The Rise of Roscoe Paine | Page 6

back gate. "Ain't goin', be
you?" asked Lute. "Hadn't you better set down and rest your breakfast a
spell?"
"No, I'm going. By the way, if you're through with that tobacco pouch
of mine, I'll take it off your hands. I may want to smoke by and by."
Lute coolly explained that he had forgotten the pouch; it had "gone

clean out of his head." However, he handed it over and I left him seated
on the wash bench, with his head tipped back against the shingles. I
opened the gate and strolled slowly along the path by the edge of the
bluff. I had gone perhaps a hundred yards when I heard a shrill voice
behind me. Turning, I saw Dorinda standing by the corner of the
kitchen, dust cloth in hand. Her husband was raking for dear life.
I walked on. The morning was a beautiful one. Beside the path, on the
landward side, the bayberry and beach-plum bushes were in bud, the
green of the new grass was showing above the dead brown of the old, a
bluebird was swaying on the stump of a wild cherry tree, and the pines
and scrub oaks of the grove by the Shore Lane were bright, vivid
splashes of color against the blue of the sky. At my right hand the
yellow sand of the bluff broke sharply down to the white beach and the
waters of the bay, now beginning to ebb. Across the bay the lighthouse
at Crow Point glistened with new paint and I could see a moving black
speck, which I knew was Ben Small, the keeper, busy whitewashing the
fence beside it. Down on the beach Zeb Kendrick was overhauling his
dory. In the distance, beyond the grove, I could hear the carpenters'
hammers on the roof of the big Atwater mansion, which was now the
property of James Colton, the New York millionaire, whose rumored
coming to Denboro to live had filled the columns of the country weekly
for three months. The quahaug boats were anchored just inside the
Point; a clam digger was wading along the outer edge of the sedge; a
lobsterman was hauling his pots in the channel; even the bluebird on
the wild cherry stump had a straw in his beak and was plainly in the
midst of nest building. Everyone had something to do and was doing
it--everyone except Lute Rogers and myself, the "birds of a feather."
And even Lute was working now, under compulsion.
Ordinarily the sight of all this industry would not have affected me. I
had seen it all before, or something like it. The six years I had spent in
Denboro, the six everlasting, idle, monotonous years, had had their
effect. I had grown hardened and had come to accept my fate, at first
rebelliously, then with more of Lute's peculiar kind of philosophy.
Circumstances had doomed me to be a good-for-nothing, a gentleman
loafer without the usual excuse-- money--and, as it was my doom, I

forced myself to accept it, if not with pleasure, at least with resignation.
And I determined to get whatever pleasure there might be in it. So,
when I saw the majority of the human race, each with a purpose in life,
struggling to attain that purpose, I passed them by with my gun or
fishing rod on my shoulder, and a smile on my lips. If my remnant of a
conscience presumed to rise and reprove me, I stamped it down. It had
no reasonable excuse for rising; I wasn't what I was from choice.
But, somehow, on this particular morning, my unreasonable conscience
was again alive and kicking. Perhaps it was the quickening influence of
the spring which resurrected it; perhaps Luther's quotation from the
remarks of Captain Jedediah Dean had stirred it to rebellion. A man
may know, in his heart, that he is no good and still resent having others
say that he is, particularly when they say that he and Luther Rogers are
birds of a feather. I didn't care for Dean's good opinion; of course I
didn't! Nor for that of any one else in Denboro, my mother excepted.
But Dean and the rest should keep their opinions to themselves,
confound them!
The path from our house--the latter every Denboro native spoke of as
the "Paine Place"--wound along the edge of the bluff for perhaps three
hundred yards, then turned sharply through the grove of scrub oaks and
pitch pines and emerged on the Shore Lane. The Shore Lane was not a
public road, in the strictest sense of the term. It was really a part of my
land and, leading, as it did, from the Lower Road to the beach, was
used as a public road merely because mother and I permitted it to