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Page 7
One peculiar trait this Shadow had: the more the restless child thought
of his visitant, the deeper it grew,--shrinking in size, but becoming
more intensely dark, till it seemed like part of a heavy thunder-cloud,
only that no lightning ever played across its blank gloom.
The first time that the Shadow ever stood before him as an actual
presence was when, a mere child, he was busied one day in the warm May
sunshine making a garden by the school-house, in a line with other
little squares, tracked and moulded by childish fingers, and set with
branches of sallow silvered with downy catkins, half-opened dandelions,
twigs of red-flowered maple, mighty reservoirs of water in sunken
clam-shells, and paths adorned with borders of broken china and
glittering bits of glass. Next to Roger's garden-bed was one that
belonged to two little boys who were sworn friends, and one of these was
busy weaving a fence for his garden, of yellow willow-twigs, which the
other cut and sharpened.
Roger looked on with longing eyes.
"Will you help me, Jimmy?" said he.
"I can't," answered the quiet, timid child.
"No!" shouted Jacob,--the frank, fearless voice bringing a tint of color
into his comrade's cheek. "Jim shan't help you, Roger Pierce! Do you
ever help anybody?"
Then the Shadow fell beside Roger, as he stood with anger and shame
swelling in his throat; it fell across the blue violets he had taken
from Jacob to dress his own garden, and they drooped and withered; it
crossed the path of shining pebbles that he had forced the younger
children to gather for him, and they grew dull as common stones; it
reached over into Jacob's positive, honest face, and darkened it, and
Jimmy, looking up, with fear in his mild eyes, whispered, softly,--"Come
away! it's going to rain;--don't you see that dark cloud?"
Roger started, for the Shadow was darkening about himself; and as he
moodily returned home, it seemed to grow deeper and deeper, till his
mother drew his head upon her knee, and by the singing fire told him
tales of her own childhood, and from the loving brightness of her tender
eyes the Shadow slunk away and left the boy to sleep, unhaunted.
As day by day went by, in patient monotony, Roger became daily more
aware of this ghostly attendant. He was not always alone, for he had
friends who loved him in spite of the Shadow, and grew used to its
appearing;--but he liked to be by himself; for, out of constant
companionship and daily use, this Shadow made for itself a strange
affinity with him, and following his daily rambles over the sharp hills,
tracing to their source the noisy brooks, or setting snares for the
wild creatures whose innocent timid eyes peered at their little enemy
curiously from nook and crevice, he grew to have a moody pleasure in the
knowledge that nothing else disturbed his path or shared his amusements.
But a time came when he must mix more with the outer world; for he was
sent away from home to school, and there, amid a host of strange faces,
he singled out the only one that had a thought of his past life and
home in it, as his special companion,--the same quiet boy who had
unconsciously feared the Shadow in their earlier school-days.
So good and gentle was he, that he did not feel the cloud of Roger's
hateful Double as every one else did; and he even won the boy himself to
except him only from a certain suspicion that had lately sprung from,
his own consciousness of his burden,--a suspicion gradually growing into
a belief that all the world had such a Shadow as his own.
Now this was not a strange result of so painful a reality. Seeing, as
Roger Pierce did, in every action of others toward himself the dark
atmosphere of the Shadow that was peculiarly his own, he watched also
their mutual actions, and, throwing from his own obscurity a shade over
all human deeds, he became possessed of the monomania, a practical
belief that every mortal man, except it might be Jimmy Doane, was
followed and overlooked by this terrible Second Shadow.
In proportion as the gloom of this black Presence seemed to be lightened
over any one was his esteem for him; but by daily looking so steadily
and with such a will to see only darkness in the hearts of men, he
discovered traces of the Shadow even in Jimmy Doane,--and the darkness
shut down, like night at sea, over all the world then.
Now Roger was miserable enough, knowing well that he could escape, if
he would; for there had come with his increasing sense of his tyrant,
a knowledge that every time he thought of the Shadow it darkened more
deeply than ever, and that in forgetting it lay his only hope of escape
from its power. But withal there was a morbid pleasure, the reflex
influence of habit and indolence, that mingled curiously with his
longing desire to forget his Double, but rendered it impossible to do
so without a greater effort than he cared to make, or some help from
another hand; and soon that help seemed to come.
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