CHAPTER XVIII.
"Yea, then were all things laid within the scale—
Pleasure and lust, love and desire of fame,
Kindness, and hope, and folly, all the tale
Told in a moment—as across him came
That sudden flash, bright as the lightning flame,
Showing the wanderer on the waste how he
Has gone astray 'mid dark and misery."
Outwardly the lives of Myron Holder and Homer Wilson gave no sign of these conflicts. It is the petty worries and every-day griefs of life that traces lines upon the brow. A fretful discontent often leaves a wrinkle when a great grief obscures itself behind the placidity of despair.
Myron Holder's face now shone in unaltered—and it seemed unalterable—calm. That wild night had not been spent in vain. Self-poised, if humble, her life seemed centred calmly at last.
As for Homer Wilson; it was different with him. His heart was still parched with the "thirst that thirsteth on," but he no longer sought for draughts to slake it. His attitude approximated that of those who, dying of some dreadful disease, accept their fate and, looking the inevitable in the face, long for the end.
One day he found in his pocket the old bullet he had picked up from the crevice in the rock. He turned it over, wondering where he got it; then remembering, a bitter thought crossed his mind that he was like that bullet. His life-impetus gone, he was but a thing for the sun to scorn. Myron, no longer trembling for herself, felt a deep tenderness spring within her heart for Homer, and sought to show him in every way that he was her only friend and that she trusted him.
Myron had almost made up her mind to leave Jamestown, and a little incident that occurred one day strengthened this thought to a resolution. The school-house was quite near the Holder cottage: the playground bordered one side of the cottage garden; a fence of slackly hung wires was between them; beyond the fence in the playground was a little ditch with heaped-up sides, on which grew many yellow buttercups. This was a favorite haunt for the younger school children, and their voices came in mingled cadences across Myron's rows of vegetables.
One day in later summer Myron was at home from Mrs. Deans', having by that lady's desire brought the weekly washing from the farm, to do it in the cottage. The windows were flung high, and through the rising steam from her wash tubs Myron's eyes followed My's golden head as he trotted about the garden. Looking up once, she saw him standing by the fence, holding to one swaying wire and peering through at the children in the playground. A momentary pang shot through her heart—he seemed so isolated there; and yet the barrier that separated him from the other Jamestown children was so slight—just a slack-wire fence—that any one could see through, that hung irregularly between its supports, now so low that it could be stepped over, again so high it seemed impassable, only where it was so lofty the spaces between the wires were wide enough to creep through.
The sunlight shone on both sides the same. The buttercups straggled through to the vegetables, seeming by their persistence to wish to bloom there, and the singing of the catbird in the elm tree was as sweet to My's ears as to Sammy Warner's upon the other side.