"Шервуд Андерсен. Белый бедняк (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

determined look on the boy's long gaunt face and a flash of understanding
came to her. Tears came into her eyes and her arms ached to take the great
boy and hold him tightly against her breast. With all her mother's soul she
wanted to protect Hugh from a world she was sure would treat him always
as a beast of burden and would take no account of what she thought of as
the handicap of his birth. Her morning's work was done and without saying
anything to Hugh, who continued to go up and down the platform laboriously
sweeping, she went out at the front door of the house and to one of
the town stores. There she bought a half dozen books, a geography, an
arithmetic, a speller and two or three readers. She had made up her mind to
become Hugh McVey's school teacher and with characteristic energy did not
put the matter off, but went about it at once. When she got back to her
house and saw the boy still going doggedly up and down the platform,
she did not scold but spoke to him with a new gentleness in her manner.
"Well, my boy, you may put the broom away now and come to the house," she
suggested. "I've made up my mind to take you for my own boy and I don't
want to be ashamed of you. If you're going to live with me I can't have you
growing up to be a lazy good-for-nothing like your father and the other men
in this hole of a place. You'll have to learn things and I suppose I'll
have to be your teacher.

"Come on over to the house at once," she added sharply, making a quick
motion with her hand to the boy who with the broom in his hands stood
stupidly staring. "When a job is to be done there's no use putting it off.
It's going to be hard work to make an educated man of you, but it has to be
done. We might as well begin on your lessons at once."

* * * * *

Hugh McVey lived with Henry Shepard and his wife until he became a grown
man. After Sarah Shepard became his school teacher things began to go
better for him. The scolding of the New England woman, that had but
accentuated his awkwardness and stupidity, came to an end and life in his
adopted home became so quiet and peaceful that the boy thought of himself
as one who had come into a kind of paradise. For a time the two older
people talked of sending him to the town school, but the woman objected.
She had begun to feel so close to Hugh that he seemed a part of her own
flesh and blood and the thought of him, so huge and ungainly, sitting in a
school room with the children of the town, annoyed and irritated her. In
imagination she saw him being laughed at by other boys and could not bear
the thought. She did not like the people of the town and did not want Hugh
to associate with them.

Sarah Shepard had come from a people and a country quite different in
its aspect from that in which she now lived. Her own people, frugal New
Englanders, had come West in the year after the Civil War to take up
cut-over timber land in the southern end of the state of Michigan. The
daughter was a grown girl when her father and mother took up the westward
journey, and after they arrived at the new home, had worked with her father
in the fields. The land was covered with huge stumps and was difficult to