Coniston | Page 7

though the feeling she had was closely akin to fear, she found something distinctly pleasurable in it.
May came, and the pools dried up, the orchards were pink and white, the birches and the maples were all yellow-green on the mountain sides against the dark pines, and Cynthia was driving the minister's gig to Brampton. Ahead of her, in the canon made by the road between the great woods, strode an uncouth but powerful figure--coonskin cap, homespun breeches tucked into boots, and all. The gig slowed down, and Cynthia began to tremble with that same delightful fear. She knew it must be wicked, because she liked it so much. Unaccountable thing! She felt all akin to the nature about her, and her blood was coursing as the sap rushes through a tree. She would not speak to him; of that she was sure, and equally sure that he would not speak to her. The horse was walking now, and suddenly Jethro Bass faced around, and her heart stood still.
"H-how be you, Cynthy?" he asked.
"How do you do, Jethro?"
A thrush in the woods began to sing a hymn, and they listened. After that a silence, save for the notes of answering birds quickened by the song, the minister's horse nibbling at the bushes. Cynthia herself could not have explained why she lingered. Suddenly he shot a question at her.
"Where be you goin'?"
"To Brampton, to get Miss Lucretia to change this book," and she held it up from her lap. It was a very large book.
"Wh-what's it about," he demanded.
"Napoleon Bonaparte."
"Who was be?"
"He was a very strong man. He began life poor and unknown, and fought his way upward until he conquered the world."
"C-conquered the world, did you say? Conquered the world?"
"Yes."
Jethro pondered.
"Guess there's somethin' wrong about that book--somethin' wrong. Conquer the United States?"
Cynthia smiled. She herself did not realize that we were not a part of the world, then.
"He conquered Europe; where all the kings and queens are, and became a king himself--an emperor."
"I want to-know!" said Jethro. "You said he was a poor boy?"
"Why don't you read the book, Jethro?" Cynthia answered. "I am sure I can get Miss Lucretia to let you have it."
"Don't know as I'd understand it," he demurred.
"I'll try to explain what you don't understand," said Cynthia, and her heart gave a bound at the very idea.
"Will You?" he said, looking at her eagerly. "Will you? You mean it?"
"Certainly," she answered, and blushed, not knowing why. "I-I must be going," and she gathered up the reins.
"When will you give it to me?"
"I'll stop at the tannery when I come back from Brampton," she said, and drove on. Once she gave a fleeting glance over her shoulder, and he was still standing where she had left him.
When she returned, in the yellow afternoon light that flowed over wood and pasture, he came out of the tannery door. Jake Wheeler or Speedy Bates, the journeyman tailoress, from whom little escaped, could not have said it was by design--thought nothing, indeed, of that part of it.
"As I live!" cried Speedy from the window to Aunt Lucy Prescott in the bed, "if Cynthy ain't givin' him a book as big as the Bible!"
Aunt Lucy hoped, first, that it was the Bible, and second, that Jethro would read it. Aunt Lucy, and Established Church Coniston in general, believed in snatching brands from the burning, and who so deft as Cynthia at this kind of snatching! So Cynthia herself was a hypocrite for once, and did not know it. At that time Jethro's sins were mostly of omission. As far as rum was concerned, he was a creature after Aunt Lucy's own heart, for he never touched it: true, gaunt Deacon Ira Perkins, tithing- man, had once chided him for breaking the Sabbath--shooting at a fox.
To return to the book. As long as he lived, Jethro looked back to the joy of the monumental task of mastering its contents. In his mind, Napoleon became a rough Yankee general; of the cities, villages, and fortress he formed as accurate a picture as a resident of Venice from Marco Polo's account of Tartary. Jethro had learned to read, after a fashion, to write, add, multiply, and divide. He knew that George Washington and certain barefooted companions had forced a proud Britain to her knees, and much of the warring in the book took color from Captain Timothy Prescott's stories of General Stark and his campaigns, heard at Jonah Winch's store. What Paris looked like, or Berlin, or the Hospice of St. Bernard--though imaged by a winter Coniston--troubled Jethro not at all; the thing that stuck in his mind was that Napoleon--for a considerable time, at least--compelled men to do his bidding. Constitutions crumble before the Strong. Not that Jethro philosophized about constitutions. Existing conditions presented