The Christmas Peace / 1908

by Thomas Nelson Page

The old friendship might have disappeared in any event, but a new cause arose which was certain to end it.

Lucy Fielding was, perhaps, the prettiest girl in all that region. Oliver Hampden had always been in love with her. However, Fortune, ever capricious, favored Wilmer Drayton, who entered the lists when it looked as if Miss Lucy were almost certain to marry her old lover. It appeared that Mr. Drayton's indifference had counted for more than the other's devotion. He carried off the prize with a dash.

If Oliver Hampden, however, was severely stricken by his disappointment, he masked it well; for he married not long afterward, and though some said it was from pique, there was no more happily married pair in all the county.

A year later a new Oliver came to keep up the name and tenets of the Hampdens. Oliver Hampden, now the head of the Bar, would not have envied any man on earth had not his wife died a few years later and left him alone with his boy in his big house.

Lucy Drayton was born two years after young Oliver Hampden.

The mammies of the two children, as the mammies of their parents had done before them, used to talk them over on the edge of the shaded meadow which divided the places, and thus young Oliver Hampden, a lusty boy of five, came to know little Lucy Drayton fully three years before his father ever laid eyes on her.

Mr. Hampden was riding around his fences one summer afternoon, and was making his way along the double division line with a cloud on his brow as the double rows recalled the wide breach with his neighbor and former friend, and many memories came trooping at the recollection. Passing through a small grove which had been allowed to grow up to shut off a part of his view of the Drayton place, as he came out into the meadow his eye fell on a scene which made him forget the present with all its wrongs. On the green turf before him where butter-cups speckled the ground with golden blossoms, was a little group of four persons busily engaged and wholly oblivious of the differences which divided the masters of the two estates. The two mammies were seated side by side on a bank, sewing and talking busily—their large aprons and caps making a splotch of white against the green willows beyond—and in front of them at a little distance a brown-haired boy of five and a yellow-ringleted girl of three were at play on the turf, rolling over and over, shouting and laughing in their glee.

As the father rested his eyes on the group, the frown which had for a second lowered on his brow passed away and he pulled in his horse so as not to disturb them. He was about to turn back and leave them in their happiness when his black-eyed boy caught sight of him and ran toward him, shouting for a ride and calling over his shoulder for “Luthy” to “come on too.” As there was no escape, Mr. Hampden went forward and, ignoring the confusion of the mammies at being caught together, took the boy up before him and gave him a ride up and down the meadow. Then nothing else would do for Master Oliver but he “must take Luthy up, too.”

“Perhaps 'Luthy' may be afraid of the horse!” suggested Mr. Hampden with a smile.

But far from it. Led by the little boy who had run to fetch her, she came to Mr. Hampden as readily as his own son had done, and, though she gave him one of those quick searching glances with which childhood reads character, having made sure that he was friendly, she was no more afraid of his horse than the boy was.