My dear boy, let us hope that you and I and all those we love so dearly will always have a bright sun above our earthly horizon to give us cheer, and to light our way, and to bring sweet songs from our hearts. And if it should set in the night of suffering and sorrow, let us guide ourselves by a holier, purer, steadier light than mortal hands can mould or kindle. So pass me those snuffers, and I will put out the candle, and we will go to bed. For all this paper of candle-ends I have collected, Bridget will find our beautiful wax-light scarcely burned; and, certainly, I think it a very cheap and excellent purchase, N'est-ce pas, mon fils?
DOCTOR JOHNS.
XXIV.
At nine next morning, prayers and breakfast being despatched,—during which Parson Brummem had determined to leave Reuben to the sting of his conscience,—the master appears in the school-room with his wristbands turned up, and his ferule in hand, to enforce judgment upon the culprit. It had been a frosty night, and the cool October air had not tempted the boys to any wide movement out of doors, so that no occupant of the parsonage had as yet detected the draggled white banner that hung from the prison-window.
Through Keziah, the parson gave orders for Master Johns to report himself at once in the school-room. The maid returned presently, clattering down the stairs in a great fright,—
"Reuben's gone, Sir!"
"Gone?" says the tall master, astounded. He represses a wriggle of healthful satisfaction on the part of his pupils by a significant lift of his ferule, then moves ponderously up the stairs for a personal visit to the chamber of the culprit. The maid had given true report; there was no one there. Never had he been met with such barefaced rebellion. Truants, indeed, there had been in days gone by; but that a pupil under discipline should have tied together Mistress Brummem's linen and left it draggling in this way, in the sight of every passer-by, was an affront to his authority which he had not deemed possible.
An hour thereafter, and he had assigned the morning's task to the boys (which he had ventured to lengthen by a third, in view—as he said, with a grim humor—of their extremely cheerful spirits); established Mistress Brummem in temporary charge, and was driving his white-faced nag down the road which led toward Ashfield. The frosted pools crackled under the wheels of the old chaise; the heaving horse wheezed as the stern parson gave his loins a thwack with the slackened reins and urged him down the turnpike which led away through the ill-kept fields, from the rambling, slatternly town. Stone walls that had borne the upheaval of twenty winters reeled beside the way. Broad scars of ochreous earth, from which the turnpike-menders had dug material to patch the wheel-track, showed ooze of yellow mud with honeycombs of ice rimming their edges, and supporting a thin film of sod made up of lichens and the roots of five-fingers. Raw, shapeless stones, and bald, gray rocks, only half unearthed, cumbered the road; while bunches of dwarfed birches, browsed by straying cattle, added to the repulsiveness of the scene. Nor were the inclosed lands scarcely more inviting. Lean shocks of corn that had swayed under the autumn winds stretched at long intervals across fields of thin stubble; a few half-ripened pumpkins, hanging yet to the seared vines,—whose leaves had long since been shrivelled by the frost,—showed their shining green faces on the dank soil. In other fields, overrun with a great shaggy growth of rag-weed, some of the parson's flock—father and blue-nosed boys—were lifting poor crops of "bile-whites" or "merinos." From time to time, a tall house jutted upon the road, with unctuous pig-sty under the lee of the garden-fence and wood-pile sprawling into the highway, where the parson would rein up his nag, and make inquiry after the truant Reuben.
A half-dozen of these stops and inquiries proved wholly vain; yet the sturdy parson urged his poor, heaving nag forward, until he had come to the little gatehouse which thrust itself quite across the high road at some six miles' distance from Bolton Church. No stray boy had passed that day. Thereupon the parson turned, and, after retracing his way for two miles or more, struck into a cross-road which led westward. There were the same fruitless inquiries here at the scattered houses, and when he came at length upon the great river-road along which the boy had passed at the first dawn there was no one who could tell anything of him; and by noon the parson reëntered the village, disconsolate and hungry. He was by no means a vindictive man, and could very likely have forgiven Reuben the blow he had struck. He had no conception of the hidden causes which had wrought in the lad such burst of anger. He conceived only that Satan had taken hold of him, and he had strong faith in the efficacy of the rod for driving Satan out.