“Becky, I—I don’t care for
anybody but you.”
No reply—but sobs.
“Becky”—pleadingly. “Becky,
won’t you say something?”
More sobs.
Tom got out his chiefest jewel, a brass knob from
the top of an andiron, and passed it around her so
that she could see it, and said:
“Please, Becky, won’t you take it?”
She struck it to the floor. Then Tom marched
out of the house and over the hills and far away,
to return to school no more that day. Presently
Becky began to suspect. She ran to the door; he
was not in sight; she flew around to the play-yard;
he was not there. Then she called:
“Tom! Come back, Tom!”
She listened intently, but there was no answer.
She had no companions but silence and loneliness.
So she sat down to cry again and upbraid herself;
and by this time the scholars began to gather again,
and she had to hide her griefs and still her broken
heart and take up the cross of a long, dreary, aching
afternoon, with none among the strangers about her
to exchange sorrows with.
Tom dodged hither and thither through lanes until
he was well out of the track of returning scholars,
and then fell into a moody jog. He crossed a
small “branch” two or three times, because
of a prevailing juvenile superstition that to cross
water baffled pursuit. Half an hour later he
was disappearing behind the Douglas mansion on the
summit of Cardiff Hill, and the schoolhouse was hardly
distinguishable away off in the valley behind him.
He entered a dense wood, picked his pathless way to
the centre of it, and sat down on a mossy spot under
a spreading oak. There was not even a zephyr
stirring; the dead noonday heat had even stilled the
songs of the birds; nature lay in a trance that was
broken by no sound but the occasional far-off hammering
of a woodpecker, and this seemed to render the pervading
silence and sense of loneliness the more profound.
The boy’s soul was steeped in melancholy; his
feelings were in happy accord with his surroundings.
He sat long with his elbows on his knees and his chin
in his hands, meditating. It seemed to him that
life was but a trouble, at best, and he more than
half envied Jimmy Hodges, so lately released; it must
be very peaceful, he thought, to lie and slumber and
dream forever and ever, with the wind whispering through
the trees and caressing the grass and the flowers
over the grave, and nothing to bother and grieve about,
ever any more. If he only had a clean Sunday-school
record he could be willing to go, and be done with
it all. Now as to this girl. What had he
done? Nothing. He had meant the best in the
world, and been treated like a dog—like
a very dog. She would be sorry some day—maybe
when it was too late. Ah, if he could only die
temporarily!
