IV.
“You must get a man to work the farm on shares. He will make it pay you better than I have. I am no farmer.” The tone had no note of discouragement; it had rather the ring of success.
Mrs. Derring looked up from her sewing. Richard had never said “must” to her before.
“What is the matter, Richard?” She looked at him searchingly.
“I want to go to college. I shall never do anything at farming, but I might at something else if I had the chance.” He spoke impersonally, as if they were talking of someone else.
“Well, perhaps it is the best thing to do.”
Mrs. Derring sewed on for a few minutes in silence; then she said slowly, as if the plan were forming itself, “I guess Tom Bishop would take the farm on shares and they could go to housekeeping in the L-part. The rent would bring in a little something. He and Mary have wanted to go to housekeeping ever since they were married.” She ended with a questioning inflection, submitting the plan.
She was not a “capable” woman. The queerness of Geoffrey Crane had descended to the daughter, and she was conscious that her plans were often impracticable. But twenty-four years of farming life had taught her to adjust herself to the inevitable. Almost without volition her mind had begun to turn over ways and means to meet this new emergency.
“I could let them have the south chamber and the back store-room. And perhaps we could pack up the things in father's room so they could have that.”
The young man listened in surprise. He had expected remonstrance, even refusal. He was not prepared for such rapid furthering of his project. He was almost inclined to make obstacles himself—so rapidly did she plan.
“Father Crane would be pleased, if he were alive, to know you wanted to go. He always wanted Eben to go to college. But he married Jerusha. They all said he ought to have been a scholar. He was bright at his books. But he was possessed to marry Jerusha. So father had to give it up. He always wanted me to go to school more, too. It was a disappointment to him that I married so young.”
She sat looking thoughtfully out of the narrow-paned window, lost in thought of that far-off time when she was courted and won by Marcus Derring.
Richard, the Greek grammar in his hand, stole softly out of the room and climbed the steep stairway. He went quickly down the long hall and opened a door at the end. The room thus disclosed was a curious one. Across one side ran a sloping shelf, broken at one end by a zinc-lined sink. The other sides of the room were filled with cabinets in which were arranged specimens of rock, chemicals, blowpipes, and many curious contrivances, the use of which Richard could not even guess. In this room Geoffrey Crane had lived and dreamed and died. Here, in the midst of his heritage, the boy sat down to begin the work that should make him what his grandfather would have wished.
But instead of opening the brown-covered book he sat with it in his hand, thinking of the new life its pages were to open up to him. Life crowded before him. College—new faces—new friends—study—success. And Emily would be—she would not know—or care. She would marry Edwards. She would not know whether he succeeded or failed. Was it worth while?
Something flashed upon him and startled him. If she had cared, he should not now be planning a new life.
“I should have been as happy as Uncle Eben,” he thought with a half smile.
To-day he did not resent the implied disloyalty to his idol. He was not thinking of her so much as of Love, the power that holds all men in its grasp and bends them to its will, till each soul longs for nothing so much as that Love shall take human shape and dwell beside him. Dimly it flitted before him,—luminous but indefinable,—filling him with wonder. Uncle Eben married the woman he loved and his life had been dwarfed. Seth Kinney lost the woman he loved, and his life was warped, distorted, and spoiled. Was it fate? Life without love was hard and cold. He opened the grammar and began to read. “Sixteen Greek letters—viz.:
α, γ, β, ε, ι, ο, δ, κ, λ, μ, ν, π, ρ, σ, τ, υ
were introduced into Phoenicia by Cadmus fifteen hundred years before Christ.”