"Hush,dear,and don't ask questions that's enough for grown folks to worry over,let alone a boy like you.Now be good,"--a quality in Mrs.Harkutt's mind synonymous with ceasing from troubling,--"and after supper,while I'm in the parlor with your father and sisters,you kin sit up here by the fire with your book.""But,"persisted the boy in a flash of inspiration,"is popper goin'to join in business with those surveyors,--a surveyin'?""No,child,what an idea!Run away there,--and mind!--don't bother your father."Nevertheless John Milton's inspiration had taken a new and characteristic shape.All this,he reflected,had happened since the surveyors came--since they had weakly displayed such a shameless and unmanly interest in his sisters!It could have but one meaning.He hung around the sitting-room and passages until he eventually encountered Clementina,taller than ever,evidently wearing a guilty satisfaction in her face,engrafted upon that habitual bearing of hers which he had always recognized as belonging to a vague but objectionable race whose members were individually known to him as "a proudy.""Which of those two surveyor fellows is it,Clemmy?"he said with an engaging smile,yet halting at a strategic distance.
"Is what?"
"Wot you're goin'to marry."
"Idiot!"
"That ain't tellin'which,"responded the boy darkly.
Clementina swept by him into the sitting-room,where he heard her declare that "really that boy was getting too low and vulgar for anything."Yet it struck him,that being pressed for further explanation,she did NOT specify why.This was "girls'meanness!"Howbeit he lingered late in the road that evening,hearing his father discuss with the search-party that had followed the banks of the creek,vainly looking for further traces of the missing 'Lige,the possibility of his being living or dead,of the body having been carried away by the current to the bay or turning up later in some distant marsh when the spring came with low water.One who had been to his cabin beside the embarcadero reported that it was,as had been long suspected,barely habitable,and contained neither books,papers,nor records which would indicate his family or friends.It was a God-forsaken,dreary,worthless place;he wondered how a white man could ever expect to make a living there.
If Elijah never turned up again it certainly would be a long time before any squatter would think of taking possession of it.John Milton knew instinctively,without looking up,that his father's eyes were fixed upon him,and he felt himself constrained to appear to be abstracted in gazing down the darkening road.Then he heard his father say,with what he felt was an equal assumption of carelessness:"Yes,I reckon I've got somewhere a bill of sale of that land that I had to take from 'Lige for an old bill,but Ikalkilate that's all I'll ever see of it."Rain fell again as the darkness gathered,but he still loitered on the road and the sloping path of the garden,filled with a half resentful sense of wrong,and hugging with gloomy pride an increasing sense of loneliness and of getting dangerously wet.The swollen creek still whispered,murmured and swirled beside the bank.At another time he might have had wild ideas of emulating the surveyors on some extempore raft and so escaping his present dreary home existence;but since the disappearance of 'Lige,who had always excited an odd boyish antipathy in his heart,although he had never seen him,he shunned the stream contaminated with the missing man's unheroic fate.Presently the light from the open window of the sitting-room glittered on the wet leaves and sprays where he stood,and the voices of the family conclave came fitfully to his ear.They didn't want him there.They had never thought of asking him to come in.Well!--who cared?And he wasn't going to be bought off with a candle and a seat by the kitchen fire.No!
Nevertheless he was getting wet to no purpose.There was the tool-house and carpenter's shed near the bank;its floor was thickly covered with sawdust and pine-wood shavings,and there was a mouldy buffalo skin which he had once transported thither from the old wagon-bed.There,too,was his secret cache of a candle in a bottle,buried with other piratical treasures in the presence of the youthful Peters,who consented to be sacrificed on the spot in buccaneering fashion to complete the unhallowed rites.He unearthed the candle,lit it,and clearing away a part of the shavings stood it up on the floor.He then brought a prized,battered,and coverless volume from a hidden recess in the rafters,and lying down with the buffalo robe over him,and his cap in his hand ready to extinguish the light at the first footstep of a trespasser,gave himself up--as he had given himself up,I fear,many other times--to the enchantment of the page before him.
The current whispered,murmured,and sang,unheeded at his side.
The voices of his mother and sisters,raised at times in eagerness or expectation of the future,fell upon his unlistening ears.For with the spell that had come upon him,the mean walls of his hiding-place melted away;the vulgar stream beside him might have been that dim,subterraneous river down which Sindbad and his bale of riches were swept out of the Cave of Death to the sunlight of life and fortune,so surely and so simply had it transported him beyond the cramped and darkened limits of his present life.He was in the better world of boyish romance,--of gallant deeds and high emprises;of miraculous atonement and devoted sacrifice;of brave men,and those rarer,impossible women,--the immaculate conception of a boy's virgin heart.What mattered it that behind that glittering window his mother and sisters grew feverish and excited over the vulgar details of their real but baser fortune?From the dark tool-shed by the muddy current,John Milton,with a battered dogs'-eared chronicle,soared on the wings of fancy far beyond their wildest ken!