It will be seen that the influence of Mrs. Potts pervaded our utmost social and commercial limits. And when the "Compendium" had become a centre-table ornament in the homes of the rich, and a bulky object of awe in humbler abodes, she went over the ground again with other volumes calculated to serve her double purpose, from "Dr. Chase"s Receipt Book"
to "Picturesque Italy, profusely Ill.u.s.trated." She also purveyed a line of "art-pieces," including "Wide Awake and Fast Asleep," "The Monarch of the Glen," "Woman Gathering f.a.gots," and "Retreat from Moscow." Also, little Roscoe, out of school hours, took subscriptions for the _Youth"s Companion_.
Yet the town long bore it with a gentle fort.i.tude. I believe it was not until the following spring that murmurs were really noticeable.
Naturally they were directed against Solon Denney. By that time Westley Keyts was greeting Solon morosely, though without open cavil; but Asa Bundy no longer hesitated to speak out. He quoted Scripture to Solon about the house that was swept and garnished, and the seven other wicked spirits that entered it, making its last state worse than its first.
And of course Solon was much troubled by this, though he never failed to rally to the support of the lady thus maligned, dwelling upon the advantage her mere presence must always be to the town.
"If she"d only let it go at that--"her mere presence"--" rejoined Bundy.
But Solon protested, defending the lady"s activities. He became sensitive to any mention of her name, and fell to brooding. He believed her to be a model woman, and little Roscoe to be a model boy.
"Why don"t you try to be more like Roscoe Potts?" I heard him ask his son in a moment of reproof.
My namesake took it meekly; but to me, privately, he said:--
"Hunh! I can lick Ginger Potts with one hand tied behind me!"
"How do you know?" I asked sternly.
He wriggled somewhat at this, but at length confided in me.
"Well, there"s a sell, you know, Uncle Maje. You say, "They"re goin" to tear the schoolhouse down," or something like that, and the other boy says, "What fur?" and then you say, quick as you can, "Cat-fur to make kitten britches of," and then we all laugh and yell, and I caught Ginger Potts on it, and he got mad when we yelled and come at me, and they pushed him against me and they pushed me against him, and they said he da.s.sent, and they said I da.s.sent, and then it happened, only when I got him down, he begun to say, "Oh, it"s wrong to fight! I promised my mother I would never fight!" but I wouldn"t "a" stopped for _that_, because teacher says he"s by far the brightest boy in school--only just then Eustace Eubanks come along, and he laid down the meat he was taking home to dinner and jumped into the crowd and says: "Boys, boys, shame on you to act so like the brutes! _That_ isn"t any way to act!" and he pulled me off"n Ginger, and--and that"s all, but I had him licked fair."
"I shall not tell your father of this," I said sternly.
"He has enough to worry him," said my namesake.
"Exactly," I said. "But I advise you to cultivate a friendly feeling for Roscoe Potts. Boys should not fight."
"Well--now--I would--but he"s a regular teacher"s pet."
And remembering the letter that was not sent to Sam Murdock,--that the teacher was my namesake"s love,--I perceived that this breach was not to be healed.
CHAPTER XII
TROUBLED WATERS ARE STILLED
It was spring again, a Sunday in early May, warm, humid, scented with blossoms that were bodied souls of the laughing air. They starred the bank that fell away from my porch to the clear-watered river, and they sang of the young spirit that lives in this old earth so deceptively, defacing it with false scars of age, and craftily permitting us to count years by the thousand, yet remaining always as fresh in itself as on the primal morning when the world was found good by that ill-fated but joyous first pair of lovers. I marvel that so many are fooled by the trick; how so few of us detect that the soul of it all is ageless--has never even wearied. The blossoms told this secret now in quiet triumph over the denials of ancient oaks that towered above them and murmured solemn falsities in their tops about the incredible oldness of things.
There was the star-shaped bloodroot, with its ten or a dozen petals of waxen white set with jewel-like precision about a centre of dead gold.
There was the less formal phlox of a pinkish purple; deer"s-tongue, white and yellow; frail anemones, both pink and white; small but stately violets, and the wake-robin with its wine-red centre among long green leaves. There was a dogwood in the act of unfolding its little green tents that would presently be snow-white, and a plum tree ruffled with tiny flowers of a honied fragrance.
With a fine j.a.panese restraint, Clem had placed a single bough of these in a dull-colored vase on my out-of-doors breakfast table.
All these were to say that the soul of the world is ageless, and that time is but a cheap device to measure our infirmities. Above, the trees were hinting that life might still be lived acceptably, as in Eden days; though they seemed to suspect that the stage of it to which they were amazedly awakening must be at least the autumn, and timidly clothed themselves accordingly. The elm, the first big tree to stir in its sleep, showed tiny, curled leaflets of a doubting, yellowish green; and the later moving oaks were frankly sceptical, one glowing faintly brown and crimson, another silvery gray and pink. They would need at least ten more days to convince them into downright summer greenery, even though slender-throated doves already mated in their tops with a perfect confidence.
It was an early morning hour, when it was easy to believe in the perfect fitness of Little Arcady"s name; an hour in a time when the Potts-troubled waters had been mercifully stilled by the hand of G.o.d; an hour when the spirit of each Little Arcadian might share to its own fulness in the large serenity of the ageless world-soul.
I recalled Mrs. Potts"s paper on "The Lesson of Greek Art," which had enriched two columns of the _Argus_ after its reading to the ladies of the Literary and Home Study Club. It seemed to me that the Greeks must have divined this important secret of the vegetable world--the secret of ageless time--and that therein lay the charm of them; that spirit of ever freshening joy which they chiselled and sang into tangible grace for us of a later and heavier age.
At the moment I was on the porch, waiting for my coffee, and my thought seemed to be shared by Jim, my bony young setter, who, being but a scant year old, had not yet forgotten the lesson of Greek art. Over the gra.s.sy stretch before the porch he chased robins tirelessly, though with indifferent success. His was a spirit truly Greek. I knew it by reason of his inexhaustible enthusiasm for this present sport after a year"s proving that chased birds will rise strangely but expertly into air that no dog can climb by any device of whining, leaping, or straining.
Living on into the Renaissance, I saw that Jim would be taught the grievous thing called wisdom--would learn his limitations and to form habits tamely contrary to his natural Greek likings. Then would he honorably neglect rabbits and all fur, cease pointing droves of pigs, and quit the silly chase of robins. Under check-cord and spike-collar he would become a fast and stylish dog, clean-cut in his bird work, perhaps a field-trial winner. He would learn to take reproof amiably, to "heel" at a word, to respect the whistle at any distance, to be steady to shot and wing, to retrieve promptly from land or water, and never to bolt or range beyond control or be guilty of false pointing.
I knew that coercion, steadily and tactfully applied, would thus educate him, for was he not of champion ancestry, wearing his pedigree in his looks, with the narrow shoulders so desirable and so rarely found, with just the right number of hairs at the end of his tail, the forelegs properly feathered, the feet and ankles strong, the right amount of leather in his ear to the fraction of an inch,--a dog, in short, of beauty, style, speed, nose, and brains?
But in this full moment of a glad morning I resolved that Jim should never know the Renaissance; he should never emerge from what Mrs. Potts had gracefully described as "the golden age of Pericles."
To the end of his days he should be blithely, navely Greek; a dog of wretched field manners, pointing cattle and quail impartially, shamefully gun-shy, inconsequent, volatile, ignorant, forever paganly joyous without due cause. For him I should do what no one had been able to do for me--detain him in that "world of fine fabling" where everything is true that ought to be; where the earth is a running course, fascinating in its surprises of open road and tangled hedgerow; where mere indiscriminate smelling is keenest ecstasy; and where the fact that robins have eluded one"s fleetest rush to-day, by an amazing and unfair trick of levitation, is not the slightest promise that they can escape our interested mouthing on the morrow.
Doubtless he would be a remarkably foolish dog in his old age; but I, growing old beside him, would learn wisely foolish things from his excellent folly. I knew we should both be happier for it; knew it was best for us both to prove that my thin white friend had been born chiefly to display the acute elegance of his bones and the beauty of hopeful effort.
It was this last that kept him thin. When I took to the road, he travelled five miles to my every one, circling me widely, ranging far over the hills in mad dashes, or running straight and swiftly on the road, vanishing in a white fog of dust. Walking slowly to avoid this, I would only meet him emerging from a fresh cloud of it with a glad tongue thrown out to the breeze. Again, there were desperate plunges into wayside underbrush or down steep ravines, whence I would hear rapid splashing through a hidden stream and short, plaintive cries to tell that that wonderful, unseen wood-presence of a thousand provoking scents had once more cunningly evaded him.
Also did he love to swim stoutly across a field of growing wheat, his head alone showing above the green waves. And if the wheat were tall, he still braved it--lost to sight at the bottom. Then one might observe the mystery of a furrow ploughing itself swiftly across the billows without visible agency.
When I do not walk, to give countenance to his running, he has a game of his own. He plays it with an ancient fur cap that he keeps conveniently stored. The cap represents a prey of considerable dignity which must be sprung upon and shaken again and again until it is finally disabled.
Then it is to be seized by implacable jaws and swiftly run with about the yard in a feverish pretence that enemies wish to ravish it from its captor. Any chance observer is implored to humor this pretence, and upon his compliance he is fled from madly, or perhaps turned upon and growled at most directly, if he show signs of losing interest in the game.
This ceaseless motion, with its attendant nervous strains, has prevented any acc.u.mulation of flesh, and explains the name of Slim Jim affixed to him by my namesake.
Jim consented now to rest for a moment at my feet, though at a loss to know how I could be calm amid so many exciting smells. I promised him as he lay there that he should never be compelled to learn any but the fewest facts necessary to make him as harmless as he was happy; chiefly not to bark at old ladies and babies, no matter how threatening their aspect, as they pa.s.sed our house. A few things he had already learned--to avoid fences of the barbed wire, to respect the big cat from across the way who sometimes called and treated him with watchful disdain, and not to chew a baby robin if by any chance he caught one.
This last had been a hard lesson, his first contact with a problem only a few days younger than Eden itself. It came to his understanding, however, that if you mouth a helpless baby robin, a hand or a stick falls upon you hurtfully, even if you evade it for the moment and seclude yourself under a porch until it would seem that so trifling an occurrence must have been utterly forgotten. This was the one big sin--sin, to the best of our knowledge, being obedience to any natural desire, the satisfaction of which is unaccountably followed by pain.
I told him this would probably be all that he need ever know; and he looked up at me in a fashion he has, the silky brown ears falling either side of the white face. It is a look of languishing, melting adoration, and if I face him steadily, he must always turn away as if to avoid being overcome--as if the sight of beauty so great as mine could be borne full in the eyes only for the briefest of moments.
But Clem came now, ranging my breakfast dishes about the bowl of plum flowers, and I approached the table with all the ardor he could have wished at his softly spoken, "Yo" is suhved, Mahstah Majah."
The sight of Clem, however, inevitably suggests the person to whom I am indebted for his sustaining ministrations. Potts had been a necessary instrument in one of those complications which the G.o.ds devise among us human ephemera for their mild amus.e.m.e.nt on a day of _ennui_. And Potts, having served his purpose, had been neatly removed. I have said that the Potts-troubled waters of Little Arcady were for the moment stilled. By the hands of the G.o.ds had they been mercifully stilled so that not for a month had any citizen been asked to subscribe for any improving book or patented device of culture.
A month before, in a far-off place, J. Rodney Potts had suffered extinction through the apparently casual agency of a moving railway train, the intervention of the G.o.ds in all such matters being discreetly veiled so that the denser of us shall suspect nothing but that they were the merest of accidents.
One could only surmise that the widow viewed this happening with a kind of trustful resignation, sweetened perhaps by certain ancient memories attuned to a gentle melancholy. I know that she placed on view in her parlor for the first time a crayon portrait of Potts in his early manhood, one made ere life had broken so many of its promises to him, the portrait of one who might conceivably have enchained the fancy of even a superior woman. But the widow was not publicly anguished. She donned a gown and bonnet of black in testimony of her bereavement, but there was no unnecessary flaunt of c.r.a.pe in her decently symbolic garb.
As Aunt Delia McCormick phrased it, she was not in "heavy mourning,"--merely "in light distress."
The town was content to let it go at that, especially after the adjustment of certain formalities which enabled the widow for a time to suspend her work of ministering to its higher wants.
The railway company had at first, it appeared, been disposed to view its removal of Potts very lightly indeed; not only because of his unimposing appearance, but by reason of his well-attested mental condition at the time of the occurrence--a condition clearly self-induced, and one that placed him beyond those measures of safety which a common carrier is obliged to exercise in behalf of its patrons.
But a package of letters had been discovered among the meagre belongings of the unfortunate man, and these had placed the matter in a very different light. They showed conclusively that the victim had been of importance, a citizen of rare values in any community that he might choose to favor with his presence.
Truman Baird settled the case and, after these letters had been appraised by the corporation"s attorney, he succeeded in extorting the sum of eight hundred dollars from the railway as recompense to the widow for the loss of her husband"s services. I considered that the company would have given up at least five hundred more to avoid being sued for the death of a man who had been able to evoke those letters; but I did not say so, for the case was Truman"s and eight hundred dollars were many. Westley Keyts thought they were, indeed, a great many, and outrageously excessive as a cold money valuation of Potts. "She only got eight hundred dollars, but there"s them that thinks she skinned the company at _that!_" said Westley.
But there was no disposition to begrudge the widow a single dollar of this modest sum. A jury of Little Arcadians would have multiplied it tenfold without a blush; for, while that little h.o.a.rd endured, any citizen, however public spirited, could flavor with a certain grace his refusal to subscribe for a book.