Rose MacLeod

								

when, after a word or two to the boy, surprising to Peter in its
coldness, he went away alone and threw himself under an apple tree, his
face in the grass, to realize what had come. His own life up to this
time had seemed to him so poor that the hint of riches dazzled him. He
saw the golden gleam, not of money, but of the wealth of being. Peter
had the gift, but they would both foster it. Peter should sleep softly
and live well. He should have every luxurious aid, and to that end
Osmond would learn to wring out money from the ground. That was his only
possibility, since he must have an outdoor life. Then he began his
market-gardening. Grandmother was with him always. She even sold a piece
of land for present money to put into men and tools, and the boy began.
At first there were only vegetables to be carried to the market; then
the scheme broadened into plants and seeds. He was working passionately,
and so on honor, and his works were wanted. To his grandmother even he
made no real confidence, but she still walked with him like a spirit of
the earth itself. He knew, as he grew older, how she had drained herself
for him, how she had tended him and lived the hardiest life with him
because he needed it. There were six months of several years when she
took him to the deep woods, and they camped, and she did tasks his heart
bled to think of, as he grew up, and looked at her work-worn hands; but
those things which bound them indissolubly were never spoken of between
them. His infirmity was never mentioned save once when, a boy, and then
delicate, he came in from the knoll where he had been watching the
woodsmen felling trees. His face was terrible to her, but she went on
getting their dinner and did not speak.
"Grannie," he said at last, "what am I going to do?"
She paused over her fire, and turned her face to him, flushed with heat
and warm with mother love.
"Sonny," she said, "we will do the will of God."
"Did He do this to me?" the boy asked inflexibly.
She looked at the mountain beyond the lake, whence, she knew, her
strength came hourly.
"The world is His," she said. "He does everything. We can't find out
why. We must help Him. We must ask Him to help us do His will."
Then they sat down to dinner, and the boy, strengthening his own savage
will, forced himself to eat.
He did not think so much about the ways of God as shrewdly, when he grew
older, of toughening muscles and hardening flesh. Peter's talents,
Peter's triumphs, became a kind of possession with him. Osmond had
perhaps his first taste of happiness when Peter went abroad, and Osmond
knew who had sent him and who, if the market-garden throve, had sworn to
keep him there. The allowance he provided Peter thereafter gave him as
much pleasure in the making as it did the boy in the using of it. Peter
was like one running an easy race, not climbing the difficult steps that
lead to greatness. It looked, at times, as if it were the richness of