One Way of Love (Lee)/Chapter 5
V.
At breakfast next morning his mother faced him over her coffee-cup, stern and less ready. “I have been going over the accounts all night.” She spoke in a voice that was half complaint. “I don't see how we can manage it. The interest is a hundred and eighty-six and the taxes thirty-five, and there is never anything left at the end of the year, even as it is now.” She looked at him, her dark eyes weary with the night's work.
His own eyes flashed back a still light. “I shall do it some way, mother. Don't you worry.”
She shook her head, choking back something in her throat. “Your father would have wanted you to—if he had lived” She rose quickly and turned away to the pantry.
When she came back her eyes were shining again.
He looked at her, smiling. “You'll find that Tom makes twice as much off the farm as I ever have. You'll be rich.”
“There's the schooling,” she said anxiously.
“I shall earn it.” His lips came together. The dreamy look in his eyes was replaced by one of shrewd determination.
His mother's glance followed him admiringly. She rose from the table and began to clear away the dishes. Her step was light.
“And if I find I can't study and earn, too, I'll stop till I get enough to go on. It isn't as if I were good for much on the farm” He looked at her, waiting,
“No, no—have your way. You've never asked for what you hadn't ought to have. It's true enough you'll never be a farmer.” She stood for a moment, one hand holding the plates and cups, the other resting on the table, looking at him fondly. Then she turned brusquely away to the sink.
He took down his cap from its nail and went out into the clear light, whistling. Particles of frost glinted in the air. They formed on the edge of his upturned collar and fur cap and deepened the down of his lip. He blew them aside with a laugh. Taking the axe from the shed, down the lane he strode, the crusted earth crunching beneath his vigorous tread. The axe was shifted from side to side, as he walked, and the free arm swung across his chest. He struck into the wood-road with a song and hallooed to the stillness. The love-sick boy of yesterday was gone. Taking off his cap he called and sang till the blue-jays forgot to be frightened and hovered, curious, in the trees overhead. He took off his cap to them, looking up through the tree-tops to the blue shimmer of sky. He swung the cap around his head and they darted away—a blue and white clatter of sound. He replaced it, laughing softly.
The earth was alive. He reached out to the bushes as he passed, trailing the budded stems through his fingers and brushing the purple-brown oak-leaves with swiftest touch. When he came to the tree that he was to cut he ran his palm up and down its rough bark before he seized his axe and swung it clear from his shoulder. The blows rang even and hard, and with every blow he drove home the first declension of the Greek grammar.
Every day found him at work in the woods. Soon Tom Bishop joined him and the cross-cut saw flashed to its work in the trunks. Richard, to the tune of its monotonous seesaw, sang Greek verbs and declined nouns—till Tom caught the rhythm and chanted declensions in sheer self-defence. At night when he repeated the strange sounds proudly to his little wife she looked at him in delight—but half in fear that he would grow away from her. She counted jealously the days that must elapse before the sledding should be done.
The fame of Richard's learning went abroad through the land. All the world knew that Seth Kinney was “learning him Greek.” The old man came often to the wood-lot to hear him recite. Sitting on a fallen log, he would repeat long, rolling lines of poetry that the choppers repeated after him, to the rhythm of the saw, till the still, cold light was alive with tumbling Greek. Perhaps the blue-jays, flitting among the treetops, heard the news and told it to the crows; and the crows of the open field called to the snowbirds and sparrows; and the snowbirds lisped it to the chickadees; and the chickadees, turning upside down on the orchard trees, twittered to the hens running to and fro and cackling everywhere. Or it may be that Tom's wife told her mother. In any case, the whole village knew it. And, perhaps, it was a little balm to Richard's heart—if balm it needed—as he swung by her lighted window at night to know that she knew.