The sun began to fall behind the trees before Homer rose. As he did so, he cast a look at the rock upon which he had been resting; there, caught in a crevice, lay an old-fashioned bullet. He picked it up and looked at it lying in his palm. One could scarcely imagine it speeding through the air upon a hurtful mission. It had wandered on to find a victim, until, its impetus spent, it had fallen ingloriously to lie upon this rock, mocked by the sunlight which it had been meant to darken forever for some living creature. Homer slipped it into his pocket and began to make his way shoreward, leaping lightly from stone to stone. As he sprang to land again, he said between his teeth, "I'd like to hear any she-cat in the crowd open her lips to my wife!" It will be seen his reverie had developed its subject.
Homer held his way home happily, his eyes alight, his face aglow with his old generous spirit. He was once more the Homer of the past. Realizing this, he recognized the debt he owed Myron Holder, and paid homage to that strong soul whose mute endurance of ignominy and betrayal had shamed his own sleeping soul into life. It is plain to us that Myron Holder's shame was Homer Wilson's salvation. It is an ugly thought, but inevitable, that such instances may not be rare. But may not that virtue we hold "too high and good for human nature's daily food"—may not even that be bought too dear? What an ugly complexion it would put upon our intolerant attitude to those fallen ones, if we dreamed for one moment that our immaculate virtue was preserved by their vice! It would be hard to ask us to renounce heaven, but if heaven for one meant hell for another, it were at least well for us not to blow the fire.
But Homer Wilson was not thinking of any generalizations; he was simply concerned with the debt he owed Myron Holder and how to pay it; for, and be it told with no thought of disparaging Homer Wilson, he felt he would bestow an inestimable benefit upon Myron Holder by making her his wife. He believed he would, at one blow, free her from the shackles of shame. He never thought of the woman-soul that strove to justify itself by rigid adherence to those vows that had seemed so sacred, uttered, as they were, by lips that were almost divine to the listening heart they had betrayed.
It must be remembered that Homer was nothing but a plain countryman. It was therefore natural that he should look upon himself somewhat in the light of a deliverer when he considered himself in relation to Myron; and yet, inarticulate but existent, there was a hesitancy in his heart, not born of self-conceit or paltry self-seeking, but rooted in the knowledge of his own weakness in time of trial. But he put aside all this; and as he pushed on towards Jamestown mused happily upon the happiness that was his, for he loved Myron Holder. Poor Homer!
"Whoso encamps
To take a fancied city of delight,
Oh, what a wretch is he!"
CHAPTER XIV.
"For thy life shall fall as a leaf, and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain."
It was late autumn. The grapes were all out, although their aroma still filled the air, for stray bunches, super-ripened by the frost, hung visible now upon the leafless stems where they had been concealed by the foliage from the cutters. The late apples were all picked, and in the orchards were great piles of new barrels ready to be filled.
Bright green fields checkered the face of the sombre countryside with vivid squares, showing the advance of the fall-sown wheat. The chestnut-burs had opened in the woods, and the hickory-nuts were strewn thick beneath the trees. All the boys in Jamestown had brown-stained fingers, from the shelling of walnuts and butternuts. The Indian corn was being cut and bound into tent-shaped shocks, so that the fields had the appearance of a plain, set thick with tiny wigwams. Now and then, along the roads, a great wagon passed, piled high with apples, windfalls and culls going to the cider mills. Their drivers went out to Ezra Harmon's and loitered about in his big barn where the cider press stood, and watched their apples poured into the wide hopper, heard them grinding and groaning between the wheels, and saw their juices drain out through the clean rye straw into the pails beneath.