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Wheat and Huckleberries; Or, Dr. Northmore's Daughters

by Charlotte M. Vaile · English · Gutenberg #41515 · 436,754 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Wheat and Huckleberries; Or, Dr. Northmore's Daughters

Author: Charlotte M. Vaile

Illustrator: Alice Barber Stevens


        
Release date: November 30, 2012 [eBook #41515]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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[Illustration: “MORTON FOUND TIME TO ANSWER ALL HER QUESTIONS.”]


WHEAT AND HUCKLEBERRIES

Or

Dr. Northmore's Daughters

by

CHARLOTTE M. VAILE

Illustrated by Alice Barber Stevens







BOSTON AND CHICAGO
W. A. WILDE COMPANY

Copyright, 1899,
By W. A. Wilde Company.

_All rights reserved._

WHEAT AND HUCKLEBERRIES.




To J. F. V.

This Story

TOO SLIGHT TO BE AN OFFERING TO HIM, BUT WRITTEN
IN DEAR REMEMBRANCE OF HIS EARLY HOME
AND OF MINE

Is Lovingly Dedicated

C. M. V.




CONTENTS
    CHAPTER I—HARVEST AT THE FARM
    CHAPTER II—TALKING IT OVER
    CHAPTER III—BETWEEN TIMES
    CHAPTER IV—AT THE OLD PLACE
    CHAPTER V—AUNT KATHARINE SAXON
    CHAPTER VI—AUNT KATHARINE—CONTINUED
    CHAPTER VII—HUCKLEBERRYING
    CHAPTER VIII—A PAIR OF CALLS
    CHAPTER IX—A GLIMPSE FROM THE INSIDE
    CHAPTER X—SOME BITS OF POETRY
    CHAPTER XI—AN OUTING AND AN INVITATION
    CHAPTER XII—WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK
    CHAPTER XIII—INTO THE WEST AGAIN
    CHAPTER XIV—THE NABOB MAKES AN IMPRESSION
    CHAPTER XV—ESTHER GOES TO PRAYER-MEETING
    CHAPTER XVI—IN WHICH SEVERAL PEOPLE GET HOME




ILLUSTRATIONS.
    “Morton found time to answer all her questions”
    “He leaned on the gate when he had opened it for the girls”
    “She opened the door in person”
    “Tom and Kate watched them go”
    “‘It has been delightful to see you in this lovely old home’”




CHAPTER I

HARVEST AT THE FARM


Just how Dr. Philip Northmore came to be the owner of a farm had never
been quite clear to his fellow-townsmen. That he had bought it—that
pretty stretch of upland five miles from Rushmore—in some settlement
with a friend, who owed him more money than he could ever pay, was the
open fact, but how the doctor had believed it to be a good investment
for himself was the question. The opportunity to pay interest on a
mortgage and make improvements on those charming acres at the expense of
his modest professional income was the main part of what he got out of
it. The doctor, as everybody knew, had no genius for making money.

However, he had never lamented his purchase. On the principle perhaps
which makes the child who draws most heavily on parental care the object
of dearest affection, this particular possession seemed to be the one on
which the good doctor prided himself most. Its fine location and natural
beauty were points on which he grew eloquent, and he sometimes referred
to its peaceful cultivation as the employment in which he hoped to spend
his own declining years, an expectation which it is safe to say none of
his acquaintances shared with him.

So much for Dr. Northmore’s interest in the farm. It had a peculiar
interest for the feminine part of his household in the early days of
July, when wheat harvest had come and the threshing machine was abroad
in the land. It was too much to expect of Jake Erlock, the tenant at the
farm, who, since his wife’s death had lived there alone, that he would
provide meals for the score of threshers who would bring the harvesting
appetite to the work of the great day. Clearly this fell to the
Northmores, and the doctor’s wife had risen to the part with her own
characteristic energy. But for once, on the very eve of the threshing,
she found herself facing a sudden embarrassment. Relatives from a
distance had made their unexpected appearance as guests at her house,
and to leave them behind, or take them into the crowded doings at the
farm, seemed alike impossible. The prompt proposal of her daughters,
that they, with the combined wisdom of their seventeen and nineteen
years, should manage the harvest dinner, hardly seemed a plan to be
adopted, and would have found scant attention but for the unlooked-for
support it received from one of the neighbors.

“Now why don’t you let ’em do it?” said Mrs. Elwell, who had happened in
at the doctor’s an hour after the arrival of the guests. “You’ve got
everything planned out, of course, and there’ll be lots of the neighbor
women in to help. There always is.”

She caught the look of entreaty in the eyes of the girls and the doubt
in the eyes of their mother, and added, “Now I think of it, I could go
out there myself just as well as not. There isn’t anything so very much
going on at our house to-morrow, and I’d be right glad to take a hand in
it. I’ll risk it but what the girls and I can manage.”

Manage! There was no question on that score. Mrs. Northmore’s eyes grew
moist and she opened her lips to speak, but her good friend was before
her, her pleasant face at that moment the express image of neighborly
kindness. “Now, with all you’ve done for us, you and the doctor, to make
a fuss over a little thing like this!” she said. And Mrs. Northmore,
with the grace which can receive as well as render a favor, accepted the
offer without a protest.

That was how it happened that Esther and Kate Northmore went to the
harvesting at the farm, in their mother’s stead, the next morning. Kate,
at least, carried no anxiety, but Esther, as the older, could not lay
aside some uneasiness, not so much lest things should go wrong as lest
their generous friend might be too much burdened, and the thought of all
there was to do lent an unusual gravity to her sensitive face.

It was a perfect July day, with the sky an unbroken blue except for the
clouds which floated like golden chaff high in the zenith. The great
machine, flaming in crimson against a background of gold, stood among
the ripened sheaves, and a score of sunburned men urged the labor which
had begun betimes.

Ah, there is no harvest like this of the wheat. It comes when the year
is at its flood, and the sun, rejoicing as a strong man to run a race,
holds long on his course against the slow-creeping night. What
ingathering of the later months, when the days have grown short and
chilly, can match it in joy? The one is like the victory that comes in
youth, when the success of to-day seems the promise for to-morrow; the
other is the reward that comes to the worn and enfeebled man, who
whispers in the midst of his gladness: “How slight at best are the gains
of life!”

Esther was too young to moralize and too busy with the very practical
work of helping with the dinner to grow poetical over the harvest scene,
but the beauty of it did hold her for a minute with a long admiring gaze
as she stood by the well, where she had gone for a pitcher of fresh
water.

A man in gray jeans had hurried from the edge of the field at sight of
her, to lower the buckets hanging from the old-fashioned windlass. She
detained him a moment when he had handed her the dripping pitcher.

“We couldn’t have had a better day than this, could we?” she said. “And
what a good thing it is that you and father decided to put in the wheat!
He was speaking of that at breakfast this morning, and he says it was
all your doing. There was such a poor crop last year that for his part
he was almost afraid to try it again.”

The man’s face shone with gratified pride. “Well, I reckon the doctor
ain’t fretting over it much now that I had my way,” he said. And then he
added modestly: “But I might have missed it. You never can tell how a
crop’ll come out till you see the grain in the measure.”

“Well, we’re seeing that to-day,” said the girl. “How much will there
be?”

“We can’t rightly tell till it’s all threshed out,” said the man; “but
Tom Balcom ’lows it’ll average as well’s anything they’ve threshed, and
they’ve had thirty-five bushels to the acre.”

Figures did not mean much to Esther, but her “Oh!” had a note of
appreciation. Then, as he was turning away, she said earnestly: “I hope
we shall have a good dinner for you, Mr. Erlock. Mother was ever so
sorry she couldn’t come out to-day herself; I believe she was afraid you
wouldn’t fare as well as you ought without her. But Mrs. Elwell came,
and between us all we won’t let you suffer.”

“I hain’t a bit o’ doubt about the victuals being good,” said the man,
gallantly. “I hope you found things all right in the house. I tried to
red up a little for you.”

“Oh, everything was in beautiful order, and the women are all praising
your good housekeeping,” said Esther, smiling.

He looked at once pleased and embarrassed. “I did the best I could,” he
said, then turned with an awkward nod and hurried again to his work.

She remembered hers too, and hastened with her pitcher back to the
house. It was a one-story frame, with gray shingled sides and a deep
drooping roof whose forward projection formed a porch across the entire
front. Ordinarily it wore an expression of shy reserve, but to-day, with
doors and windows open, and the hum of voices sounding through and round
it, it seemed to have taken a new interest in life and looked a willing
part of the cheerful scene.

The kitchen which the girl entered was full of country women, so full
indeed that it seemed a wonder they could accomplish any work, but every
one was busy except a young woman with a baby in her arms, who sat
complacently watching the labors of the others.

It is the neighborly fashion in the middle West for the women of
adjoining farms to help each other in the labors of this busiest time in
the year, and the custom had not been omitted to-day because there was
no one to return the service. It was rendered willingly as ever, partly
from regard for Dr. Northmore, and partly from sympathy with the lonely
householder who managed his farm.

“I had to stop and talk a minute with Jake Erlock,” said Esther,
apologetic for her slight loitering now that she felt the hurry of the
work again. “He came up to draw the water for me, and you ought to have
seen him blush when I told him you all thought he was a good
housekeeper.”

“Well, if he has any doubt what we think on that point, he’d better come
in here and we’ll tell him,” said a woman who was grinding coffee at a
mill fixed to the wall. “I don’t believe there’s another man in this
township that would manage as well as he does. I wouldn’t answer for the
way things would look at our house if ’twas _my_ man that had the
running of ’em.”

Groans and headshakings followed this remark. Apparently none of the
women present felt any confidence in the ability of their respective men
to run the domestic machinery.

“Well, Mis’ Erlock was a mighty good housekeeper herself,” observed one
of them. “And I reckon Jake thinks it wouldn’t be showing proper respect
to her memory to let everything go at loose ends now she’s gone. I tell
you, Jake’s an uncommon good man in more ways than one. ’Tain’t
everybody that would stay single as long as he has, but that’s just what
I expected from the feelings he showed at the funeral, and it coming so
long afterward too.”

A murmur of assent showed that the speaker was not the only one who
remembered the emotion of the bereaved man on that mournful occasion,
which, as had been suggested, occurred some time after his wife’s death,
the delay of the sermon devoted to her memory being occasioned, as often
happens in country districts of the West and South, by the absence of
the preacher proper, whose extended circuit gives him but a portion of
the year in one place.

“Well, ’twas to his credit, of course,” observed an elderly woman who
was shelling peas; “but I must say I don’t like this way of putting off
the funeral so long. I think burying people and preaching about ’em
ought to go together, and if you can’t have your own preacher, you’d
better put up with somebody else, or go without.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the young woman with the baby. “It looks
to me as if folks were in a mighty hurry to get the last word said when
they can’t wait for the right one to say it. I shouldn’t want my husband
to be so keen to get through with it all, if ’twas me that was taken.”

“Maybe you’d want him to do like the man that took his second wife to
hear his first wife’s funeral,” retorted the other.

The defender of local custom admitted, in the midst of a general laugh,
that this was carrying it too far, and then the conversation turned on
the probability of Jake Erlock’s marrying again, the various suitable
persons to be found should he feel so inclined, and the importance in
general of men having some one to take care of them, and of women having
men and their houses to take care of.

The subject which, with its ramifications, seemed fairly inexhaustible
was making Kate Northmore yawn and had fairly driven Esther from the
room, when a young man with a bright, sunburned face and a pair of
straight, broad shoulders looked in at the window.

“My, how good it smells in here!” he exclaimed in a voice that went well
with the face. “What all are we going to have for dinner, Aunt Jenny?”

Mrs. Elwell, who was testing the heat of the oven on a plump bare arm,
turned a flushed face and motherly smile on the speaker.

“Everything nice,” she said. “You never saw a better dinner than the
girls have brought out for you. What do you say to fried chicken, and
new potatoes, and green peas, with pie and doughnuts to top off, and
lots of other good things thrown in extra?”

The young man smacked his lips and sent a devouring glance around the
room. “Say!” he repeated. “Why, I say it’s enough to make a fellow feel
like John Ridd and thank the Lord for the room there is in him. When are
you going to give us a chance at all that?”

“When the bell rings, of course,” said Kate Northmore, looking up at him
with a saucy glance from the meal she was sifting. “You didn’t expect to
get anything to eat now, I hope.”

“Oh, not anything much,” said the young man, helping himself to a
doughnut from a plate which stood within easy reach. “I just looked in
to tell you that while you’re getting, you’d better get us a plenty.
We’re a fearful hungry crowd, and there won’t be much left over; but if
there should be, it might come in handy to-morrow.”

“_To-morrow!_” repeated Kate, letting the meal which was whirling under
her hand fall level in the pan. “You don’t mean that there’s any danger
of your being here to-morrow, do you?”

The young man brushed the chaff from the shoulders of his blue flannel
shirt, and set his straw hat a little further on the back of his head
before he answered. Kate’s “_To-morrow_” had put a complete pause on the
talk of the room, and every woman there was looking at him anxiously.

“Well, I wouldn’t really say that there’s any need of worrying about it
_yet_” he said, lowering his voice to a confidential tone; “but you see
the men have heard that you and Esther are such stunning good cooks
that—well, of course, I don’t want to give ’em away, but I don’t know as
you can blame ’em any for wanting to make the work hold out so as to get
in an extra meal or two here, if they can. That’s all.”

There was a shout at this, and Mrs. Elwell said reproachfully, “Now,
Morton, quit your fooling. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself to come
scaring the girls with your talk about to-morrow? Why, we thought the
machine had broken down, or something of that sort.”

He did look a little conscience-smitten just then, as Esther, who had
caught some hint of excitement in the dining room, where she was setting
the table, appeared in the doorway, looking really troubled. Kate was
facing him with a different expression.

“Well, since you’re so anxious about to-morrow, Mort Elwell, you needn’t
eat any more of those doughnuts,” she said, snatching up the plate
toward which his hand was moving a second time, and setting it out of
his reach. “We may want them, you know.”

He drew down his face to an injured expression. “That’s the way you
treat a body, is it, when he comes to give you a friendly warning? All
right, I’ll go now. I see I’m not wanted.”

He shifted his position as he spoke, and the next moment the pitchfork,
on which he had been leaning, was thrust through the window, and as
quickly withdrawn, with a doughnut sticking on every point. “Good-by,
Kate,” he shouted, as he disappeared. “If the doughnuts don’t hold out,
you can make some cookies for to-morrow.”

He had the best of it, and after a moment, apparently, even Kate forgave
him, “the rascal,” as she called him, with a toss of her pretty head.
And then the talk of the kitchen took a new turn, suggested by the
thought of all the ills which would have followed if an accident had
really happened to the machine. There had been such accidents in the
experience of most of those present, and they were recounted now with
much fulness of detail and some rivalry as to the amount of agony
endured in the several cases by the workers in the culinary department.

“It’s the worst thing there is about threshing,” said the woman who had
related the most harrowing tale of all. “I don’t care how many men there
are, and I don’t mind cooking for ’em, and setting out the best I’ve
got,—seems as if a body warn’t thankful for the crop if they don’t,—but
when the machine gets out of order, and the work hangs on, and you have
the men on your hands for three or four days running, just eating you
out of house and home, and keeping you on the jump from morning to
night, getting things on the table and off again, I tell you it’s
something awful.”

There was no demur to this sentiment, but there was still another phase
of distress to be mentioned.

“No,” said one of the others, “there ain’t anything quite as bad as
that, but it’s the next thing to it to have the threshers come down on
you without your having fair warning that they’re coming. I never _will_
forget what a time we had last year. Abe had been telling me all along
that they were going to stack the wheat and thresh in the fall, when one
day, ’most sundown, up comes the threshing machine right into our barn
lot. I told the men there must be some mistake, but they said, no,
they’d just made a bargain with Abe, and were going to begin on our
wheat in the morning. I tell you I was that mad I couldn’t see straight.
Abe he tried to smooth it over, said he found the men had been thrown
out at one place, and he thought he’d better close right in on ’em, and
I needn’t to worry about the victuals—just give ’em what I had.”

She paused with an accent of inexpressible contempt, and covered her
husband’s remarks on that point with the words, “You know how men talk!
Why, even our side meat was most gone, and I hadn’t a single chicken
frying size. Well, I tell you I didn’t let the grass grow under my feet
nor under Abe’s neither. I made him hitch up and put himself into town
the liveliest ever he did, and what with me sitting up most all night to
brown coffee, and churn, and make pies, we somehow managed to put things
through. I was plumb wore out when ’twas all over, but they do say the
men bragged all the rest of the season on the dinner I gave ’em.”

Great applause followed this story, and an elderly woman remarked:
“That’s one good thing about having the threshers. You’re sure to get
your name up for a good cook if your victuals suit the men. I’ll warrant
you’ll get a recommend after to-day, girls,” she said, with a nod at
Kate and Esther. “And it ain’t a bad thing to have at your age,” she
added, with a knowing wink.

Esther flushed, with a look of annoyance, but Kate responded gayly: “All
right. Don’t any of you tell that they made the pies and doughnuts at
home, and don’t you ever let it out that you fried the chickens, Mrs.
Elwell.”

There was a sisterly resemblance between the two girls. Each was fair,
with dark hair and eyes, but Esther was generally counted the prettier.
She had a delicate, oval face, with soft, responsive eyes, and a color
that came and went as easily as ripples in a wheat-field; the sort of
face which, without the slightest coquetry of expression, was almost
sure to hold and draw again the interested glance of those who met her.
Kate’s was of the commoner type, and yet there was nothing too common in
its strong, pleasant lines, or the straightforward frankness of her
ready smile.

With so many to help, the preparations for dinner could not but move
briskly. At sharp twelve o’clock the farm bell, mounted on a hickory
post at the corner of the house, rang out its invitation, and almost
instantly the engine stopped puffing, the whir of labor in the fields
slackened, and the men had turned their faces toward the house. They
were not a company of common laborers. Many of them were well-to-do
farmers, who gave their services here in repayment or anticipation of
similar aid in their own time of need. Most of them knew the Northmore
girls, and had a friendly greeting for Kate as they passed her, standing
by the swinging bell.

“Well, Miss Kate,” said one of them, a tall, angular man, who, in spite
of his office in the district as the New Light preacher, was one of the
most active workers, “I’ll wager you never rang a bell before for such a
hard-looking crowd. We’re ‘knaves that smell of sweat.’ But there’s
folks that look better in worse business, and I reckon you don’t mind
the looks of us as long as we behave ourselves. How many do you want at
once? I s’pose we can’t all sit down at the first table.”

“Well, then,” broke in a hearty young farmer, with a twinkle in his
eyes, “I move that the preacher goes in with the last crowd. We don’t
any of us want to run our chances after he gets through.”

“Oh,” said the preacher, good-naturedly, “I was calculating to wait,
anyhow. Shan’t have any scruples then against taking the last piece.”

“Well, I’ll engage that the last piece shall lie as good as the first,”
said Kate; “but we can’t give more than ten of you elbow-room at once. I
might count ‘Eeny, meny, miny, mo,’ to see which of you shall come in
now, but there’s a pan of corn-bread in the oven that I’m watching, and
I think you’d better settle it yourselves.”

Apparently there was no difficulty, for in an extraordinarily short
space of time the toilets made at the well were finished, and the dinner
was furnished with guests. Loaded as the table was with good things, it
might have seemed part of a Thanksgiving scene but that the holiday air
was quite wanting to the men who sat around it. There was not much
conversation. Some observations on crops and the price of wheat, or an
occasional bit of good-natured raillery, filled the infrequent pauses in
the business of eating, but the latter was carried on with a heartiness
which spoke well for those who had spread the feast.

Outside, however, in the shadow of the great beech by the kitchen door,
there was a waiting group who found time for talking, and the preacher,
whose long, lank figure was stretched in the midst, was easily taking
the leading part. Some remark had evidently started him on a train of
reminiscences, and his mellow, half-drawling tones floated through the
kitchen door, and mingled with the clatter of the dishes.

“Yes, there’s been a heap o’ change in this country since I came here
twenty years ago. ’Twas pretty much all timber through here then, and
there warn’t a foot o’ tile in this end o’ the county. I hired out to
old Jim Rader. He was just clearing up his farm. Lord, he used to have
me up by four o’clock in the morning, grubbing stumps, with the fog so
thick you couldn’t tell stump from fog before you.”

“I reckon you made the acquaintance of the ager ’bout that time,”
observed one of the group as the preacher paused.

“Ague!” repeated the other, raising himself on his elbow and eying the
speaker. “Wall, I reckon! If there’s any kind I didn’t get on speaking
terms with, I’d like to know the name of it. I’ve had the third-day
ague, and the seventh-day ague, the shaking ague, and the dumb
ague—though why ’twas ever called ‘dumb’ beats me. If there’s anything
calculated to make a man open his mouth and express his mind freely on
the way things go in this neck o’ wilderness, it’s that particular kind.
Lord! My bones have ached so, I’d have given any man a black eye that
said there was only two hundred of ’em. However, I got shet of it at
last, taking quinine. Reckon this country couldn’t have been settled up
without quinine, and I stayed with Rader two years and helped him break
in the land. Didn’t like the business much, but I had a notion in my
head that I wanted to make a preacher of myself, and I didn’t quit till
I had the means to do it. Didn’t get over-much schooling, but I wouldn’t
take a heap for what I did get. Mort!” he exclaimed, turning abruptly to
the young man at his side, “how have you been getting on at college?
They say you’re going to stick right to it.”

“I haven’t had to give up yet,” said the young man, quietly; “and I
don’t think it’s likely any part of the course will be harder than the
first two years.”

“Reckon your uncle don’t come down very heavy with the stamps yet,” said
the preacher, grimly.

The young man flushed. “’Tisn’t my uncle’s business to send me to
college,” he said; “I never asked him to.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” said the preacher, heartily. “I like your
grit. For that matter, you might as well spend your breath trying to
blow up a rain as trying to persuade him to spend any money on schooling
that he didn’t haf to. But how did you make it? You must have found it
hard pulling at first.”

“Oh, at first I sawed wood,” said the other, lightly, “and I’ll own that
was hard pulling. Half a cord before breakfast is a pretty fair stint,
but I managed to make it. After that ’twas different things. I never had
any trouble getting work. It was one man’s horse and another man’s lawn,
and in the spring I had a great run helping the women at house-cleaning.
Got quite a reputation for laying carpets. This year there hasn’t been
quite as much variety in my jobs, for I taught school in the winter.”

The preacher’s sallow face was tense and the shrewd gray eyes gleamed as
he listened. “You’ll do, Mort Elwell!” he said. “If I was a betting man,
I’d bet on you and take all the chances going.”

At that moment, Mrs. Elwell, who was standing in the kitchen doorway for
a moment’s rest and coolness, was saying to Esther Northmore, with a
little sigh, “I don’t wonder he had all he could do at house-cleaning.
If he knew how I missed him last spring! There’s nobody ’round here that
can put down carpets equal to him.” And then she sighed again, this time
more heavily. Every one knew that if she had her way, her husband’s
nephew, who had grown up as one of their own family, would not be
working his way through college in this stern fashion.

As for Morton himself, perhaps, being a young fellow not much given to
talking of his private affairs in public, he was glad to see a stream of
men issuing just then from the house, and it was but a few minutes later
when a second call summoned him and his fellows to their places.

It was hardly an hour that the wheels of the great machine stood still.
At the end of that time the workers were all at their places again. And
now that the masculine appetites were satisfied, the women sat down to
eat, an occupation which they prolonged far beyond the time of their
predecessors. To the Northmore girls, indeed, it seemed as if it would
never be over, but there came an end to it at last, and even to the
washing of the dishes.

Esther would not consent to the proposal of the women that they should
do the work without her, but Kate—with better wisdom perhaps—accepted it
with the frankest pleasure. She was a girl who had a healthy curiosity
about everything that went on around her, and no one was surprised to
see her presently standing in the field, beside the engine that made the
wheels of the threshing machine go round, getting points from the man in
charge as to how they did it. After that an invitation from Morton
Elwell, who was on the feed board, to come up and watch the work from
that point was instantly accepted, amid the laughing approval of the
crowd. For her sake the speed of the work was slackened a little, the
bundles were thrown from the loaded wagon more slowly, and Morton found
time, while cutting their bands and thrusting them in at their place, to
answer all her questions.

It was a pretty picture she made, standing in her blue gingham dress on
this crimson throne, her sunbonnet fallen on her shoulders and her dark
hair blowing about her face, but she knew nothing of this. She was
thinking only of that wonderful machine, and she knew before she left
her place how it whirled the loosened sheaves from sight, rubbed out the
grain in its rough iron palms, sent the free clean wheat in a rushing
stream down to the waiting measure, and flung out the broken straw to be
caught on the pitchforks of the laborers behind and pressed to its place
on the growing stack.

There was an exhilaration in it not to be dreamed of by her sister, who
glanced at her occasionally from the kitchen windows and wondered how
she could bear to be in the midst of all that heat and noise. For her
part, she was quite content to let the machine stand merely as part of
the picture. And perhaps for her it wore the greater dignity from her
vague idea of its internal workings.

The afternoon wore away swiftly. There was a five o’clock supper to be
served to the men, but this was not the elaborate affair the dinner had
been, and by sunset of the long bright day the work indoors and out had
been brought to a successful finish. The shining stubble of the field
lay bare except for the fresh clean straw stack. The machine was
rumbling on its way to another farm, and Jake Erlock’s kitchen had been
restored to a state of order equal to that in which his kindly neighbors
had found it.

It had been expected that Dr. Northmore would come for his daughters,
but, as he had not appeared when the work was finished, they accepted
the offer of a ride home with a farmer who was going their way. The
sight of them sitting in the big Studebaker wagon must have acted as a
prompter to Morton Elwell’s memory, for he suddenly recalled that he had
an important errand in town, and proposed to go along too, a proposal to
which the owner of the wagon agreed with the greatest good will. There
was not a chair for him,—the girls had been established in the only
two,—and the farmer and his hired man occupied the seat, but the young
man settled him on a bundle of straw in the bottom of the wagon, with an
air of supreme content.

They were old comrades, he and the Northmore girls; the girls could not
remember the time when he had not been their escort and champion, their
Fidus Achates, all the more free to devote himself to their service
because he had no sisters or even girl cousins of his own. He was two
years older than either of them, and his years at college seemed to make
him older still, but if his absence had made any difference in the
perfect freedom of their relations, he, at least, had not guessed it.

“Well, you girls must be glad to be through with this,” he said, as the
team started at a rattling pace down the road. “I know you’re awfully
tired.”

He included them both in his glance, but it rested longest on Esther’s
face, which certainly looked a little weary under the shadow of her wide
straw hat.

“You must be tired yourself, Mort,” she said, looking down at him.
“You’ve been working ever since daylight, haven’t you?”

“Oh, but I’m used to that,” he said gayly, “and this is new business for
you. I must say, though, I never saw things go better. There won’t be
anybody round here to beat you at housekeeping if you keep on like
this.”

She frowned slightly. “It was your aunt who managed everything,” she
said; “all we did was to help a little.”

“That isn’t what she’ll say about it,” said the young man, and then he
added warmly: “but my Aunt Jenny’s a host wherever you put her. There’s
no doubt about that. My, what a good place this world would be if
everybody in it was made like her!” And there was an assent to this
which ought to have made the good woman’s ears burn, if there is any
truth in the old saying.

For a while the talk ran lightly on the incidents of the day; then it
grew more personal, and plans for the summer fell under discussion.
Morton’s were all for work. He was of age, master of his own time, and
he meant to make a good sum toward the expenses of the coming year at
college. He talked of his hopes with the utmost frankness, and then
questioned of theirs as one who had the fullest rights of friendship.

“Will you go away anywhere?” he asked; “or are you going to stay at home
all summer?”

“That depends,” said Kate, answering for both. “We may go up to
Maxinkuckee for a little while; but what we’d like to do, what we’d like
best—” she paused upon the words with a lifting of her hands and the
drawing of a long ecstatic breath, “would be to make a visit at
grandfather’s. You can’t think how he’s urging us to come.”

“Do you mean go to New England?” he exclaimed, sitting up straight on
his bundle of straw.

“Yes, to mother’s old home,” said Kate. “Just think, we haven’t been
there since we were little girls. Mother’s been trying to persuade
grandfather to come out here, but he says he’s too old to make the
journey, and that we must come there. He has fairly set his heart on
it.”

“And so have the others too,” said Esther. “Stella’s letters have been
full of it for the last six months.”

“Stella’s that cousin of yours who’s such an artist, isn’t she?” said
Morton. He was looking extremely interested.

“Oh, she’s an artist and everything else that’s lovely,” said Esther. “I
don’t suppose you ever saw the kind of girl that she is. She has a
studio in Boston in the winters. She sent me a picture of it once, and
it’s perfectly charming. And only think, she’s been in Europe twice—once
she was studying over there. And she’s seen those wonderful old places
and the famous pictures, and been a part of everything that’s
beautiful.”

“That’s the sort of thing you’d like to do yourself, I suppose,” said
the young man, drawing a wisp of straw slowly through his fingers.

“Like it!” she cried. “To travel, to study, to see beautiful things, to
hear beautiful music, and to be in touch every day with charming,
cultivated people! Oh, if I had half a chance, wouldn’t I take it!”

There was something very wistful in her voice as she said it, but not
more wistful than the look that came into Morton Elwell’s eyes at that
moment. He turned them away from her face, and the rattle of the big
wagon filled the silence.

“You ought to show Mort that picture of Stella you got the other day,”
said Kate, suddenly.

Esther took a letter from her pocket. “I brought it out to the farm
to-day on purpose to show your aunt,” she said, and she handed him a
photograph which he regarded for a moment with a bewildered expression.

“Why, it looks like a picture of Greek statuary,” he said; “one of the
old goddesses, or something of that sort.”

“That’s just the way she meant to have it look,” said Esther,
triumphantly. “You see how artistic she is.”

The young man still looked mystified. “But is her hair really white,
like that?” he asked.

“Why, of course not,” said Esther, in a rather disgusted tone. “She
powdered it and did it in a low coil for the sake of the picture. Then
she put the white folds over her shoulders to make it look like a bust
against the dark background, and she had the lights and shadows arranged
to give just the right effect. Isn’t it exquisite?”

“I can’t say I admire it,” said the young man, grimly; “I’d rather see
people look as if they were made of flesh and blood.”

Kate laughed. She had privately expressed the same opinion herself, but
she did not choose to encourage him in criticising her relatives.

“You’re an insensible Philistine, Mort Elwell,” she said, with a sly
glance at her sister. “That’s what Stella’d call you, and she knows.”

The point of the taunt was lost on the young man, but he had an
impression, derived from early lessons in the Sabbath School, that the
Philistines were a race of heathen idolaters, and he resented the charge
with spirit.

“You’d better call your cousin the Philistine,” he retorted; “I’m sure I
have no liking for graven images.”

This was too much for Esther. She snatched the picture from his hand and
bent a look of admiration upon the shapely white head, with its classic
profile and downcast eyes, which made ample amends for the cold scrutiny
to which it had just been subjected.

“It is perfectly beautiful,” she said, with slow emphasis; “I don’t see
how you can be unappreciative.”

Morton did not press his obnoxious opinion. He grew rather silent, and
except for an occasional sally from Kate, conversation was at a low ebb
for the rest of the way.

Meanwhile the sunset flamed and faded in the west. The evening breeze
sprang up, and cool, restful shadows fell on the wide, rich landscape.

“Home at last!” cried Kate, as a bend in the road brought them suddenly
upon a house of the colonial style, shaded by fine old trees, at the
edge of town. “And there’s mother in the doorway looking for us.”




CHAPTER II

TALKING IT OVER


Mrs. Northmore was at the gate to greet her daughters when the great
wagon stopped.

“We knew you would find some one to bring you home,” she said, smiling
up at them. “Your father was disappointed that he couldn’t come for you
himself, but he took our friends to the station, and then, just as he
was ready to start for you, he was called to the other end of the town.
Come in, Morton,” she added, turning to the young man, who was helping
the girls over the wheel; “I must have a full account of the doings
to-day, and it may be a one-sided report if I have only the family
version of it.”

“But there is only one side, Mrs. Northmore,” said the young man.
“Everything went gloriously,—specially the dinner,—and everybody behaved
beautifully except me. Kate’ll tell you how bad I was. No, I can’t stay.
There’s an errand I must do before dark.”

“I shan’t take anybody’s report against _you_, Morton, unless it’s your
own, and I’m not sure that I’ll admit even that,” said Mrs. Northmore.
It was in her eyes as well as her voice how much she liked the big brown
fellow. “Well, if you must go—but come and see us soon. Don’t work so
hard this summer that you’ll have no time for your friends.”

She took an arm of each of the girls and walked with them up the gravel
path between the rows of blossoming catalpas. “So the day has gone
well?” she said, glancing from one to the other.

“As if you had been there yourself, mother,” said Esther, and Kate
added: “It’s been a regular picnic. I never enjoyed a day more in my
life.”

In different ways each of the girls resembled her strongly. Esther had
the broad, low forehead and serious eyes, but Kate had the resolute
mouth with a touch of playfulness lurking at the corners. A girl, much
younger than either, rolled sleepily out of the hammock as they stepped
on the veranda.

“Oh, I’m glad you’ve come,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “This has been
the longest, stupidest day I ever saw. Papa’s been away, and mamma’s
been busy with the company, and Aunt Milly’s been so cross because she
couldn’t go out to the farm, that she’s been ready to snap my head off
every time I looked in at the kitchen. Even the cat went off visiting.”

“What a dull day you’ve had of it, Virgie!” said Esther, kissing the
child’s flushed cheek. “But what ailed Aunt Milly? She knows she
couldn’t be spared to go out there to-day.”

“Of course she knows it,” said Mrs. Northmore, “and she would have felt
even worse to be spared from here, but I suspect the real grievance was
the cheerfulness with which you girls left her behind. She wanted to
feel that she was needed in both places. Poor old Milly, she can’t
reconcile herself to the idea that we can really get along without her
anywhere.”

“Why didn’t we think of that?” cried Kate. “If we’d asked her advice
about a lot of things, and shaken our heads over the difficulties we
should get into, with her out of our reach, she’d have been happy all
day. Esther, you and I are a pair of stupids, but I’ll make it up to her
yet.”

“Oh, she’s forgiven you already,” said Mrs. Northmore; “and if she
punishes you at all, it’ll be by way of showing you some special favors,
you may be sure of that.”

“There she comes now,” said Kate, as footsteps were heard approaching on
the tiled floor of the hall; and she added, listening to the thud of the
heavy feet, whose stout slippers dropping at the heels doubled the fall
with a solemn tap, “walking as if she went on two wooden legs and a pair
of crutches.”

The comparison was not bad, and the laugh that followed it had hardly
ended when the old servant showed a lugubrious face at the door.

“Howdy, Aunt Milly?” cried Kate before the other had a chance to speak.
“Here we are, you see, home again. I was just coming out to the kitchen
to tell you how we got along, and see if you could give us a bite to
eat. I suppose you think we had our suppers at the farm, and so we did;
but it wasn’t like one of your suppers, and I guess you know how much
appetite you have when you’re all mixed up with the cooking. Don’t
bother to bring anything in here, but just let us sit out in the kitchen
with you.”

At this artful proposal Milly’s face shortened unmistakably. “Don’t
know’s I’ve got anything you’d keer about,” she began with a show of
reluctance, “but I’ll knock round and see what I can find for you.”

“Oh, you’ll find something—you always do,” said Kate. “By the way, I
thought I smelled something good when I was coming up to the house.”

“It was the catalpa blossoms, and you know it,” said Esther, laughing,
and looking at her sister with a reproving glance, when the door had
closed behind Milly.

“Well, but she did make a spice cake, and it smells awfully good,” said
Virgie. “It’s warm now, and she wouldn’t break a crumb of it for me.”

“There!” said Kate, triumphantly. “You see how people are helped out,
when they prevaricate for high moral ends. Come on to the kitchen. I’ll
never pretend to be smart again if I can’t put Aunt Milly in good
spirits before we’ve been there long.”

It would have been an incomplete picture indeed of the Northmore
household which did not include old Aunt Milly. An important figure she
was and had been ever since the girls could remember. But in truth her
connection with the family was of much older date than that. She had
been born and reared a slave on the Kentucky plantation which had been
the home of Dr. Northmore’s boyhood. He had left it earlier than she,
having before the war gone out from the large circle of brothers to
establish himself in his profession in a neighboring state. But when, in
the changed times, the servants had scattered from the old place, Milly
had made her way to the home of her favorite, and urged with many
entreaties that she might fill a post of service there.

Dr. Northmore could not resist the appeal, nor his young wife his wish
in the matter, and though the service had been a trying one at first to
the energetic Northern girl, yet, as time went on, and children, one
after another, were added to the household, she learned to set truer
value on the faithful, affectionate servant, whose devotion nothing
could tire; and now, when Milly was old and infirm, her place was as
secure as it had been in her palmiest days. She herself had full
confidence in her ability to fill it still, and her one fear for the
future was that she might be forced to share it with one of those
“transients” who rendered their service by the week,—a class for which
her high-bred contempt knew no bounds.

Kate had not misjudged the effect of her stratagem on the simple old
soul. It was a long time since her young ladies had done her the honor
of eating at her own pine table, and Milly forgot the grief of the day
in the zest of her hospitality, and accepted their praises for the feast
she furnished, with a delight quite different from the forgiving dignity
with which she had meant to pierce the hearts of her darlings.

“Well, yes, I did stir up a little cake for you,” she admitted, when
Kate, after due admiration of the fresh and fragrant loaf, accused her
of misrepresenting the extent of her supplies. “Laws, I knew you’d be
wantin’ a bite of somethin’ afore you went to bed. It allers makes my
stomach feel powerful empty to ride in one o’ them wagons, jouncin’
round in them straight-backed cheers.”

“And you must have named it for me, Aunt Milly,” said Kate, with her
eyes on the cake.

This was an allusion to one of Milly’s culinary secrets, and she
received it with a smile which fairly transfigured the dusky old face.
She had her own theories of cake-making, theories which she maintained
with the unanswerable logic of her own surpassing skill.

“You see, Miss Kate,” she had said years before, when the girl had come
to the kitchen with a request to be instructed in the mysteries of the
art, “there’s somethin’ curus about makin’ cake. It ain’t all in havin’
a good receipt, though it stan’s to reason if you don’t take the right
things there’s no use puttin’ ’em together. An’ it ain’t all in the way
you put ’em together neither, though I ’low that makes a heap o’
difference. Folks has their ’pinions, an’ there’s some that says you
must take your hand to the mixin’, an’ some that says you must use a
wooden spoon, an’ I knew one cook that would have it you must stir the
batter all one way, or ’twould be plumb ruined. But I can’t say as I
_jest_ hold with any o’ them idees, nor yet with the notions folks has
about the bakin’, though it’s true as you live, a body’s got to be
mighty keerful on that p’int. Laws, I’ve known folks dassn’t let a cat
run across the kitchen floor while the cake’s in the oven.

“I tell you, Miss Kate,” Milly had proceeded, growing more impressive,
as the greatness of her subject loomed before her, “there’s a heap o’
things to be looked to in the makin’ o’ cake, but there’s somethin’
besides all them p’ints I’ve mentioned. It takes the _right person_ to
make it! There’s some that’s been ’lected to make cake an’ some that
hasn’t. There ain’t no other doctrine to account for the luck folks has.
I’ll show you my way, but I can’t tell beforehand how it’ll work with
you. There’s one thing, though, I’ll jest say private between you’n me,”
she added, lowering her voice to a mysterious whisper, “an’ I ain’t one
to take up with no superstitious notions neither; when you want to make
an extra fine cake, you name it for somebody that loves you jest as
you’re shettin’ the oven door, an’ if you’ve made that cake all right,
an’ if you ain’t deceived in that person, your cake’ll come out
splendid.”

“But if you _are_ deceived?” Kate had suggested solemnly.

“Then,” said Milly, lifting her finger, and shaking it with slow
emphasis, “as sure’s you’re born that cake’ll fall in the pan an’ be
sad. There can’t nothin’ on earth prevent it.”

“But that is such an uncertain way,” Kate had objected. “You can’t
always tell whether or not a person loves you. Why don’t you name it for
somebody that you love yourself? Then you could be sure.”

But Milly had shaken her head wisely. It was the nature of cake, as it
was of love, to be uncertain, and she refused to reconstruct her charm.

All this had happened years before, but when, by some lucky turn of
memory, Kate recalled it now, and suggested that this perfect specimen
of cake had been baked under the inspiration of her own love for Milly,
the last shadow of the old woman’s melancholy vanished. “Well, Honey,”
she said radiantly, “I reckon I shouldn’t have missed it fur if I had.”

She was prepared now to enjoy to the full the account which the girls
gave of the experiences at the farm, including everything of importance,
from Kate’s exaltation on the machine to Morton Elwell’s capture of the
doughnuts. Over the latter incident her eyes fairly rolled with delight,
and she interrupted the narrator to exclaim, “That chile’s boun’ to make
a powerful smart man. Puts me in mind of Mars Clay, your uncle, you
know, what got to be kunnel in the army. That chile did have the most
’mazin’ faculty for comin’ roun’ when a body was cookin’, an’ the
beatin’est way findin’ out where things was kep’ an’ helpin’ hisself
that ever I did see. I never will forgit how he fooled your grandma one
year ’bout the jelly. Ole Miss she allus put her jelly in glasses with
lids to ’em. She had a closet full that year, an’ every glass of it
would turn out slick an’ solid. Mars Clay, he foun’ he could turn the
jelly out on the lid, an’ cut a slice off’m the bottom, an’ jist slide
the jelly back again. I seed him do it one day, but I never let on, and
your grandma she never foun’ out, but she ’lowed ’twas mighty strange
how her jelly did shwink that year.”

She shook with glee at that remembrance, and Kate forgave Morton Elwell
over again for outwitting her, since the act had been the means of
giving her one more story of the old days. But Milly’s delight reached
its climax when Kate told of the favor with which the various dishes had
been received at dinner, and how Farmer Giles, after helping himself to
the third piece of corn-bread, had declared it the best he ever tasted,
to which she had replied that it ought to be; it was made by Aunt
Milly’s own receipt.

“Bless your heart, chile,” cried the old woman; “you didn’t tell him
that now, did you? You mustn’t make the old darky too proud!”

She did not enter with quite as much enthusiasm into Kate’s description
of the threshing machine, and reverted with a sigh to the days when the
thresher was content with his flail, an instrument which she extolled as
being “a heap safer than that great snorting machine” (she persisted in
confounding its functions with those of the engine); and she refused to
share in Kate’s wonder that people didn’t starve in those days waiting
for the grain to be threshed.

The two were still discussing harvests past and present when Esther,
feeling that she had done her full duty there, left the kitchen. She had
never held quite the place in Milly’s affections which Kate enjoyed, nor
had she of late years listened with her sister’s contentment to the old
woman’s thrice-told tales. She left them now and went to seek her
mother.

Mrs. Northmore was seated on the cool veranda with her hands in her lap,
and that look of tired content which tells of a busy but successful day.
A generous hospitality had left her a little worn. Esther sat down on
the step at her feet and leaned her arms across her lap in a childish
fashion she had never outgrown.

“I wish I didn’t get so tired of people whom I really like,” she said.
“It would break Aunt Milly’s heart if she knew how she bores me. It
seems to me sometimes I get tired of everybody—everybody but you, mother
dear.”

Mrs. Northmore looked into her daughter’s eyes with a smile.

“I don’t think I should feel hurt, my dear, if you wanted to get away
from me, too, sometimes. Nobody quite suits all our moods. I wouldn’t
reproach myself on that score, if I were you.”

“But it seems so disloyal, when it’s anybody—anybody that you really
care a great deal about,” said Esther. Her mother’s smile kept its tinge
of amusement, and the girl’s face grew more serious.

“I wonder sometimes if I’m made like other girls,” she said. “It isn’t
just getting tired of people. It’s getting tired of things in general,
and longing for something larger than anything that comes into my life.
I don’t know as I can make you understand quite what I mean,” she went
on, a strained note creeping into her voice, “but somehow it came over
me to-day more strongly than it ever did before that I could never be
satisfied just to live out my life in the common humdrum way. Perhaps it
was the talk of those women. I suppose they’re just as good and useful
as the average, but it seemed as if they thought there was nothing in
the world for women to do but to be married, and keep house, and take
care of children. Even Mrs. Elwell, nice as she is, appeared to think
so, and it all seemed to me so poor and small. I almost despised them,
mother.”

The smile had gone now from Mrs. Northmore’s eyes. “Oh, my dear!” she
said; and then she was silent. Of what use would it be to tell this
child, with the experiences of life all untried, that the common lot,
which she despised, had in its round the truest joys and deepest
satisfactions? Years and love and happy work must bring the knowledge of
that. She stroked the brown head for a moment without speaking. It was
Esther who found words first.

“You never felt like those women, did you, mother? You don’t seem a bit
like them. You are always reading and thinking, and you know about a
thousand things they’ve never thought of.”

The smile came back to Mrs. Northmore’s eyes, but there was a touch of
sadness in it. “My dear girl,” she said, “I’m not half as wise as you
think I am; but if I have any wisdom I’m sure I’ve found most of it, and
my happiness too, in those same common things. There isn’t such a
difference between me and those friends of ours as you imagine.”

The girl looked unconvinced. Presently she said, with a sigh, “If one
could only _be_ something or _do_ something! When I think of the people
who have been great—the heroes, the poets, the artists, people who have
accomplished something that lasted—they seem to me the only ones who
have been really happy. Just to be one of the mass, and live, and die,
and be forgotten, seems so pitiful.”

There had never been any closed doors between Mrs. Northmore’s heart and
her daughters. She had been the friend and confidante of each, and she
knew this mood of Esther’s; but the day had deepened its color to an
unusual sombreness. The girl had never before disclosed a feeling quite
like this, and for once the mother was at a loss how to help her. To say
that all could not be great was trite, and had no comfort in it.

“I think we often make a mistake in our envying of the great,” she said
gently. “The happiness to them was not in being known and remembered
beyond others; few of them knew in their lifetime that this would be
true of them, or even the value of their work to the world. The real
happiness lay in doing with success the thing they cared to do. To know
our work and do it, Esther, not the sort of work nor the reward, but the
finding and doing—_that_ is the true joy of the greatest, and it is open
to us all.”

She had spoken with simple seriousness, as she always did when others
brought her their troubles, however fanciful. Perhaps the girl did not
grasp the thought, or, grasping, find the comfort in it.

“But it seems to me that some of us have no special work to do, nor any
special faculty for doing it,” she said. “Here am I, for instance. What
am I good for? I seem to myself to be just one of those creatures who
are made for nothing but to fill up the spaces between the people who
amount to something.”

Mrs. Northmore pressed her hand for a moment lightly on the dark
appealing eyes of the girl. “If we are in earnest,” she said gently,
“and if it is usefulness, not praise that we are caring about, we shall
find our work; and be sure it will seem special to us if we love it as
we ought.”

There were a few minutes of silence; then the girl said more quietly,
but with a note of despondence in her voice: “If I had gone to school
longer and tried to fit myself for something, perhaps I might have found
out what I was good for. I didn’t care much when I left Lance Hall, and
I never studied as hard as I might while I was there; but I’ve thought
more about it since then.”

A look of pain came into Mrs. Northmore’s face. It was a regret the girl
had never expressed before, but one which had been often in her own
thoughts. Yet the year in boarding-school, which had followed Esther’s
graduation from the high school, had been all that Dr. Northmore could
afford to give his daughter. She was considered in the region quite an
accomplished girl, but her mother, at least, realized what a broader and
more serious education might have done for her. She realized it at this
moment with unusual force.

“I wish you might have had the best the schools can give, and some other
things you have missed, Esther,” she said. And then she added, “If we
were only a little richer!”

There was a tone in Mrs. Northmore’s voice which one heard but seldom,
and the girl noted it with a sudden compunction. “I haven’t missed
anything that I deserved to have,” she said quickly, “and I’ve had more
than most girls. I know that. It’s _you_ who go without things, mother.
You’re always planning and saving, and pretending you don’t want to have
anything or go anywhere.” And then the impatience came into her tone
again, though she was not thinking of herself, as she added, “Sometimes
I can’t see how it is that we have so little money to spend, when father
has such a good practice.”

Mrs. Northmore sighed. “Your father has never looked very sharply after
his own interests in money matters. He has been too busy with other
things, and too generous, for that,” she said. And then she added,
almost gayly: “But I have never lacked for anything; and it is so much
easier to bear the sort of mistakes your father makes than it would be
to bear some others! The ’handle’—you remember what Epictetus says about
the ’two handles’—why, the handle to bear _our_ sort of trouble with
stands out all round, and is so big one can’t help laying hold of it.”

Perhaps it was the light-heartedness with which she spoke, more than the
slight reproof which the words contained, that made Esther’s head drop
in her mother’s lap. “I wish I were half as good as you are, mother,”
she whispered.

The voices of Kate and Virgie from the direction of the kitchen made her
spring to her feet a minute later. “I don’t want to be here when they
come,” she said, dashing her handkerchief across her eyes. “I’m tired
and disagreeable. Good night.”

She was off before the others had reached the porch, and a half hour
later, when Kate followed her to her room, she was in bed, more than
willing that her sister should think her closed eyelids drowsy with
sleep, an impression which did not, however, prevent the other from
indulging in some lively monologue as she undressed. Her father had come
home, she said, and was delighted with the report of the day, but there
was a lot left to tell him in the morning. “Besides,” she added, “I
could see there was something on mother’s mind that she wanted to talk
over with him alone, so I came away.”

She was silent for fully two minutes, then burst out, “I say, wasn’t it
great, what Mort Elwell said about Stella Saxon’s picture?” She chuckled
at the remembrance, then added: “By the way, did it occur to you that he
wasn’t particularly enthusiastic over the idea of our going to
grandfather’s? My, but I wish we could go.”

“I don’t know what difference our plans make to him,” said Esther, in a
tone which indicated that her sleepiness had not reached an acute stage.

“Oh, they make plenty of difference to him; at least yours do,” said
Kate, sagely.

“Well, he might spare himself the trouble,” said Esther. “I must say I
think Morton Elwell takes too much for granted, lately.”

Kate stopped braiding her hair and stared at her sister. “I don’t know
what he takes for granted, except that old friends don’t change,” she
said. She continued to stare for a minute, then remarked slowly: “I know
what ails you, Esther. You want to have a lot of romance and all that
sort of thing. For my part I never could see that romance amounted to
anything but getting all mixed up and having a lot of trouble.” And
having delivered herself of this she apparently resigned herself to her
own reflections.

On the porch, still sitting in the evening darkness, Mrs. Northmore was
saying to her husband at that moment: “Philip, what do you say to
letting the girls go to New England? We’ve talked about it a good deal;
why not settle on it? Now that the wheat has turned out so well,
couldn’t we afford it?”

“Why, I think ’twould be an excellent plan, Lucia,” said the doctor,
cordially. “I’ve thought so all along, but I was under the impression
that you wanted the wheat money to go another way.”

She gave a little sigh. “Yes,” she said, “I did want to reduce that
mortgage, but some things can wait better than others. It would do the
girls good to go, and I believe Esther really needs a change.”

“You think the child is not well?” queried the doctor, with a note of
surprise in his voice.

“Oh, not ill,” said Mrs. Northmore, quickly, “but”—she hesitated a
moment, “she is rather restless and inclined to be a little morbid and
moody. It might be worth a good deal to her to have a change of scene,
and get some new ideas.”

“By all means pack her off,” said the doctor. “It’s a prescription I
always like to give my patients; and if that is yours for her I’ll fill
it with all confidence.” He rose and stretched his long arms with a
tired gesture. “I believe it’s bedtime for me,” he said, “and I rather
think it ought to be for you too.”




CHAPTER III

BETWEEN TIMES


It was at breakfast the next morning that the great decision was
announced.

“Well, young ladies,” said the doctor, looking from one to the other of
his older daughters, “what do you think your mother and I have decided
to do with you?” He paused for just an instant, then gave the answer
himself without waiting for theirs. “Nothing short of sending you East
for the rest of the summer. We’ve held a council, and decided that
nothing else will do in your case.”

They caught their breath, gasping for a moment at the suddenness of it,
then Kate brought her hands together with a clap. “Glorious!” she cried;
“that’s the best news I ever heard. But, do you know, I felt in my bones
last night that it was coming.”

The doctor laughed. The idea of this plump young creature deriving any
premonitions from her bones amused him. “And what did yours indicate?”
he asked, turning to Esther.

“Nothing as delightful as that,” she said. Her face was not as bright as
Kate’s. She wondered, with a sudden misgiving, whether her discontented
mood of the evening before had any share in bringing the decision, and
the thought was in the glance which she sent at that moment toward her
mother.

The latter met it with a smiling clearness. “Your father has been in
favor of it for some time,” she said, “and now that the wheat has turned
out so well there is really nothing in the way.”

The shadow flitted from Esther’s eyes. “Oh, it will be beautiful to go,
perfectly beautiful! I only wish Virgie could go, too,” she said, with a
glance at the little sister, whose face had grown very sober.

“Now you needn’t worry a bit about Virgie,” said the doctor, putting his
arm around the child, who sat beside him. “Your mother and I couldn’t
stand it without her, and we’re going to see that she has a good time.
Just you wait, Virgie,” he added, lowering his voice confidentially, “I
have a plan for this fall, and you’re going to be in it. There’ll be a
fine slice of cake left for us three when the others have eaten theirs
all up.”

He was exceedingly fond of his children. With their training, either
physical or mental, he had never charged himself,—perhaps because they
were girls,—but to gratify their wants, and to shield them as far as
possible from the hardships of life, was a side of parental privilege to
which he was keenly responsive.

“But when are we going?” Kate was already demanding.

“Just as soon as your mother can get you ready,” said the doctor; “and I
shouldn’t think that need to take very long. I fancy she has your
wardrobe planned already. Something kept her awake last night, and when
I asked her, sometime in the small hours, what it was, she said she was
contriving a new way to make over one of your old dresses. For your
mother,” he added, smiling at that lady, “is like the wife of John
Gilpin. Though bent on pleasure—yours, of course—she has ‘a frugal
mind.’”

“Think of being likened to that immortal woman!” cried Mrs. Northmore.
“I only hope my plans will work better than hers did.”

“Oh, your plans always work,” said the doctor. “But don’t tax your wits
too far reconstructing old clothes. Get some new ones; get ’em pretty
and stylish. I want the girls to be fixed up nice if they’re going to
visit those Eastern relatives.”

“Hear! hear!” cried Kate. “Papa, your ideas and mine fit beautifully.”

He was in the best of spirits. The good wheat crop had already brought
the payment of some long-standing medical bills, and Dr. Northmore could
always adjust himself to a time of abundance more gracefully than to the
day of small things.

“We shall treat you handsomely in the matter of our expenses, you may
depend on that,” said his wife. She had no intention of relaxing her
carefulness in the use of money; but she never wounded her husband’s
pride, and she always indulged him in the amused smile with which, in
times of comparative ease, he seemed to regard feminine economies.

There were plenty of them in the days that immediately followed, but the
girls had most of the things they wanted, and their father was more than
satisfied with the pretty becoming dresses in which they bloomed out,
one after another, for his benefit. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Northmore
was quite as desirous as he that her girls should be well provided for
this summer outing. She was a bit of a philosopher, but she never
affected the slightest indifference to the matter of dress. She had
excellent taste herself, and had given it to her children.

Things moved so swiftly that in little more than a week they were ready.
There were good-by calls to be made, and a host of others to be received
from friends who came to offer their congratulations and express
effusive hopes for their pleasure during the summer, for the news of
their plan had spread rapidly. But there was one friend to whom word
came late, and who, but for accident, might have missed it altogether.

This was Morton Elwell. The girls were walking home from the village
late one afternoon, when Kate, glancing back, saw the young man with the
New Light preacher. The two had been harvesting together at the other
end of the county, and since that day at the farm neither of them had
been in town.

“There’s Mort Elwell!” she exclaimed; and then she faced about, drawing
her sister with her, and waited frankly for him to come up.

The two men quickened their steps instantly. “Upon my word, I didn’t
know you till you turned,” said Morton. “My, how fine you look!”

Kate smiled, and Esther flushed. Perhaps it was one of the liberties she
did not quite like his taking, that he should be so plainly observant of
their new dresses.

“Well, it’s a wonder that anybody knows _you_, face to face, Mort,” said
Kate. “I declare you’re as brown as a mulatto.”

“Am I?” said the young man cheerfully. “Well, I’m at the engine now, and
what with smoke and sunburn it paints a fellow up in good style.”

“I suppose you know we’re going away next Wednesday,” said Kate. She had
fallen behind with him, leaving Esther to walk with the preacher.

“Why, no, I didn’t know it,” said Morton, fairly stopping in his walk.
“Is that so?”

“‘Certain true, black and blue,’ as we used to say when we were
children,” replied Kate. “We’re going to Grandfather Saxon’s. It was all
settled that night after we got home from the threshing.” She paused a
moment; then, as he had not spoken, added, with a little pout: “I
suppose you couldn’t strain a point to say you’re glad. Everybody else
seems to say it easily enough.”

“Why, of course I’m glad,” said Morton, hastily, “and I hope you’ll have
a tremendously good time; but it sort of takes a body’s breath away,
it’s so sudden. When are you coming back?”

“We’re not thinking of that part yet,” said Kate; “but not before
September.”

His face lengthened. “Why, I shan’t see anything of you girls all
vacation,” he said. “I did think when the harvesting was over I should
get an occasional glimpse of you. I wish threshing hadn’t begun so early
this year.”

“What’s that?” said the preacher, turning his head. “Wanting seed time
and harvest put off for your special benefit! That won’t do, Mort.”

“Oh, not that exactly,” said the young man. “But it _is_ sort of hard on
a fellow not to get any chance of seeing his friends all summer, when
that’s the only time in the year he’s at home.”

“There’ll be plenty of your friends left,” said Esther. She had half
turned her head, and was looking wonderfully pretty in her new leghorn
hat with the corn-flowers and poppies.

“Oh!” he said, reproachfully; but he had no chance to say anything more
just then, for the preacher claimed her attention.

“How far East are you going?” he asked.

“To mother’s old home in New England,” said the girl. The preacher gave
a surprised whistle. “Was your mother raised back there?” he demanded.
“Well, I never should have known but she was a born Hoosier.”

As a born Hoosier herself the young lady appreciated the compliment.
“No,” she said, “mother came from Massachusetts; but she’s lived here
twenty years, and I don’t suppose there’s much difference now.”

“Oh, we’ll let her have the name now,” said the preacher,
good-naturedly. “But it’s queer I never heard her say a word about
‘Boston.’”

“She didn’t come from Boston,” said Esther. “There’s ever so much of New
England outside of Boston, you know.”

“’Pears to cover the whole ground for most Yankees,” said the preacher,
dryly. “I don’t recollect as I ever talked with any of ’em—except your
mother—that it didn’t leak out mighty quick if they’d come from
anywheres near the ‘Hub.’ ’Peared to carry it round as a sort of
measuring stick, to size up everything else by.”

His figure was a trifle mixed, but it met the case. After a moment he
added: “Well, I’m right glad you’re going. It’s a good thing for young
folks to see something of the world outside of the home corner. I always
thought I’d like to travel a bit myself, but I reckon I’ll never get to
do it any other way than going round with a threshing machine, and that
don’t exactly hit my notion of travelling for pleasure. Eh, Mort?” he
queried, turning to the young man behind him.

The latter was not in a mood to feel the full humor of the remark, which
he had heard in spite of his apparent attention to Kate’s lively
chatter. “Can’t say there’s much variety in it,” he replied rather
absently.

“However,” continued the preacher, turning again to Esther, “I did go to
Kentucky once when I was a little chap. No,” he said, shaking his head,
as he caught the eager question in her eyes, “not in the Blue Grass
country where your father was raised, but in among the knobs where the
Cumberlands begin. It was a mighty poor rough country. I reckon you’ll
see something of the same sort where you’re going.”

“Oh, but that is a beautiful country! Mother has always said so,” cried
the girl, looking quite distressed.

“Well, maybe you’d call that country down there pretty too,” said the
preacher, with easy accommodation, “though it’s all in a heap, and rocks
all over it. Reminds me of the story about a soldier from somewhere
hereabouts that was going through there in the war-time, and stopped to
talk a minute with a fellow that was hoeing corn. ‘Well, stranger,’ says
he, ‘reckon you’re about ready to move out of here.’ ‘Why so?’ says the
fellow, looking sort of stupid. ‘Why, I see you’ve got the land all
rolled up ready to start,’ says the soldier.”

The preacher interrupted his mellow drawl for a moment to join in her
laugh at the story, then went on: “Now my notion of a pretty country is
one that looks as if you could raise something on it; the sort we’ve got
round here, you know,” he added, stretching out his arm with an
inclusive gesture.

His idea of landscape beauty was not Esther Northmore’s, but as she
looked at that moment over the peaceful country, golden and green with
its generous harvests, with here and there a stretch of forest rising
tall and straight against the sky, she felt its quiet charm with a
thrill of pride and gladness. “Yes; this is a beautiful country,” she
said softly. “I shall never change my mind about that.”

They had reached a point where another road crossed the one they were
following, and the preacher paused in his walk. “I must turn off here,”
he said. “Good-by! and take care of yourselves.” He shook hands heartily
with each of the girls, and added, with a nod at Esther: “Give my
special regards to your mother. Tell her I’ve just found out that she’s
a Yankee, and I don’t think any less of her for it.”

He was an odd genius, this New Light preacher. The Northmores were by no
means of his flock, but the feeling between them was most cordial. In
his office of comforter he had touched that of the healer more than once
among the families under his care, and the touch had left a mutual
respect between him and the doctor. With Mrs. Northmore the feeling was
even warmer. Rough and ill-educated as he was, there was a native force
and shrewdness in the man by no means common, and they were joined with
a frank honesty which would have attracted her in a far less interesting
person than he.

Morton Elwell walked on to the house, but refused the girls’ invitation
to come in to supper. “You know mother would like to have you,” Esther
said, with polite urgence. “She was complaining the other day that we
saw so little of you.”

But Morton was resolute. Perhaps the thresher’s costume in which he was
arrayed, the blue flannel shirt, jean trousers, and heavy boots, none
too black, helped him to stand by the promise he had given Mrs. Elwell.
“No,” he said; “I told Aunt Jenny I wouldn’t fail to come home to
supper.” But he leaned on the gate when he had opened it for the girls,
and stood for a minute as if he found it hard to turn away.

[Illustration: “HE LEANED ON THE GATE WHEN HE HAD OPENED IT FOR THE
GIRLS.”]

“Of course you’ll write to me first,” he said, glancing from one to the
other. There had been a correspondence of a desultory sort between them
ever since he went away to college, and he seemed to take for granted
that it would go on now. And then he added, looking to Esther, “You
wrote to me real often when you were a little girl, and went to your
grandfather’s before.”

Her color rose a trifle. “You have a remarkably good memory, Mort, to
remember such little things when they happened so long ago,” she said
lightly.

“Why, I’ve got every one of them now,” he replied. “I was looking them
over not so very long ago, and they were the jolliest kind of letters,
with little postscripts added by Kate in cipher. She was five, I
believe, then. They were joint productions in those days, but you
needn’t feel obliged to make them so now.”

“I suppose we needn’t feel ‘_obliged_’ to write them at all,” she said,
lifting her eyebrows a little.

“Oh, you wouldn’t go back on a fellow like that!” said Morton. “Why, it
would break me all up.”

There was something so affectionately boyish in his manner that Kate
said instantly: “Of course we’ll write to you, and tell you everything
that happens. You may wish my letters were postscripts again before you
get through with them.”

And Esther added cheerfully, “Yes, if you want to add a few more
specimens of my handwriting to that ancient collection, you shall
certainly have them.”

“Maybe we’ll send you our pictures too,” said Kate. “We’re going to have
some taken after we get there, and if they’re good—”

He broke in upon her with a sudden eagerness. “Well, don’t let your
cousin get you up like statues. I hate that kind.”

Kate burst into a laugh, but Esther looked impatient. “Oh, dear, don’t
you know that common, everyday faces like ours can’t be made to look
that way?” she said.

“Can’t they? Well, I’m awfully glad of it,” he replied. “Good-by.” And
then he grasped their hands for a moment, and struck off at a long,
swinging gait across the field that lay between their home and his
uncle’s.

The days that were left ran fast. They were full and hurried, as the
last days of preparation are apt to be in spite of the best-laid plans.
But the girls managed to take some rides with their father, who, in view
of the coming separation, seemed to expect more of their company than
usual, and Kate contrived to hold some sittings in the kitchen with Aunt
Milly, who had been in a depressed state of mind ever since the summer
plan had been decided on. In spite of being one who held with no
superstitions, a fact she never failed to mention when she had anything
of a mysterious nature to communicate, the number of dreams and
presentiments she had in regard to this visit was remarkable, and they
all tended to throw doubt on the probability of her darlings’ return.

“Why, we came back when we were children,” said Kate one evening, when
the old woman was unusually depressed, “and it was just as far to
grandfather’s then as it is now. It’s because you’re getting old and
rheumatic that you feel so blue about us, Aunt Milly.”

But Milly sighed as she shook her head. “It was different in those days,
honey,” she said. “You couldn’t help comin’ back to your ole mammy when
you were chil’en. But you’re older now, an’ a mighty good looking pair
o’ girls, if I do say it, an’ there’s no tellin’ what may happen when
you get to gallivantin’ roun’ with the young men in your mother’s
country.”

“Now, Aunt Milly,” laughed Kate, “you’ve always pretended to think we’re
only children still, and all at once you talk as if we were grown-up
young ladies. It’s no such thing. Besides,” she added cunningly, “didn’t
we come back safe and sound from Kentucky last year? And you know there
are no young men anywhere to hold a candle with those down there.”

“That’s a fac’, honey,” said Aunt Milly, lifting her head. “The ole
Kentucky stock don’t have to knock under yet, if some things is
changed.”

“Trust Milly to stand up for her own country,” laughed Dr. Northmore,
who had paused in his passage through the kitchen, and caught the last
remark.

“And me for mine, papa,” cried Kate. “I shall always like it better than
any other. I know I shall.”

Apparently he did not disapprove the sentiment, but he added warningly,
“Well, make it big enough.” And then he took her away with him to join
the family conclave in talking over the proposed journey.

They were small travellers, the Northmores, and the excursions from home
had of late years been short. The length of the one about to be taken
impressed them all. Mrs. Northmore spoke of it with manifest anxiety,
and the doctor spent much time poring over the railroad guide and
time-table. It was a work which, in spite of its fascination, harassed
him, and he alternated between the exasperated opinion that it was
impossible for any man not inspired to understand its vexatious figures,
and a disposition to combat with vehemence any one who reached a
conclusion different from his own on a single point. By this time the
course of the journey had been fully decided on. There would be but one
change of cars, and this had been hedged about with so much of
explanation and admonition that no two girls of average sense could
possibly go wrong.

The day came at last, and a perfect day it was, when they started off.
The doctor and Virgie accompanied them to the station, but Mrs.
Northmore preferred to say the last word quietly at home. There was a
crowd of young people gathered at the station, but the time for good-bys
was brief. The through train for the East was not a moment behind time.
There was a short impatient stop of the iron steed, a sudden crowding
together for hurried farewells, then two flushed faces, half smiling,
half tearful, pressed against the window, and the great wheels were in
motion again and the travellers on their way.

They drew a long breath as they settled fairly into their seats. “I’m
glad that part of it’s over,” said Kate.

“So am I,” said Esther; and then she added: “I’m glad we don’t get there
right away. It’s nice to have an interlude between the acts.”




CHAPTER IV

AT THE OLD PLACE


The journey to New England was more than a mere interlude for the girls.
It was a distinct pleasure in itself. To watch the low, rich landscape
which had lain around them from their infancy change imperceptibly to
one different and bolder; the broad fields narrowing; the long, rolling
swells lifting into clear-cut hills; the forests of beech and oak, with
smooth, sunlighted floors, giving place to woods filled with a
bewitching tangle of vines and ferns—all this was a constant delight to
travellers as fresh and unsated as ours.

“I like the wide, open stretches better,” said Kate once, when they were
winding with many turns between the close-set hills. But Esther did not
assent to this. It seemed to her that nature had heaped the measure of
her bounty here,—the bounty which is beauty,—not spread it out in even
level, and something in her heart responded to the change.

The hills had sharpened to a rugged sternness, the fields were checkered
off in little plots by lines of gray stone walls, plots in which men
were gathering hay behind oxen instead of horses, when at last they
reached the village of Esterly.

They had passed a succession of such villages, catching just a glimpse
of pretty homes and shaded streets, with always a spire or two lifted
above them,—an endless number it seemed to the girls,—but this was the
name for which they had been breathlessly waiting, and it was no sooner
spoken than they rose unsteadily in their places and turned their faces
toward the door.

“They’ll be here, of course. I only hope we shall know them,” murmured
Esther, anxiously.

She need have had no fear. Aside from some functionaries of the station
there were but two persons on the platform of the Esterly depot when the
Western train drew in, and these two were unmistakable. One of them was
an old man, leaning eagerly forward, with his hands clasped on the top
of his cane; a small, spare man, with clean-shaven face, and a touch of
ruddy color in his cheeks, hair but slightly gray, and bright blue eyes
which searched the faces before him without the aid of spectacles. The
other was a petite young lady, in a stylish dress, with a mist of golden
hair about her face, and a hat, which seemed to belong exactly with the
face, tied in a gauzy mesh of something under her chin. She did not look
in the least like a goddess, she was too slight and genteel; but she was
clearly Stella Saxon.

“Grandfather! Stella!” came from the one side in a moment, and “Girls!
Girls!” from the other, as the four met and embraced.

“We knew somebody would be here to meet us,” said Esther, when they had
taken another breath and a good look at each other; “but I’d no idea it
would be you, grandfather.”

“Hm,” said the old gentleman, evidently enjoying her surprise. “Mebbe
you thought I’d be propped up in a big chair waiting for you at the
house.”

“If you knew the state of mind he’s been in since morning!” said Stella.
“We got Uncle Doctor’s telegram early, saying you’d be here on this
train, and grandfather seemed to regard it as a summons to start for you
at once. Mother and I had hard work to hold him back at all, and in
spite of us he would start an hour before time this afternoon; actually
hurried his horse to get here, too,” she added, glancing with a little
grimace at the fattest of family horses which was standing before the
two-seated carriage at the side of the depot. “I shudder to think what
would have happened to him if you hadn’t come.”

She was saying this last to Esther privately. The old gentleman had
started briskly off with Kate to look after the trunks. These were to
follow to the farm in a spring wagon, and securing them was a matter
involving so little delay at this quiet station that the four were very
shortly on their way behind the gray nag, which, after receiving an
admonishing “cluck” at starting off, was allowed to settle to his own
jog-trot without further attention. They made a long circuit through the
main street of the village, the old gentleman bowing and smiling to
every one he met, and obviously eager to attract attention. But as the
houses grew more scattering he laid the reins across his lap, put on a
pair of spectacles, and for a full minute gazed through them steadily at
his granddaughters.

“You look as your mother did at your age; wonderfully like,” he said,
with his eyes on Esther’s face, “and you, too, but not so much,” he
added more slowly, turning to Kate. He took off his spectacles and
returned them to an old-fashioned steel case; then asked, with much
deliberation, “And what do you think of your old grandfather?”

“Why, you look just as I thought you did, only so very much younger,”
replied Esther. “I’d no idea you were so strong and active.” She paused
an instant, then, with a charming eagerness in her voice, added: “You
make me think of the ‘Farmer of Tilsbury Vale.’ You know the poem says,—

    “‘His bright eyes look brighter, set off by the streak
    Of the unfaded rose that still blooms on his cheek.’”

The old gentleman made no attempt to conceal his elation. He fairly
beamed; and Stella murmured in Esther’s ear: “You’ve done it! His
youthful looks are his particular vanity; and to have a fresh quotation
brought to bear upon the subject!” She lifted her hands as if in despair
of expressing the effect on her grandfather, and settled back in her
seat. He had turned to Kate and was plainly waiting for her to speak
now.

“Well,” said that young lady, regarding him with cheerful scrutiny, “I
can’t quote any poetry about it. It’s always Esther who puts in the fine
strokes with that sort of thing; but I must say I think you look mighty
young for a man of your age.”

In its way this was equally good. Ruel Saxon evidently considered that
she had used a very strong expression.

“Well,” he said with complacence, “I guess there ain’t much doubt but
what I do bear my age better ’n most men at my time of life. I guess I’m
some like Moses about that. You know it says, ‘his eye was not dim nor
his natural force abated,’ when he got to be a very old man.”

There was such evident surprise on the part of his granddaughters at
this remark that he added: “To be sure, Moses was a good deal older ’n I
am; he was a hundred and twenty years old when that was said of him, and
I hain’t got to _that_ yet by considerable. But I’m past the time of
life that most men get to, a good deal past. I was born in the year
seventeen hundred and ninety-one, and if I live till the twenty-first
day of next June I shall be eighty-nine years old.”

He paused to let the statement take full effect, and Stella remarked:
“That’s the way grandfather always tells his age. He names that year,
away back in the last century, and then he tells what his birthday next
year will make him. I don’t mind his keeping account for himself that
way, but he has the same style of reckoning for the rest of us.”

“Well,” he said, with a twinkle in his eyes, “the women would forget
their own ages if it warn’t for me and the big Bible. Now Stella here
was born in the year—”

“There,” cried the girl, “what did I tell you! And isn’t it enough to
make one feel ancient, the way he rolls out the syllables? Never you
mind about me, grandfather. Tell the girls when they were born. I’m sure
they’ve forgotten.”

They admitted the fact promptly, but he had not yet exhausted the
subject of his own exceptional fortune in withstanding the ravages of
age. It was a theme of which he was never weary, largely no doubt from a
certain vanity, which time had spared to him in a somewhat unusual
measure, along with his physical powers. To have a fresh and interested
audience was inspiration enough.

“It’s a great blessing to retain one’s faculties in old age,” he said
impressively. “Now I enjoy life, for aught I know, pretty near as much
as I ever did; but it ain’t so with everybody. There was Barzillai, for
instance. He was a younger man, by eight years, than I am, but he must
have been terrible hard of hearing, by his own account, and he’d lost
his taste so that there warn’t any flavor to him in the victuals he ate;
though he seems to have been an active enough man in some ways,” he
added reflectively.

There was a moment’s pause during which Deacon Saxon doubtless mused
upon his own mercies, and his granddaughters pondered the question, who
the unfortunate octogenarian whom he had just mentioned might be. Esther
could not remember ever hearing of any relative of that name, and it
hardly seemed to have a local flavor. She was glad when Kate, who seldom
remained ignorant for want of asking a question, inquired briskly:—

“Who was this Bar—what’s his name, that you’re talking about?”

“Who was Barzillai?” cried the old man, turning upon the girl an
astonished countenance. “Hain’t you never heard of Barzillai, the
Gileadite, the man who went down to give sustenance to David when he was
fleeing before Absalom? Don’t you know about _that_, and how David
afterwards wanted to take him up to Jerusalem with him, but Barzillai
said he was too old, and asked the king to let him stay in his own
place? Hain’t you read about _him_? Well, I never!”

He paused as in speechless wonder, then ejaculated: “When your mother
was your age she could have told all about him and anybody else you
could mention out of the Bible. What on airth is she doing that she
hain’t trained you up to know about it? I hope she hain’t stopped
reading the scriptures herself, living out there in the West.”

“Oh, dear!” cried Kate, quite overwhelmed by this burst, and in her
jealousy for her mother indifferent for the moment to the insinuation
against her native section. “Mother knows more about the Bible than
anybody I ever saw,—except you,—and I’ve no doubt she told us all about
that man when we were little” (she made no attempt now at his name),
“but I never could remember those Old Testament folks.”

It is doubtful whether Ruel Saxon felt much reassured as to the training
his daughter had given her children by the cheerful manner in which Kate
made the last admission. For himself his delight in those “Old Testament
folks” was perennial. He had pored over their histories till every
incident of their lives was as familiar to him as that of his own
neighbors. He had entered so intimately into the thoughts and
experiences of those ancient worthies that it was no meaningless phrase
when, in his daily prayers, he asked that he might “sit down with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of Heaven.”

Ruel Saxon was a type of that class of men, passing away now even from
the hills of New England, who from infancy were so steeped in knowledge
of the Bible that its incidents formed the very background of their
daily thinking, and its language colored their common conversation. It
must be confessed that in the Old Testament he found his keenest
pleasure, but between the covers of the Old or New there was no spot
which was not to him revered and familiar ground. That all scripture was
given by inspiration of God, and was “profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, and for instruction in righteousness,” was a part of his creed
on which no shadow of doubt had ever fallen. The doctrine, according to
his lights, he maintained with unction; the instruction he counted
himself well qualified to give; and the reproof he felt equally called
to administer on all needful occasions.

It was some minutes before he could quite recover from the astonishment
of finding himself the direct progenitor of two young people who knew
nothing of that worthy Gileadite whose state in old age formed such a
striking contrast to his own. Probably he would have delivered a little
homily, then and there, on the importance of reading the Bible, had not
a turn in the road at the top of a long steep hill brought them suddenly
into sight of the old Saxon homestead.

“There ’tis! There’s the old place! Should you know it?” he demanded of
his granddaughters.

Esther leaned forward from the back seat where she was sitting with
Stella and gazed for a moment, almost holding her breath. Then she
lifted a pair of moist shining eyes to her grandfather. “I should know
it anywhere,” she said, with a thrill in her voice. “It looks just as I
have dreamed of it all these years.”

Indeed it was a picture which might easily hold its place in a loving
memory; an old white house, with a wide stone chimney rising in the
middle of a square old-fashioned roof, standing in the shelter of a
cluster of elms, so tall, so noble, and so gracious in their bearing
that the special guardianship of Heaven seemed resting on the spot.

Kate had been looking at it steadily too, but she shook her head as she
glanced away. “No,” she said, “I shouldn’t know that I’d ever seen it
before; but if you had handed me the reins, grandfather, and told me to
find it somewhere on this road, I don’t think I should have turned in at
the wrong place.”

They talked of nothing else as they drove slowly toward it. The motion
Ruel Saxon had made—a most unusual one—to apply the lash to Dobbin had
been checked by Esther, who declared she wanted to take in the details
one by one, and begged him, with feeling, not to go too fast, a request
which threw Stella into a state of inward convulsion from which she
barely recovered in time to prevent the old gentleman from monopolizing
the whole distance with an account of the various improvements he had
made on the house, notably the last shingling and the raising of the
door-sills.

“You might tell the girls how you _didn’t_ change the windows,” she said
slyly; but if he was inclined to do this, Esther’s exclamation just then
prevented.

“Oh, those dear little old-fashioned windows!” she cried. “They’re
blinking in the sunshine just as they used to. Grandfather dear, I’m so
glad you haven’t had them changed into something different.”

He winced a little at this, and Stella said magnanimously, “It was
really my mother’s idea. She does complain sometimes of the trouble it
is to keep all those tiny little window-panes clean, and so grandfather
thought one spring that he’d have some new sashes put in, with a single
pane of glass above and below. They had it all fixed up between them,
but I came home just in time to prevent.” She gave a shudder, then
added: “I’ve always believed in special providences since then. Why, the
change would have been ruinous, simply ruinous! You know if you can’t
have a lovely new house with everything graceful and artistic, the next
best thing is to have one that’s old and quaint. I wouldn’t have a thing
changed about our house for any consideration. I’ve set my foot down
about that.” (With all her daintiness she looked as if she could do it
with effect.) “But mother and grandfather understand now, and have given
their solemn promise never to make the smallest alteration without
consulting me.”

The old gentleman had been listening to this with his mouth pulled down
to an expression of resignation which was clearly not natural to him.
“Well,” he said, when she had reached her triumphant conclusion, “I’ve
always been of the opinion that it’s best to let women-folks have their
way about things in the house. It pacifies ’em, and makes ’em willing to
let the men manage things of more consequence. You know Solomon says ‘it
is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious woman.’”

“That’s a fact, grandfather,” said Stella, cordially; “and there’s no
describing how contentious I should be if you set about changing this
old house.”

They had almost reached it now. A minute more carried them under the
elms, straight to the door. It was open, and under the latticed porch,
covered with honeysuckles on one side and bitter-sweet on the other,
stood Aunt Elsie waiting to receive them. She was a delicate-looking
woman, whose quality, as one read it at first glance, was distinctly
that of a lady. That she was somewhat precise and old-fashioned came
next, in spite of the graceful French twist in her hair and her pretty
lavender dress. She kept her place under the lattice, the color rising
slightly in her thin cheeks as the girls came up, and her manner of
greeting them, though affectionate, had none of the eager warmth of the
earlier meeting.

Aunt Elsie Saxon, beside her vivacious daughter, or her still more
sprightly father-in-law, seemed a singularly colorless person, but her
quiet unresponsive manner covered a stronger individuality than
appeared. The war had made her a widow at the very beginning of the
struggle. In the bereavement of those first days she had come with her
children to the old home for the help and comfort she sorely needed, but
the time never came when she could be spared to leave it. And now for
many years she had been mistress of the house, bearing with the somewhat
erratic humors of Ruel Saxon as a more impulsive woman could hardly have
done, and consoled, no doubt, for much that was trying by the certain
knowledge that in his heart he loved and leaned upon her.

There was one other member of the family circle, Tom, the
sixteen-year-old boy, but he, it appeared, had some pressing duty in the
field. At least he did not show himself till supper time, and then he
slipped in with the hired man, who, as well as himself, was duly
introduced to the cousins. He was a shy, awkward fellow, with a freckled
face, and a pair of shrewd observant eyes, in whose glance Kate thought
she detected a lurking disdain for the society of girls. She wanted to
begin making his acquaintance at once,—by way of punishment, of
course,—but his seat was too far from hers at the table, and he was off
like a flash when the meal was over.

It seemed to both the girls that this was the longest day they had ever
known, but its hours did not outlast the pleasure they brought. Esther
could not rest till she had rambled about the place to find the old
familiar things, and her delight, as she came upon one after another,
knew no bounds. There was the cherry tree, almost strangled by the
grape-vine which hung around it in a thick green canopy, under which she
had done miniature housekeeping in those childish days, and a fragment
of old blue china, trodden in the ground, was a find to bring a joy like
that of relic-hunters in Assyrian mounds, when they come upon some
mighty treasure.

“It was a part of our best tea-set, Stella,” she cried. “Don’t you
remember how I broke one of grandmother’s company plates by accident,
and after mourning over it a little in her gentle way, she gave us the
pieces to play with, so I shouldn’t feel too badly?” She wiped the bit
on her lace-edged handkerchief and held it for a moment lovingly against
her cheek.

There was the bunch of striped grass, growing still at the corner of the
garden, and she felt a childish impulse to throw herself on the ground
beside it, and hunt, as she used to, for two of the long silky spears
which would exactly match. She had never quite done it in the old days.
Perhaps she could find them now. She peered up into the tallest of the
elms and shouted for joy to find the nest of a fire hangbird swinging
just as it used to among the long, lithe branches. She made her way
straight to the tree where the pound sweetings grew, and laughed to find
that it bore them still, large and golden as ever.

And here again a childish memory came back with a rippling delight over
the years that were past. “Do you remember how I tore my dress one day,
climbing that tree to get apples?” she appealed to Stella. “I could
never bring enough down in my pocket, and if I took a basket up it was
sure to spill and the chickens to peck the apples before I got down. One
day I gave my dress a horrible tear going up. It scared me at first, and
then it dawned upon me, What a place for apples! It was a woollen dress
and the skirt was lined. I used that hole for a pocket, and filled the
skirt full. It’s a wonder I wasn’t dragged from the tree by the weight
of it. The gathers were dragged from the belt, I remember that
perfectly, and how grandmother looked when I went in to share the booty
with her,” she added, laughing.

Oh, it was pleasant, this wandering over the old place, the finding and
remembering!

It was really inside the house that things were most changed; but this,
as Stella explained, was really a return to the way they rightly
belonged. Much of the furniture which Esther remembered as crowding the
dusky garret had come down, and some which her grandmother had rejoiced
in as new and handsome had taken its place there. The haircloth sofa and
chairs over which she had slipped and slidden in her youthful days had
given place to an oak settle and chairs which, in spite of their
old-fashioned shape, were roomy and comfortable. One, a delicious old
sleepy hollow, covered with the quaintest of chintz, stood in the corner
which had been the grandmother’s, and the little, round light-stand was
beside it, with the leather-covered Bible smooth as glass, and the
candlestick and snuffers, as if she still might sit there of an evening
to read.

“Grandfather himself prefers a lamp,” Stella remarked, in passing; “he
says he’s got past tallow dips, but out of respect to grandmother’s
memory—I impressed that on him strongly—he lets me keep the stand just
as she used it.”

She certainly had a genius for restoring the old, and doing it with an
art which threw all its stiffness into graceful lines. The fireplace in
the sitting room, which had been boarded up in Esther’s day, with a
sheet-iron stove in front of it, was open now, and the old brass
andirons shone at the front. The old bricks had been cracked with age,
but they had been replaced by some blue Dutch tilings representing Bible
scenes, which gave the whole a charmingly quaint effect.

“It came high,” Stella said to Esther, who hung on every word of
explanation, “and I didn’t know for a while as I should get what I
wanted. There was a Colonial tile that would have been perfect, but
grandfather wouldn’t hear of it. Then all at once I lighted on this in a
shop in Boston, and I knew the deed was done. Grandfather fell a victim
to my account of the pictures, and I couldn’t get them quick enough to
suit him. I consider that fireplace my greatest triumph.”

The house was really a succession of them. It was only at the pictures
on the walls that the girl’s desire to restore the old had stopped. “If
there had only been some fine old family portraits!” she said
mournfully. “But there weren’t. I suppose our ancestors never had any
money to spend for that sort of thing. There was positively nothing but
some wretched prints, and one oil painting that grandmother saved her
egg-money for months to buy; hideous thing, quite on the order of those
that are advertised nowadays, ‘Picture painted while you wait.’ I had to
banish them all. There was no other way. But I found some of
grandmother’s dear old samplers tucked away in the drawers, and I pinned
them up around to take the edge off the other things.”

“The other things” were some of them her own, and they mingled on the
walls with photographs of foreign scenes, and here and there an etching
with a name pencilled in the corner, to which she called attention as
they passed, with the air of one confident of impressing the beholder.

“Oh, I’ve picked up a few good things in the course of my travels,” she
said, after one of Esther’s bursts of admiration. “I’ll defy anybody to
make a better showing than I with the amount I’ve spent. Mother thinks
I’ve spent too much; but it’s my only extravagance, positively my only
one, and you have to let yourself out in some direction. It’s all that
makes saving worth while.”

She seemed to have no vanity about her own work, but there was one bit
of it before which Esther paused with a long delight, turning back from
famous Madonnas again and again to gaze at it.

It was a picture of a sweet old face, framed in a grandmother’s cap,
very softly done in crayon, and it hung above the little stand in the
corner. Below it, pinned carefully on the wall, was an old, old sampler,
and the faded letters at the top spelled, “Roxana Fuller, aged eleven.”
It was a deft hand, though so young, that had wrought it. There was
exquisite needlework in the flowing border, and in the slender maidens
at the centre, clasping hands under a weeping willow, above the lines:—

    “When ye summers all are fled,
    When ye wafting lamp is dead,
    Where immortal spirits reign,
    There may we two meet again.”

Why these two sweet creatures, evidently in the bloom of life, should
have been consoling themselves with this pensive sentiment it was hard
to see; but a consolation it may have been to the poor little artist who
achieved them to think of Elysian fields where teachers should cease
from troubling and samplers be no more.

It had grown dark in the house, too dark for any more searching of its
treasures, when the two girls at last sat quietly down in the old south
doorway. “If grandmother were only here it would all be perfect,” said
Esther, with a long, soft sigh. “Somehow it seems strange that she
should be gone, and everything else just as it used to be. I had no idea
I should miss her so.”

“I always miss her when I sit in this doorway in the evening,” said
Stella. “It was her favorite place. She was so feeble in those last
years that she seldom got beyond the threshold, but she said there was
always some pleasant smell or sound coming in to find her. You ought to
have seen her here in the spring. The door was always boarded up in the
winter, with a bank across the threshold to keep out the cold, and she
was so happy when it was opened. I used to tell her when the frogs began
to peep, and she would listen and smile, and say it seemed to her their
voices were softer than they used to be. Dear heart, she was so deaf in
those days that I really suppose she only heard them singing in her
memory, but it was all the same to her.

“Yes, it was all the same,” she repeated musingly, “and just as real,
though grandfather used to argue with her sometimes that a person who
couldn’t hear her own name across the room couldn’t hear frogs peeping
at a quarter of a mile. And she would admit it sometimes in a humble
way, but she always forgot it, and enjoyed the singing just the same the
next evening.”

“She wasn’t a bit like grandfather, was she?” asked Esther. She wanted
Stella to keep on talking about this sweet old grandmother, whom she
herself had known only in a brief childish way.

“Oh, dear, no,” said Stella; “there couldn’t be two people more unlike.
She never talked of herself, and she never quoted scripture unless it
was one of the promises. Grandfather always lorded it over her in a way,
and she was so frail toward the last that he did it more than ever. If
the least thing ailed her he thought she was going to die right off, and
he always felt it his duty to tell her that she was a very sick woman,
and that it would not be surprising if she were drawing near her end.”

She made a soft gurgling in her throat, then went on.

“But that never worried grandmother a bit. She always said she was
willing to go if ’twas the Lord’s will; but, do you know, in her heart
she really expected to outlive him! She told me so once confidentially,
and explained, in her perfectly sweet way, that she knew how to manage
him better than any one else, and she was afraid it would be a little
hard for us to get along with him if she were gone. She said it had been
a subject of prayer with her for years, and she had faith that her
prayer would be answered.”

She paused, and Esther said gravely: “But she did die before him, after
all. I wonder what she thought about her prayer then.” Stella shook her
head. “I don’t know,” she said; “I imagine she didn’t think of it at
all, but only that God wanted her. It would have been just like her.”

Esther did not speak for a minute. She was pondering her grandmother’s
case, while the crickets in the grass filled the stillness with their
chirping, and the long, clear call of a whippoorwill sounded from the
woods. Presently she asked, “Did she know at the last that she was
really going to die?”

“I think she did,” said Stella. “I’ve always felt sure she did, though
no one else feels just as I do about it.”

She clasped her hands about her knees, and a graver note than usual
crept into her musical voice, as she went on. “There was something like
a paralytic stroke toward the end, and after that she never got up, but
lay in bed, not suffering any pain, but only growing weaker every day. I
was with her a great deal, and there never was any one easier to take
care of. One morning I was watering the flowers in her window and I saw
a cluster of buds, that were almost blown, on her tea rose. She was
passionately fond of flowers, and that rose was a special favorite,
though it blossomed so seldom that any one else would have lost all
patience with it. I knew how pleased she would be, so I took it over to
her bed. ‘Grandmother,’ I said, ‘there are some buds on your tea rose;
it’ll be in bloom in a day or two.’ If you could have seen how her face
lighted up! ‘Why, why,’ she said, ‘my tea rose!’ And then she put out
her hands all of a tremble, as if she couldn’t believe it without
touching. I guided her dear old fingers, and she moved them over the
bush as gently as if it had been a baby’s face. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it has
blossomed so many times when something beautiful happened! Somehow, it
seemed to know. It blossomed when Lucia was married, and the day your
mother came home to live with you children; but I never thought it would
be so now. A day or two, did you say; only a day or two more?’ And then
she closed her eyes with such a smile, and I heard her saying softly to
herself,—

    “‘There everlasting spring abides,
    And never-withering flowers.’

“Her mind wandered a little all that day and the next, and she never
once spoke of leaving us, but she slipped away at night as quietly as
going to sleep, and in the morning the rose was in bloom. I told
grandfather about it afterward, but he didn’t attach any significance to
it at all. In fact, I think he felt a little mortified, and he said if
she had realized that she was on the brink of eternity she wouldn’t have
been thinking about a rose.”

She was silent a minute, then added: “In one way I don’t know but
grandmother’s prayer was answered after all, for grandfather seemed
different after her death. He has been more considerate of us all, and
we—yes, I guess we’ve tried harder to be good to him. We couldn’t help
it when we remembered how patient she always was.”

The chirping of the crickets seemed to grow fuller and gladder in the
summer stillness, and the notes of the whippoorwill came with yet
mellower call. It was as if the influence of a sweet, unselfish, loving
spirit filled the place, and somehow it did not seem to Esther Northmore
at that moment a poor or paltry thing to have lived and died one of the
common throng.




CHAPTER V

AUNT KATHARINE SAXON


In the privacy of their room that night Kate confided to Esther two
resolutions. The first was that she would not again, during her stay at
her grandfather’s, needlessly expose her ignorance of any point of Bible
history: “For if we’re going to get mother into disgrace, and make him
think she never taught us anything about it, it’ll be a pretty
business,” she ended with feeling.

To this Esther gave cordial assent, but she was not so sure of Kate’s
wisdom in the other matter; for the girl, with her usual penetration,
had guessed that the Eastern relatives held a somewhat exalted opinion
of the superiority of New England to the rest of the United States, and
announced her intention of correcting it to the best of her ability.
Esther, whose loyalty to her own section was not of a combative sort,
suggested mildly that people’s opinions about things didn’t alter them,
and that the grandfather, at his advanced age, should at least be left
to the enjoyment of any prejudices he might have in favor of his native
section.

But the allusion to his age should have been omitted. Kate shook her
head at this, and declared that he of all others was the one not to be
spared. Was it not his pride and boast that time had not robbed him of
either mental or physical vigor? No, no; she should not hold herself
debarred from supplying him with new ideas on any subject. It was only
when he stood on Bible ground that she should let him alone.

It was evident the next morning that on this ground he did not intend to
let her alone, for at family prayers he read the pathetic story of
David’s flight from his unworthy son, and his eyes sought hers for a
moment with pointed meaning as he paused on the name of the loyal friend
whose swift generosity remembered the fugitives, “hungry and weary and
thirsty in the wilderness,” and who of good right met them again with
rejoicing in their hour of victory.

The quaint old story held the girl’s absorbed attention to the end. She
wished it were longer, and told her grandfather so after breakfast,
adding that the way he read the Old Testament made it more interesting
than common.

He received the compliment with complacence. “Well,” he said, “I guess I
do read it better than some folks. I guess I’m a little like those men
in the days of Ezra the scribe, who stood up before the people, and
‘read in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them
to understand.’”

Kate privately wondered how many more people in the Bible her
grandfather resembled, but she refrained from suggesting the query, lest
he should claim her attention at once for the whole list.

It was while they sat at table that morning that he said, looking at her
with the sudden lighting of face which marks a mental discovery: “It’s
your great-aunt Katharine that you put me in mind of. I knew there was
somebody. It ain’t your looks so much; but a way you have.”

“Oh, grandfather, how can you?” cried Stella. “Kate, you won’t thank him
much for that when you know Aunt Katharine.”

“She’s the one I was named for, I suppose,” said Kate. “I’ve heard
mother tell about her. Well, if she’s disagreeable, there won’t be any
love lost between us on account of the name. I never did like it
particularly.”

“Disagreeable!” cried Stella, “why, she’s the queerest, most
cross-grained, cantankerous—”

“Stella! Stella!” said her mother, severely. “Why will you prejudice
your cousins against your poor Aunt Katharine?”

“My poor Aunt Katharine will do it herself quick enough,” said Stella.
“Oh, yes,” she added with a little shrug, as she saw her mother’s lips
parting again, “my mother’s going to tell you that Aunt Katharine has
had a great deal in her life to try her, and that she is really a
remarkably bright and capable woman. It’s perfectly true; and several
other things are true besides.”

“The trouble with my sister Katharine,” said Ruel Saxon, setting down
his cup of tea, which he had been drinking so hot that every swallow was
accompanied by an upward jerk of the head and a facial contortion, “the
trouble with Katharine Saxon don’t lay in her nat’ral faculties. It lays
in a stiff-necked and perverse disposition. When she gets a notion into
her head she won’t change it for anybody, and she’s wiser in her own
conceit than ‘seven men that can render a reason.’”

“Grandfather himself frequently personates the whole seven,” observed
Stella, with a nod at her cousins. She smiled, as if the memory of some
past scenes amused her, then said soberly: “The fact of it is, Aunt
Katharine is a regular crank. There’s nothing in this world that goes
right according to her notion of it, but she’s particularly down on the
ways of the men. She _would_ have a little patience with women—for she
thinks their faults are mostly due to their being so down-trodden—if
they only wouldn’t marry. I’ve heard her say so! She never married
herself, you know, and she has an awfully poor opinion of the whole
institution.”

Ruel Saxon looked as if he had a word to offer at this point in regard
to his sister’s matrimonial opinions, but Aunt Elsie was before him.
“Now, don’t you think,” she said, looking gravely at Stella, and
incidentally including him in the passing glance, “that we’d better let
the girls form their own impressions of Aunt Katharine? They may like
her a great deal better than you do, Stella.”

“I’m sure I’m willing,” said the girl, with another shrug, and her
grandfather, after wrestling with a little more extremely hot tea,
seemed to be willing too; but he suggested that the girls should make an
early call on their Aunt Katharine. It would give them a chance of
forming the desired impressions, and besides she would expect it.

The girls accepted the suggestion promptly. Indeed Kate, whose interest
in her namesake had been considerably whetted by what had been said of
her, proposed that they should go that very morning; but to this Aunt
Elsie’s judgment was again opposed. It seemed that Aunt Katharine had a
special dislike to being interrupted in her morning duties by callers,
and was disposed to think slightingly of people who hadn’t “work enough
to keep them at home in the fore part of the day.” In the case of her
nieces, who must certainly be excused for being at leisure, she might
waive the last objection, but it was best to be on the safe side.

It was settled that the girls, accompanied by their grandfather, should
go that afternoon, and if the call had been upon some distinguished
person they could not have taken more pains with their toilets. Esther
debated between three gowns, and finally settled on a soft gray, with
plain white cuffs and collar, while Kate put on a pretty lawn and the
dashing Roman sash which had been Aunt Milly’s parting gift.

It was less than a half hour’s walk across the fields to Aunt
Katharine’s house, but the grandfather had decided to go by the road in
state, and had Dobbin and the two-seated carriage at the door in good
time. He had taken a little more pains than usual with his own
appearance, and his daughter-in-law added the last touches with careful
hand.

She was not much inclined to the giving of gratuitous advice; but, in
the absence of the young people from the room, she did say,
persuasively, as she adjusted the old gentleman’s cravat: “If I were
you, father, I’d try not to get into one of those discussions to-day
with Aunt Katharine. We want the girls to have as pleasant an opinion of
her as possible, and you know she always appears at a disadvantage when
she’s arguing with you.”

Sly Aunt Elsie! There were moments when the wisdom of the serpent was as
nothing to hers. Ruel Saxon twisted his neck for a moment impatiently in
his cravat, then replied meekly: “Well, I s’pose it does kind of put her
out to have me always get the better of her. Katharine has her good
p’ints as well as anybody, and I’d be glad to have Lucia’s children see
’em. If she don’t rile me up too much I’ll—yes, I’ll try to bear with
her this afternoon. Solomon says there’s a time for everything: a time
to keep silence and a time to speak; and mebbe it’s a time to keep
silence to-day.”

In this accommodating frame of mind he started off with his
granddaughters. Stella had declined an invitation to accompany
them—possibly at her mother’s suggestion—though the fact that the way
lay along one of her favorite drives, the old county road, had been
something of an inducement to go.

It was one of those dear old roads, familiar in every part of New
England, through which the main business of the region, now diverted to
other highways, once took its daily course, but which, as its importance
dwindled, had gained in every roadside charm. The woods, sweet with all
summer odors, had crept close to its edge; daisies and ferns encroached
on its borders, and its wavy line made gracious curve for the rock which
had rolled from the hill above and lay beside it still, a moss-covered
perch for children and squirrels. Here, the birds, not startled too
often in their secret haunts, tilted on sprays of the feathery sumach,
finishing their songs with confident clearness as the traveller drew
near, and the swift brown lizards darted across the way before the very
wheels of his carriage.

Miss Katharine Saxon’s farm was one of those which still had contact
with the world through this deserted highway, but its comparative
isolation had not affected its well-kept appearance. The house was
white, with green blinds at the front and sides, but presented a red end
to the fields behind, after the fashion of many in that section. The
dooryard, a small rectangle, was shut off from the surrounding pastures
by a high picket fence, though there were no shrubs, or even a
flower-bed, inside the enclosure. The owner was not visible at any of
the windows as her guests walked up the gravel path, which was too
narrow to admit of their advancing in any but single file, but the brass
knocker had scarcely fallen before she opened the door in person.

[Illustration: “SHE OPENED THE DOOR IN PERSON.”]

Even Esther had no remembrance of having seen her before, but there
could be no doubt of her identity. In feature she was singularly like
her brother, but her small thin figure was not trim and straight like
his. She was so painfully bent as plainly to need the aid of the stout
oak stick on which she leaned, and her hair, in striking contrast with
his, was snowy white. She greeted her nieces with as little effusion as
their Aunt Elsie, but her quick bright eyes betrayed a much keener
interest as they darted sharply from one to the other.

“Well, Ruel, I s’pose you’re feeling just as smart as ever to-day, and
just as able to bless the Lord that you ain’t as the rest of us are.
Thank you, my rheumatism ain’t a mite better ’n ’twas the last time you
was here, and my sight and hearing are mebbe a little grain worse.”

She delivered herself of this with surprising rapidity as she walked
before them into the parlor, looking back with short quick glances at
her brother. He responded by a rather discomfited grunt. Evidently she
had the start of him. The parlor was of the primmest New England type,
and so dark that for some moments the girls, sitting uncomfortably on
straight-backed chairs whose hard stuffed seats seemed never before to
have been pressed by a human figure, could scarcely make out what manner
of place they had entered. It dawned on them by degrees, and if anything
had been needed to enhance the charm of the parlor at the old homestead,
the necessary contrast would certainly have been furnished here.

There was nothing to suggest that any of the ordinary occupations of
human life had ever been carried on in this room. The pictures which
Stella had banished would seem to have been dragged from their
hiding-places and hung on these walls, and beside them there was nothing
of mural ornament except three silver coffin plates framed in oak on a
ground of black. The Northmore girls, gazing in wonder at these shining
tablets, could scarcely believe that they were really what they seemed,
but Stella, to whom they appealed on their return, promptly disabused
them of the doubt. Most certainly these sombre ornaments had their
original place on the funeral casket. It was not uncommon, she said, to
find such relics displayed in old-fashioned houses in this region.

“There were some in our house once,” she added, “but I persuaded
grandfather to let me lay them away in the best bureau drawers. He
objected at first, but after I put up my Madonnas and cathedrals he
succumbed. I believe he considered the place unfit to display the names
of those who had died in the faith.”

But this was afterward. At present Esther was occupied with the
strenuous effort to read the names thus honored of Aunt Katharine, and
Kate was bending all her energies to discover the points in which she
herself resembled that lady. The latter turned upon them now with one of
her sharp glances.

“So you’re Lucia’s girls,” she said with deliberation. “Well, you ain’t
as good looking as she was, neither of you. But handsome is that
handsome does; and if you behave yourselves, you’ll do.”

The girls were somewhat taken aback by this, but Kate rallied in a
moment. “You can’t hurt our feelings by telling us we aren’t as good
looking as mother was,” she said gayly, “for we know she was a regular
beauty. Father’s told us that over and over.”

“I’ll warrant he thought so,” chuckled her grandfather, “and he wasn’t
the only one, neither. Why all the likeliest young fellows in town came
courting your mother. She didn’t have to take up with a Western man
because she couldn’t get anybody nearer home.”

“Perhaps it was because she had a chance to compare the Western man with
those around here that she _did_ take up with him,” said Kate, quickly.

It was a fair retort; but the old gentleman’s forehead puckered for a
moment as if he were not quite prepared for it. Before he could say
anything in reply his sister had changed the subject, by asking, in her
abrupt way, with her eyes fixed on her younger niece, “What do you think
of this country?”

It is the stereotyped question from the old resident to the newcomer in
all parts of the world. Perhaps, convenient as it is in bridging over
the awkwardness of first acquaintance, it would be oftener omitted if
society remembered that dictum of Dr. Johnson’s, that no one has a right
to put you in such a position that you must either hurt him by telling
the truth, or hurt yourself by not telling it. Kate Northmore had never
faced the alternative under very crucial conditions, but whatever twinge
there might be she preferred on general principles to resign to the
other party, and she did so promptly now.

“Well, I can’t say I’m very much struck with the looks of it,” she said
frankly. “It’s different from ours, you know; and these little bits of
fields are so funny, all checkered off with stone walls. I haven’t got
used to them yet.”

Miss Saxon looked at her niece without speaking, but the grandfather
bristled at this. “Hm!” he grunted, “You Western folks seem to think
nothing’s of any account unless it’s big. ’Taint the size of things, but
what you do with ’em, that counts.”

“Well, it’s a wonder to me what you can do with some of this land of
yours, it’s so rough and poor,” said Kate, lightly. “I don’t see how the
farmers manage to make a living, scratching round among the rocks.”
Then, with a good-natured laugh, she added: “Oh, we don’t despise the
littles, out our way, as much as you think; but when it comes to wheat
and corn, and things of that sort, we do like to see a lot of it growing
all together. It looks as if there was enough to go round, you know, and
makes people feel sort of free and easy.”

Perhaps, in his heart, Ruel Saxon doubted whether it was good for people
to feel free and easy in this transient mortal state, but he had no
chance just then to discuss the moral advantages of large labor and
small returns, for Esther exclaimed, with a glance at her sister which
was half reproachful: “But there are so many other things in a country
besides the crops! For my part, I think New England is perfectly
beautiful. I believe I’m in love with it all.”

Miss Katharine Saxon turned her head and looked at the girl attentively.
The mother must have been very pretty indeed if she had ever looked
prettier than Esther did at that moment. A delicate pink had risen in
her cheeks, and her brown eyes seemed unusually soft and lustrous in the
warmth with which she had spoken. She had made a lucky suggestion, and
her grandfather took his cue instantly.

“We never pretended that our strong p’int was raising wheat ’n’ corn
here in New England,” he said loftily. “The old Bay State can do better
than that. She can raise men; men who fear God and honor their country,
and can guide her in the hour of need with the spirit of wisdom and
sound understanding.”

“We’ve got some of that sort, too,” said Kate, cutting in at the first
pause. “The only difference is you started on your list a little ahead
of us.”

But the remark was lost on her grandfather. He was on solid ground now,
and he felt his eloquence rising. “You talk about our land being poor.
Well, mebbe ’tis; mebbe we do have to scratch round among the rocks to
make a living, but we’ve scratched lively enough to do it, and support
our schools and churches, and start yours into the bargain. We’ve
scratched deep enough to find the money to send lots of our boys to
college—there’s been a good many of ’em right from this district. There
was Abner Sickles that went to Harvard from the back side of Rocky Hill,
where they used to say the stones were so thick you had to sharpen the
sheep’s nose to get ’em down to the grass between; there was Baxter
Slocum—thirteen children his father had—there were the Dunham boys,
three out of six in one family.”

For the last minute Miss Katharine Saxon had been moving uneasily in her
chair. Her square chin, which had been resting on her clasped hands at
the top of her cane, had come up, and her eyes were fixed sharply on her
brother.

“While you’re about it, Ruel,” she said, interrupting him in the dryest
of tones, “you might just mention some o’ the _girls_ that have been
sent to college from these old farms.”

Ruel Saxon, reined up thus suddenly in the onward charge of his
eloquence, opened and closed his lips for a moment with a rather
helpless expression. She waited for him to speak, her thin hands
gripping the cane, and the corners of her mouth twitching ominously.

“Well, of course, Katharine,” he said testily, “there hain’t been as
many girls. For that matter there warn’t the female colleges to send ’em
to fifty years ago; but you know yourself there hain’t been the means to
send ’em both, the boys _and_ the girls, and if it couldn’t be but one—”

He paused to moisten his lips, and she took up the word with an accent
of intense bitterness. “If there couldn’t be but one, it must be the
boy, of course,—always the boy. Oh, I know! Yes, and I know how the
girls ’n’ their mothers have slaved to send ’em. It ain’t the men that
have learned how to get more out of the farms; it’s the women that have
learned how to get along with less in the house. There was Abner
Sickles! Yes, there was; and there was his sister Abigail, too. I went
to school with ’em both. She was enough sight smarter ’n he was; always
could see into things quicker, ’n’ handle ’em better, but they took a
notion to send him to college,—wanted to make a minister of him,—and she
stopped going to school when she was fourteen, and did the housework for
the family,—her mother was always sickly,—and then sat up nights, sewing
straw and binding shoes to earn money for Abner.” She paused, with a
note in her voice which suggested a clutch at the throat, then added:
“She died when she was twenty. Went crazy the last part of the time, and
thought she’d committed the unpardonable sin. It’s my opinion somebody
_had_ committed it; but ’twarn’t her.”

It was the old gentleman who was moving uneasily now. “It was too bad
about Abigail,” he said, with a shake of the head. “I remember her case,
and ’twas one of the strangest we ever had in the church. I went out to
see her once, with two of the other deacons, and we set out the doctrine
of the unpardonable sin clear and strong, and showed her that if she
really _had_ committed it she wouldn’t be feeling so bad about it—she’d
have her conscience seared as with a hot iron; but she couldn’t seem to
lay hold of any comfort. However, it was plain that her mind wasn’t
right, and I don’t believe the Lord held her responsible for her lack of
faith.”

The old woman gave an impatient snort. “If he didn’t hold somebody
responsible, you needn’t talk to me about justice,” she said fiercely.
“I don’t know how you and the other deacons figured it out, Ruel, but if
it ain’t the unpardonable sin for folks to act like fools, when the Lord
has given ’em eyes to see with, and sense enough to put two and two
together, I don’t know what ’tis. I tell you the whole trouble grew out
of that notion that a boy must be sent away to school just because he
was a boy, and a girl must be kept at home just because she was a girl.
If the Almighty ever meant to have things go that way why didn’t He give
the men the biggest brains, and put the strongest backs ’n’ arms on the
women? Heaven knows they’ve needed ’em.”

A good memory was undoubtedly one of Ruel Saxon’s strong points, but all
recollection of the gentle warning his daughter-in-law had given him was
put utterly to flight by this speech of his sister’s. He stiffened
himself in his chair, and his nostrils dilated (to use a pet figure of
his own) “like a war-horse smelling the battle from afar.”

“Katharine,” he said, “you darken counsel by words without knowledge. I
don’t pretend, and nobody ever pretended, that Abigail Sickles or’ to
have worked herself to death to keep Abner in college. Her folks or’ to
have seen it in time, and stopped her. But you take too much upon
yourself when you want to change things round from the way the Lord made
’em. It’s the _men_ that have got to be at the head of things in church
and state; it’s the _men_ that have got to go out into the world and
earn the living for the women and children; and it’s because they’ve
needed the education more, and had more call to use it, that the boys
have been sent to college instid of the girls. There’s reason in all
things.”

She broke in upon him with a short, scornful laugh. “There’s a terrible
good reason sometimes, Ruel, why the women have to earn the living for
themselves, ’n’ the children too; and that’s to keep themselves from
starving. Who earned the living for Nancy’s children when she brought
’em all home to the old house forty years ago? Well, I guess she ’n’ I
earned most of it.”

She lifted her shoulders with an effort, and added: “Shouldn’t be quite
so near doubled together now if it hadn’t been for bending over that
spinning-wheel day in ’n’ day out, working to get food ’n’ clothes for
those children, the six of ’em that John Proctor ran away ’n’ left. You
talk about men going out in the world to earn the living. It would be a
good thing for the women to go into the world too, sometimes. Mebbe they
wouldn’t be quite so helpless then when they’re left to shift for
themselves.”

The old man winced. “You had an awful hard time, Katharine, you ’n’
Nancy. John Proctor didn’t do his duty by his family,” he said; and then
he faced her with a fresh impatience. “But that ain’t the way the men
gener’ly do, is it? To hear you talk a body’d think the women had just
naturally got to plan for that sort of thing. You want ’em to go out
into the world, like the men, and make a business of it. I’d like to
know who’d take care of the home ’n’ the children if they did. Home is
the place for women. The Apostle Paul—”

There was a distinct flash of anger now in the small, bright eyes of
Miss Katharine Saxon. “Don’t tell me what Paul said,” she exclaimed. “I
tell you that notion o’ his, that there was nothing a woman had a right
to do but marry, ’n’ have children, ’n’ tend the house, is at the bottom
of half the foolishness there is in the world to-day. Women have just as
good a right to pick ’n’ choose what they shall do as the men have. And
some of ’em had a good deal better do something else than marry the men
that want ’em. I tell you Paul didn’t know it all. ’Cording to his own
account he had to be struck by lightning before he could see some
things, and if another streak had come his way mebbe he’d caught sight
of a few more that were worth looking at.”

Ruel Saxon gazed at his sister for a minute speechless. Then he said
solemnly, “Katharine, there _is_ such a thing as blasphemy, and I’d be a
little careful if I was you how I talked about the Lord’s dealings with
his saints.”

He glanced at his granddaughters as he said it, as if to suggest that
their morals, if not his own, might be impaired by such language.

“Laws, Ruel,” she said briskly, “I’d somehow got it into my head that
that thing happened to him on the way to Damascus, and I didn’t know as
you or anybody else called Saul of Tarsus a saint.”

She had him at a moment’s disadvantage, and the thin, high, mocking
laugh with which she ended put the finishing touch to his irritation.

“As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool,”
he said, with slow emphasis.

It should be observed in passing that Deacon Saxon’s use of the name
which he had just bestowed by implication on his sister was, like the
text itself, Solomonic. The person lacking, not in knowledge, but in
moral sense, was the one whom the wise man called a fool, and there were
moments when Katharine Saxon appeared to her brother to be so wanting in
this respect as to come fairly under the title. It was not the first
time that his frankness had led him to bestow it on her.

“Hey?” she said, leaning forward suddenly, with her hand curled about
her ear.

That she had not caught the words was by no means certain. It suited her
humor sometimes to offset his boastfulness as to his good hearing with a
certain parade of her own slight deafness, and the occasions for making
him repeat himself were often cunningly chosen. For once he did not do
it. Perhaps, a second time, he remembered the presence of his
granddaughters.

As for the girls themselves, they caught their breath, in the silence
that followed, with something like a gasp. It is safe to say that they
had never been present before at such an interview between relatives.
Kate would not have minded a renewal of hostilities, but Esther, with
better grace, seized the chance to effect a truce by turning the
conversation into a more peaceful channel.

“Aunt Katharine,” she said eagerly, “you spoke of the spinning you used
to do. Have you the old wheel now? I’ve heard mother tell what a
wonderful spinner you were, and I should so like to see the very wheel
you used.”

The old woman took her hand from her ear and turned toward the girl.
“No,” she said, “I hain’t got the old wheel now; one of Nancy’s girls
wanted it, and I let her carry it off. ’Twasn’t any account; pretty near
as much wore out as I was when it stopped running.”

Evidently she felt that her passage-at-arms with her brother was ended.
The sharpness of her expression relaxed, and she rose from her place
with her ordinary manner. “I can show you a piece of linen your mother
wove, if you want to see it. She’d have made a good spinner herself if
she’d stuck to it, but I s’pose she forgot all about it long ago. Well,
there’s plenty other ways for women to use their time nowadays, and I’m
glad of it.”

The rest of the call ran smoothly. Miss Saxon could be even gracious
when she was so disposed, and she treated her guests to a bottle of
raspberry vinegar, which, in spite of the fact that she had brewed it
herself, was not in the least too sharp, with fruit cake which time had
brought to the most perfect mellowness. Her nieces would have left her
house imagining that the “queerness,” of which she had given such ample
proof, was confined to the one subject which she had discussed with her
brother, had it not been for a little episode at the very end of the
call, and for this, as it happened, the old gentleman was again
responsible.

“How are you getting along with your garden, Katharine?” he asked. “I
was thinking mebbe I or’ to send Tom down here to do a little weeding
for you.”

A peculiar smile gleamed suddenly in the eyes of his sister. “Thank ye,
Ruel, I’ve got all the help I need jest now,” she said. “Come out ’n’
take a look at my garden.”

She led the way to the rear of the house, and stepped before them into
the trim little garden. It was of the old-fashioned sort, with
vegetables growing in thrifty rows, and bunches of such flowers as
phlox, sweet william, and bachelor’s buttons standing at the corners of
the walks. It would have seemed a model of conventional primness, but
for a curious figure seated on a three-legged stool, puffing tobacco
smoke from a long Dutch pipe in among the branches of a rose-bush.

He might have been upwards of sixty; a dapper little man with a shining
face, and a round head covered as to its top by an embroidered cap
adorned with a crimson tassel. His waistcoat was of gay old-fashioned
silk, across which was strung a huge gold chain, and a flaming topaz pin
adorned the front of his calico shirt. At sight of the company issuing
from the house he started from his seat and trotted up the walk to meet
them, his hand extended and his face expressive of the most beaming
cordiality.

Ruel Saxon, who was following his sister with a meekness of deportment
which had sat uneasily upon him ever since the close of their
discussion, started as his eye fell on this person, and threw up his
head with a movement of surprise and irritation. “Good day, Solomon,” he
said stiffly, as they came together, Miss Saxon having stepped aside to
give free course for the meeting.

“Why, how d’y’ do, Deacon, how d’y’ do?” exclaimed the other, seizing
the old gentleman’s hand, which, to tell the truth, had not been offered
him, and shaking it furiously. “It’s been a terrible long time since you
and I met. I—I was thinkin’ the other day I or’ to come round and see
how you was gittin’ along.”

The deacon did not look overjoyed at the mention of the intended honor.
“How long has Solomon been here?” he asked rather curtly, turning to his
sister.

“Two weeks to-morrow,” she replied, with equal curtness. Then, turning
to the little man, and from him to the girls, she said with marked
politeness, “Mr. Ridgeway, these are my nieces, Lucia Saxon’s children.
I guess you remember her.”

The little man pulled the cap from his head, revealing a crown as bald
as a baby’s, and bowed himself up and down with the fervor of an
Oriental. “Lucia Saxon? What, her that married the doctor and went out
West? Why, sartin, sartin. She was one of the nicest gals I ever see,
and the prettiest spoken. I—I guess your mother must ’av’ told you about
me,” he added eagerly. “I took her home from spellin’ school once. She
had spelled down everybody but me; but I was older’n she was, you know,
a good deal older.” The delight of the remembrance seemed to overcome
him, and he hopped first on one foot, then on the other, like an excited
child.

Ruel Saxon’s face worked curiously while this performance lasted. “I
don’t see but what your garden truck is getting on all right,” he said
in the dryest of tones, “and I guess the girls ’n’ I’d better be going.”

He turned, making his way past the others, regardless of the fact that
his footprints were left in the onion-bed which bordered the walk, and
headed the line again toward the house.

“I shall write to mother that we have seen you,” said Esther, smiling
back at the little man, who still stood bowing with his cap in his
hands, and Kate gave him a friendly nod, though her mouth was twitching
with amusement.

Aunt Katharine said good-by to them at the front door. “If you ever feel
like seeing the old woman again, come down,” she said to the girls.
“’Tain’t so very far across the fields, and you can follow the
cow-path.” Then, without waiting to see them go, she closed the door.

“Grandfather,” Kate burst out when they were fairly off, “who in the
world is that man, and how does he come to be at Aunt Katharine’s?”

“That man,” he repeated, deepening his tone with an accent of disgust,
“is a poor half-witted cretur that belongs at the poorhouse. He stays
there most of the time, but now ’n’ then he gets a restless spell and
they let him out. Then he always comes round to your Aunt Katharine’s,
and she takes him in.”

“Well, he’s the queerest acting man I ever came across,” said Kate, “and
how he was dressed out, with his fine flowered vest and his jewellery!”

“‘Jewellery!’” grunted her grandfather. “He didn’t have on any compared
with what he has sometimes. Why, when he really dresses up, that cretur
covers himself all over with it.”

The girls looked so astonished that he apparently felt it incumbent on
him to attempt some explanation of the man. “The fact is,” he said,
“Solomon Ridgeway is as crazy as a loon on one p’int. He thinks he’s
rich, though for aught I know he’s got as much sense about other things
as he ever had. He thinks he’s terrible rich, and that the best way to
keep his property, as he calls it, is in gold and jewels. He’s got a
trunkful of it—wo’thless stuff, of course—that he carries with him
everywhere. I s’pose it’s stowed away somewhere at your Aunt Katharine’s
now.”

Kate really seemed past speaking for a moment, and Esther exclaimed in a
tone of utter bewilderment, “Well, I should have thought Aunt Katharine
was the last person in the world who would want such a man at her house.
What makes her do it?”

“The Lord only knows,” said the old gentleman solemnly. And then he
jerked the reins and urged Dobbin on his way in a tone of uncommon
asperity.

The fact was, the question had a special irritation for him. That his
sister, who flouted wise men and scorned the opinions of those having
authority, should bear with the vagaries of a being like Solomon
Ridgeway was a thing that passed his understanding. With the man himself
he _might_ have had some patience, though his form of mania was
peculiarly exasperating to his own hard common sense, and somehow he
could not help resenting it that “Solomon,” of all names, should have
lighted on so foolish a creature; but that, such as he was, he should be
the object of Katharine Saxon’s pointed and continuous favor was trying
beyond measure to her brother. He lapsed into a silence quite unusual
with him, and the girls did not disturb it again on the way home.

They were longing to talk the visit over with Stella, but she was away
when they reached the house, and Aunt Elsie asked no questions beyond an
inquiry for Aunt Katharine’s health. It was at supper that the subject
found its way into the family talk, and then Stella, who had just come
in, opened it.

“Well, I hope you enjoyed your call on Aunt Katharine,” she said,
smiling at her cousins.

“Of course we did,” said Kate, promptly. “You didn’t begin to tell us
how interesting she is.”

“Oh, but you should have been there on a day when she and grandfather
discussed things,” said Stella. “That’s the time when she really shows
her quality.” She sent a demure glance at the old gentleman as she
spoke. How she had become possessed of his intention to refrain from
controversy is not certain, but somehow she had it.

He glanced with obvious embarrassment at his granddaughters. Then he set
down his cup of tea, and faced his daughter-in-law. “Elsie,” he said, in
a tone whose humility was really touching, “I meant to stand by what I
said to you. I certainly did; but I couldn’t do it.” He cleared his
throat and his tone grew firmer. “I couldn’t do it, and I don’t know as
I shall be held responsible for it, either. The Bible says, ‘As much as
lieth in you, live peaceably with all men,’—and I s’pose that means
women too,—but it don’t lie in me, and it never will, to keep my mouth
shut while folks are advancing such notions as Katharine did this
afternoon. I did contend with her; I certainly did.”

The Northmore girls could not keep straight faces, and Stella broke into
a delighted giggle. “I’m sure ’twas your duty, grandpa, and I’m glad you
did it,” she said. “What was it this time; woman’s rights, or the folly
of getting married, or what?”

She glanced at her cousins as she asked the question, and Esther spoke
first. “It was education partly, and the question whether women ought
not to be as free as men to choose what they shall do. I must say that
for my part I thought Aunt Katharine made some real good points, though
of course she needn’t have been quite so bitter.”

“It was my speaking about Abner Sickles that stirred her up to begin
with,” said the old gentleman, still addressing himself in
half-apologetic tone to Aunt Elsie. “That put her in mind of his sister
Abigail, and how she worked herself to death helping him through
college.”

“I shouldn’t wonder if helping Abner was the greatest comfort the poor
girl had,” observed Aunt Elsie.

The unemphatic way in which she sometimes made important suggestions was
one of Aunt Elsie’s peculiarities. No one spoke for a minute, and she
turned the conversation away from Aunt Katharine by suddenly asking a
question on a wholly different subject.




CHAPTER VI

AUNT KATHARINE—CONTINUED


After supper that evening, as Ruel Saxon sat in his room in the
twilight, Esther came softly in and sat down beside him.

“Grandfather,” she said, “what made Aunt Katharine so bitter against the
men?”

She had been turning the question wonderingly in her thoughts ever since
the interview of the afternoon. There was something in the lonely old
woman, crabbed of manner and sharp of tongue as she was, which had
appealed to her strongly. That she was a unique personality, unlike any
one she had seen before, was no doubt a part of it, for Esther loved the
striking and picturesque; but there was more than this. She, too, had
felt some touch of revolt against the limitations with which custom had
hedged the ordinary life of woman, and Aunt Katharine’s fierce, uncaring
challenge of it all had not been wholly unpleasing to her.

“What made Katharine so bitter against the men?” repeated her
grandfather. He had started at the question, as one does sometimes when
called upon suddenly to account for a familiar fact which everyday
acquaintance has robbed of all its wonder. “Well, that’s a long story,
and I don’t s’pose anybody but Katharine herself could tell the whole of
it; but there were some things all of us knew, and she did have her
grievances—there’s no doubt but what she had her grievances.”

He jerked off his spectacles, through which he had been trying to read a
chapter of Proverbs, settled himself in his chair, dropped his chin in
his hand, and began:—

“It started just about the time that Nancy came home with her children;
Nancy was our sister, you know. There were three of us: Nancy and
Katharine and me. Katharine was the youngest, and she was going to be
married that spring to Levi Dodge. He was a likely young fellow, as
everybody thought, and they’d been keeping company for upward of a year.
But when Nancy came home it changed everything. There were those six
children to be done for, and Nancy herself all wore out with work ’n’
worry, and your grandmother—for I was married then, you know—had her
hands more ’n full with the housework and her own children, and it
looked to Katharine as if she’d or’ to put off getting married a while
and help things along here at home.”

“We didn’t ask her to, and we didn’t so much as know she was thinking of
it, till she’d got her mind all made up; but I tell you we were awful
glad, and I never shall forget how Nancy and your grandmother cried and
hugged her, when she told ’em what she was going to do, right here in
this room where you ’n’ I be to-night.”

He paused, and it seemed to Esther as if the shadows in the dusky room
took momentary shape of those three women, young, loving, and in trouble
together, who had met there so long ago. Perhaps the old man felt their
presence too, for there was a peculiar softness in his voice as he went
on:—

“We wouldn’t ’a’ let her do it, if we’d known how things were coming
out, but you see we thought Nancy’d be in a home of her own again inside
a year, and then the way’d be open for Katharine ’n’ Levi, and of course
we thought he’d be reasonable about it. But bless your heart, when she
came to talk it over with him he wouldn’t give in an inch. He said she’d
giv’ her promise to him, and she couldn’t go back on it; he had more
claim on her than John Proctor’s family had. Well, of course, I don’t
know what passed between ’em,—Katharine never talked it over much,—but
she was always high strung, and I guess she gave it to him pretty
straight that if he couldn’t wait for her a little while under such
circumstances he needn’t count on having her at all. Anyhow, the upshot
of it was he went away mad, and we were dreadful sorry, but we thought
he’d get over it in a day or two. He didn’t, though. In less ’n a week
he was courting Sally Fry, and they two were married on the very day
that was set for Katharine’s wedding.”

“How perfectly abominable!” burst out Esther. “I don’t wonder she
despises the men if that’s the way she was treated.”

“She needn’t despise ’em all, need she?” said her grandfather, sharply.
“There _have_ been men that could wait as long as any woman. There was
Jacob, for instance. He waited seven years for Rachel, working for a
hard man all the time, and the Bible says they seemed like only a few
days to him for the love he bore her. And then he worked for her seven
years more.”

Esther was silent. There was no answer to this case of Jacob, dear old
Jacob, a prince indeed, with all his meanness, since he could love like
that!

“Do you suppose Aunt Katharine really cared for that man?” she asked
after a moment.

“I guess most likely she did,” said her grandfather, nodding his head
slowly. “She wasn’t the kind to say she’d marry a man unless she loved
him. But she never made a sound after he left her. She held her head
higher than ever, and the way she worked! You’d have thought she had the
strength of ten women in her.”

He drew his hand reflectively across his chin for a moment, then added:
“But somehow I never thought ’twas that affair with Levi that soured
your Aunt Katharine as much as it was the way John Proctor acted. It was
strange about Proctor. You see, in those days they could put a man in
prison for debt, and he had got in debt—not so very deep, only a matter
of three or four hundred dollars; but the man he owed it to was
threatening to have the law of him if he didn’t pay, and there warn’t
any way John could turn to get that money. There was nothing he could do
but get out of the country, and I’m free to confess now that I helped
him go.

“You see, we thought if he could once get into Canada, and work at his
trade—he was a first-rate carpenter—he could pay off that money in a
little while, and I agreed to do what I could for his family while he
was gone. We went over everything together, and he talked as fair as a
man could, and then I drove with him one day ’n’ night, and the
relatives up New Hampshire way gave him a lift when he got there, and
between us all he was over the border before folks round here knew he
was gone. I thought then that I was doing my duty, for it was an unjust
law, and they did away with it pretty soon after that; but looking back
_now_, and seeing how things turned out, I sometimes wish I’d let John
Proctor stay here, and take what came of it.”

“Why, didn’t he pay that money, after all?” asked Esther, as her
grandfather paused.

“Pay it!” he repeated. “Not a cent of it; and what’s more we never saw
hide or hair of him in this country again. For a while he wrote to his
wife, and now ’n’ then sent her some money, but it got longer between
times, and by’m by the letters stopped for good, though we heard of him
now ’n’ then, and knew he was alive and earning a good living. I never
could figure it out why he acted that way, for Nancy was a good wife,
and up to the time he went away John seemed to think as much of his
family as other men. There was such a thing in Bible times as folks
being possessed with the devil,” he added solemnly, “and I have my
suspicions that that was what ailed John Proctor.”

He paused when he had made this not wholly unkind suggestion, then went
on: “It was terrible hard for all of us, but somehow it seemed as if it
worked on Katharine more ’n anybody else. She hated the very name of
John Proctor, but she took up the cudgels for his wife ’n’ children, and
I always thought ’twas slaving for them, and seeing all they went
through with, that set her so against the men. Mebbe she might have got
over it some, when the children grew older, and times eased up a little,
but then came that trouble to Ruth, the oldest of Nancy’s girls, and the
one Katharine thought the most of.

“We thought Ruth had made a good match, though the man was consider’ble
older ’n she was,—her mother hurried it on a little herself, for of
course she was anxious to get the girls into homes of their own,—but he
never was good to her after they were married. He broke her down with
hard work, and holding her in, and the poor little thing only lived a
year or two. After that if anybody said marriage to Katharine it was
like tinder in dry leaves. She took to studying about woman’s rights and
all that, till she got to be as—well, as you saw her this afternoon.”

“Poor Aunt Katharine!” said Esther, softly. That she had suffered wrong
might surely bespeak in a generous mind some excuse for her bitterness,
but that, after all, it was not her own wrongs, but those of others
which had burned that bitterness into her soul, made it seem even noble
to the girl who had heard her story.

“Yes, it was too bad. I’ve always been sorry for Katharine,” said the
old gentleman, and then he added, with an asperity he could not quite
repress: “but the trouble is she got into the way of looking all the
time at the worst side of things, and by’m by it ’peared to her as if
that side reached all the way round. She talks about folks having sense
enough to put two ’n’ two together, but I notice she always picks out
the partic’ler two she wants when _she_ adds things up.”

A light step crossed the threshold at that moment, and Stella Saxon’s
graceful figure appeared behind her grandfather’s chair. “Haven’t you
had enough of Aunt Katharine for one day, Esther?” she demanded. “Leave
grandfather to think up some new arguments for the next time he goes to
see her, and come with me. I want you to see what a picture it is from
the back of our old barn when the shadows creep over the hills.”

She lighted the lamp that stood by the open Bible, then slipped her arm
through her cousin’s and drew her away. “Thank you for telling me all
this,” said Esther, lingering a moment by her grandfather’s chair. “I
love to hear stories of what happened here so long ago.”

“There are plenty of ’em, and they’ll keep,” he replied, smiling; and
then he returned to the Proverbs again with unabated enjoyment.

“Do you know,” said Esther, as the two walked away, “I believe I should
really love Aunt Katharine if I knew her.”

Stella gave one of her shrugs. “There’s no accounting for tastes,” she
said. Then, as she glanced in at the barn door, which they were passing
at that moment, she added with a laugh: “I declare, if Kate hasn’t
managed to make her way with my brother Tom! They’re hobnobbing together
like two old cronies.”

The truth was Kate Northmore had made up her mind to get acquainted with
her cousin. Whether it was the barn or the boy that had brought her out
this evening is not certain. She had a liking for a good quality of
each. This particular barn was of a larger sort than she was used to,
and the boy—she half suspected that he was smaller. There was something
wrong about a boy who would go whistling off across the fields when his
chores were done without saying “boo” to a girl who was looking after
and longing to go with him. However, he might be only timid.

She had no thought of winning a place in his regard by the thing she did
when she stepped into the barn to-night, but by chance she had done it.
She had seen Dobbin standing in his stall with his harness on, as he had
been put there an hour before. There was a rush of work now, for the
cows were in the barn, and Tom and the hired man were seated at the
milking. She had taken in the situation; then, with a word to Dobbin and
a good-natured slap on his flank, stepped in beside him and removed his
unnecessary burden.

It was a foolish thing to do, for she had on her pretty lawn, sash and
all, but the fact that she had not minded her clothes, together with the
surprising fact that she could do the deed at all, had impressed Tom
deeply.

“Well,” he said, “you’re the first girl I ever saw who could do that.”

“That!” repeated Kate, “why, I’ve helped about horses ever since I was
big enough to reach up. Father’s a doctor, you know, and the horses have
to be got out in a hurry sometimes. I can harness and unharness about as
quick as any man he ever had on the place. I’m strong in my arms.” She
made a quick, free movement of her arms, from which the sleeves fell
back, showing the firm round muscles, then added lightly: “I like
everything about horses, specially driving. Dobbin’s too fat to be any
good. What makes you feed him so much?”

“You’d better ask grandfather that question,” said Tom. “He never comes
into the barn without piling his manger full of hay. He thinks the rest
of us abuse him.”

They exchanged a good-natured laugh. Then Kate said: “I should think you
would want more than one horse on this place. I don’t see how you can
stand it to work behind oxen; they’re so slow.”

Tom’s countenance grew a trifle rigid. “We like them well enough,” he
said stiffly.

“Oh, but you wouldn’t,” protested Kate, “if you’d ever worked with
horses. Out our way they do all the work with them, and you’ll hardly
see a farmer driving into town with a one-horse team.”

Tom would have scorned to appear at all impressed. “I shouldn’t care for
such a lot of horses,” he said. “I like cows. There’s more profit in
them.”

“Well, when it comes to cows you can make a bigger showing than we can,”
said Kate, “but that’s because you raise milk and we raise crops.” And
then she added in a tone of candor, “I reckon that makes the difference
in the way the work is done. You don’t have big fields to plough and
reap, and you can afford to spend time crawling round behind oxen when
we can’t.”

Tom did not offer any reply to this interesting theory. “What makes you
say ‘reckon’ so much?” he asked abruptly.

Kate’s eyes widened. “It’s as good as ‘guess,’ isn’t it?” she retorted.
“I’d as lief reckon as guess any time.”

Tom poured his pail of milk into the big strainer and turned to go.
“I’ve got another cow to milk before I’m through,” he said.

“I can milk, too,” said Kate, “though I don’t care much about it. Aunt
Milly taught me.” And then she added, with a glance down the line of
stalls: “But if I were going to do it I shouldn’t want the cows cooped
up this way. I should want them out in the barn lot.”

“What, loose in the yard?” repeated Tom. He positively had to stop now.
“And have them walking round all the time you’re trying to milk them?
Well, I should think that would be a pretty business!”

“Our cow doesn’t walk round when we’re milking her,” said Kate. “Why, a
cow naturally wants to be milked when the time comes, and it’s a great
deal pleasanter being outdoors. We don’t care so very much about the
milking-stool, either,” she added, laughing. “I _could_ do it on a pinch
without any.”

“What, squat on your feet, and the cow not even tied up!” ejaculated
Tom. The accomplishments of his cousin Kate were certainly out of the
ordinary. He looked at her with a growing curiosity, then added loftily:
“In this part of the country women don’t milk. We don’t think it’s their
business.”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t,” said Kate; “but ’tisn’t such a queer thing
for women to do as you seem to think. In most countries women generally
do it.”

“I never heard of a woman milking before,” said Tom, doggedly.

Kate’s eyes grew big again. “Why, in stories they always do it,” she
cried.

Tom looked impervious to any memory of the sort, and she added, with
insistence: “You must have heard of the woman who counted her chickens
before they were hatched. She had a pail of milk on her head at the very
time, you know; and in the ‘House that Jack Built’ it was the ‘maiden
all forlorn who milked the cow with the crumpled horn.’ The man hadn’t a
thing to do with it except bothering her.”

Certainly Tom could not deny acquaintance with those classics. “I never
took much stock in Mother Goose,” he said, starting on with his pail
again.

“But you’ve _heard_ of them,” Kate cried triumphantly. He did not look
back this time, but he was evidently meditating. As for Kate, she felt
that the acquaintance had begun in an auspicious manner, and perched on
the side of the cutting machine to wait for his return.

They were together preparing some cut-feed for Dobbin’s evening meal
when the girls looked in at the door, and the talk was evidently flowing
with the greatest ease.

“This is just like a cutting machine we used to have at home, and I have
special reason to remember it,” Kate was saying as she turned the wheel,
“for I nearly lost the end of my thumb in it when I was a little tot.
Father was at home, as good luck would have it, and he fixed it up so
quick that no great harm came of it.” She held up a pink thumb for Tom’s
inspection, and added, “You wouldn’t know it now by anything except the
nail being a little thicker than common at one corner, and that’s really
been an advantage to me, for I can open a jack-knife without asking a
boy to do it for me.”

Tom gave a grunt of approval. “And sharpen the pencil too?” he asked.
Then, suddenly: “Are there many boys out your way? There are more girls
here.”

“Oh, there are lots of boys,” said Kate, and then she added: “but the
nicest one of all has gone to college, and we don’t see much of him
nowadays. Are you going to college?”

He stirred the cut-feed for a minute without speaking, then shook his
head. “Stella wants me to go,” he said, “and grandfather used to talk
about it, too, but he’s sort of given it up lately. I guess he thinks
I’m not scholar enough; and I’m not,” he added frankly. “I don’t take to
studying. I’d rather work with things that are outside of my own head.”

Kate dropped the handle of the cutting machine. “Tom,” she exclaimed, in
a tone of heartfelt sympathy, “that’s just the way I feel, too. I never
did like school as Esther and Mort and some of the others do. I don’t
want to be a stupid, of course—you have to know things or you’re no
account; but for my part, I’d never get them out of books if I could get
them any other way. I like people and affairs better.”

There is nothing like downright honesty to prepare the way for
friendship. They had made a frank disclosure of feeling on an important
subject, and Kate and Tom were comrades from that moment; comrades, in
spite of the fact that certain other points of view were by no means
held in common, and that each contended strenuously for his own. They
talked for a long time of cousinly affairs. With his mother’s quiet way
of looking at things, Tom had a considerable spice of his grandfather’s
shrewdness, and Kate found his opinions on various matters interesting.

“Aunt Katharine must be a strange woman,” she said, when they had
touched on a variety of other subjects. “Do they always fight, she and
grandfather, as they did to-day?”

“Always,” said Tom, promptly. “It’s nip and tuck every time they come
together. You’d think sometimes they fairly hated each other. But if one
of them gets sick you ought to see how the other frets. Grandfather gets
into a regular stew sometimes over her living off there by herself; but
it’s a good thing she does. We couldn’t stand it if she lived here.”

“What supports her?” asked Kate, with her quick instinct for practical
details.

“Supports her?” repeated Tom; “why, Aunt Katharine’s rich. Didn’t you
know that? She had some property left to her years ago,—it was city
land, I believe,—and it rose in value so it made a fortune. I heard
grandfather say once that she must have as much as forty thousand
dollars of her own.” The sum seemed unlimited wealth to the country boy.
“Nobody knows what she’ll do with it,” he added; “she’ll want to fix it
so the men can’t get it. She says she’d leave it to one of her female
relatives if she could find one who’d promise never to marry.”

“She’d better propose that to Stella,” said Kate; “she’s so fond of her
art.”

Tom whistled. “She isn’t so fond of it but she’d leave it quick enough
if the right one asked her,” he said astutely.

And then they rose and walked together toward the house. Aunt Elsie, in
the kitchen door, was calling, with an anxious note in her voice:
“Girls, girls, why don’t you come in? You’re staying out in the dew too
long.”




CHAPTER VII

HUCKLEBERRYING


It seemed as if a summer of ordinary time was compressed into that first
fortnight at the old homestead. Esther wondered sometimes whether the
surrounding hills, over whose tops the morning broke earlier, and in
whose soft green hollows the twilights seemed to linger longer than any
she had known before, had not something to do with the lifting of the
days into the lengthened space of life and happiness. The charm of the
New England landscape, its restful yet enticing beauty, its reserves,
its revelations, had captured her fancy and her heart completely. Her
letters were full of the new delight. Mrs. Northmore smiled as she read
them, and felt that in Esther she was living over again the joys of her
own girlhood.

As for Kate, she was feeling the new environment as keenly as her
sister, but there was a difference in the letters. They were not
rhapsodical, and they were sprinkled with questions, such, for instance,
as, “_Don’t_ we speak as correctly in the West as they do in New
England?” “_Isn’t_ it absurd to drop the _r_ clear out of words, and
_do_ we over-do it?”

Between herself and Tom Saxon there was continual sharpshooting as to
the relative merits of their respective sections, but it did not
diminish in the least their relish for each other’s company. She rode
with him in the mornings to the milk factory, and occasionally took down
the load of cans in his stead. She went with him for the cows, and was
regularly depended on as the person to take the luncheon to the hayfield
in the middle of the forenoon. Sometimes she stopped and ate a doughnut
with the workmen under the trees, but she had not yet developed a
fondness for the peculiar beverage compounded of water, molasses, and
vinegar, vaguely called “drink,” which seemed the approved liquid in
this region for quenching the thirst of haymakers.

Indeed, the daily round furnished to each of the girls so much of
enjoyment that they could easily have spared the more formal pleasures,
but Aunt Elsie had definite ideas as to the courtesies due between
families, and Stella’s prestige in the community gained ready attention
for her cousins. There were calls in plenty to be received and returned,
and for picnics and teas there were early invitations.

Esterly was counted one of the most social of New England towns, and its
summer population included city boarders who had a mind for pleasure.
They fell in with whatever was planned for them, Kate and Esther, with
ready enjoyment, yet for them both the distinctive engagements of the
old home and the old farm remained easily the best. One of them,
suggested by Aunt Elsie one day at table, brought a thrill of peculiar
pleasure.

“I do wish,” she said, with a glance at the young people which included
them all, “that we could get some huckleberries. They say they’re ripe
on Gray’s Hill, and I do need something to make pies of.”

Stella gave a little sigh. It was the first invitation of the season to
an occupation which she detested; but Esther exclaimed: “Go
huckleberrying! Oh, I should like that so much! I’ve heard mother talk
about huckleberrying, and I want to see what it’s like.”

“So do I,” said Kate, eagerly. “Why can’t we go this afternoon?”

Stella gave another sigh, this time a deeper one. “Oh, what
accommodating creatures you are!” she said. “I ought to want to go with
you, of course, but to tell the honest truth I don’t hanker for it, and
I’m positively opposed to climbing Gray’s Hill unless we know for
certain that those berries are ripe.”

“I saw some there yesterday, over on the south side,” said Tom.

“Then maybe you’d better go too,” said his mother, persuasively. “You
could show the girls right where they are.”

Tom may have regretted that he had aired his knowledge, but there was no
escape for him now, especially as his grandfather added briskly, “Yes,
Tom, you can go as well as not, for we shan’t get in the hay that’s down
this afternoon, it’s so cloudy.”

And so it happened that an hour later the four, well supplied with tin
pails, were off in search of huckleberries. Across the fields odorous of
new-mown hay, by the foot-bridge over the meadow brook, across the old
county road and over the low stone wall, they made their pleasant
pilgrimage. Tom and Kate were ahead, she keeping steady pace with his
easy swing, lowlander though she was, and not to the manner born of such
climbing as this. Once, in a dimple of the hill, she made a dash
forward, and, swinging her pail above her head, shouted: “I’ve found the
first! Here they are!”

But Tom, who was up with her in a moment, gave a whoop of disdain as he
scanned the low cluster of bushes. “Those! why, those are blueberries.
Don’t you know the difference?”

Kate confessed with some humility that she did not, but the humility
vanished when he added loftily: “And just as like as not you never will.
There were some Westerners boarding over at Lester’s one summer, and
those folks couldn’t tell one from t’other clear up to the end of the
season.”

“Well,” said Kate, with a toss of her head, “maybe we can’t tell
huckleberries from blueberries, but we can always tell hickory nuts from
walnuts, which is more than you folks here can do, and there’s a sight
more difference between them than there is between _these_ little
things.”

She broke a blueberry bush, and looked at it with an attention which
promised that she, at least, would know the species when she met it
again, then started on with the remark, “Well, whichever of them I get,
I mean to fill my bucket with something before I leave this hill.”

“There you go again,” grumbled Tom, who had been rather set back by the
taunt about the nuts. “You always call a pail a bucket.”

“Well, it _is_ a bucket,” cried Kate, beating a tattoo on the bottom of
hers with spirit. “You couldn’t prove that I was wrong when you went to
the dictionary about it, and anyway it isn’t half as funny to call a
pail a bucket as to call a frying-pan a ‘spider’ and a stool a
‘cricket.’”

“I suppose you children are quarrelling about something as usual,”
observed Stella, who with Esther had just caught up with the advance
guard. “I wonder how you can keep it up so steadily. I should think
you’d sometimes get tired.”

“I’ll tell you one thing, sis,” said Tom, with brotherly responsiveness,
“you’ll have to keep at the picking a little steadier than you generally
do, or it won’t make anybody tired to carry home the berries you’ll get.
This is the way she does,” he added, turning to his cousins; “she goes
fidgeting round, looking for the place where they’re thickest, and when
she finds it she settles down and draws a picture of a tree, or a rock,
or something. I’ll bet she’s got her drawing things with her now.”

Stella did not deny the charge. “What irrelevant remarks you do contrive
to make, Tom!” she said. “Come, go ahead, if you mean to show us where
those berries are.”

They found them, and were all busily picking in a few minutes more.
However Stella’s interest in huckleberries might flag later on there was
no criticism to be made on her attention at first, and her fingers flew
over the bushes at a rate which augured well for the filling of her
pail. As for the Northmore girls, they were in ecstasies. Kate settled
down to the business at once, though for a while she ate most of the
berries she picked, while Esther paused between the handfuls to take
long whiffs of the sweet fern which grew everywhere among the bushes,
and to fill her eyes with the landscape which looked fairer than ever
from the side of this green old hill.

Everything was interesting—the sights, the smells, the blossoms which
were all around them; even the sprig of lobelia which Tom presented for
his cousins’ tasting, having first cunningly prepared the way with
spearmint and pennyroyal—how Kate wished she could return the favor with
a green persimmon!—and the slender yellow worm, industriously measuring
the bushes, had its own claim to attention. Its name and manner of
travel reminded Kate of one of Aunt Milly’s songs with an admonishing
refrain of, “Keep an inching along, Keep an inching along,” and she
trolled it out with a rollicking plantation accent that charmed her
audience.

Perhaps it was the singing which drew a traveller who was climbing up
the hill in their direction. In a pause of the verses Tom suddenly
exclaimed: “Upon my word, there’s Solomon Ridgeway. He’s got his pack on
his back, too. Let’s have some fun.”

It was indeed the queer protégé of Aunt Katharine who appeared at that
moment, bowing and smiling as he emerged from behind a rock. Evidently
Tom did not share his grandfather’s extreme dislike for the man’s
society, for he advanced to meet him in the most friendly manner.

“Well, Solomon,” he exclaimed, “so you thought you’d come
huckleberrying, too! Do you expect to fill that box of yours this
afternoon?”

The face of the little old man, which was fairly twinkling with
pleasure, expressed an eager dissent. “Oh, no, I—I didn’t come
huckleberryin’,” he said, “and I couldn’t think of puttin’ ’em in this
box. Why this box—” he lowered his voice with a delighted chuckle—“has
got some of my jewels in it You see, I’m goin’ over to see little Mary
Berger. They say she’s got the mumps, and I kind o’ thought ’twould
brighten her up to see ’em. It don’t hurt the children—bless their
hearts—to see fine things; it does ’em good. And I always tell ’em,” he
added earnestly, “that there _air_ things better ’n pearls and rubies.
Tain’t everybody that the Lord gives riches to, and if they’re good
they’ll be happy without ’em.”

“Why, that’s quite a moral, Solomon,” said Tom. “You ought to have been
a preacher.” He sent a roguish glance at the girls, then, throwing an
accent of solicitude into his voice, added: “But aren’t you afraid you
might get robbed going through those woods? There’s quite a strip of
them before you get to Berger’s.”

The owner of the jewels sent an apprehensive glance into the woods which
skirted the brow of the hill and answered bravely: “Yes, I be, Thomas. I
be a little afeared of it. I—I won’t go so far as to say I ain’t. But I
don’t b’lieve a body or’ to stan’ back on that account when there’s
somethin’ they feel as if they or’ to be doin’, and I’ve always been
took care of before—I’ve always been took care of.”

The manliness of this ought to have shamed Tom out of his waggishness,
but he was not done with it yet. “Solomon,” he said, with the utmost
gravity,—“I should think you’d want to get your property into something
besides jewellery. Then you wouldn’t run such risks. Besides, if you had
it in the bank, you know, it would be growing bigger all the time.”

The little man’s face wore a look of distress, and he put his hand on
his box protectingly. “They tell me that sometimes,” he said in a
plaintive tone, “but I—I couldn’t think of it. It wouldn’t be half as
much comfort to me as ’tis this way. Besides, I’m rich enough now, and
when a body’s got enough, it’s enough, ain’t it? And why can’t you
settle down and take the good of it?”

“I think you’re quite right, Mr. Ridgeway,” said Stella. “It’s perfectly
vulgar for people to go straining and scrambling after more money when
they have as much as they can enjoy already. The world would be a good
deal pleasanter place than it is if more people felt as you do about
that.”

She punctuated this with reproving glances at Tom, to which, however, he
paid not the smallest attention.

“But you know, Solomon,” he said artfully, “if you only had your money
where you could draw on it, you wouldn’t have to work as you do now.
They keep you trotting pretty lively at the farm, don’t they? And I’ll
warrant Aunt Katharine finds you chores enough when you’re at her
house.”

The little man’s face was clear again. Here, at least, was a point on
which he had no misgiving. “Law, Thomas,” he said, “I—I like to keep
busy. Why, there ain’t a bit o’ sense in a body bein’ all puffed up and
thinkin’ he’s too good to work like other folks jest ’cause he’s rich.
’Tain’t your own doings, being rich, leastways not all of it. It’s
partly the way things happen, and then it’s the disposition you’ve got.
That’s the way I look at it. And it always ’peared to me,” he added,
with the most touching simplicity, “that, when a body’s rich as I be, he
or’ to do a leetle more ’n common folks to sort o’ try ’n’ pay up for
it.”

“Mr. Ridgeway,” exclaimed Stella—it was impossible after this to let
that graceless brother say another word—“would you mind showing us some
of your pretty things right now? My cousins never saw them, and I’m sure
they’d enjoy it ever so much.”

The countenance of Solomon Ridgeway was aflame with pleasure. He lowered
his box from his shoulders and unstrapped it with a childish eagerness.
“Why, I—I’d be proud to, Miss Stella,” he said, with a hurrying rapture.
Then, looking about for a suitable place of exhibition, he added, “Jest
come under that big chestnut tree over there, and I’ll spread ’em all
out so you can see ’em.”

It was not huckleberrying, but something much more unique, which engaged
them for the next half hour. The collection which Solomon Ridgeway drew
from his box and spread before their dazzled eyes was a marvel of tinsel
and glitter. There were brooches and rings and chains enough to have
made the fortune of half a dozen pedlers; trumpery stuff, most of it,
but what of that?

The owner was not one to let a carping world settle for him the value of
his treasure. There was paste that gleamed like diamonds in settings
burnished like the finest gold, and there were the colors of topaz and
emerald and sapphire and ruby. Who cared whether they flashed in bits of
glass or in stones drawn from the mines? They were things of beauty for
a’ that, and they filled their owner’s soul with joy. He had gathered
them slowly through the savings of earlier years, and the gifts of
friends; he loved them every one, and believed them to be of fabulous
value.

“They ain’t all I’ve got, you know. There’s a lot more,” he said
repeatedly; and then he rubbed his hands together and smiled upon his
audience with the air of a Crœsus demanding, “Do you know any one richer
than I?”

It was impossible not to wish to give him pleasure, and more than once
the girls exclaimed over the beauty of some trinket. Esther was
especially warm in her admiration, and there was no insincerity in her
words when she said: “I think you have some perfectly lovely things, Mr.
Ridgeway. I don’t wonder you prize them, and I’m sure that little girl
who is sick will thank you all her life for letting her see them.”

He had almost forgotten his friend on the other side of the hill. He
gathered up his treasures now with a sudden remembrance, lifted his box
to his shoulders again and was off, turning back again and again to make
his little bow, half of pomposity and half of humility, as he hurried
away.

“Is he crazy, or isn’t he?” exclaimed Kate, when he was fairly out of
hearing.

“He’s queer. That’s all you can say,” said Stella; “but for my part, I
don’t mind him. People are so much of a pattern here in America that I
think it’s rather nice to have one of a different sort mixed in now and
then.”

“I don’t see how he can keep up his notion of being rich and live in a
poorhouse,” said Kate.

“Don Quixote thought all the inns were castles,” said Stella. “I don’t
know why a person with an imagination like his shouldn’t take a
poorhouse for a first-class hotel.”

Her interest in huckleberrying was gone now, and the mood Tom had
foretold was upon her. Esther divined it as she saw her looking at the
chestnut tree, with her head tipped to one side.

“Oh, do sketch it, dear,” she whispered. “Did you really bring drawing
materials with you?”

Stella laughed, and drew a pencil and small pad from the bag that hung
at her belt.

“Fill my pail for me, and you shall have it for a souvenir,” she said.

The sketch was a pretty thing, and the pails, though not all full,
contained a goodly quantity of berries, when they descended the hill in
the late afternoon. As they reached the bottom a sudden thought came to
Esther. “Do you suppose your mother would care if I should take my
berries round to Aunt Katharine?” she asked.

“My mother would be ready to give you a special reward for thinking of
it,” said Stella. “But do you really feel like going round by Aunt
Katharine’s? It’s ever so far out of our way!”

“Oh, I don’t care for that,” said Esther, and she added quickly: “but
please don’t feel that you must go too. I know the way.”

Perhaps she was not really anxious that Stella should accompany her, nor
sorry that Kate was already far ahead with Tom, when she turned down the
old road a few minutes later with her face toward Aunt Katharine’s. “I
shall only stay a little while,” she called back. “You won’t be home
very long before me.”

But she was wrong as to this. Supper was over and the sunset fading when
she appeared at her grandfather’s.

“She insisted on my staying, though I had no thought of her asking me,”
she explained to Aunt Elsie. “She was delighted with the huckleberries.”

Sitting in the south doorway afterward with Stella, she said very
earnestly: “You never saw anybody pleasanter than Aunt Katharine was all
the time I was there. I’m sure she’s a great deal kinder than you think
she is. Do you know we got talking of Solomon Ridgeway, and she told me
some real interesting things about him. She says he was married when he
was young, but his wife only lived a few months. Evidently Aunt
Katharine didn’t think much of her, for she said she was a silly little
thing, who cared more about finery than anything else. But he was all
bound up in her, and when she died it almost killed him. He had a
terrible sickness, and when he got over it his mind had this queer kink
in it, and never came right afterward.” She paused a moment, then added,
“Somehow I couldn’t help thinking that there might be a clew in that
story to the reason why she is so good to him.”

“She’s just as queer in her way as he is in his. I guess it’s an
affinity of queerness,” said Stella, carelessly. And then she called her
cousin’s attention to the color of the clouds, which were fading in airy
fringes over Gray’s Hill.




CHAPTER VIII

A PAIR OF CALLS


Among the honors which came to Ruel Saxon with advancing years there was
probably none which he valued more than his position, well recognized in
the community, as keeper of the best fund of stories of the olden time,
and referee-in-chief on all debated points of local history. There were
plenty of old people in Esterly, some even who had reached the
patriarchal age in which he himself so gloried, but there was no other
with a memory like his, none with so unique a gift for setting out the
past event in warmth and color. The gift was his own, but the memory was
in part at least that of some who had gone before.

It had been the old man’s fortune in his youth to be the constant
companion of a grandfather who, like himself, was a local authority; a
deaf man, who relied much on the boy’s clear voice and quick attention
for intercourse with his fellows. Perhaps the service had been irksome
sometimes to the boy, but it had its reward for him now; for his
grandfather’s experiences and his own blended in his thought as one
continuous whole, and covered a space of time no other memory in the
town could match.

The time was not yet when every rural village of New England had its
historical society, but the recovery of the past was becoming a fad in
the cities, and families who valued themselves on their standing were
waking up to the importance of making sure of their ancestors. A letter
from some gatherer of ancient facts, making requisition on Ruel Saxon’s
knowledge, was not uncommon now, and more than once a caller had stopped
at the farmhouse hoping to gain help from him in tracing some obscure
branch of a family tree.

The person bent on such an errand was so commonly of serious and elderly
aspect that the extremely stylish young man who rode into the yard one
afternoon was not suspected by the girls, who saw him from the parlor,
of belonging to this class. Kate, who was nearest the window, was quite
excited by the appearance of a gentleman on horseback. She had not seen
one before since she left home, and the horse itself was as interesting
as the rider.

“I’ll wager anything that’s a blooded Kentucky,” she said, craning her
neck for a fuller view. “My, but isn’t she a beauty? I’ll have a good
look at her if his highness gets down. Wouldn’t I like to call out,
‘Light, and come in, stranger!’” she added under her breath. “Stella,
who is he? He must be some admirer of yours.”

“Never saw him before,” said Stella, who was eying him with as much
curiosity as Kate. “I’ll tell you what, he must be a connoisseur in art
and has heard of my Breton Peasant. Ha! With that horse and that riding
costume I shall charge him a hundred and fifty.”

By this time the young man had reached the hitching post and jumped down
from the saddle. He patted his horse’s neck when he had adjusted the
hitching rein, flicked the dust from his riding boots with his
gold-handled whip, and proceeded toward the door.

“You go, Kate,” whispered Stella, who was drawing Greenaway figures with
pen and ink on a set of table doilies, and Kate was not loath.

“Is Deacon Saxon at home?” inquired the young man in a pleasant voice.

“I think so. Will you come in?” responded Kate.

“It isn’t the Breton Peasant after all,” murmured Stella to Esther. “I
wonder if it can be an ancestor.” She arranged the doilies with a quick
artistic touch, and rose as the young man entered the room.

He had presented Kate with a small engraved card, and though it was a
new discovery for her that gentlemen ever carried such things, she used
it as if to the manner born.

“Mr. Philip Hadley, Miss Saxon and Miss Northmore,” she announced
easily, and Stella added, with a pretty bow, “And, Mr. Hadley, Miss Kate
Northmore.”

The young man looked bewildered. In search of a country deacon of
advanced years, at an old-fashioned farmhouse, to be ushered into one of
the most attractive of parlors, with three charming young ladies in
possession, was enough to bewilder. But he rose to the surprise
gracefully in another moment.

“I must apologize for intruding myself in this way,” he said, “but I
have heard that Deacon Saxon is quite an authority on Esterly
antiquities, and I wanted to see him on a little matter of inquiry.”

“He will be delighted to talk with you. You may be sure of it,” said
Stella.

It was only a minute before the old gentleman appeared, walking in his
nimblest manner from his own room, whither Kate had gone in search of
him. She had put him in possession of his caller’s name, and he extended
his hand with an air of welcome and curiosity combined.

“Hadley? Did you say your name was Hadley? Well, I’m pleased to see
you.”

“I’m very pleased to see you, sir,” said the young man, bowing with a
deference of manner which was peculiarly pleasing. “I’m taking a liberty
in calling on you, I’m well aware of it, but it’s the penalty one pays
for having a reputation like yours. People say you know everything that
ever happened in Esterly, and as I’m looking up our family history a
little, I thought perhaps you could help me. I confess though,” he added
with a smile, “I expected to see a much older person.”

“Older than eighty-eight?” quoth Ruel Saxon. “I was born in the year
seventeen hundred and ninety-one, and if I live till the twenty-first
day of next June I shall be eighty-nine.”

He was too much pleased with the young man’s errand, and himself as the
person appealed to, to pause for a compliment at this point, and added
briskly, “I shall be glad to tell you anything I know. ’Tisn’t many
young men that go to the old men to inquire about things that are past.
They did in Bible times. In fact, they were commanded to: ‘Ask thy
father and he will show thee, thy elders and they will tell thee.’
That’s what it says; but they don’t do it much nowadays.”

“They have more books to go to now, you know, grandfather,” said Stella,
glancing from the figure she was drawing, a charming little maid in a
sunbonnet, and incidentally holding it up as she spoke.

“Yes, too many of ’em,” said her grandfather, rather grimly. “They’d go
to the old folks more if they couldn’t get the printed stuff so easy.”

“But, grandfather,” exclaimed Esther, “the young people can’t all go to
the old people who know the stories. Kate and I didn’t have you, for
instance, till a few weeks ago.”

Her grandfather’s face relaxed, and Mr. Philip Hadley looked amused.

“But Deacon Saxon is right,” he said, turning to the young ladies. “It’s
a much more delightful thing to hear a story from one who has been a
part of it, or remembers those who were, than to get it from the printed
page. I fancy the spirit of a thing is much better preserved by oral
tradition than by cold print. You remember Sir Walter attributed a good
deal of his enthusiasm for Scottish history to the tales of his
grandmother. I see you have a charming sketch of Abbotsford,” he added,
glancing at a picture on the wall opposite, and from there with a
questioning look to Stella.

She gave a pleased nod. “We were sketching in Scotland, a party of us,
last summer,” she said.

“Were you?” exclaimed the young man. “I was tramping on the Border
myself.”

Perhaps he would have liked to defer his consultation with the old
gentleman long enough for a chat with the young lady, but the former was
impatient for it now. He had been scrutinizing his caller’s face for the
last few moments with sharp attention.

“You say your name is Hadley. Are you any relation to the Hadleys that
used to live in our town? There was quite a family of ’em here fifty
years ago.”

“I think I am,” said the young man, smiling. “My father was born in
Esterly, but moved away before his remembrance. Perhaps you knew my
grandfather, Moses Hadley.”

“I knew _of_ him,” said the old gentleman, nodding; “but our family
never had much to do with the Hadleys, for they lived on the other side
of town. They were good respectable folks,” he added in a ruminating
tone; “didn’t care any great about schooling, I guess, but they were
master hands for making money. I’ve heard one of ’em made a great
fortune somewhere out West. He sent a handsome subscription to our
soldiers’ monument.”

The young man, who had flushed distinctly during part of this speech,
looked relieved at its conclusion. “That must have been my Uncle
Nathan,” he said. “My father went into business in Boston.” Perhaps it
was by way of foot-note to the remark about his ancestors’ lack of zeal
for learning that he added carelessly: “I remember my cousin came to
Esterly once to see your monument. We were in Harvard together at the
time.”

The remark was lost on the old gentleman. He was pursuing his own train
of recollection now. “I knew your grandmother’s folks better ’n I did
your grandfather’s,” he said. “Moses Hadley married Mercy Bridgewood,
and the Bridgewoods and our folks neighbored a good deal.”

“Did they?” exclaimed the young man, with a quick eagerness in his
voice. “It was the Bridgewood line that I came to see you about. Did you
ever hear of Jabez Bridgewood?”

“Jabez Bridgewood!” exclaimed Ruel Saxon. “What, old Jabe that used to
live on Cony Hill? Why, sartin, sartin! He ’n’ my grandfather were great
cronies. I’ve heard my mother say more ’n once, when she saw him coming
across the fields: ‘Girls, we may as well plan for an extra one to
supper. There’s Jabe Bridgewood, and he ’n’ your grandfather’ll set an’
talk till all’s blue. There’ll be no getting rid of him.’”

The young man colored again, and this time the girls did too. But they
might have spared their blushes. The old gentleman was serenely
unconscious of having said anything to call them out, and was pursuing
his subject now under a full head of delighted reminiscence.

“He was an uncommon bright man, old Jabez Bridgewood; sort o’ crotchety
and queer, but chuck full of ideas, and ready to stand up for ’em agin
anybody. He was pretty quick-tempered, too, when anybody riled him up.
My grandfather’s told me more ’n once about a row he got into with Peleg
Wright; and the beginning of it was right here in this room. You see,
Peleg was a regular Tory, though he didn’t let out fair ’n’ square where
he stood; and Jabez he was hot on the other side, right from the start.”

A gleam of amused recollection came into his eyes as he added: “They
used to tell about a contrivance he had on the hill to pepper the
British with, if they should happen to come marching along his road. It
was a young sapling that he bent down and loaded with stones and hitched
a rope to, so he could jerk it up and let fly at a moment’s notice. They
called it ‘Bridgewood’s Battery,’ but I guess he never used it. He was
firing that old flint-lock gun of his instead. He was one of the
minute-men, you know.

“But about that fuss with Peleg Wright. I don’ know just what ’twas
Peleg said. He was sitting here talking with Jabe ’n’ my grandfather,
getting hold of everything he could, I guess; and he said something
about our duty to the king that stirred Jabe up so that he just bent
down and scooped up a handful o’ sand—you know they had the floors
sanded in those days, instead of having carpets on ’em—and flung it
right square into Peleg’s face.”

“Shocking!” exclaimed Mr. Hadley, laughing. “Is that the sort of manners
my great-great-grandfather had? I’m ashamed of him.”

“Well, there was a good many that thought he hadn’t or’ to have done
it,” admitted the old gentleman, “but I don’t know. Peleg was a terrible
mean-spirited, deceiving sort of cretur. It came out afterwards that
’twas he that put the British on the track of some gunpowder our folks
had stored up; and sometimes I’ve kind o’ thought it served him right.
The Bible says, ‘Bread of deceit is sweet to a man, but afterwards his
mouth shall be filled with gravel,’ and I don’ know but your grandfather
was just fulfilling scripture when he gave it to him.”

“Do you suppose he thought of that verse when he did it?” said Mr.
Hadley, laughing more heartily than before.

“Mebbe he didn’t,” said the deacon; “but there’s been plenty of
scripture fulfilled without folks knowing it. Well, naturally it made
Peleg pretty mad, ’specially when folks twitted him ’bout it; and a day
or two afterward he pitched on Jabez down town, and I guess it’s more ’n
likely one of ’em would have got hurt if folks hadn’t separated ’em.
Jabez wrote some verses about it afterward, and I remember my
grandfather telling 

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