Chapter XII
IT was Cy Akers who carried the news to the schoolhouse, galloping his old sorrel up to the open door just before the bell tapped for afternoon dismissal. He did not dismount, but drawing rein, leaned forward in his saddle, waiting for the little schoolmistress to step down from the desk to the doorstep. The rows of waiting children craned their necks anxiously, but only those nearest the door heard his message.
"Mr. Asa Holmes died this morning," he said. "The funeral is set for to-morrow afternoon at four, and you can announce to the children that there won't be any school. The trustees thought it would be only proper to close out of respect for him, as he was on the school board over thirty years, and has done so much for the community. He's one of the old landmarks, you might say, about the last of the old pioneers, and everybody will want to go."
Before she could recover from the suddenness of the announcement the rider was gone, and she was left looking out across the October fields with a lonely sense of personal loss, although her acquaintance with the old miller had extended over only two short school terms.
A few minutes later the measured tramp of feet over the worn door-sill began, and forty children passed out into the mellow sunshine of the late autumn afternoon. They went quietly at first, awed by the tender, reverent words in which the little schoolmistress had given them the message to carry home. But once outside, the pent-up enthusiasm over their unexpected holiday, and the mere joy of being alive and free on such a day sent them rushing down the road pell-mell, shouting and swinging their dinner-pails as they ran.
A shade of annoyance crossed the teacher's face as she stood watching from the doorstep. She wished she had cautioned them not to be so noisy, for she knew that their shouts could be plainly heard in the old house whose gables she could see through a clump of cedars, farther down the road. It was standing with closed blinds now, and she had a feeling that the laughing voices floating across to it must strike harshly across its profound silence.
But presently her face brightened as she watched the children running on in the sunshine, in the joy of their emancipation. Part of a poem she had read that morning came to her. She had thought when she read it that it was a beautiful way to look upon death, and now it bore a new significance, and she whispered it to herself:
"'Why should it be a wrench to leave this wooden bench?
Why not with happy shout, run home when school is out?'
"That's the way the old miller has gone," she said, softly. "His lessons all learned and his tasks all done—so well done, too, that he has nothing to regret. I'm glad that I didn't stop the children. I am sure that's the way he would want them to go. Dear old man! He was always a boy at heart."
She turned the key in the door behind her presently, and started down the road to Mrs. Powers's, where she boarded. In every fence corner the sumachs flamed blood-red, and across the fields, where purple shadows trailed their royal lengths behind every shock of corn, the autumn woodlands massed their gold and crimson against the sunset sky. She walked slowly, loath to reach the place where she must go indoors.