And then, of course, the mantelpiece with the black-edged funeral notice and shiny coffin plate, relics of Grampaw Peel’s taking-off; and the pink mug with the purple pansy and “Woodstock, N. Y.,” on it; the photograph of a forgotten cousin in Iowa, with long antennæ-shaped mustaches; the Bible with the little china knobs on the corners; and the pile of medicine testimonials and seed catalogues—all these contributed something.
If it was not a beautiful place within, it was, also, not even a pleasant place spiritually. What with the open door into his father’s room, whence you could hear the thin frettings made by the man who had lain these ten years with chronic rheumatism, and the untuneful whistlings of whittling Tom, the big brother, the shapely supple giant whose mind had never grown since the fall from the barn room when he was eight years old, and the acrid complaints of the tall gaunt mother, stepping about getting their inadequate supper, in her gray wrapper, with the ugly little blue shawl pinned round her shoulders, it was as bad a place as you might find in a year’s journeying for anyone to keep bright and “chirk up” in.
Not that anyone in particular expected “them poor Hayneses” to keep bright or “chirk up.” As far back as he could remember, Luke had realized that the hand of God was laid on his family. Dragging his bad leg up the hill pastures after the cow, day in and day out, he had evolved a sort of patient philosophy about it. It was just inevitable, like a lot of things known in that rock-ribbed and fatalistic region—as immutably decreed by heaven as foreordination and the damnation of unbaptized babes. The Hayneses had just “got it hard.”
Yet there were times, now he was come to a gangling fourteen, when Luke’s philosophy threatened to fail him. It wasn’t fair—so it wasn’t! They weren’t bad folks; they’d done nothing wicked. His mother worked like a dog—“no fair for her,” any way you looked at it. There were times when the boy drank in bitterly every detail of the miserable place he called home and knew the depths of an utter despair.
If there was only some way to better it all! But there was no chance. His father had been a failure at everything he touched in early life, and now he was a hopeless invalid. Tom was an idiot—or almost—and himself a cripple. And Nat! Well, Nat “wa’n’t willin”—not that one should blame him. Times like these, a lump like a roc’s egg would rise in the boy’s throat. He had to spit—and spit hard—to conquer it.