



Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger





CONISTON

By Winston Churchill



BOOK III



CHAPTER I

One day, in the November following William Wetherell's death, Jethro Bass
astonished Coniston by moving to the little cottage in the village which
stood beside the disused tannery, and which had been his father's. It was
known as the tannery house. His reasons for this step, when at length
discovered, were generally commended: they were, in fact, a
disinclination to leave a girl of Cynthia's tender age alone on Thousand
Acre Hill while he journeyed on his affairs about the country. The Rev.
Mr. Satterlee, gaunt, red-faced, but the six feet of him a man and a
Christian, from his square-toed boots to the bleaching yellow hair around
his temples, offered to become her teacher. For by this time Cynthia had
exhausted the resources of the little school among the birches.

The four years of her life in the tannery house which are now briefly to
be chronicled were, for her, full of happiness and peace. Though the
young may sorrow, they do not often mourn. Cynthia missed her father; at
times, when the winds kept her wakeful at night, she wept for him. But
she loved Jethro Bass and served him with a devotion that filled his
heart with strange ecstasies--yes, and forebodings. In all his existence
he had never known a love like this. He may have imagined it once, back
in the bright days of his youth; but the dreams of its fulfilment had
fallen far short of the exquisite touch of the reality in which he now
spent his days at home. In summer, when she sat, in the face of all the
conventions of the village, reading under the butternut tree before the
house, she would feel his eyes upon her, and the mysterious yearning in
them would startle her. Often during her lessons with Mr. Satterlee in
the parlor of the parsonage she would hear a noise outside and perceive
Jethro leaning against the pillar. Both Cynthia and Mr. Satterlee knew
that he was there, and both, by a kind of tacit agreement, ignored the
circumstance.

Cynthia, in this period, undertook Jethro's education, too. She could
have induced him to study the making of Latin verse by the mere asking.
During those days which he spent at home, and which he had grown to value
beyond price, he might have been seen seated on the ground with his back
to the butternut tree while Cynthia read aloud from the well-worn books
which had been her father's treasures, books that took on marvels of
meaning from her lips. Cynthia's powers of selection were not remarkable
at this period, and perhaps it was as well that she never knew the effect
of the various works upon the hitherto untamed soul of her listener.
Milton and Tennyson and Longfellow awoke in him by their very music
troubled and half-formed regrets; Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" set up
tumultuous imaginings; but the "Life of Jackson" (as did the story of
Napoleon long ago) stirred all that was masterful in his blood.
Unlettered as he was, Jethro had a power which often marks the American
of action--a singular grasp of the application of any sentence or
paragraph to his own life; and often, about this time, he took away the
breath of a judge or a senator by flinging at them a chunk of Carlyle or
Parton.

It was perhaps as well that Cynthia was not a woman at this time, and
that she had grown up with him, as it were. His love, indeed, was that of
a father for a daughter; but it held within it as a core the revived love
of his youth for Cynthia, her mother. Tender as were the manifestations
of this love, Cynthia never guessed the fires within, for there was in
truth something primeval in the fierceness of his passion. She was his
now--his alone, to cherish and sweeten the declining years of his life,
and when by a chance Jethro looked upon her and thought of the suitor who
was to come in the fulness of her years, he burned with a hatred which it
is given few men to feel. It was well for Jethro that these thoughts came
not often.

Sometimes, in the summer afternoons, they took long drives through the
town behind Jethro's white horse on business. "Jethro's gal," as Cynthia
came to be affectionately called, held the reins while Jethro went in to
talk to the men folk. One August evening found Cynthia thus beside a
poplar in front of Amos Cuthbert's farmhouse, a poplar that shimmered
green-gold in the late afternoon, and from the buggy-seat Cynthia looked
down upon a thousand purple hilltops and mountain peaks of another state.
The view aroused in the girl visions of the many wonders which life was
to hold, and she did not hear the sharp voice beside her until the woman
had spoken twice. Jethro came out in the middle of the conversation,
nodded to Mrs. Cuthbert, and drove off.

"Uncle Jethro," asked Cynthia, presently, "what is a mortgage?"

Jethro struck the horse with the whip, an uncommon action with him, and
the buggy was jerked forward sharply over the boulders.

"Er--who's b'en talkin' about mortgages, Cynthy?" he demanded.

"Mrs. Cuthbert said that when folks had mortgage held over them they had
to take orders whether they liked them or not. She said that Amos had to
do what you told him because there was a mortgage. That isn't so is it?"

Jethro did not speak. Presently Cynthia laid her hand over his.

"Mrs. Cuthbert is a spiteful woman," she said. "I know the reason why
people obey you--it's because you're so great. And Daddy used to tell me
so."

A tremor shook Jethro's frame and the hand on which hers rested, and all
the way down the mountain valleys to Coniston village he did not speak
again. But Cynthia was used to his silences, and respected them.

To Ephraim Prescott, who, as the days went on, found it more and more
difficult to sew harness on account of his rheumatism, Jethro was not
only a great man but a hero. For Cynthia was vaguely troubled at having
found one discontent. She was wont to entertain Ephraim on the days when
his hands failed him, when he sat sunning himself before his door; and
she knew that he was honest.

"Who's b'en talkin' to you, Cynthia?" he cried. "Why, Jethro's the
biggest man I know, and