CONISTON

BOOK III

CHAPTER I

One day, in the November following William Wetherell’s death, Jethro Bass astonished Coniston by moving to the little cottage in the village which stood beside the disused tannery, and which had been his father’s.  It was known as the tannery house.  His reasons for this step, when at length discovered, were generally commended:  they were, in fact, a disinclination to leave a girl of Cynthia’s tender age alone on Thousand Acre Hill while he journeyed on his affairs about the country.  The Rev. Mr. Satterlee, gaunt, red-faced, but the six feet of him a man and a Christian, from his square-toed boots to the bleaching yellow hair around his temples, offered to become her teacher.  For by this time Cynthia had exhausted the resources of the little school among the birches.

The four years of her life in the tannery house which are now briefly to be chronicled were, for her, full of happiness and peace.  Though the young may sorrow, they do not often mourn.  Cynthia missed her father; at times, when the winds kept her wakeful at night, she wept for him.  But she loved Jethro Bass and served him with a devotion that filled his heart with strange ecstasies—­yes, and forebodings.  In all his existence he had never known a love like this.  He may have imagined it once, back in the bright days of his youth; but the dreams of its fulfilment had fallen far short of the exquisite touch of the reality in which he now spent his days at home.  In summer, when she sat, in the face of all the conventions of the village, reading under the butternut tree before the house, she would feel his eyes upon her, and the mysterious yearning in them would startle her.  Often during her lessons with Mr. Satterlee in the parlor of the parsonage she would hear a noise outside and perceive Jethro leaning against the pillar.  Both Cynthia and Mr. Satterlee knew that he was there, and both, by a kind of tacit agreement, ignored the circumstance.

Cynthia, in this period, undertook Jethro’s education, too.  She could have induced him to study the making of Latin verse by the mere asking.  During those days which he spent at home, and which he had grown to value beyond price, he might have been seen seated on the ground with his back to the butternut tree while Cynthia read aloud from the well-worn books which had been her father’s treasures, books that took on marvels of meaning from her lips.  Cynthia’s powers of selection were not remarkable at this period, and perhaps it was as well that she never knew the effect of the various works upon the hitherto untamed soul of her listener.  Milton and Tennyson and Longfellow awoke in him by their very music troubled and half-formed regrets; Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great” set up tumultuous imaginings; but the “Life of Jackson” (as did the story of Napoleon long ago) stirred all that was masterful in his blood.  Unlettered as he was, Jethro had a power which often marks the American of action—­a singular grasp of the application of any sentence or paragraph to his own life; and often, about this time, he took away the breath of a judge or a senator by flinging at them a chunk of Carlyle or Parton.