The Rise of Roscoe Paine | Page 6

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 be. It had been so used, by sufferance of the former owner, for years, and when we came into possession of the property we did not interfere with the custom. Land along the shore was worth precious little at that time and, besides, it was pleasant, rather than disagreeable, to hear the fish carts going out to the weirs, and the wagons coming to the beach for seaweed, or, filled with picnic parties, rattling down the Lane. We could not see them from the house until they had passed the grove and emerged upon the beach, but even the noise of them was welcome. The Paine Place was a good half-mile from the Lower Road and there were few neighbors; therefore, especially in the winter months, any sounds of society were comforting.
I strode through the grove,