The Harvest of Years Part 35

"Please let me get out and walk; excuse me, sir, but I cannot sit here."

We respected his feelings and held Gipsy back, that he might with his long strides reach his father before us, which he did. When Matthias saw him walking toward him, he rose to his feet and the two men approached each other with uncovered heads. At last, when about ten feet apart, Matthias stopped and cried:

"John, oh, John!"

"Father, father, I am here," and with one bound he reached him, threw his arms about him, while Matthias' head fell on his shoulder; and here, as we reached them, they stood speechless with the great joy that had come to them. Two souls delivered from bondage--two white souls bathed in pure sunlight of my native skies. I can never forget this scene. We spoke no word to them, but as we pa.s.sed them John spoke, saying:

"Sir, will you take my father's arm? He feels weak and I am not strong."

I took the reins and Louis, springing to the ground, stepped between, and each taking his arm they walked together up to the door of our home where Aunt Hildy, mother, father, Ben, Hal and Mary, Mrs. Davis, Jane North and Aunt Peg, waited to receive them. When Matthias saw Peg he said:

"Come, Peg, come and kiss him; this is my John sure enuf." Supper waited and the table was spread for all. Mr. Davis gave thanks and spoke feelingly of the one among us who had been delivered from the yoke of bondage, saying:

"May we be able to prove ourselves worthy of his great love, and confidence, and be forever mindful of all those both in the North and South who wait, as he has waited, for deliverance." Matthias grew calm, and when they left us to walk home, Louis and I went with them. On the road over John said to Louis:

"Sir, I am greatly indebted to you, and I am anxious to go to work at once and pay my debt."

"You owe me nothing," said Louis; "I have no claim upon your money or time; I will help you in every way possible, and my reward will be found in the great joy and comfort you will bring to your father in his old age."

"This is too much," said John.

"Not enough," said Louis, and at Aunt Peg's vine-covered lattice 'neath which he stood, we said good-night and turned toward home, while in our hearts lay mirrored, another fadeless picture.

CHAPTER XXI.

JOHN JONES.

How the days of this year flew past us, we were borne along swiftly on their wings, and every week was filled to overflowing with pleasant care and work. John was called in the South after his master's name, but now he said, inasmuch as he had left him and the old home in Newbern, it would seem better to him to be called by his father's name, and so he took his place among us as John Jones. He went to work with a will, became a great friend to Ben and helped him wonderfully, for between the saw-mill, the farm with its stock-raising and broom trade, which really was getting to be a good business, Ben was more than busy.

John was a mechanic naturally; he was clever at most anything he put his mind on, "and never tried to get shet of work;" and his daily work proved his worth among us. Matthias worked and sang the long days through, and all was bright and beautiful before him. He tried to think John's angel mother could look down from "hevin" on him, and it gave him pleasure to feel so.

When the fall came John said to Louis:

"I want to know something. I promised the boys and gals that when I got free I'd speak a few words for them, and I must learn something."

So he came regularly to Louis through the winter evenings, and in a little time he could send a readable letter to the friends down South.

Newbern was a nice place, had nice people, he told us, and he had been well treated and permitted to learn to read, but the writing he could not find time to master; he was skilful in figures, and Louis was very proud of his rapid improvement.

In our meetings he gradually came to feel at home, and at last surprised us one evening by a recital of his life, and an earnest appeal to Christians to forget not those who looked to the star in the North as to a light that promised them freedom and the comforts of a home. His large, expressive eyes grew luminous with feeling, and as he stood, rapt in his own thought, which carried him back to the old home, he seemed like a tower of strength in our midst, and when at the close of the meeting, as we walked behind them, he took his father's arm, I heard Matthias say:

"John, you's done made me proud as Loosfer."

And his handsome son bowed his head as he answered:

"Thank the G.o.d who made us all to be brothers that I have the power to tell these thoughts that rise within me. You feel just as I do, father, only you can't express it, because they did not let you grow. The heavy weight of slavery has held you close to the ground, and this is the foundation of the system. The ignorance of the chattel is the life that feeds the master's power. Like horses, if slaves knew this power, they could break their bondage, and no hand on earth could stop them."

Among the pleasant occurrences of this summer were the picnics of the mill children, who enjoyed two days in July and two days in August rambling in the woods and taking dinner in the old hemlock grove, where the trees had been so lavish of their gifts that a soft carpet of their fallen leaves covered the ground the long year through. The coolness of this beautiful shelter was most refres.h.i.+ng, and it seemed as if nature knew just how much room was needed to spread our lunch-cloth, for there was the nicest spot in the world right in the heart of the grove, and as we sat around our lowly table every third or fourth person had a splendid hemlock tree to lean against. This was a rare treat to the mill children, and oh, the faces of the pictures we painted in these days.

Willie and Burton both had their own friends with them, and when in conversation Louis spoke of the work of repairing the church and putting in new pews, Burton Brown said:

"My father can do such work."

"Can you, Mr. Brown?" said Louis.

"Yes, sir," he replied; "working in lumber is my trade; change and hard luck forced me into the mill."

I cannot tell you of all the events that occurred among us, but when the smoke from a new chimney rose in the very spot almost where Aunt Hildy's cottage stood, it was due to the fact that a new double house had been erected on a splendid lot, and Willie and Burton were living there with their parents.

Mrs. Moore had grown young looking, though the grey hairs that mingled with the brown still held their places. Mr. Brown did not meet temptations here, and as Aunt Hildy said:

"Headin' him off in a Christian way was the thing that saved him; poor critter, his stomach gnawed, and he needed just them bitters I made for him, and Louis' kind treatment and planning to help him be born agin, and its done good and strong, jest as I knew it would be."

Two more little mill boys were brought to Jane to take the places of Willie and Burton, and Louis kept walking forward, turning neither to the right nor left, bringing the comforts of living to the hearts that had known only the gathering of crumbs from the tables of the rich, and the few scattering pennies that chanced occasionally to fall from their selfish palms.

Clara's glad smile and happy words made a line of suns.h.i.+ne in our lives, and the three years following this one, which had brought so many pleasant changes, were as jewels in the coronet of active thought and work, which we were day by day weaving for ourselves and each other.

When Southern Mary left us, she gave to Aunt Hildy something to help make out Jane North's pension papers, and the first step Aunt Hildy took toward doing this was in the fall of 1853, when she painted Jane's house inside and out. Then in the next year she built a new fence for her, and insisted on helping Louis make some improvements needed to give more room, and from this time the old homestead where Jane's father and mother had lived and died, became the children's home, with Jane as its presiding genius, having help to do the work. From six to eight children were with her; three darling little girls whom Louis found in the streets of a city in the winter of 1855, were brought to the Home by him, and he considered them prizes.

To be independent in thought and action was Louis' wisdom. He had regard for the needs of children as well as of adults, for he remembered that the girls and boys are to be the men and women of the years to come, and to help them help themselves was his great endeavor.

"For this," he would say, "is just what our G.o.d does for us, Emily. He teaches the man who constantly observes all things around him, that the proper use of his bounty is what he most needs to know, and to live by the side of natural laws, moving parallel with them, is the only way to truthfully solve life's master problem. Yea, Emily, painting pictures is grand work; to see the ideal growing as a reality about us, to know we are the instruments in G.o.d's hands for doing great good; and are not the years verifying the truth of what I said to you, when a boy I told you I needed your help, and also that you did not know yourself? I knew the depth of your wondrous nature. My own Emily, you are a glorious woman,"

and as tenderly as in the olden days, with the great strength of his undying love, he gathered me in silence to his heart. How many nights I pa.s.sed to the land of dreams thinking, "Oh, if my Louis should die!"

Father and mother were enjoying life, and when Aunt Phebe came to see us, bringing a wee bit of a blue-eyed daughter, she said, "If I should have to leave her, I should die with the knowledge that she would find a home among you here."

"I don't see why we haint thought out sooner," said Aunt Hildy; "you see folks are ready, waitin', only they don't know whar to begin such work, and now there's Jane North, I'll be bound she'd a gone deeper and deeper into tattlin', ef the right one hadn't teched her in a tender spot, and now she's jest sot her heart into the work, and as true as you live, she's growin' handsome in doin' it. I'm ashamed of myself to think I have wasted so much time. Oh, ef I'd got my eyes open thirty years ago."

"Better late than never," said Aunt Phebe; "live and learn; it takes one life to teach us how to prize it, but the days to come will be full of fruit to our children, I hope."

"Wall ef we sow the wind we reap the whirlwind sure, Miss Dayton."

Aunt Phebe was very desirous that John should see Mr. Dayton, which he did, and an offer to study with him the higher mathematics was gladly accepted, and between these two men sprang a friends.h.i.+p which was enduring.

Uncle Dayton had helped many a one through the tangled maze of Euclid problems and their like, and when John walked along by his side in ease and pleasure, Mr. Dayton was delighted; and when he came to see us, he said:

"The fellow is a man, he's a man clear through.

"Why," said he, "I was just the one to carry him along all right. I was the first man to take a colored boy into a private school, and I did it under protest, losing some of the white boys, whose parents would not let them stay; not much of a loss either," he added, "though they behaved nearly as well as the colored boys I took. I belonged at the time to the Baptist Church; the colored woman, whose two sons I received into my school, was a member of the same church; three boys, whose parents were my brothers and sisters in the faith, were withdrawn, and the minister who had baptized us all, and declared us to be one in the name of the humble Nazarene, also withdrew his son from my school, being unwilling to have him recite in the cla.s.s with these two boys, whose skin was almost as white as his own. The natural inference was, that he considered himself of more consequence than the Almighty, for he certainly had given us all to him, and I had verily thought the man meant to help G.o.d do part of his work, but this proved conclusively that the Lord had it all to do--at any rate that which was not nice enough for the parson--and it took a large piece of comfort out of my heart. I was honest in trying to do my duty, and it grieved me to think he was not. Another young colored boy whom I took, is a physician in our city to-day, and another who came to my house to be instructed has been graduated at the Normal School of our State with high honors, being chosen as the valedictorian of the cla.s.s, and he is to-day princ.i.p.al of a Philadelphia school.

"I tell you this truth has always been before me, and I have run the risk of my life almost daily in practising upon it. My school was really injured for a time, and dwindled down to a few scholars, but I kept right along, and the seed which was self-sowing, sprang up around me, and to-day I have more than I can do, and the people know I am right."

The blue eyes of Mr. Dayton sparkled as he paused in his recital, running his fingers through his hair, and for a time evidently wandering in the labyrinthine walks of the soul's mathematics, whose beautifully defined laws might make all things straight, and it was only the sight of John's towering form in the doorway that roused him, and he said:

"I have brought to you Davies' Legendre. I thought he would receive more thanks in the years to come than now, for is it not always so? Are not those who move beyond the prescribed limits of the circle of to-day, unappreciated, and must we not often wait for the grave to cover their bodies, and their lives to be written, ere we realize what their hearts tried to do for us? It is a sad fact, and one which shapes itself in the mould of a selfish ignorance, which covers as a crust the tender growing beauty of our inner natures.