The Day of His Youth.

by Alice Brown.

The life of Francis Hume began in an old yet very real tragedy. His mother, a lovely young woman, died at the birth of her child: an event of every-day significance, if you judge by tables of mortality and the probabilities of being. She was the wife of a man well-known among honored American names, and her death made more than the usual ripple of nearer pain and wider condolence. To the young husband it was an afflicting calamity, entirely surprising even to those who were themselves acquainted with grief. He was not merely rebellious and wildly distraught, in the way of mourners. He sank into a cold sedateness of change. His life forsook its accustomed channels. Vividly alive to the one bright point still burning in the past, toward the present world he seemed absolutely benumbed. Yet certain latent conceptions of the real values of existence must have sprung up in him, and protested against days to be thereafter dominated by artificial restraints. He had lost his hold on life. He had even acquired a sudden distaste for it; but his previous knowledge of beauty and perfection would not suffer him to shut himself up in a cell of reserve, and isolate himself thus from his kind. He could become a hermit, but only under the larger conditions of being. He had the firmest conviction that he could never grow any more; yet an imperative voice within bade him seek the highest out-look in which growth is possible. He had formed a habit of beautiful living, though in no sense a living for any other save the dual soul now withdrawn; and he could not be satisfied with lesser loves, the makeshifts of a barren life. So, turning from the world, he fled into the woods; for at that time Nature seemed to him the only great, and he resolved that Francis, the son, should be nourished by her alone.

One spring day, when the boy was eight years old, his father had said to him:--

"We are going into the country to sleep in a tent, catch our own fish, cook it ourselves, and ask favors of no man."

"Camping!" cried the boy, in ecstasy.

"No; living."

The necessities of a simple life were got together, and supplemented by other greater necessities,--books, pictures, the boy's violin,--and they betook themselves to a spot where the summer visitor was yet unknown, the sh.o.r.e of a lake stretching a silver finger toward the north. There they lived all summer, shut off from human intercourse save with old Pierre, who brought their milk and eggs and const.i.tuted their messenger-in-ordinary to the village, ten miles away. When autumn came, Ernest Hume looked into his son's brown eyes and asked,--

"Now shall we go back?"

"No! no! no!" cried the boy, with a child's pa.s.sionate c.u.mulation of accent.

"Not when the snow comes?"

"No, father."

"And the lake is frozen over?"

"No, father."

"Then," said Hume, with a sigh of great content, "we must have a log-cabin, lest our bones lie bleaching on the sh.o.r.e."

Next morning he went into the woods with Pierre and two men hastily summoned from the village, and there they began to make axe-music, the requiem of the trees. The boy sat by, dreaming as he sometimes did for hours before starting up to throw himself into the active delights of swimming, leaping, or rowing a boat. Next day, also, they kept on cutting into the heart of the forest. One dryad after another was despoiled of her shelter; one after another, the green tents of the bird and the wind were folded to make that sacred tabernacle--a home.

Sometimes Francis chopped a little with his hatchet, not to be left out of the play, and then sat by again, smoothing the bruised fern-forests, or whistling back the squirrels who freely chattered out their opinions on invasion. Then came other days just as mild winds were fanning the forest into gold, when the logs went groaning through the woods, after slow-stepping horses, to be piled into symmetry, tightened with plaster, and capped by a roof. This, windowed, swept and garnished, with a central fireplace wherein two fires could flame and roar, was the log-cabin. This was home. The hired builders had protested against its primitive form; they sighed for a snug frame house, French roof and bay windows. "'Ware the cold!" was their daily croak.

"We'll live in fur and toughen ourselves," said Ernest Hume. And turning to his boy that night, when they sat together by their own fire, he asked,--

"Shall we fashion our muscles into steel, our skin into armor? Shall we make our eyes strong enough to face the sun by day, and pure enough to meet the chilly stars at night? Shall we have Nature for our only love?

Tell me, sir!"

And Francis, who hung upon his father's voice, even when the words were beyond him, answered, "Yes, father, please!" and went on feeding birch strips to the fire, where they turned from vellum to mysterious missals blazoned by an unseen hand.

The idyl continued unbroken for twelve years. Yet it was not wholly idyllic, for, even with money multiplying for them out in the world, there were hard personal conditions against which they had to fight.

Ernest Hume delighted in the fierceness of the winter wind, the cold resistance of the snow; cut off, as he honestly felt himself to be, from spiritual growth, he had great joy in strengthening his physical being until it waxed into insolent might. Francis, too, took so happily to the stern yet lovely phases of their life that his father never thought of possible wrong to him in so shaping his early years. As for Ernest Hume, he had bound himself the more irrevocably to right living by renouncing artificial bonds. He had removed his son from the world, and he had thereby taken upon himself the necessity of becoming a better world. Therefore he did not allow himself in any sense to rust out. He did a colossal amount of mental burnishing; and, a gentleman by nature, he adopted a daily purity of speech and courtesy of manner which were less like civilized life than the efflorescence of chivalry at its best. He had chosen for himself a part; by his will, a Round Table sprang up in the woods, though two knights only were to hold counsel there.

The conclusion of the story--so far as a story is ever concluded--must be found in the words of Francis Hume. Before he was twenty, his strength began stirring within him, and he awoke, not to any definite discontent, but to that fever of unrest which has no name. Possibly a lad of different temperament might not have kept housed so long; but he was apparently dreamy, reflective, in love with simple pleasures, and, though a splendid young animal, inspired and subdued by a thrilling quality of soul. And he woke up. How he awoke may be learned only from his letters.

These papers have, by one of the incredible chances of life, come into my hands. I see no possible wrong in their publication, for now the Humes are dead, father and son; nay, even the name adopted here was not their own. They were two slight bubbles of being, destined to rise, to float for a time, and to be again resolved into the unknown sea. Yet while they lived, they were iridescent; the colors of a far-away sun played upon them, and they sent him back his gleams. To lose them wholly out of life were some pain to those of us who have been privileged to love them through their own written confessions. So here are they given back to the world which in no other way could adequately know them.

[Sidenote: _Francis Hume to the Unknown Friend_[1]]

[1] This t.i.tle is adopted by the editor that the narrative may be at least approximately clear. The paragraphs headed thus were scribblings on loose sheets: a sort of desultory journal.

I never had a friend! Did any human creature twenty years old ever write that before, unless he did it in a spirit of bitterness because he was out of humor with his world? Yet I can say it, knowing it to be the truth. My father and I are one, the oak and its branch, the fern and its fruitage; but for somebody to be the mirror of my own thoughts, tantalizingly strange, intoxicatingly new, where shall I look? Ah, but I know! I will create him from my own longings. He shall be born of the blood and sinew of my brain and heart. Stand forth, beautiful one, made in the image of my fancy, and I will tell thee all--all I am ashamed to tell my father, and tired of imprisoning in my own soul. What shall I call thee? Friend: that will be enough, all-comprehending and rich in joy. To-day I have needed thee more than ever, though it is only to-day that I learned to recognize the need. All the morning a sweet languor held me, warm, like the sun, and touched with his fervor, so that I felt within me darts of impelling fire. I sat in the woods by the spring, my eyes on the dancing shadows at my feet, not thinking, not willing, yet expectant. I felt as if something were coming, and that I must be ready to meet it when the great moment should strike. Suddenly my heart beat high in s.n.a.t.c.hes of rhythm; my feet stirred, my ears woke to the whir of wings, and my eyes to flickering shade. My whole self was whelmed and suffocated in a wave of sweet delight. And then it was that my heart cried out for another heart to beat beside it and make harmony for the two; then it was that thou, dear one, wast born from my thought. I am not disloyal in seeking companionship. My father is myself. Let me say that over and over. When I tell him my fancies, he smiles sadly, saying they are the buds of youth, born never to flower.

To him Nature is G.o.ddess and mother; he turns to her for sustenance by day, and lies on her bosom at night. After death he will be content to rest in her arms and become one flesh with her mould. But I--I! O, is it because I am young; and will the days chill out this strange, sweet fever, as they have in him? Two years ago--yes, a year--I had no higher joy than to throw myself, body and soul, into motion: to row, fish, swim, to listen, in a dream of happiness, while my father read old Homer to me in the evening, or we masterfully swept through duets--'cello and violin--that my sleep was too dreamless to repeat to me. And now the very world is changed; help me to understand it, my friend; or, if I am to blame, help me to conquer myself.

II

I have much to tell thee, my friend! and of a nature never before known in these woods and by this water. Last night, at sunset, I stood on the Point waiting for my father to come in from his round about the island, when suddenly a boat shot out from Silver Stream and came on toward me, rowed to the accompaniment of a song I never heard. I stood waiting, for the voices were beautiful, one high and strong (and as I listened, it flashed upon me that my father had said the 'cello is like a woman singing), another, deep and rich. There were two men, as I saw when they neared me, and two women; and all were young. The men--what were they like? I hardly know, except that they made me feel ashamed of my roughness. And the women! One was yellow-haired and pale; she had a fairy build, I think, and her shoulders were like the birch-tree. Her head was bare, and the sun--he had stayed to do it--had turned all the threads to gold. She was so white! white as the tiarella in the spring.

When I saw her, I bent forward; they looked my way, and I drew back behind the tree. I had been curious, and I was ashamed; it seemed to me they might stop and say, "Who is this fellow who lives in the woods and stares at people like an owl by night?" But the oars dipped, and the boat and song went on. The song! if I but knew it! It called my feet to dancing. It was like laughter and the play of the young squirrels. I watched for them to go back, and in an hour they did, still singing in jubilant chorus; and after that came my father. As soon as I saw him, I knew something had happened. I have never seen him so sad, so weary. He put his hand on my shoulder, after we had beached the boat and were walking up to the cabin.

"Francis," he said, "our good days are over."

"Why?" I asked.

It appeared to me, for some reason, that they had just begun; perhaps because the night was so fragrant and the stars so near. The world had never seemed so homelike and so warm. I knew how a bird feels in its own soft nest.

"Because some people have come to camp on the Bay Sh.o.r.e. I saw their tents, and asked Pierre. He says they are here for the summer. Fool!

fool that I was, not to buy that land!"

"But perhaps we shall like them!" I said, and my voice choked in the saying, the world seemed so good, so strange. He grasped my shoulder, and his fingers felt like steel. "Boy! boy!" he whispered. For a minute, I fancied he was crying, as I cried once, years ago, when my rabbit died. "I knew it would come," he said. "Kismet! I bow the neck.

Put thy foot upon it gently, if may be."

We went on to the cabin, but somehow we could not talk; and it was not long before my father sought his tent. I went also to mine, and lay down as I was: but not to sleep. Those voices sang in my ears, and my heart beat till it choked me. Outside, the moon was at full flood, and I could bear it no longer. I crept softly out of my tent, and ran--lightly, so that my father should not hear, but still swiftly--to the beach. I pushed off a boat, grudging every grating pebble, and dipped my oars carefully, not to be heard. My father would not have cared, for often I go out at midnight; but I felt strangely. Yet I knew I must see those tents. Out of his earshot, I rowed in hot haste, and every looming tree on the wooded bank seemed to whisper "Hurry! hurry!"

I rounded the Point in a new agony lest I should never hear those singing voices again; and there lay the tents, white in the moonlight.

I rowed into the shadow of a cliff, tied my boat, and crept along the sh.o.r.e. I could see my mates, and they were mad with fun. Perhaps a dozen people stood there together on the sand laughing, inciting one another to some merrier deed. I stayed in the shadow of my tree, watching them. Then five who were in bathing-dress began wading, and struck out swimming lazily. She was there, the slight, young creature, now with her hair in a glory below her waist. The jealous dark had hid its gold, but I knew what it would be by day. They swam about, calling and laughing in delicious tones, while those on the bank--older people I think--challenged and cautioned them. Then a cry went up, "The raft!

the raft!" and they began swimming out, while the women on the bank urged them not to dive, but to wait until to-morrow. I thought I had seen all the sports of young creatures, but I never dreamed of anything so full of happy delight in life as that one girl who climbed on the raft without touching the hand a man offered to help her, and danced about on it, laughing like a wood-thrush gone mad with joy, while the other women shrieked in foolish s.n.a.t.c.hes. Then a man dived from the raft, and another. A woman called from sh.o.r.e, "Don't dive, Zoe, to-night!" and suddenly I knew she was Zoe, and that she would dive and that I must be with her. I knocked off my shoes, waded out, still in the shadow, and swam toward the raft. As I neared it, there was one splash after another; then they were coming up, and I was among them.

It seemed as if I had dreamed it, and knew how it would all happen; for when her head, sleek as polished metal, came up beside me, I knew it would, and that I should grasp her dress and swim back with her to land. She was surprised; but quite mechanically she swam beside me.

"Let me alone, Tom," she said at last. "I don't want to go in." I had guided her down the bank to my shadowy covert, and there we rose on our feet in shallow water. Then she turned and looked at me. I was not Tom.

I was a stranger. I wondered if she would be frightened, if it was a woman's way to scream; and, still worse, if the others would come. I felt that if they did come to mar that one moment, I should kill them.

But she was scarcely even surprised. I saw a quiver at the corner of her mouth.

"Will you tell me who you are?" she asked, in a very soft, cool voice.

"You must never dive again from that raft," said I, and my own voice sounded rough and hard. "Pierre knew better than to let you anchor it there. The water is too shallow. There are rocks."

"You are the hermit's son!" quite as if she had not heard me, and still looking at me with a little smile.

"You have been in the water long enough," said I. "Go to your tent at once and dress. In another minute you will be shivering."

At that she broke into laughter; it was like the moonlight ripple of the lake.

"Sir, I obey," she said with a mock humility which enchanted me.

"Good-night." She walked up the bank, her wet skirt dripping as she went. I stood dazed, foolish, looking after. Then as she threaded among the trees toward the glimmer of a tent, I recovered myself and ran after her.

"Tell me," I said in haste, "tell me, are you Zoe?"

She was walking on, and I kept pace with her, knowing how rash I was to follow. She turned her head.