Coniston | Page 8

themselves, and it occurred to him that there were crevices in the town system, and ways into power through the crevices for men clever enough to find them.
A week later, and in these same great woods on the way to Brampton, Cynthia overtook him once more. It was characteristic of him that he plunged at once into the subject uppermost in his mind.
"Not a very big place, this Corsica--not a very big place."
"A little island in the Mediterranean," said Cynthia.
"Hum. Country folks, the Bonapartes--country folks?"
Cynthia laughed.
"I suppose you might call them so," she said. "They were poor, and lived out of the world."
"He was a smart man. But he found things goin' his way. Didn't have to move 'em."
"Not at first;" she admitted; "but he had to move mountains later. How far have you read?"
"One thing that helped him," said Jethro, in indirect answer to this question, "he got a smart woman for his wife--a smart woman."
Cynthia looked down at the reins in her lap, and she felt again that wicked stirring within her,--incredible stirring of minister's daughter for tanner's son. Coniston believes, and always will believe, that the social bars are strong enough. So Cynthia looked down at the reins.
"Poor Josephine!" she said, "I always wish he had not cast her off."
"C-cast her off?" said Jethro. "Cast her off! Why did he do that?"
"After a while, when he got to be Emperor, he needed a wife who would be more useful to him. Josephine had become a drag. He cared more about getting on in the world than he did about his wife."
Jethro looked away contemplatively.
"Wa-wahn't the woman to blame any?" he said.
"Read the book, and you'll see," retorted Cynthia, flicking her horse, which started at all gaits down the road. Jethro stood in his tracks, staring, but this time he did not see her face above the hood of the gig. Presently he trudged on, head downward, pondering upon another problem than Napoleon's. Cynthia, at length, arrived in Brampton Street, in a humor that puzzled the good Miss Lucretia sorely.
CHAPTER II
The sun had dropped behind the mountain, leaving Coniston in amethystine shadow, and the last bee had flown homeward from the apple blossoms in front of Aunt Lucy Prescott's window, before Cynthia returned. Aunt Lucy was Cynthia's grandmother, and eighty-nine years of age. Still she sat in her window beside the lilac bush, lost in memories of a stout, rosy lass who had followed a stalwart husband up a broad river into the wilderness some seventy years agone in Indian days--Weathersfield Massacre days. That lass was Aunt Lucy herself, and in just such a May had Timothy's axe rung through the Coniston forest and reared the log cabin, where six of her children were born. Likewise in review passed the lonely months when Timothy was fighting behind his rugged General Stark for that privilege more desirable to his kind than life--self government. Timothy Prescott would pull the forelock to no man, would have such God-fearing persons as he chose make his laws for him.
Honest Captain Timothy and his Stark heroes, Aunt Lucy and her memories, have long gone to rest. Little did they dream of the nation we have lived to see, straining at her constitution like a great ship at anchor in a gale, with funnels belching forth smoke, and a new race of men thronging her decks for the mastery. Coniston is there still behind its mountain, with its rusty firelocks and its hillside graves.
Cynthia, driving back from Brampton in the gig, smiled at Aunt Lucy in the window, but she did not so much as glance at the tannery house farther on. The tannery house, be it known, was the cottage where Jethro dwelt, and which had belonged to Nathan, his father; and the tannery sheds were at some distance behind it, nearer Coniston Water. Cynthia did not glance at the tannery house, for a wave of orthodox indignation had swept over her: at any rate, we may call it so. In other words, she was angry with herself: pitied and scorned herself, if the truth be told, for her actions--an inevitable mood.
In front of the minister's barn under the elms on the hill Cynthia pulled the harness from the tired horse with an energy that betokened activity of mind. She was not one who shrank from self-knowledge, and the question put itself to her, "Whither was this matter tending?" The fire that is in strong men has ever been a lure to women; and many, meaning to play with it, have been burnt thereby since the world began. But to turn the fire. to some use, to make the world better for it or stranger for it, that were an achievement indeed! The horse munching his hay, Cynthia lingered as the light fainted above