Chapter V The Sick Tree
The going of my old grandsire was pathetic, for towards the last he lost interest in the living, in everything except the great elm he had always loved because his mother had nursed him under it.
“And it is dying, Jack, just as I am going; but I do so want it to live until I am gone!”
“It shall, Grandfather,” I said, “it is sick, but with a little surgery I can save it. It shall live twenty years longer.”
The old tree, tall and beautiful even in death, was half rotted as it stood. Any violent wind was likely to snap it off. Any great storm would beat it to the earth.
Every morning the old man would rise and look first of all to see if his tree was still standing.
He was greatly interested in the way I cured it. I cut away the dead rot up the entire trunk; and when I had finished, little, except a shell, remained. Into this I drove a section of iron railing from a railway track, fully fifteen feet high, driven five feet into the ground, down among the old roots of the tree. Around this and entirely filling the hollow to the top of the iron rail, I poured cement, casing it in to fit the old body that was gone, tucking sheets of zinc under the edges of the bark whose layers carry the sap up and down.
When this was painted and treated to a coating of tar, it looked like the great tree in its youth, and under a strong wind it swayed, supported by the cement and its rod of steel, with all the strength of its younger days.
There one evening, clasping it in the twilight, we found the old General asleep. It was the last sleep of a second childhood, and having no mother for the lullaby, he had slept, his arms around the tree she had loved.
The sun had set; the twilight had come; the great trees shadowed the eternal hills.
The old warrior had died a tree-lover; the young tree-lover had been forced, of God, to fight.
We plan, and, like the rough ashlar, we cut and hew; but the Sculptor is God....
I do not know why Eloise should have risked it, but she did; and though I would not have her try it again for The Home Stretch nor feel again that memory-pang of horror when, for one brief second, I saw what she meant to do, yet when it was done my heart beat fiercely with pride and love for her. How blessed are those children who have a mother both brave and beautiful!
We had ridden to town one day, as we often did when the weather was fit. And for a pretense she had me ride out to the Fair Grounds to see a new colt in training. I suspect she had fixed it all before; for I had seen her practicing Satan on nearly every little ride, at jumps, stone walls, mainly, and old rail fences up to four feet.
“Oh, it’s just to see if age and the campaigns of honorable war,” she laughed, “have stiffened the old fellow’s muscles or softened his heart”; and she would reach over and pat his great neck.
At the track the old bars stood across.
I sickened at the sight of them, remembering. But Eloise, pretending not to notice, glanced quickly at me.
“Who’s put them back there?” I asked, paling with fear of my own suspicion. “I’ll tear them down now and burn them,” I said, dismounting quickly.
But Eloise was too quick for me. Even Satan knew her thought and at the sound of her bantering laugh and the old sideway flash of the whip above his ears, he flew like a winged horse at the bars.
I did not breathe, when, for one short, awful moment, I saw them mount straight up toward the sky. Then, realizing that age and service had hampered his driving power behind, the game horse threw his front easily over, and like a great see-saw swung across, bringing his rear limbs, not straight, to tap the bars and be tangled, but sidewise and parallel, barely saving his neck!
“Well, I did it!” She rode up laughing, Satan trembling so with excitement and the effort I could see his knees quivering, his flank fluttering wildly. And in Eloise’s face there was the white flag of peril yet lingering before the red of victory.
She rode up close to me, her eyes lit with the tenderness of love’s light, and bedewed with its tears: “Kiss me, Jack, dearest—for that is what I had sworn all the time I would do. If—if they had only let me break the world’s record that first time.”
The End