. Louis during the Civil War have been mentioned as the originals of characters in "The Crisis," and there are houses in that city which have been pointed out as fitting descriptions in that novel. An author has, frequently, people, houses, and localities in mind when he writes; but he changes them, sometimes very materially, in the process of literary construction.
It is inevitable, perhaps, that many people of a certain New England state will recognize Jethro Ba.s.s. There are different opinions extant concerning the remarkable original of this character; ardent defenders and detractors of his are still living, but all agree that he was a strange man of great power. The author disclaims any intention of writing a biography of him. Some of the things set down in this book he did, and others he did not do. Some of the anecdotes here related concerning him are, in the main, true, and for this material the author acknowledges his indebtedness particularly to Colonel Thomas B. Cheney of Ashland, New Hampshire, and to other friends who have helped him. Jethro Ba.s.s was typical of his Era, and it is of the Era that this book attempts to treat.
Concerning the locality where Jethro Ba.s.s was born and lived, it will and will not be recognized. It would have been the extreme of bad taste to have put into these pages any portraits which might have offended families or individuals, and in order that it may be known that the author has not done so he has written this Afterword. Nor has he particularly chosen for the field of this novel a state of which he is a citizen, and for which he has a sincere affection. The conditions here depicted, while retaining the characteristics of the locality, he believes to be typical of the Era over a large part of the United States.
Many of the Puritans who came to New England were impelled to emigrate from the old country, no doubt, by an aversion to pulling the forelock as well as by religious principles, and the spirit of these men prevailed for a certain time after the Revolution was fought. Such men lived and ruled in Coniston before the rise of Jethro Ba.s.s.
Self-examination is necessary for the moral health of nations as well as men, and it is the most hopeful of signs that in the United States we are to-day going through a period of self-examination.
We shall do well to ascertain the causes which have led us gradually to stray from the political principles laid down by our forefathers for all the world to see. Some of us do not even know what those principles were. I have met many intelligent men, in different states of the Union, who could not even repeat the names of the senators who sat for them in Congress. Macaulay said, in 1852, "We now know, by the clearest of all proof, that universal suffrage, even united with secret voting, is no security, against the establishment of arbitrary power." To quote James Russell Lowell, writing a little later: "We have begun obscurely to recognize that ... popular government is not in itself a panacea, is no better than any other form except as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so."
As Americans, we cannot but believe that our political creed goes down in its foundations to the solid rock of truth. One of the best reasons for our belief lies in the fact that, since 1776, government after government has imitated our example. We have, by our very existence and rise to power, made any decided retrogression from these doctrines impossible. So many people have tried to rule themselves, and are still trying, that one begins to believe that the time is not far distant when the United States, once the most radical, will become the most conservative of nations.
Thus the duty rests to-day, more heavily than ever, upon each American citizen to make good to the world those principles upon which his government was built. To use a figure suggested by the calamity which has lately befallen one of the most beloved of our cities, there is a theory that earthquakes are caused by a necessary movement on the part of the globe to regain its axis. Whether or not the theory be true, it has its political application. In America to-day we are trying--whatever the cost--to regain the true axis established for us by the founders of our Republic.
HARLAKENDEN HOUSE, May 7, 1906.