← catalogue

Tiverton Tales

by Alice Brown · English · Gutenberg #9370 · 450,487 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tiverton Tales
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Tiverton Tales

Author: Alice Brown


        
Release date: November 1, 2005 [eBook #9370]
                Most recently updated: March 21, 2014

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9370

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andrew Templeton, Tonya
        Allen, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders.
        HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TIVERTON TALES ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andrew Templeton, Tonya
Allen, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders.
HTML version by Al Haines.











TIVERTON TALES

BY

ALICE BROWN

1899




  CONTENTS


  DOORYARDS
  A MARCH WIND
  THE MORTUARY CHEST
  HORN-O'-THE-MOON
  A STOLEN FESTIVAL
  A LAST ASSEMBLING
  THE WAY OF PEACE
  THE EXPERIENCE OF HANNAH PRIME
  HONEY AND MYRRH
  A SECOND MARRIAGE
  THE FLAT-IRON LOT
  THE END OF ALL LIVING





DOORYARDS


Tiverton has breezy, upland roads, and damp, sweet valleys; but should
you tarry there a summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many
excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family
living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards,
those outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them,
and, when children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the
common occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather
holds, we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the
solid block of shadow thrown by the house. We churn there, also, at the
hour when Sweet-Breath, the cow, goes afield, modestly unconscious of
her own sovereignty over the time. There are all the varying fortunes
of butter-making recorded. Sometimes it comes merrily to the tune of

  "Come, butter, come!
  Peter stands a-waiting at the gate,
  Waiting for his butter-cake.
  Come, butter, come!"

chanted in time with the dasher; again it doth willfully refuse, and
then, lest it be too cool, we contribute a dash of hot water, or too
hot, and we lend it a dash of cold. Or we toss in a magical handful of
salt, to encourage it. Possibly, if we be not the thriftiest of
householders, we feed the hens here in the yard, and then "shoo" them
away, when they would fain take profligate dust-baths under the
syringa, leaving unsightly hollows. But however, and with what
complexion, our dooryards may face the later year, they begin it with
purification. Here are they an unfailing index of the severer virtues;
for, in Tiverton, there is no housewife who, in her spring cleaning,
omits to set in order this outer pale of the temple. Long before the
merry months are well under way, or the cows go kicking up their heels
to pasture, or plants are taken from the south window and clapped into
chilly ground, orderly passions begin to riot within us, and we "clear
up" our yards. We gather stray chips, and pieces of bone brought in by
the scavenger dog, who sits now with his tail tucked under him,
oblivious of such vagrom ways. We rake the grass, and then, gilding
refined gold, we sweep it. There is a tradition that Miss Lois May once
went to the length of trimming her grass about the doorstone and
clothes-pole with embroidery scissors; but that was a too-hasty
encomium bestowed by a widower whom she rejected next week, and who
qualified his statement by saying they were pruning-shears.

After this preliminary skirmishing arises much anxious inspection of
ancient shrubs and the faithful among old-fashioned plants, to see
whether they have "stood the winter." The fresh, brown "piny" heads are
brooded over with a motherly care; wormwood roots are loosened, and the
horse-radish plant is given a thrifty touch. There is more than the
delight of occupation in thus stirring the wheels of the year. We are
Nature's poor handmaidens, and our labor gives us joy.

But sweet as these homespun spots can make themselves, in their mixture
of thrift and prodigality, they are dearer than ever at the points
where they register family traits, and so touch the humanity of us all.
Here is imprinted the story of the man who owns the farm, that of the
father who inherited it, and; the grandfather who reclaimed it from
waste; here have they and their womenkind set the foot of daily living
and traced indelible paths. They have left here the marks of tragedy,
of pathos, or of joy. One yard has a level bit of grassless ground
between barn and pump, and you may call it a battlefield, if you will,
since famine and desire have striven there together. Or, if you choose
to read fine meanings into threadbare things, you may see in it a field
of the cloth of gold, where simple love of life and childlike pleasure
met and sparkled for no eye to see. It was a croquet ground, laid out
in the days when croquet first inundated the land, and laid out by a
woman. This was Della Smith, the mother of two grave children, and the
wife of a farmer who never learned to smile. Eben was duller than the
ox which ploughs all day long for his handful of hay at night and his
heavy slumber; but Della, though she carried her end of the yoke with a
gallant spirit, had dreams and desires forever bursting from brown
shells, only to live a moment in the air, and then, like bubbles, die.
She had a perpetual appetite for joy. When the circus came to town, she
walked miles to see the procession; and, in a dream of satisfied
delight, dropped potatoes all the afternoon, to make up. Once, a
hand-organ and monkey strayed that way, and it was she alone who
followed them; for the children were little, and all the saner
house-mothers contented themselves with leaning over the gates till the
wandering train had passed. But Della drained her draught of joy to the
dregs, and then tilted her cup anew. With croquet came her supremest
joy,--one that leavened her days till God took her, somewhere, we hope,
where there is playtime. Della had no money to buy a croquet set, but
she had something far better, an alert and undiscouraged mind. On one
dizzy afternoon, at a Fourth of July picnic, when wickets had been set
up near the wood, she had played with the minister, and beaten him. The
game opened before her an endless vista of delight. She saw herself
perpetually knocking red-striped balls through an eternity of wickets;
and she knew that here was the one pastime of which no soul could tire.
Afterwards, driving home with her husband and two children, still in a
daze of satisfied delight, she murmured absently:--

"Wonder how much they cost?"

"What?" asked Eben, and Della turned, flushed scarlet, and replied:--

"Oh, nothin'!"

That night, she lay awake for one rapt hour, and then she slept the
sleep of conquerors. In the morning, after Eben had gone safely off to
work, and the children were still asleep, she began singing, in a
monotonous, high voice, and took her way out of doors. She always sang
at moments when she purposed leaping the bounds of domestic custom.
Even Eben had learned that, dull as he was. If he heard that guilty
crooning from the buttery, he knew she might be breaking extra eggs, or
using more sugar than was conformable.

"What you doin' of?" he was accustomed to call. But Delia never
answered, and he did not interfere. The question was a necessary
concession to marital authority; he had no wish to curb her ways.

Della scudded about the yard like a willful wind. She gathered withes
from a waiting pile, and set them in that one level space for wickets.
Then she took a handsaw, and, pale about the lips, returned to the
house and to her bedroom. She had made her choice. She was sacrificing
old associations to her present need; and, one after another, she sawed
the ornamenting balls from her mother's high-post bedstead. Perhaps the
one element of tragedy lay in the fact that Della was no mechanician,
and she had not foreseen that, having one flat side, her balls might
decline to roll. But that dismay was brief. A weaker soul would have
flinched; to Della it was a futile check, a pebble under the wave. She
laid her balls calmly aside. Some day she would whittle them into
shape; for there were always coming to Della days full of roomy leisure
and large content. Meanwhile apples would serve her turn,--good alike
to draw a weary mind out of its channel or teach the shape of spheres.
And so, with two russets for balls and the clothes-slice for a mallet
(the heavy sledge-hammer having failed), Della serenely, yet in
triumph, played her first game against herself.

"Don't you drive over them wickets!" she called imperiously, when Eben
came up from the lot in his dingle cart.

"Them what?" returned he, and Della had to go out to explain. He looked
at them gravely; hers had been a ragged piece of work.

"What under the sun'd you do that for?" he inquired. "The young ones
wouldn't turn their hand over for't They ain't big enough."

"Well, I be," said Della briefly. "Don't you drive over 'em."

Eben looked at her and then at his path to the barn, and he turned his
horse aside.

Thereafter, until we got used to it, we found a vivid source of
interest in seeing Della playing croquet, and always playing alone.
That was a very busy summer, because the famous drought came then, and
water had to be carried for weary rods from spring and river. Sometimes
Della did not get her playtime till three in the afternoon, sometimes
not till after dark; but she was faithful to her joy. The croquet
ground suffered varying fortunes. It might happen that the balls were
potatoes, when apples failed to be in season; often her wickets broke,
and stood up in two ragged horns. Sometimes one fell away altogether,
and Della, like the planets, kept an unseen track. Once or twice, the
mistaken benevolence of others gave her real distress. The minister's
daughter, noting her solitary game, mistook it for forlornness, and, in
the warmth of her maiden heart, came to ask if she might share. It was
a timid though official benevolence; but Della's bright eyes grew dark.
She clung to her kitchen chair.

"I guess I won't," she said, and, in some dim way, everybody began to
understand that this was but an intimate and solitary joy. She had
grown so used to spreading her banquets for one alone that she was
frightened at the sight of other cups upon the board; for although
loneliness begins in pain, by and by, perhaps, it creates its own
species of sad and shy content.

Della did not have a long life; and that was some relief to us who were
not altogether satisfied with her outlook here. The place she left need
not be always desolate. There was a good maiden sister to keep the
house, and Eben and the children would be but briefly sorry. They could
recover their poise; he with the health of a simple mind, and they as
children will. Yet he was truly stunned by the blow; and I hoped, on
the day of the funeral, that he did not see what I did. When we went
out to get our horse and wagon, I caught my foot in something which at
once gave way. I looked down--at a broken wicket and a withered apple
by the stake.

Quite at the other end of the town is a dooryard which, in my own mind,
at least, I call the traveling garden. Miss Nancy, its presiding
mistress, is the victim of a love of change; and since she may not
wander herself, she transplants shrubs and herbs from nook to nook. No
sooner does a green thing get safely rooted than Miss Nancy snatches it
up and sets it elsewhere. Her yard is a varying pageant of plants in
all stages of misfortune. Here is a shrub, with faded leaves, torn from
the lap of prosperity in a well-sunned corner to languish under
different conditions. There stands a hardy bush, shrinking, one might
guess, under all its bravery of new spring green, from the premonition
that Miss Nancy may move it tomorrow. Even the ladies'-delights have
their months of garish prosperity, wherein they sicken like country
maids; for no sooner do they get their little feet settled in a dark,
still corner than they are summoned out of it, to sunlight bright and
strong. Miss Nancy lives with a bedridden father, who has grown peevish
through long patience; can it be that slow, senile decay which has
roused in her a fierce impatience against the sluggishness of life, and
that she hurries her plants into motion because she herself must halt?
Her father does not theorize about it. He says, "Nancy never has no
luck with plants." And that, indeed, is true.

There is another dooryard with its infallible index finger pointing to
tell a tale. You can scarcely thread your way through it for vehicles
of all sorts, congregated there to undergo slow decomposition at the
hands of wind and weather. This farmer is a tradesman by nature, and
though, for thrift's sake, his fields must be tilled, he is yet
inwardly constrained to keep on buying and selling, albeit to no
purpose. He is everlastingly swapping and bargaining, giving play to a
faculty which might, in its legitimate place, have worked out the
definite and tangible, but which now goes automatically clicking on
under vain conditions. The house, too, is overrun with useless
articles, presently to be exchanged for others as unavailing, and in
the farmer's pocket ticks a watch which to-morrow will replace with
another more problematic still. But in the yard are the undisputable
evidences of his wild unthrift. Old rusty mowing-machines, buggies with
torn and flapping canvas, sleighs ready to yawn at every crack, all are
here: poor relations in a broken-down family. But children love this
yard. They come, hand in hand, with a timid confidence in their right,
and ask at the back door for the privilege of playing in it. They take
long, entrancing journeys in the mouldy old chaise; they endure
Siberian nights of sleighing, and throw out their helpless dolls to the
pursuing wolves; or the more mercantile-minded among the boys mount a
three-wheeled express wagon, and drive noisily away to traffic upon the
road. This, in its dramatic possibilities, is not a yard to be
despised.

Not far away are two neighboring houses once held in affectionate
communion by a straight path through the clover and a gap in the wall.
This was the road to much friendly gossip, and there were few bright
days which did not find two matrons met at the wall, their heads
together over some amiable yarn; But now one house is closed, its
windows boarded up, like eyes shut down forever, and the grass has
grown over the little path: a line erased, perhaps never to be renewed.
It is easier to wipe out a story from nature than to wipe it from the
heart; and these mutilated pages of the outer life perpetually renew in
us the pangs of loss and grief.

But not all our dooryard reminiscences are instinct with pain. Do I not
remember one swept and garnished plot, never defiled by weed or
disordered with ornamental plants, where stood old Deacon Pitts, upon
an historic day, and woke the echoes with a herald's joy? Deacon Pitts
had the ghoulish delight of the ennuied country mind in funerals and
the mortality of man; and this morning the butcher had brought him news
of death in a neighboring town. The butcher had gone by, and I was
going; but Deacon Pitts stood there, dramatically intent upon his
mournful morsel. I judged that he was pondering on the possibility of
attending the funeral without the waste of too much precious time now
due the crops. Suddenly, as he turned back toward the house, bearing a
pan of liver, his pondering eye caught sight of his aged wife toiling
across the fields, laden with pennyroyal. He set the pan down
hastily--yea, even before the advancing cat!--and made a trumpet of his
hands.

"Sarah!" he called piercingly. "Sarah! Mr. Amasa Blake's passed away!
Died yesterday!"

I do not know whether he was present at that funeral, but it would be
strange if he were not; for time and tide both served him, and he was
always on the spot. Indeed, one day he reached a house of mourning in
such season that he found the rooms quite empty, and was forced to wait
until the bereaved family should assemble. There they sat, he and his
wife, a portentous couple in their dead black and anticipatory gloom,
until even their patience had well-nigh fled. And then an arriving
mourner overheard the deacon, as he bent forward and challenged his
wife in a suspicious and discouraged whisper:--

"Say, Sarah, ye don't s'pose it's all goin' to fush out, do ye?"

They had their funeral.

To the childish memory, so many of the yards are redolent now of wonder
and a strange, sweet fragrance of the fancy not to be described! One,
where lived a notable cook, had, in a quiet corner, a little grove of
caraway. It seemed mysteriously connected with the oak-leaf cookies,
which only she could make; and the child, brushing through the delicate
bushes grown above his head, used to feel vaguely that, on some
fortunate day, cookies would be found there, "a-blowin' and a-growin'."
That he had seen them stirred and mixed and taken from the oven was an
empty matter; the cookies belonged to the caraway grove, and there they
hang ungathered still. In the very same yard was a hogshead filled with
rainwater, where insects came daily to their death and floated
pathetically in a film of gauzy wings. The child feared this innocent
black pool, feared it too much to let it alone; and day by day he would
hang upon the rim with trembling fingers, and search the black, smooth
depths, with all Ophelia's pangs. And to this moment, no rushing river
is half so ministrant to dread as is a still, dull hogshead, where
insects float and fly.

These are our dooryards. I wish we lived in them more; that there were
vines to sing under, and shade enough for the table, with its wheaten
loaf and good farm butter, and its smoking tea. But all that may come
when we give up our frantic haste, and sit down to look, and breathe,
and listen.




A MARCH WIND


When the clouds hung low, or chimneys refused to draw, or the bread
soured over night, a pessimistic public, turning for relief to the
local drama, said that Amelia Titcomb had married a tramp. But as soon
as the heavens smiled again, it was conceded that she must have been
getting lonely in her middle age, and that she had taken the way of
wisdom so to furbish up mansions for the coming years. Whatever was set
down on either side of the page, Amelia did not care. She was
whole-heartedly content with her husband and their farm.

It had happened, one autumn day, that she was trying, all alone, to
clean out the cistern. This was while she was still Amelia Titcomb,
innocent that there lived a man in the world who could set his foot
upon her maiden state, and flourish there. She was an impatient
creature. She never could delay for a fostering time to put her plants
into the ground, and her fall cleaning was done long before the flies
were gone. So, to-day, while other house mistresses sat cosily by the
fire, awaiting a milder season, she was toiling up and down the ladder
set in the cistern, dipping pails of sediment from the bottom, and,
hardy as she was, almost repenting her of a too-fierce desire. Her
thick brown hair was roughened and blown about her face, her cheeks
bloomed out in a frosty pink, and the plaid kerchief, tied in a hard
knot under her chin, seemed foolishly ineffectual against the cold. Her
hands ached, holding the pail, and she rebelled inwardly against the
inclemency of the time. It never occurred to her that she could have
put off this exacting job. She would sooner have expected Heaven to put
off the weather. Just as she reached the top of the cistern, and lifted
her pail of refuse over the edge, a man appeared from the other side of
the house, and stood confronting her. He was tall and gaunt, and his
deeply graven face was framed by grizzled hair. Amelia had a rapid
thought that he was not so old as he looked; experience, rather than
years, must have wrought its trace upon him. He was leading a little
girl, dressed with a very patent regard for warmth, and none for
beauty. Amelia, with a quick, feminine glance, noted that the child's
bungled skirt and hideous waist had been made from an old army
overcoat. The little maid's brown eyes were sweet and seeking; they
seemed to petition for something. Amelia's heart did not respond; at
that time, she had no reason for thinking she was fond of children. Yet
she felt a curious disturbance at sight of the pair. She afterwards
explained it adequately to the man, by asserting that they looked as
odd as Dick's hatband.

"Want any farmwork done?" asked he. "Enough to pay for a night's
lodgin'?" His voice sounded strangely soft from one so large and
rugged. It hinted at unused possibilities. But though Amelia felt
impressed, she was conscious of little more than her own cold and
stiffness, and she answered sharply,--

"No, I don't. I don't calculate to hire, except in hayin' time, an'
then I don't take tramps."

The man dropped the child's hand, and pushed her gently to one side.

"Stan' there, Rosie," said he. Then he went forward, and drew the pail
from Amelia's unwilling grasp. "Where do you empt' it?" he asked.
"There? It ought to be carried further. You don't want to let it gully
down into that beet bed. Here, I'll see to it."

Perhaps this was the very first time in Amelia's life that a man had
offered her an unpaid service for chivalry alone. And somehow, though
she might have scoffed, knowing what the tramp had to gain, she
believed in him and in his kindliness. The little girl stood by, as if
she were long used to doing as she had been told, with no expectation
of difficult reasons; and the man, as soberly, went about his task. He
emptied the cistern, and cleansed it, with plentiful washings. Then, as
if guessing by instinct what he should find, he went into the kitchen,
where were two tubs full of the water which Amelia had pumped up at the
start. It had to be carried back again to the cistern; and when the job
was quite finished, he opened the bulkhead, set the tubs in the cellar,
and then, covering the cistern and cellar-case, rubbed his cold hands
on his trousers, and turned to the child.

"Come, Rosie," said he, "we'll be goin'."

It was a very effective finale, but still Amelia suspected no trickery.
The situation seemed to her, just as the two new actors did, entirely
simple, like the course of nature. Only, the day was a little warmer
because they had appeared. She had a new sensation of welcome company.
So it was that, quite to her own surprise, she answered as quickly as
he spoke, and her reply also seemed an inevitable part of the drama:--

"Walk right in. It's 'most dinner-time, an' I'll put on the pot." The
two stepped in before her, and they did not go away.

Amelia herself never quite knew how it happened; but, like all the
other natural things of life, this had no need to be explained. At
first, there were excellent reasons for delay. The man, whose name
proved to be Enoch Willis, was a marvelous hand at a blow, and she kept
him a week, splitting some pine knots that defied her and the boy who
ordinarily chopped her wood. At the end of the week, Amelia confessed
that she was "terrible tired seein' Rosie round in that gormin' kind of
a dress;" so she cut and fitted her a neat little gown from her own red
cashmere. That was the second reason. Then the neighbors heard of the
mysterious guest, and dropped in, to place and label him. At first,
following the lead of undiscouraged fancy, they declared that he must
be some of cousin Silas's connections from Omaha; but even before
Amelia had time to deny that, his ignorance of local tradition denied
it for him. He must have heard of this or that, by way of cousin Silas;
but he owned to nothing defining place or time, save that he had been
in the war--"all through it." He seemed to be a man quite weary of the
past and indifferent to the future. After a half hour's talk with him,
unseasonable callers were likely to withdraw, perhaps into the pantry,
whither Amelia had retreated to escape catechism, and remark jovially,
"Well, 'Melia, you ain't told us who your company is!"

"Mr. Willis," said Amelia. She was emulating his habit of reserve. It
made a part of her new loyalty.

Even to her, Enoch had told no tales; and strangely enough, she was
quite satisfied. She trusted him. He did say that Rosie's mother was
dead; for the last five years, he said, she had been out of her mind.
At that, Amelia's heart gave a fierce, amazing leap. It struck a note
she never knew, and wakened her to life and longing. She was glad
Rosie's mother had not made him too content. He went on a step or two
into the story of his life. His wife's last illness had eaten up the
little place, and after she went, he got no work. So, he tramped. He
must go again. Amelia's voice sounded sharp and thin, even to her, as
she answered,--

"Go! I dunno what you want to do that for. Rosie's terrible contented
here."

His brown eyes turned upon her in a kindly glance.

"I've got to make a start somewhere," said he. "I've been thinkin' a
machine shop's the best thing. I shall have to depend on somethin'
better 'n days' works."

Amelia flushed the painful red of emotion without beauty.

"I dunno what we're all comin' to," said she brokenly.

Then the tramp knew. He put his gnarled hand over one of hers. Rosie
looked up curiously from the speckled beans she was counting into a
bag, and then went on singing to herself an unformed, baby song.
"Folks'll talk," said Enoch gently. "They do now. A man an' woman ain't
never too old to be hauled up, an' made to answer for livin'. If I was
younger, an' had suthin' to depend on, you'd see; but I'm no good now.
The better part o' my life's gone."

Amelia flashed at him a pathetic look, half agony over her own lost
pride, and all a longing of maternal love.

"I don't want you should be younger," said she. And next week they were
married.

Comment ran races with itself, and brought up nowhere. The treasuries
of local speech were all too poor to clothe so wild a venture. It was
agreed that there's no fool like an old fool, and that folks who ride
to market may come home afoot. Everybody forgot that Amelia had had no
previous romance, and dismally pictured her as going through the woods,
and getting a crooked stick at last. Even the milder among her judges
were not content with prophesying the betrayal of her trust alone. They
argued from the tramp nature to inevitable results, and declared it
would be a mercy if she were not murdered in her bed. According to the
popular mind, a tramp is a distinct species, with latent tendencies
toward crime. It was recalled that a white woman had, in the old days,
married a comely Indian, whose first drink of fire-water, after six
months of blameless happiness, had sent him raging home, to kill her
"in her tracks." Could a tramp, pledged to the traditions of an awful
brotherhood, do less? No, even in honor, no! Amelia never knew how the
tide of public apprehension surged about her, nor how her next-door
neighbor looked anxiously out, the first thing on rising, to exclaim,
with a sigh of relief, and possibly a dramatic pang, "There! her
smoke's a-goin'."

Meantime, the tramp fell into all the usages of life indoors; and
without, he worked revolution. He took his natural place at the head of
affairs, and Amelia stood by, rejoicing. Her besetting error of doing
things at the wrong moment had disarranged great combinations as well
as small. Her impetuosity was constantly misleading her, bidding her
try, this one time, whether harvest might not follow faster on the
steps of spring. Enoch's mind was of another cast. For him, tradition
reigned, and law was ever laying out the way. Some months after their
marriage, Amelia had urged him to take away the winter banking about
the house, for no reason save that the Mardens clung to theirs; but he
only replied that he'd known of cold snaps way on into May, and he
guessed there was no particular hurry. The very next day brought a
bitter air, laden with sleet, and Amelia, shivering at the open door,
exulted in her feminine soul at finding him triumphant on his own
ground. Enoch seemed, as usual, unconscious of victory. His immobility
had no personal flavor. He merely acted from an inevitable devotion to
the laws of life; and however often they might prove him right, he
never seemed to reason that Amelia was consequently wrong. Perhaps that
was what made it so pleasant to live with him.

It was "easy sleddin'" now. Amelia grew very young. Her cheeks gained a
bloom, her eyes brightened. She even, as the matrons noticed, took to
crimping her hair. They looked on with a pitying awe. It seemed a
fearsome thing, to do so much for a tramp who would only kill you in
the end. Amelia stepped deftly about the house. She was a large woman,
whose ways had been devoid of grace; but now the richness of her
spiritual condition informed her with a charm. She crooned a little
about her work. Singing voice she had none, but she grew into a way of
putting words together, sometimes a line from the psalms, sometimes a
name she loved, and chanting the sounds, in unrecorded melody.
Meanwhile, little Rosie, always irreproachably dressed, with a jealous
care lest she fall below the popular standard, roamed in and out of the
house, and lightened its dull intervals. She, like the others, grew at
once very happy, because, like them, she accepted her place without a
qualm, as if it had been hers from the beginning. They were simple
natures, and when their joy came, they knew how to meet it.

But if Enoch was content to follow the beaten ways of life, there was
one window through which he looked into the upper heaven of all:
thereby he saw what it is to create. He was a born mechanician. A
revolving wheel would set him to dreaming, and still him to that
lethargy of mind which is an involuntary sharing in the things that
are. He could lose himself in the life of rhythmic motion; and when he
discovered rusted springs, or cogs unprepared to fulfill their purpose,
he fell upon them with the ardor of a worshiper, and tried to set them
right. Amelia thought he should have invented something, and he
confessed that he had invented many things, but somehow failed in
getting them on the market. That process he mentioned with the
indifference of a man to whom a practical outcome is vague, and who
finds in the ideal a bright reality. Even Amelia could see that to be a
maker was his joy; to reap rewards of making was another and a lower
task.

One cold day in the early spring, he went "up garret" to hunt out an
old saddle, gathering mildew there, and came upon a greater treasure, a
disabled clock. He stepped heavily down, bearing it aloft in both
hands.

"See here, 'Melia," asked he, "why don't this go?"

Amelia was scouring tins on the kitchen table. There was a teasing wind
outside, with a flurry of snow, and she had acknowledged that the
irritating weather made her as nervous as a witch. So she had taken to
a job to quiet herself.

"That clock?" she replied. "That was gran'ther Eli's. It give up
strikin', an' then the hands stuck, an' I lost all patience with it. So
I bought this nickel one, an' carted t'other off into the attic. 'T
ain't worth fixin'."

"Worth it!" repeated Enoch. "Well, I guess I'll give it a chance."

He drew a chair to the stove, and there hesitated. "Say, 'Melia," said
he, "should you jest as soon I'd bring in that old shoemaker's bench
out o' the shed? It's low, an' I could reach my tools off'n the floor."

Amelia lacked the discipline of contact with her kind, but she was
nevertheless smooth as silk in her new wifehood.

"Law, yes, bring it along," said she. "It's a good day to clutter up.
The' won't be nobody in."

So, while Enoch laid apart the clock with a delicacy of touch known
only to square, mechanical fingers, and Rosie played with the
button-box on the floor, assorting colors and matching white with
white, Amelia scoured the tins. Her energy kept pace with the wind; it
whirled in gusts and snatches, yet her precision never failed.

"Made up your mind which cow to sell?" she asked, opening a discussion
still unsettled, after days of animated talk.

"Ain't much to choose," said Enoch. He had frankly set Amelia right on
the subject of livestock; and she smilingly acquiesced in his larger
knowledge. "Elbridge True's got a mighty nice Alderney, an' if he's
goin' to sell milk another year, he'll be glad to get two good milkers
like these. What he wants is ten quarts apiece, no matter if it's bluer
'n a whetstone. I guess I can swap off with him; but I don't want to
run arter him. I put the case last Thursday. Mebbe he'll drop round."

"Well," concluded Amelia, "I guess you're pretty sure to do what's
right."

The forenoon galloped fast, and it was half past eleven before she
thought of dinner.

"Why," said she, "ain't it butcher day? I've been lottin' on a piece o'
liver."

"Butcher day is Thursday," said Enoch. "You've lost count."

"My land!" responded Amelia. "Well, I guess we can put up with some
fried pork an' apples." There came a long, insistent knock at the outer
door. "Good heavens! Who's there! Rosie, you run to the side-light, an'
peek. It can't be a neighbor. They'd come right in. I hope my soul it
ain't company, a day like this."

Rosie got on her fat legs with difficulty. She held her pinafore full
of buttons, but disaster lies in doing too many things at once; there
came a slip, a despairing clutch, and the buttons fell over the floor.
There were a great, many round ones, and they rolled very fast. Amelia
washed the sand from her parboiled fingers, and drew a nervous breath.
She had a presentiment of coming ill, painfully heightened by her
consciousness that the kitchen was "riding out," and that she and her
family rode with it. Rosie came running back from her peephole, husky
with importance. The errant buttons did not trouble her. She had an
eternity of time wherein to pick them up; and, indeed, the chances were
that some tall, benevolent being would do it for her.

"It's a man," she said. "He's got on a light coat with bright buttons,
and a fuzzy hat. He's got a big nose."

Now, indeed, despair entered into Amelia, and sat enthroned. She sank
down on a straight-backed chair, and put her hands on her knees, while
the knock came again, a little querulously.

"Enoch," said she, "do you know what's happened? That's cousin Josiah
Pease out there." Her voice bore the tragedy of a thousand past
encounters; but that Enoch could not know.

"Is it?" asked he, with but a mild appearance of interest. "Want me to
go to the door?"

"Go to the door!" echoed Amelia, so stridently that he looked up at her
again. "No; I don't want anybody should go to the door till this room's
cleared up. If 't w'an't so ever-lastin' cold, I'd take him right into
the clock-room, an' blaze a fire; but he'd see right through that. You
gether up them tools an' things, an' I'll help carry out the bench."

If Enoch had not just then been absorbed in a delicate combination of
brass, he might have spoken more sympathetically. As it was, he seemed
kindly, but remote.

"Look out!" said he, "you'll joggle. No, I guess I won't move. If he's
any kind of a man, he'll know what 'tis to clean a clock."

Amelia was not a crying woman, but the hot tears stood in her eyes. She
was experiencing, for the first time, that helpless pang born from the
wounding of pride in what we love.

"Don't you see, Enoch?" she insisted. "This room looks like the Old
Boy--an' so do you--an' he'll go home an' tell all the folks at the
Ridge. Why, he's heard we're married, an' come over here to spy out the
land. He hates the cold. He never stirs till 'way on into June; an' now
he's come to find out."

"Find out what?" inquired Enoch absorbedly. "Well, if you're anyways
put to 't, you send him to me." That manly utterance enunciated from a
"best-room" sofa, by an Enoch clad in his Sunday suit, would have
filled Amelia with rapture; she could have leaned on it as on the
Tables of the Law. But, alas! the scene-setting was meagre, and though
Enoch was very clean, he had no good clothes. He had pointedly refused
to buy them with his wife's money until he should have worked on the
farm to a corresponding amount. She had loved him for it; but every day
his outer poverty hurt her pride. "I guess you better ask him in,"
concluded Enoch. "Don't you let him bother you."

Amelia turned about with the grand air of a woman repulsed.

"He _don't_ bother me," said she, "an' I _will_ let him in." She walked
to the door, stepping on buttons as she went, and conscious, when she
broke them, of a bitter pleasure. It added to her martyrdom.

She flung open the door, and called herself a fool in the doing; for
the little old man outside was in the act of turning away. In another
instant, she might have escaped. But he was only too eager to come back
again, and it seemed to Amelia as if he would run over her, in his
desire to get in.

"There! there! 'Melia," said he, pushing past her, "can't stop to talk
till I git near the fire. Guess you were settin' in the kitchen, wa'n't
ye? Don't make no stranger o' me. That your man?"

She had shut the door, and entered, exasperated anew by the rising
wind. "That's my husband," said she coldly. "Enoch, here's cousin
Josiah Pease."

Enoch looked up benevolently over his spectacles, and put out a horny
left hand, the while the other guarded his heap of treasures. "Pleased
to meet you, sir," said he. "You see I'm tinkerin' a clock."

To Enoch, the explanation was enough. All the simple conventions of his
life might well wait upon a reason potent as this. Josiah Pease went to
the stove, and stood holding his tremulous hands over a cover. He was a
little man, eclipsed in a butternut coat of many capes, and his
parchment face shaded gradually up from it, as if into a harder medium.
His eyes were light, and they had an exceedingly uncomfortable way of
darting from one thing to another, like some insect born to spear and
sting. His head was entirely bald, all save a thin fringe of hair not
worth mentioning, since it disappeared so effectually beneath his
collar; and his general antiquity was grotesquely emphasized by two
sets of aggressive teeth, displaying their falsity from every crown.

Amelia took out the broom, and began sweeping up buttons. She had an
acrid consciousness that by sacrificing them she was somehow completing
the tragedy of her day. Rosie gave a little cry; but Amelia pointed to
the corner where stood the child's chair, exhumed from the attic, after
forty years of rest. "You set there," she said, in an undertone, "an'
keep still."

Rosie obeyed without a word. Such an atmosphere had not enveloped her
since she entered this wonderful house. Remembering vaguely the days
when her own mother had "spells," and she and her father effaced
themselves until times should change, she folded her little hands, and
lapsed back into a condition of mental servitude.

Meanwhile, Amelia followed nervously in the track of Enoch's talk with
cousin Josiah, though her mind kept its undercurrent of foolish musing.
Like all of us, snatched up by the wheels of great emergencies, she
caught at trifles while they whirled her round. Here were
"soldier-buttons." All the other girls had collected them, though she,
having no lover in the war, had traded for her few. Here were the
gold-stones that held her changeable silk, there the little clouded
pearls from her sister's raglan. Annie had died in youth; its glamour
still enwrapped her. Poor Annie! But Rosie had seemed to bring her
back. Amelia swept litter, buttons and all, into the dustpan, and
marched to the stove to throw her booty in. Nobody marked her save
Rosie, whose playthings were endangered; but Enoch's very obtuseness to
the situation was what stayed her hand. She carried the dustpan away
into a closet, and came back, to gather up her tins. A cold rage of
nervousness beset her, so overpowering that she herself was amazed at
it.

Meantime, Josiah Pease had divested himself of his coat, and drawn the
grandfather chair into a space behind the stove.

"You a clock-mender by trade?" he asked of Enoch.

"No," said Enoch absently, "I ain't got any reg'lar trade."

"Jest goin' round the country?" amended cousin Josiah, with the
preliminary insinuation Amelia knew so well. He was, it had been said,
in the habit of inventing lies, and challenging other folks to stick to
'em. But Enoch made no reply. He went soberly on with his work.

"Law, 'Melia, to think o' your bein' married," continued Josiah,
turning to her. "I never should ha' thought that o' you."

"I never thought it of myself," said Amelia tartly. "You don't know
what you'll do till you're tried."

"No! no!" said Josiah Pease. "Never in the world. You remember Sally
Flint, how plain-spoken she is? Well, Betsy Harden's darter Ann rode
down to the poor-house t'other day with some sweet trade, an' took a
young sprig with her. He turned his back a minute, to look out o'
winder, an' Sally spoke right up, as ye might say, afore him. 'That
your beau?' says she. Well, o' course Ann couldn't own it, an' him
right there, so to speak. So she shook her head. 'Well, I'm glad on
't,' says Sally. 'If I couldn't have anything to eat, I'd have suthin'
to look at!' He was the most unsignifyin'est creatur' you ever put your
eyes on. But they say Ann's started in on her clo'es."

Amelia's face had grown scarlet. "I dunno's any such speech is called
for here," said she, in a furious self-betrayal. Josiah Pease had
always been able to storm her reserves.

"Law, no," answered he comfortably. "It come into my mind,--that's
all."

She looked at Enoch with a passionate sympathy, knowing too well how
the hidden sting was intended to work. But Enoch had not heard. He was
absorbed in a finer problem of brass and iron; and though Amelia had
wished to save him from hurt, in that instant she scorned him for his
blindness. "I guess I shall have to ask you to move," she said to her
husband coldly. "I've got to git to that stove, if we're goin' to have
any dinner to-day."

It seemed to her that even Enoch might take the hint, and clear away
his rubbish. Her feelings might have been assuaged by a clean hearth
and some acquiescence in her own mood. But he only moved back a little,
and went on fitting and musing. He was not thinking of her in the
least, nor even of Josiah Pease. His mind had entered its brighter,
more alluring world. She began to fry her pork and apples, with a
perfunctory attempt at conversation. "You don't often git round so
early in the spring," said she.

"No," returned cousin Josiah. "I kind o' got started out, this time, I
don't rightly know why. I guess I've had you in mind more of late, for
some Tiverton folks come over our way, tradin', an' they brought all
the news. It sort o' stirred me up to come."

Amelia turned her apples vigorously, well aware that the slices were
breaking. That made a part of her bitter day.

"Folks needn't take the trouble to carry news about me," she said.
There was an angry gleam in her eyes. "If anybody wants to know
anything, let 'em come right here, an' I'll settle 'em." The ring of
her voice penetrated even to Enoch's perception, and he looked up in
mild surprise. She seemed to have thrown open, for an instant, a little
window into a part of her nature he had never seen.

"How good them apples smell!" said Josiah innocently. "Last time I had
'em was down to cousin Amasa True's, he that married his third wife,
an' she run through all he had. I went down to see 'em arter the
vandoo,--you know they got red o' most everything,--an' they had fried
pork an' apples for dinner. Old Bashaby dropped in. 'Law!' says she.
'Fried pork an' apples! Well, I call that livin' pretty nigh the
wind!'" Josiah chuckled. He was very warm now, and the savory smell of
the dish he decried was mounting to what served him for fancy. "'Melia,
you ain't never had your teeth out, have ye?" he asked, as one who
spoke from richer memories.

"I guess my teeth'll last me as long as I want 'em," said Amelia
curtly.

"Well, I didn't know. They looked real white an' firm last time I see
'em, but you never can tell how they be underneath. I knew the folks
would ask me when I got home. I thought I'd speak."

"Dinner's ready," said Amelia. She turned an alien look upon her
husband. "You want to wash your hands?"

Enoch rose cheerfully. He had got to a hopeful place with the clock.

"Set ri' down," said he. "Don't wait a minute. I'll be along."

So Amelia and the guest began their meal, while little Rosie climbed,
rather soberly, into her higher chair, and held out her plate.

"You wait," said Amelia harshly. "Can't you let other folks eat a
mouthful before you have to have yours?" Yet as she said it, she
remembered, with a remorseful pang, that she had always helped the
child first; it had been so sweet to see her pleased and satisfied.

Josiah was never talkative during meals. Not being absolute master of
his teeth, his mind dwelt with them. Amelia remembered that, with a
malicious satisfaction. But he could not be altogether dumb. That,
people said, would never happen to Josiah Pease while he was above
ground.

"That his girl?" he asked, indicating Rosie with his knife, in a
gustatory pause.

"Whose?" inquired Amelia willfully.

"His." He pointed again, this time to the back room, where Enoch was
still washing his hands.

"Yes."

"Mother dead?"

Amelia sprang from her chair, while Rosie looked at her with the
frightened glance of a child to whom some half-forgotten grief has
suddenly returned.

"Josiah Pease!" said Amelia. "I never thought a poor, insignificant
creatur' like you could rile me so,--when I know what you're doin' it
for, too. But you've brought it about. Her mother dead? Ain't I been
an' married her father?"

"Law, Amelia, do se' down!" said Josiah indulgently. There was a
mince-pie warming on the back of the stove. He saw it there. "I didn't
mean nuthin'. I'll be bound you thought she's dead, or you wouldn't ha'
took such a step. I only meant, did ye see her death in the paper, for
example, or anything like that?"

"'Melia," called Enoch, from the doorway, "I won't come in to dinner
jest now. Elbridge True's drove into the yard. I guess he's got it in
mind to talk it over about them cows. I don't want to lose the chance."

"All right," answered Amelia. She took her seat again, while Enoch's
footsteps went briskly out through the shed. With the clanging of the
door, she felt secure. If she had to deal with Josiah Pease, she could
do it better alone, clutching at the certainty that was with her from
of old, that, if you could only keep your temper with cousin Josiah,
you had one chance of victory. Flame out at him, and you were lost.
"Some more potatoes?" asked she, with a deceptive calm.

"Don't care if I do," returned Josiah, selecting greedily, his fork
hovering in air. "Little mite watery, ain't they? Dig 'em yourself?"

"We dug 'em," said Amelia coldly.

Rosie stepped down from her chair, unnoticed. To Amelia, she was then
no bigger than some little winged thing flitting about the room in time
of tragedy. Our greatest emotions sometimes stay unnamed. At that
moment, Amelia was swayed by as tumultuous a love as ever animated
damsel of verse or story; but it merely seemed to her that she was an
ill-used woman, married to a man for whom she was called on to be
ashamed. Rosie tiptoed into the entry, put on her little shawl and
hood, and stole out to play in the corn-house. When domestic squalls
were gathering, she knew where to go. The great outdoors was safer. Her
past had taught her that.

"Don't like to eat with folks, does he? Well, it's all in what you're
brought up to."

Amelia was ready with her counter-charge. "Have some tea?"

She poured it as if it were poison, and Josiah became conscious of her
tragic self-control.

"You ain't eat a thing," said he, with an ostentatious kindliness. He
bent forward a little, with the air of inviting a confidence. "Got
suthin' on your mind, ain't you, 'Melia?" he whispered. "Kind o'
worried? Find he's a drinkin' man?"

Amelia was not to be beguiled, even by that anger which veils itself as
justice. She looked at him steadily, with scorching eyes.

"You ain't took any sugar," said she. "There 't is, settin' by you.
Help yourself."

Josiah addressed himself to his tea, and then Amelia poured him another
cup. She had some fierce satisfaction in making it good and strong. It
seemed to her that she was heartening her adversary for the fray, and
she took pleasure in doing it effectually. So great was the spirit
within her that she knew he could not be too valiant, for her keener
joy in laying him low. Then they rose from the table, and Josiah took
his old place by the stove, while Amelia began carrying the dishes to
the sink. Her mind was a little hazy now; her next move must depend on
his, and cousin Josiah, somewhat drowsy from his good dinner, was not
at once inclined to talk. Suddenly he raised his head snakily from
those sunken shoulders, and pointed a lean finger to the window.

"'Melia!" cried he sharply. "I'll be buttered if he ain't been and
traded off both your cows. My Lord! be you goin' to stan' there an' let
them two cows go?"

Amelia gave one swift glance from the window, following the path marked
out by that insinuating index. It was true. Elbridge was driving her
two cows out of the yard, and her husband stood by, watching him. She
walked quietly into the entry, and Josiah laid his old hands together
in the rapturous certainty that she was going to open the door, and
send her anger forth. But Amelia only took down his butternut coat from
the nail, and returned with it, holding it ready for him to insert his
arms.

"Here's your coat," said she, with that strange, deceptive calmness.
"Stan' up, an' I'll help you put it on."

Josiah looked at her with helplessly open mouth, and eyes so vacuous
that Amelia felt, even at that moment, the grim humor of his plight.

"I was in hopes he'd harness up"--he began, but she ruthlessly cut him
short.

"Stan' up! Here, put t'other arm in fust. This han'kercher yours? Goes
round your neck? There 't is. Here's your hat. Got any mittens? There
they be, in your pocket. This way. This is the door you come in, an'
this is the door you'll go out of." She preceded him, her head thrown
up, her shoulders back. Amelia had no idea of dramatic values, but she
was playing an effective part. She reached the door and flung it open,
but Josiah, a poor figure in its huddled capes, still stood abjectly in
the middle of the kitchen. "Come!" she called peremptorily. "Come,
Josiah Pease! Out you go." And Josiah went, though, contrary to his
usual habit, he did not talk. He quavered uncertainly down the steps,
and Amelia called a halt. "Josiah Pease!"

He turned, and looked up at her. His mouth had dropped, and he was
nothing but a very helpless old child. Vicious as he was, Amelia
realized the mental poverty of her adversary, and despised herself for
despising him. "Josiah Pease!" she repeated. "This is the end. Don't
you darken my doors ag'in. I've done with you,--egg an' bird!" She
closed the door, shutting out Josiah and the keen spring wind, and went
back to the window, to watch him down the drive. His back looked poor
and mean. It emphasized the pettiness of her victory. Even at that
moment, she realized that it was the poorer part of her which had
resented attack on a citadel which should be impregnable as time
itself. Just then Enoch stepped into the kitchen behind her, and his
voice jarred upon her tingling nerves.

"Well," said he, more jovially than he was wont to speak, "I guess I've
made a good trade for ye. Company gone? Come here an' se' down while I
eat, an' I'll tell ye all about it."

Amelia turned about and walked slowly up to him, by no volition of her
conscious self. Again love, that august creature, veiled itself in an
unjust anger, because it was love and nothing else.

"You've made a good bargain, have you?" she repeated. "You've sold my
cows, an' had 'em drove off the place without if or but. That's what
you call a good bargain!" Her voice frightened her. It amazed the man
who heard. These two middle-aged people were waking up to passions
neither had felt in youth. Life was strong in them because love was
there.

"Why, 'Melia!" said the man. "Why, 'Melia!"

Amelia was hurried on before the wind of her destiny. Her voice grew
sharper. Little white stripes, like the lashes from a whip, showed
themselves on her cheeks. She seemed to be speaking from a dream, which
left her no will save that of speaking.

"It's been so ever sence you set foot in this house. Have I had my say
once? Have I been mistress on my own farm? No! You took the head o'
things, an' you've kep' it. What's mine is yours."

Her triumph over Josiah seemed to be strangely repeated; the scene was
almost identical. The man before her stood with his hands hanging by
his sides, the fingers limp, in an attitude of the profoundest
patience. He was thinking things out. She knew that. Her hurrying mind
anticipated all he might have said, and would not. And because he had
too abiding a gentleness to say it, the insanity of her anger rose
anew. "I'm the laughin'-stock o' the town," she went on bitterly.
"There ain't a man or woman in it that don't say I've married a tramp."

Enoch winced, with a sharp, brief quiver of the lips; but before she
could dwell upon the sight, to the resurrection of her tenderness, he
turned away from her, and went over to the bench.

"I guess I'll move this back where't was," he said, in a very still
voice, and Amelia stood watching him, conscious of a new and bitterer
pang: a fierce contempt that he could go on with his poor, methodical
way of living, when greater issues waited at the door. He moved the
bench into its old place, gathered up the clock, with its dismantled
machinery, and carried it into the attic. She heard his step on the
stairs, regular and unhalting, and despised him again; but in all those
moments, the meaning of his movements had not struck her. When he came
back, he brought in the broom; and while he swept up the fragments of
his work, Amelia stood and watched him. He carried the dustpan and
broom away to their places, but he did not reenter the room. He spoke
to her from the doorway, and she could not see his face.

"I guess you won't mind if I leave the clock as 'tis. It needs some new
cogs, an' if anybody should come along, he wouldn't find it any the
worse for what I've done. I've jest thought it over about the cows, an'
I guess I'll leave that, too, jest as it is. I made you a good bargain,
an' when you come to think it over, I guess you'd rather it'd stan' so
than run the resk of havin' folks make a handle of it. Good-by, 'Melia.
You've been good to me,--better 'n anybody ever was in the world."

She heard his step, swift and steady, through the shed and out at the
door. He was gone. Amelia turned to the window, to look after him, and
then, finding he had not taken the driveway, she ran into the bedroom,
to gaze across the fields. There he was, a lonely figure, striking
vigorously out. He seemed glad to go; and seeing his haste, her heart
hardened against him. She gave a little disdainful laugh.

"Well," said Amelia, "_that's_ over. I'll wash my dishes now."

Coming back into the kitchen, with an assured step, she moved calmly
about her work, as if the world were there to see. Her pride enveloped
her like a garment. She handled the dishes as if she scorned them, yet
her method and care were exquisite. Presently there came a little
imperative pounding at the side door. It was Rosie. She had forgotten
the cloudy atmosphere of the house, and being cold, had come, in all
her old, imperious certainty of love and warmth, to be let in. Amelia
stopped short in her work, and an ugly frown roughened her brow. Josiah
Pease, with all his evil imaginings, seemed to be at her side, his lean
forefinger pointing out the baseness of mankind. In that instant, she
realized where Enoch had gone. He meant to take the three o'clock train
where it halted, down at the Crossing, and he had left the child
behind. Tearing off her apron, she threw it over her head. She ran to
the door, and, opening it, almost knocked the child down, in her haste
to be out and away. Rosie had lifted her frosty face in a smile of
welcome, but Amelia did not see it. She gathered the child in her arms,
and hurried down the steps, through the bars, and along the narrow path
toward the pine woods. The sharp brown stubble of the field merged into
the thin grasses of the greener lowland, and she heard the trickling of
the little dark brook, where gentians lived in the fall, and where,
still earlier, the cardinal flower and forget-me-not crowded in lavish
color. She knew every inch of the way; her feet had an intelligence of
their own. The farm was a part of her inherited life; but at that
moment, she prized it as nothing beside that newly discovered wealth
which she was rushing to cast away. Rosie had not striven in the least
against her capture. She knew too much of life, in some patient
fashion, to resist it, in any of its phases. She put her arms about
Amelia's neck, to cling the closer, and Amelia, turning her face while
she staggered on, set her lips passionately to the little sleeve.

"You cold?" asked she--"_dear_?" But she told herself it was a kiss of
farewell.

She stepped deftly over the low stone wall into the Marden woods, and
took the slippery downward path, over pine needles. Sometimes a rounded
root lay above the surface, and she stumbled on it; but the child only
tightened her grasp. Amelia walked and ran with the prescience of those
without fear; for her eyes were unseeing, and her thoughts hurrying
forward, she depicted to herself the little drama at its close. She
would be at the Crossing and away again, before the train came in;
nobody need guess her trouble. Enoch must be there, waiting. She would
drop the child at his side,--the child he had deserted,--and before he
could say a word, turn back to her desolate home. And at the thought,
she kissed the little sleeve again, and thought how good it would be if
she could only be there again, though alone, in the shielding walls of
her house, and the parting were over and done. She felt her breath come
chokingly.

"You'll have to walk a minute," she whispered, setting the child down
at her side. "There's time enough. I can't hurry."

At that instant, she felt the slight warning of the ground beneath her
feet, shaken by another step, and saw, through the pines, her husband
running toward her. Rosie started to meet him, with a little cry, but
Amelia thrust her aside, and hurried swiftly on in advance, her eyes
feeding upon his face. It had miraculously changed. Sorrow, the great
despair of life, had eaten into it, and aged it more than years of
patient want. His eyes were like lamps burned low, and the wrinkles
under them had guttered into misery. But to Amelia, his look had all
the sweet familiarity of faces we shall see in Paradise. She did not
stop to interpret his meeting glance, nor ask him to read hers. Coming
upon him like a whirlwind, she put both her shaking hands on his
shoulders, and laid her wet face to his.

"Enoch! Enoch!" she cried sharply, "in the name of God, come home with
me!"

She felt him trembling under her hands, but he only put up his own, and
very gently loosed the passionate grasp. "There! there!" he said, in a
whisper. "Don't feel so bad. It's all right. I jest turned back for
Rosie. Mebbe you won't believe it, but I forgot all about her."

He lowered his voice, for Rosie had gone close to him, and laid her
hands clingingly upon his coat. She did not understand, but she could
wait. A branch had almost barred the path, and Amelia, her dull gaze
fallen, noted idly how bright the moss had kept, and how the scarlet
cups enriched it. Her strength would not sustain her, void of his, and
she sank down on the wood, her hands laid limply in her lap. "Enoch,"
she said, from her new sense of the awe of life, "don't lay up anything
ag'inst me. You couldn't if you knew."

"Knew what?" asked Enoch gently. He did not forget that circumstance
had laid a blow at the roots of his being; but he could not turn away
while she still suffered.

Amelia began, stumblingly,--

"He talked about you, I couldn't stan' it."

"Did you believe it?" he queried sternly.

"There wa'n't anything to believe. That's neither here nor there.
But--Enoch, if anybody should cut my right hand off--Enoch"--Her voice
fell brokenly. She was a New England woman, accustomed neither to
analyze nor talk. She could only suffer in the elemental way of dumb
things who sometimes need a language of the heart. One thing she knew.
The man was hers; and if she reft herself away from him, then she must
die.

He had taken Rosie's hand, and Amelia was aware that he turned away.

"I don't want to bring up anything," he said hesitatingly, "but I
couldn't stan' bein' any less 'n other men would, jest because the
woman had the money, an' I hadn't. I dunno's 't was exactly fair about
the cows, but somehow you kind o' set me at the head o' things, in the
beginnin', an' it never come into my mind"--

Amelia sat looking wanly past him. She began to see how slightly
argument would serve. Suddenly the conventions of life fell away from
her and left her young.

"Enoch," she said vigorously, "you've got to take me. Somehow, you've
got to. Talkin' won't make you see that what I said never meant no more
than the wind that blows. But you've got to keep me, or remember, all
your life, how you murdered me by goin' away. The farm's come between
us. Le's leave it! It's 'most time for the cars. You take me with you
now. If you tramp, I'll tramp. If you work out, so'll I. But where you
go, I've got to go, too." Some understanding of her began to creep
upon him; he dropped the child's hand, and came a step nearer. Enoch,
in these latter days of his life, had forgotten how to smile; but now a
sudden, mirthful gleam struck upon his face, and lighted it with the
candles of hope. He stood beside her, and Amelia did not look at him.

"Would you go with me, 'Melia?" he asked.

"I'm goin'," said she doggedly. Her case had been lost, but she could
not abandon it. She seemed to be holding to it in the face of righteous
judgment.

"S'pose I don't ask you?"

"I'll foller on behind."

"Don't ye want to go home, an' lock up, an' git a bunnit?"

She put one trembling hand to the calico apron about her head.

"No."

"Don't ye want to leave the key with some o' the neighbors?"

"I don't want anything in the world but you," owned Amelia shamelessly.

Enoch bent suddenly, and drew her to her feet. "'Melia," said he, "you
look up here."

She raised her drawn face and looked at him, not because she wished,
but because she must. In her abasement, there was no obedience which
she would deny him. But she could only see that he was strangely happy,
and so the more removed from her own despair. Enoch swiftly passed his
arm about her, and turned her homeward. He laughed a little. Being a
man, he must laugh when, that bitter ache in the throat presaged more
bitter tears.

"Come, 'Melia," said he, "come along home, an' I'll tell you all about
the cows. I made a real good bargain. Come, Rosie."

Amelia could not answer. It seemed to her as if love had dealt with her
as she had not deserved; and she went on, exalted, afraid of breaking
the moment, and knowing only that he was hers again. But just before
they left the shadow of the woods, he stopped, holding her still, and
their hearts beat together.

"'Melia," said he brokenly, "I guess I never told you in so many words,
but it's the truth: if God Almighty was to make me a woman, I'd have
her you, not a hair altered. I never cared a straw for any other. I
know that now. You're all there is in the world."

When they walked up over the brown field, the sun lay very warmly there
with a promise of spring fulfilled. The wind had miraculously died, and
soft clouds ran over the sky in flocks. Rosie danced on ahead, singing
her queer little song, and Enoch struggled with himself to speak the
word his wife might wish.

"'Melia," said he at last, "there ain't anything in my life I couldn't
tell you. I jest ain't dwelt on it, that's all. If you want to have me
go over it"--

"I don't want anything," said Amelia firmly. Her eyes were suffused,
and yet lambent. The light in them seemed to be drinking up their
tears. Her steps, she knew, were set within a shining way. At the door
only she paused and fixed him with a glance. "Enoch," said she
threateningly, "whose cows were them you sold to-day?"

He opened his lips, but she looked him down. One word he rejected, and
then another. His cheeks wrinkled up into obstinate smiling, and he
made the grimace of a child over its bitter draught.

"'Melia, it ain't fair," he complained. "No, it ain't. I'll take one of
'em, if you say so, or I'll own it don't make a mite o' difference
whose they be. But as to lyin'"--

"Say it!" commanded Amelia. "Whose were they?"

"Mine!" said Enoch. They broke into laughter, like children, and held
each other's hands.

"I ain't had a mite o' dinner," said Amelia happily, as they stepped
together into the kitchen. "Nor you! An' Rosie didn't eat her pie. You
blaze up the fire, an' I'll fry some eggs."




THE MORTUARY CHEST


"Now we've got red o' the men-folks," said Mrs. Robbins, "le's se' down
an' talk it over." The last man of all the crowd accustomed to seek the
country store at noontime was closing the church door behind him as she
spoke. "Here, Ezry," she called after him, "you hurry up, or you won't
git there afore cockcrow to-morrer, an' I wouldn't have that letter
miss for a good deal."

Mrs. Robbins was slight, and hung on wires,--so said her neighbors.
They also remarked that her nose was as pickèd as a pin, and that
anybody with them freckles and that red hair was sure to be smart. You
could always tell. Mrs. Robbins knew her reputation for extreme
acuteness, and tried to live up to it.

"Law! don't you go to stirrin' on him up," said Mrs. Solomon Page
comfortably, putting on the cover of her butter-box, which had
contained the family lunch. "If the store's closed, he can slip the
letter into the box, an' three cents with it, an' they'll put a stamp
on in the mornin'."

By this time, there was a general dusting of crumbs from Sunday gowns,
a settling of boxes and baskets, and the feminine portion of the East
Tiverton congregation, according to ancient custom, passed into the
pews nearest the stove, and arranged itself more compactly for the
midday gossip. This was a pleasant interlude in the religious decorum
of the day; no Sunday came when the men did not trail off to the store
for their special council, and the women, with a restful sense of
sympathy alloyed by no disturbing element, settled down for an
exclusively feminine view of the universe. Mrs. Page took the head of
the pew, and disposed her portly frame so as to survey the scene with
ease. She was a large woman, with red cheeks and black, shining hair.
One powerful arm lay along the back of the pew, and, as she talked, she
meditatively beat the rail in time. Her sister, Mrs. Ellison, according
to an intermittent custom, had come over from Saltash to attend church,
and incidentally to indulge in a family chat. It was said that Tilly
rode over about jes' so often to get the Tiverton news for her son
Leonard, who furnished local items to the Sudleigh "Star;" and, indeed,
she made no secret of sitting down in social conclave with a bit of
paper and a worn pencil in hand, to jog her memory. She, too, had
smooth black hair, but her dark eyes were illumined by no steadfast
glow; they snapped and shone with alert intelligence, and her great
forehead dominated the rest of her face, scarred with a thousand
wrinkles by intensity of nature rather than by time. A pleasant warmth
had diffused itself over the room, so cold during the morning service
that foot-stoves had been in requisition. Bonnet strings were thrown
back and shawls unpinned. The little world relaxed and lay at ease.

"What's the news over your way, sister?" asked Mrs. Ellison, as an
informal preliminary.

"Tilly don't want to give; she'd ruther take," said Mrs. Baxter, before
the other could answer. "She's like old Mis' Pepper. Seliny Hazlitt
went over there, when she was fust married an' come to the neighborhood
an' asked her if she'd got a sieve to put squash through. Poor Seliny!
she didn't know a sieve from a colander, in them days."

"I guess she found out soon enough," volunteered Mrs. Page. "_He_ was
one o' them kind o' men that can keep house as well as a woman. I'd
ruther live with a born fool."

"Well, old Mis' Pepper she ris up an' smoothed down her apron
(recollect them little dots she used to wear?--made her look as broad
as a barn door!), an' she says, 'Yes, we've got a sieve for flour, an'
a sieve for meal, an' a sieve for rye, an' a sieve for blue-monge, an'
we could have a sieve for squash if we was a mind to, _but I don't wish
to lend_.' That's the way with Tilly. She's terrible cropein' about
news, but she won't lend."

"How's your cistern?" asked Mrs. John Cole, who, with an exclusively
practical turn of mind, saw no reason why talk should be consecutive.
"Got all the water you want?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Page; "that last rain filled it up higher'n it's been
sence November."

But Mrs. Ellison was not to be thrown off the track.

"Ain't there been consid'able talk over here about Parson Bond?" she
asked.

Miss Sally Ware, a plump and pleasing maiden lady, whose gold beads lay
in a crease especially designed for them, stirred uneasily in her seat
and gave her sisters an appealing glance. But she did not speak, beyond
uttering a little dissentient noise in her throat. She was loyal to her
minister. An embarrassed silence fell like a vapor over the assemblage.
Everybody longed to talk; nobody wanted the responsibility of
beginning. Mrs. Page was the first to gather her forces.

"Now, Tilly," said she, with decision, "you ain't comin' over here to
tole us into haulin' our own pastor over the coals, unless you'll say
right out you won't pass it on to Saltash folks. As for puttin' it in
the paper, it ain't the kind you can."

Tilly's eyes burned.

"I guess I know when to speak an' when not to," she remarked. "Now
don't beat about the bush; the men-folks'll be back to rights. I never
in my life give Len a mite o' news he couldn't ha' picked up for
himself."

"Well, some master silly pieces have got into the paper, fust an'
last," said Mrs. Robbins. "Recollect how your Len come 'way over here
to git his shoes cobbled, the week arter Tom Brewer moved int' the
Holler, an' folks hadn't got over swappin' the queer things he said?
an' when Tom got the shoes done afore he promised, Len says to him,
'You're better'n your word.' 'Well,' says Tom, 'I flew at 'em with all
the venom o' my specie.' An' it wa'n't a fortnight afore that speech
come out in a New York paper, an' then the Sudleigh 'Star' got hold on
't, an' so 't went. If folks want that kind o' thing, they can git a
plenty, _I_ say." She set her lips defiantly, and looked round on the
assembled group. This was something she had meant to mention; now she
had done it.

The informal meeting was aghast. A flavor of robust humor was
accustomed to enliven it, but not of a sort to induce dissension.

"There! there!" murmured Sally Ware. "It's the Sabbath day!"

"Well, nobody's breakin' of it, as I know of," said Mrs. Ellison. Her
eyes were brighter than usual, but she composed herself into a careful
disregard of annoyance. When desire of news assailed her, she could
easily conceal her personal resentments, cannily sacrificing small
issues to great. "I guess there's no danger o' Parson Bond's gittin'
into the paper, so long 's he behaves himself; but if anybody's got
eyes, they can't help seein'. I hadn't been in the Bible class five
minutes afore I guessed how he was carryin' on. Has he begun to go with
Isabel North, an' his wife not cold in her grave?"

"Well, I think, for my part, he does want Isabel," said Mrs. Robbins
sharply, "an' I say it's a sin an' a shame. Why, she ain't twenty, an'
he's sixty if he's a day. My soul! Sally Ware, you better be settin'
your cap for my William Henry. He's 'most nineteen."

Miss Ware flushed, and her plump hands tightened upon each other under
her shawl. She was never entirely at ease in the atmosphere of these
assured married women; it was always a little bracing.

"Well, how's she take it?" asked Tilly, turning from one to the other.
"Tickled to death, I s'pose?"

"Well, I guess she ain't!" broke in a younger woman, whose wedding
finery was not yet outworn. "She's most sick over it, and so she has
been ever since her sister married and went away. I believe she'd hate
the sight of him, if 't wasn't the minister; but _'tis_ the minister,
and when she's put face to face with him, she can't help saying yes and
no."

"I dunno'," said Mrs. Page, with her unctuous laugh. "Remember the
party over to Tiverton t'other night, an' them tarts? You see, Rosanna
Maria Pike asked us all over; an' you know how flaky her pie-crust is.
Well, the minister was stan'in' side of Isabel when the tarts was
passed. He was sort o' shinin' up to her that night, an' I guess he
felt a mite twittery; so when the tarts come to him, he reached out
kind o' delicate, with his little finger straight out, an' tried to
take one. An' a ring o' crust come off on his finger. Then he tried it
ag'in, an' got another ring. Everybody'd ha' laughed, if it hadn't been
the minister; but Isabel she tickled right out, an' says, 'You don't
take jelly, do you, Mr. Bond?' An' he turned as red as fire, an' says,
'No, I thank you.'"

"She wouldn't ha' said it, if she hadn't ha' been so nervous," remarked
Miss Sally, taking a little parcel of peppermints from her pocket, and
proceeding to divide them.

"No, I don't s'pose she would," owned Mrs. Page reflectively. "But if
what they say is true, she's been pretty sassy to him, fust an' last.
Why, you know, no matter how the parson begins his prayer, he's sure to
end up on one line: 'Lord, we thank Thee we have not been left to live
by the dim light of natur'.' 'Lisha Cole, when he come home from
Illinois, walked over here to meetin', to surprise some o' the folks.
He waited in the entry to ketch 'em comin' out, an' the fust word he
heard was, 'Lord, we thank Thee we have not been left to live by the
dim light of natur'.' 'Lisha said he'd had time to be shipwrecked (you
know he went to California fust an' made the v'yage), an' be married
twice, an' lay by enough to keep him, and come home poor; but when he
heard that, he felt as if the world hadn't moved sence he started."

Sally Ware dropped her mitten, to avoid listening and the necessity of
reply; it was too evident that the conversational tone was becoming
profane. But Mrs. Page's eyes were gleaming with pure dramatic joy, and
she continued:--

"Well, a fortnight or so ago he went over to see Isabel, an' Sadie an'
her husband happened to be there. They were all settin' purrin' in the
dark, because they'd forgot to send for any kerosene. 'No light?' says
he, hittin' his head ag'inst the chimbly-piece goin' in,--'no light?'
'No,' says Isabel, 'none but the dim light of natur'.'"

There was a chime of delighted laughter in many keys. The company felt
the ease of unrestricted speech. They wished the nooning might be
indefinitely prolonged.

"Sometimes I think she sets out to make him believe she's wuss 'n she
is," remarked Mrs. Cole. "Remember how she carried on, last Sabbath?"

"I guess so!" returned Mrs. Page. "You see, Tilly, he's kind o' pushin'
her for'ard to make her seem more suitable,--he'd like to have her as
old as the hills!--an' nothin' would do but she must go into the Bible
class. Ain't a member that's under fifty, but there that little young
thing sets, cheeks red as a beet, an' the elder asks her questions,
when he gits to her, as if he was coverin' on her over with cotton
wool. Well, last Sabbath old Deacon Pitts--le's see, there ain't any o'
his folks present, be they?--well, he was late, an' he hadn't looked at
his lesson besides. 'T was the fust chapter in Ruth, where it begins,
'In the days when the judges ruled.' You recollect Naomi told the two
darters they'd got to set sail, an' then the Bible says, 'they lifted
up their voice an' wept.' 'Who wept?' says the parson to Deacon Pitts,
afore he'd got fairly se'down. The deacon he opened his Bible, an'
whirled over the leaves. 'Who wept, Brother Pitts?' says the parson
over ag'in. Somebody found the deacon the place, an' p'inted. He was
growin' redder an' redder, an' his spe'tacles kep' slippin' down, but
he did manage to see; the chapter begun suthin' about the judges. Well,
by that time parson spoke out sort o' sharp. 'Brother Pitts,' says he,
'who wept?' The deacon see't he'd got to put some kind of a face on't,
an' he looked up an' spoke out, as bold as brass. 'I conclude,' says
he,--'I conclude 't was the judges!'"

Even Miss Ware smiled a little, and adjusted her gold beads. The others
laughed out rich and free.

"Well, what'd that have to do with Isabel?" asked Mrs. Ellison, who
never forgot the main issue.

"Why, everybody else drawed down their faces, an' tried to keep 'em
straight, but Isabel, she begun to laugh, an' she laughed till the
tears streamed down her cheeks. Deacon Pitts was real put out, for him,
an' the parson tried not to take no notice. But it went so fur he
couldn't help it, an' so he says, 'Miss Isabel, I'm real pained,' says
he. But 'twas jest as you'd cuff the kitten for snarlin' up your yarn."

"Well, what's Isabel goin' to do?" asked Mrs. Ellison. "S'pose she'll
marry him?"

"Why, she won't unless he tells her to. If he does, I dunno but she'll
think she's got to."

"I say it's a shame," put in Mrs. Robbins incisively; "an' Isabel with
everything all fixed complete so 't she could have a good time. Her
sister's well married, an' Isabel stays every night with her. Them two
girls have been together ever sence their father died. An' here she's
got the school, an' she's goin' to Sudleigh every Saturday to take
lessons in readin', an' she'd be as happy as a cricket, if on'y he'd
let her alone."

"She reads real well," said Mrs. Ellison. "She come over to our
sociable an' read for us. She could turn herself into anybody she'd a
mind to. Len wrote a notice of it for the 'Star.' That's the only time
we've had oysters over our way."

"I'd let it be the last," piped up a thin old lady, with a long figured
veil over her face. "It's my opinion oysters lead to dancin'."

"Well, let 'em lead," said optimistic Mrs. Page. "I guess we needn't
foller."

"Them that have got rheumatism in their knees can stay behind," said
the young married woman, drawn by the heat of the moment into a daring
at once to be repented. "Mrs. Ellison, you're getting ahead of us over
in your parish. They say you sing out of sheet music."

"Yes, they do say so," interrupted the old lady under the figured veil.
"If there's any worship in sheet music, I'd like to know it!"

"Come, come!" said peace-loving Mrs. Page; "there's the men filin' in.
We mustn't let 'em see us squabblin'. They think we're a lot o'
cacklin' hens anyway, tickled to death over a piece o' chalk. There's
Isabel, now. She's goin' to look like her aunt Mary Ellen, over to
Saltash."

Isabel preceded the men, who were pausing for a word at the door, and
went down the aisle to her pew. She bowed to one and another, in
passing, and her color rose. They could not altogether restrain their
guiltily curious gaze, and Isabel knew she had been talked over. She
was a healthy-looking girl, with clear blue eyes and a quantity of soft
brown hair. Her face was rather large-featured, and one could see that,
if the world went well with her, she would be among those who develop
beauty in middle life.

The group of dames dispensed to their several pews, and settled their
faces into expressions more becoming a Sunday mood. The village folk,
who had time for a hot dinner, dropped in, one by one, and by and by
the parson came,--a gaunt man, with thick red-brown hair streaked with
dull gray, and red-brown, sanguine eyes. He was much beloved; but
something impulsive and unevenly balanced in his nature led even his
people to regard him with more or less patronage. He kept his eyes
rigorously averted from Isabel's pew, in passing; but when he reached
the pulpit, and began unpinning his heavy gray shawl, he did glance at
her, and his face grew warm. But Isabel did not look at him, and all
through the service she sat with a haughty pose of the head, gazing
down into her lap. When it was over, she waited for no one, since her
sister was not at church, but sped away down the snowy road.

The next day, Isabel stayed after school, and so it was in the wintry
twilight that she walked home, guarded by the few among her flock who
had been kept to learn the inner significance of common fractions.
Approaching her own house, she quickened her steps, for there before
the gate (taken from its hinges and resting for the winter) stood a
blue pung. The horse was dozing, his Roman nose sunken almost to the
snow at his feet. He looked as if he had come to stay. Isabel withdrew
her hand from the persistent little fingers clinging to it.

"Good-night, children," said she. "I guess I've got company. I must
hurry in. Come bright and early to-morrow."

The little group marched away, swathed in comforters, each child
carrying the dinner-pail with an easy swing. Their reddened faces
lighted over the chorusing good-nights, and they kept looking back,
while Isabel ran up the icy path to her own door. It was opened from
within, before she reached it, and a tall, florid woman, with smoothly
banded hair, stood there to receive her. Though she had a powerful
frame, she gave one at the outset an impression of weak gentleness, and
the hands she extended, albeit cordial, were somewhat limp. She wore
her bonnet still, though she had untied the strings and thrown them
back; and her ample figure was tightly laced under a sontag.

"Why, aunt Luceba!" cried Isabel, radiant. "I'm as glad as I can be.
When did you rain down?"

"Be you glad?" returned aunt Luceba, her somewhat anxious look relaxing
into a smile. "Well, I'm pleased if you be. Fact is, I run away, an'
I'm jest comin' to myself, an' wonderin' what under the sun set me out
to do it."

"Run away!" repeated Isabel, drawing her in, and at once peeping into
the stove. "Oh, you fixed the fire, didn't you? It keeps real well. I
put on coal in the morning, and then again at night."

"Isabel," began her aunt, standing by the stove, and drumming on it
with agitated fingers, "I hate to have you live as you do. Why under
the sun can't you come over to Saltash, an' stay with us?"

Isabel had thrown off her shawl and hat, and was standing on the other
side of the stove; she was tingling with cold and youthful spirits.

"I'm keeping school," said she. "School can't keep without me. And I'm
going over to Sudleigh, every Saturday, to take elocution lessons. I'm
having my own way, and I'm happy as a clam. Now, why can't you come and
live with me? You said you would, the very day aunt Eliza died."

"I know I did," owned the visitor, lowering her voice, and casting a
glance over her shoulder. "But I never had an idea then how Mary Ellen
'd feel about it. She said she wouldn't live in this town, not if she
was switched. I dunno why she's so ag'in' it, but she seems to be, an'
there 't is!"

"Why, aunt Luceba!" Isabel had left her position to draw forward a
chair. "What's that?" She pointed to the foot of the lounge, where,
half hidden in shadow, stood a large, old-fashioned blue chest.

"'Sh! that's it! that's what I come for. It's her chist."

"Whose?"

"Your aunt 'Liza's." She looked Isabel in the face with an absurd
triumph and awe. She had done a brave deed, the nature of which was not
at once apparent.

"What's in it?" asked Isabel, walking over to it.

"Don't you touch it!" cried her aunt, in agitation. "I wouldn't have
you meddle with it--But there! it's locked. I al'ays forgit that. I
feel as if the things could git out an' walk. Here! you let it alone,
an' byme-by we'll open it. Se' down here on the lounge. There, now! I
guess I can tell ye. It was sister 'Liza's chist, an' she kep' it up
attic. She begun it when we wa'n't more 'n girls goin' to Number Six,
an' she's been fillin' on't ever sence."

"Begun it! You talk as if 't was a quilt!" Isabel began to laugh.

"Now don't!" said her aunt, in great distress. "Don't ye! I s'pose 't
was because we was such little girls an' all when 'Liza started it, but
it makes me as nervous as a witch, an' al'ays did. You see, 'Liza was a
great hand for deaths an' buryin's; an' 'as for funerals, she'd ruther
go to 'em than eat. I'd say that if she was here this minute, for more
'n once I said it to her face. Well, everybody 't died, she saved
suthin' they wore or handled the last thing, an' laid it away in this
chist; an' last time I see it opened, 'twas full, an' she kind o'
smacked her lips, an' said she should have to begin another. But the
very next week she was took away."

"Aunt Luceba," said Isabel suddenly, "was aunt Eliza hard to live with?
Did you and aunt Mary Ellen have to toe the mark?"

"Don't you say one word," answered her aunt hastily. "That's all past
an' gone. There ain't no way of settlin' old scores but buryin' of 'em.
She was older 'n we were, an' on'y a step-sister, arter all. We must
think o' that. Well, I must come to the end o' my story, an' then we'll
open the chist. Next day arter we laid her away, it come into my head,
'Now we can burn up them things.' It may ha' been wicked, but there 't
was, an' the thought kep' arter me, till all I could think of was the
chist; an' byme-by I says to Mary Ellen, one mornin', 'Le's open it
to-day an' make a burnfire!' An' Mary Ellen she turned as white as a
sheet, an' dropped her spoon into her sasser, an' she says: 'Not yet!
Luceba, don't you ask me to touch it yet.' An' I found out, though she
never'd say another word, that it unset her more'n it did me. One day,
I come on her up attic stan'in' over it with the key in her hand, an'
she turned round as if I'd ketched her stealin', an' slipped off
downstairs. An' this arternoon, she went into Tilly Ellison's with her
work, an' it come to me all of a sudden how I'd git Tim Yatter to
harness an' load the chist onto the pung, an' I'd bring it over here,
an' we'd look it over together; an' then, if there's nothin' in it but
what I think, I'd leave it behind, an' maybe you or Sadie'd burn it.
John Cole happened to ride by, and he helped me in with it. I ain't
a-goin' to have Mary Ellen worried. She's different from me. She went
to school, same's you have, an' she's different somehow. She's been
meddled with all her life, an' I'll be whipped if she sha'n't make a
new start. Should you jest as lieves ask Sadie or John?"

"Why, yes," said Isabel wonderingly; "or do it myself. I don't see why
you care."

Aunt Luceba wiped her beaded face with a large handkerchief.

"I dunno either," she owned, in an exhausted voice. "I guess it's
al'ays little things you can't stand. Big ones you can butt ag'inst.
There! I feel better, now I've told ye. Here's the key. Should you jest
as soon open it?"

Isabel drew the chest forward with a vigorous pull of her sturdy arm.
She knelt before it and inserted the key. Aunt Luceba rose and leaned
over her shoulder, gazing with the fascination of horror. At the moment
the lid was lifted, a curious odor filled the room.

"My soul!" exclaimed Aunt Luceba. "O my soul!" She seemed incapable of
saying more; and Isabel, awed in spite of herself, asked, in a
whisper:--

"What's that smell? I know, but I can't think."

"You take out that parcel," said aunt Luceba, beginning to fan herself
with her handkerchief. "That little one down there't the end. It's
that. My soul! how things come back! Talk about spirits! There's no
need of 'em! _Things_ are full bad enough!"

Isabel lifted out a small brown paper package, labeled in a cramped
handwriting. She held it to the fading light. "'Slippery elm left by my
dear father from his last illness,'" she read, with difficulty. "'The
broken piece used by him on the day of his death.'"

"My land!" exclaimed aunt Luceba weakly. "Now what'd she want to keep
that for? He had it round all that winter, an' he used to give us a
little mite, to please us. Oh, dear! it smells like death. Well, le's
lay it aside an' git on. The light's goin', an' I must jog along. Take
out that dress. I guess I know what 't is, though I can't hardly
believe it."

Isabel took out a black dress, made with a full, gathered skirt and an
old-fashioned waist. "'Dress made ready for aunt Mercy,'" she read,
"'before my dear uncle bought her a robe.' But, auntie," she added,
"there's no back breadth!"

"I know it! I know it! She was so large they had to cut it out, for
fear 't wouldn't go into the coffin; an' Monroe Giles said she was a
real particular woman, an' he wondered how she'd feel to have the back
breadth of her quilted petticoat showin' in heaven. I declare I'm 'most
sick! What's in that pasteboard box?"

It was a shriveled object, black with long-dried mould.

"'Lemon held by Timothy Marden in his hand just before he died.' Aunt
Luceba," said Isabel, turning with a swift impulse, "I think aunt Eliza
was a horror!"

"Don't you say it, if you do think it," said her aunt, sinking into a
chair and rocking vigorously. "Le's git through with it as quick 's we
can. Ain't that a bandbox? Yes, that's great-aunt Isabel's leghorn
bunnit. You was named for her, you know. An' there's cousin Hattie's
cashmere shawl, an' Obed's spe'tacles. An' if there ain't old Mis'
Eaton's false front! Don't you read no more. I don't care what they're
marked. Move that box a mite. My soul! There's ma'am's checked apron I
bought her to the fair! Them are all her things down below." She got up
and walked to the window, looking into the chestnut branches, with
unseeing eyes. She turned about presently, and her cheeks were wet.
"There!" she said; "I guess we needn't look no more. Should you jest as
soon burn 'em?"

"Yes," answered Isabel. She was crying a little, too. "Of course I
will, auntie. I'll put 'em back now. But when you're gone, I'll do it;
perhaps not till Saturday, but I will then."

She folded the articles, and softly laid them away. They were no longer
gruesome, since even a few of them could recall the beloved and still
remembered dead. As she was gently closing the lid, she felt a hand on
her shoulder. Aunt Luceba was standing there, trembling a little,
though the tears had gone from her face.

"Isabel," said she, in a whisper, "you needn't burn the apron, when you
do the rest. Save it careful. I should like to put it away among my
things."

Isabel nodded. She remembered her grandmother, a placid, hopeful woman,
whose every deed breathed the fragrance of godly living.

"There!" said her aunt, turning away with the air of one who thrusts
back the too insistent past, lest it dominate her quite. "It's gittin'
along towards dark, an I must put for home. I guess that hoss thinks
he's goin' to be froze to the ground. You wrop up my soap-stone while I
git on my shawl. Land! don't it smell hot? I wisht I hadn't been so
spry about puttin' on't into the oven." She hurried on her things; and
Isabel, her hair blowing about her face, went out to uncover the horse
and speed the departure. The reins in her hands, aunt Luceba bent
forward once more to add, "Isabel, if there's one thing left for me to
say, to tole you over to live with us, I want to say it."

Isabel laughed. "I know it," she answered brightly. "And if there's
anything I can say to make you and aunt Mary Ellen come over here"--

Aunt Luceba shook her head ponderously, and clucked at the horse.
"Fur's I'm concerned, it's settled now. I'd come, an' be glad. But
there's Mary Ellen! Go 'long!" She went jangling away along the country
road to the music of old-fashioned bells.

Isabel ran into the house, and, with one look at the chest, set about
preparing her supper. She was enjoying her life of perfect freedom with
a kind of bravado, inasmuch as it seemed an innocent delight of which
nobody approved. If the two aunts would come to live with her, so much,
the better; but since they refused, she scorned the descent to any
domestic expedient. Indeed, she would have been glad to sleep, as well
as to eat, in the lonely house; but to that her sister would never
consent, and though she had compromised by going to Sadie's for the
night, she always returned before breakfast. She put up a leaf of the
table standing by the wall, and arranged her simple supper there,
uttering aloud as she did so fragments of her lesson, or dramatic
sentences which had caught her fancy in reading or in speech. Finally,
as she was dipping her cream toast, she caught herself saying, over and
over, "My soul!" in the tremulous tone her aunt had used at that moment
of warm emotion. She could not make it quite her own, and she tried
again and again, like a faithful parrot. Then of a sudden the human
power and pity of it flashed upon her, and she reddened,
conscience-smitten, though no one was by to hear. She set her dish upon
the table with indignant emphasis.

"I'm ashamed of myself!" said Isabel, and she sat down to her delicate
repast, and forced herself, while she ate with a cordial relish, to fix
her mind on what seemed to her things common as compared with her
beloved ambition. Isabel often felt that she was too much absorbed in
reading, and that, somehow or other, God would come to that conclusion
also, and take away her wicked facility.

The dark seemed to drift quickly down, that night, because her supper
had been delayed, and she washed her dishes by lamplight. When she had
quite finished, and taken off her apron, she stood a moment over the
chest, before sitting down to her task of memorizing verse. She was
wondering whether she might not burn a few of the smaller things
to-night; yet somehow, although she was quite free from aunt Luceba's
awe of them, she did feel that the act must be undertaken with a
certain degree of solemnity. It ought not to be accomplished over the
remnants of a fire built for cooking; it should, moreover, be to the
accompaniment of a serious mood in herself. She turned away, but at
that instant there came a jingle of bells. It stopped at the gate.
Isabel went into the dark entry, and pressed her face against the
side-light. It was the parson. She knew him at once; no one in Tiverton
could ever mistake that stooping figure, draped in a shawl. Isabel
always hated him the more when she thought of his shawl. It flashed
upon her then, as it often did when revulsion came over her, how much
she had loved him until he had conceived this altogether horrible
attachment for her. It was like a cherished friend who had begun to cut
undignified capers. More than that, there lurked a certain cruelty in
it, because he seemed to be trading on her inherited reverence for his
office. If he should ask her to marry him, he was the minister, and how
could she refuse? Unless, indeed, there were somebody else in the room,
to give her courage, and that was hardly to be expected. Isabel began
casting wildly about her for help. Her thoughts ran in a rushing
current, and even in the midst of her tragic despair some sense of the
foolishness of it smote her like a comic note, and she could have
laughed hysterically.

"But I can't help it," she said aloud, "I am afraid. I can't put out
the light. He's seen it. I can't slip out the back door. He'd hear me
on the crust. He'll--ask me--to-night! Oh, he will! he will! and I
said to myself I'd be cunning and never give him a chance. Oh, why
couldn't aunt Luceba have stayed? My soul! my soul!" And then the
dramatic fibre, always awake in her, told her that she had found the
tone she sought.

He was blanketing his horse, and Isabel had flown into the
sitting-room. Her face was alive with resolution and a kind of joy. She
had thought. She threw open the chest, with a trembling hand, and
pulled out the black dress.

"I'm sorry," she said, as she slipped it on over her head, and speaking
as if she addressed some unseen guardian, "but I can't help it. If you
don't want your things used, you keep him from coming in!"

The parson knocked at the door. Isabel took no notice. She was putting
on the false front, the horn spectacles, the cashmere shawl, and the
leghorn bonnet, with its long veil. She threw back the veil, and closed
the chest. The parson knocked again. She heard him kicking the snow
from his feet against the scraper. It might have betokened a decent
care for her floors. It sounded to Isabel like a lover's haste, and
smote her anew with that fear which is the forerunner of action. She
blew out the lamp, and lighted a candle. Then she went to the door,
schooling herself in desperation to remember this, to remember that, to
remember, above all things, that her under dress was red and that her
upper one had no back breadth. She threw open the door.

"Good-evening"--said the parson. He was, about to add "Miss Isabel,"
but the words stuck in his throat.

"She ain't to home," answered Isabel. "My niece ain't to home."

The parson had bent forward, and was eyeing her curiously, yet with
benevolence. He knew all the residents within a large radius, and he
expected, at another word from the shadowy masker, to recognize her
also. "Will she be away long?" he hesitated.

"I guess she will," answered Isabel promptly. "She ain't to be relied
on. I never found her so." Her spirits had risen. She knew how exactly
she was imitating aunt Luceba's mode of speech. The tones were
dramatically exact, albeit of a more resonant quality. "Auntie's voice
is like suet," she thought. "Mine is vinegar. _But I've got it!_" A
merry devil assailed her, the child of dramatic triumph. She spoke with
decision: "Won't you come in?"

The parson crossed the sill, and waited courteously for her to precede
him; but Isabel thought, in time, of her back breadth, and stood aside.

"You go fust," said she, "an' I'll shet the door."

He made his way into the ill-lighted sitting-room, and began to unpin
his shawl.

"I ain't had my bunnit off sence I come," announced Isabel, entering
with some bustle, and taking her stand, until he should be seated,
within the darkest corner of the hearth. "I've had to turn to an' clear
up, or I shouldn't ha' found a spot as big as a hin's egg to sleep in
to-night. Maybe you don't know it, but my niece Isabel's got no more
faculty about a house'n I have for preachin'--not a mite."

The parson had seated himself by the stove, and was laboriously
removing his arctics. Isabel's eyes danced behind her spectacles as she
thought how large and ministerial they were. She could not see them,
for the spectacles dazzled her, but she remembered exactly how they
looked. Everything about him filled her with glee, now that she was
safe, though within his reach. "'Now, infidel,'" she said noiselessly,
"'I have thee on the hip!'"

The parson had settled himself in his accustomed attitude when making
parochial calls. He put the tips of his fingers together, and opened
conversation in his tone of mild goodwill:--

"I don't seem to be able to place you. A relative of Miss Isabel's, did
you say?"

She laughed huskily. She was absorbed in putting more suet into her
voice.

"You make me think of uncle Peter Nudd," she replied, "when he was took
up into Bunker Hill Monument. Albert took him, one o' the boys that
lived in Boston. Comin' down, they met a woman Albert knew, an' he
bowed. Uncle Peter looked round arter her, an' then he says to Albert,
'I dunno's I rightly remember who that is!'"

The parson uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way. The old
lady began to seem to him a thought too discursive, if not hilarious.

"I know so many of the people in the various parishes"--he began, but
he was interrupted without compunction.

"You never'd know me. I'm from out West. Isabel's father's brother
married my uncle--no, I would say my step-niece. An' so I'm her aunt.
By adoption, 't ennyrate. We al'ays call it so, leastways when we're
writin' back an' forth. An' I've heard how Isabel was goin' on, an' so
I ketched up my bunnit, an' put for Tiverton. 'If she ever needed her
own aunt,' says I--'her aunt by adoption--she needs her now.'"

Once or twice, during the progress of this speech, the visitor had
shifted his position, as if ill at ease. Now he bent forward, and
peered at his hostess.

"Isabel is well?" he began tentatively.

"Well enough! But, my sakes! I'd ruther she'd be sick abed or paraletic
than carry on as she does. Slack? My soul! I wisht you could see her
sink closet! I wisht you could take one look over the dirty dishes she
leaves round, not washed from one week's end to another!"

"But she's always neat. She looks like an--an angel!"

Isabel could not at once suppress the gratified note which crept of
itself into her voice.

"That's the outside o' the cup an' platter," she said knowingly. "I
thank my stars she ain't likely to marry. She'd turn any man's house
upside down inside of a week."

The parson made a deprecating noise in his throat. He seemed about to
say something, and thought better of it.

"It may be," he hesitated, after a moment,--"it may be her studies
take up too much of her time. I have always thought these elocution
lessons"--

"Oh, my land!" cried Isabel, in passionate haste. She leaned forward as
if she would implore him. "That's her only salvation. That's the makin'
of her. If you stop her off there, I dunno but she'd jine a circus or
take to drink! Don't you dast to do it! I'm in the family, an' I know."

The parson tried vainly to struggle out of his bewilderment.

"But," said he, "may I ask how you heard these reports? Living in
Illinois, as you do--did you say Illinois or Iowa?"

"Neither," answered Isabel desperately. "'Way out on the plains. It's
the last house afore you come to the Rockies. 'Law! you can't tell how
a story gits started, nor how fast it will travel. 'Tain't like a gale
o' wind; the weather bureau ain't been invented that can cal'late it. I
heard of a man once that told a lie in California, an' 'fore the week
was out it broke up his engagement in New Hampshire. There's the
'tater-bug--think how that travels! So with this. The news broke out in
Missouri, an' here I be."

"I hope you will be able to remain."

"Only to-night," she said in haste. More and more nervous, she was
losing hold on the sequence of her facts. "I'm like mortal life, here
to-day an' there to-morrer. In the mornin' I sha'n't be found." ("But
Isabel will," she thought, from a remorse which had come too late, "and
she'll have to lie, or run away. Or cut a hole in the ice and drown
herself!")

"I'm sorry to have her lose so much of your visit," began the parson
courteously, but still perplexing himself over the whimsies of an old
lady who flew on from the West, and made nothing of flying back. "If I
could do anything towards finding her"--

"I know where she is," said Isabel unhappily. "She's as well on't as
she can be, under the circumstances. There's on'y one thing you could
do. If you should be willin' to keep it dark t you've seen me, I should
be real beholden to ye. You know there ain't no time to call in the
neighborhood, an' such things make talk, an' all. An' if you don't
speak out to Isabel, so much the better. Poor creatur', she's got
enough to bear without that!" Her voice dropped meltingly in the
keenness of her sympathy for the unfortunate girl who, embarrassed
enough before, had deliberately set for herself another snare. "I feel
for Isabel," she continued, in the hope of impressing him with the
necessity for silence and inaction. "I do feel for her! Oh, gracious
me! What's that?"

A decided rap had sounded at the front door. The parson rose also,
amazed at her agitation.

"Somebody knocked," he said. "Shall I go to the door?"

"Oh, not yet, not yet!" cried Isabel, clasping her hands under her
cashmere shawl. "Oh, what shall I do?"

Her natural voice had asserted itself, but, strangely enough, the
parson did not comprehend. The entire scene was too bewildering. There
came a second knock. He stepped toward the door, but Isabel darted in
front of him. She forgot her back breadth, and even through that dim
twilight the scarlet of her gown shone ruddily out. She placed herself
before the door.

"Don't you go!" she entreated hoarsely. "Let me think what I can say."

Then the parson had his first inkling that the strange visitor must be
mad. He wondered at himself for not thinking of it before, and the idea
speedily coupled itself with Isabel's strange disappearance. He stepped
forward and grasped her arm, trembling under the cashmere shawl.

"Woman," he demanded sternly, "what have you done with Isabel North?"

Isabel was thinking; but the question, twice repeated, brought her to
herself. She began to laugh, peal on peal of hysterical mirth; and the
parson, still holding her arm, grew compassionate.

"Poor soul!" said he soothingly. "Poor soul! sit down here by the stove
and be calm--be calm!"

Isabel was overcome anew.

"Oh, it isn't so!" she gasped, finding breath. "I'm not crazy. Just let
me be!"

She started under his detaining hand, for the knock had come again.
Wrenching herself free, she stepped into the entry. "Who's there?" she
called.

"It's your aunt Mary Ellen," came a voice from the darkness. "Open the
door."

"O my soul!" whispered Isabel to herself. "Wait a minute!" she
continued. "Only a minute!"

She thrust the parson back into the sitting-room, and shut the door.
The act relieved her. If she could push a minister, and he could obey
in such awkward fashion, he was no longer to be feared. He was even to
be refused. Isabel felt equal to doing it.

"Now, look here," said she rapidly; "you stand right there while I take
off these things. Don't you say a word. No, Mr. Bond, don't you speak!"
Bonnet, false front, and spectacles were tossed in a tumultuous pile.

"Isabel!" gasped the parson.

"Keep still!" she commanded. "Here! fold this shawl!"

The parson folded it neatly, and meanwhile Isabel stepped out of the
mutilated dress, and added that also to the heap. She opened the blue
chest, and packed the articles hastily within. "Here!" said she; "toss
me the shawl. Now if you say one word--Oh, parson, if you only will
keep still, I'll tell you all about it! That is, I guess I can!" And
leaving him standing in hopeless coma, she opened the door.

"Well," said aunt Mary Ellen, stepping in, "I'm afraid your hinges want
greasing. How do you do, Isabel? How do you do?" She put up her face
and kissed her niece. Aunt Mary Ellen was so pretty, so round, so
small, that she always seemed timid, and did the commonest acts of life
with a gentle grace. "I heard voices," she said, walking into the
sitting-room. "Sadie here?"

The parson had stepped forward, more bent than usual, for he was
peering down into her face.

"Mary Ellen!" he exclaimed.

The little woman looked up at him--very sadly, Isabel thought.

"Yes, William," she answered. But she was untying her bonnet, and she
did not offer to shake hands.

Isabel stood by with downcast eyes, waiting to take her things, and
aunt Mary Ellen looked searchingly up at her as she laid her mittens on
the pile. The girl, without a word, went into the bedroom, and her aunt
followed her.

"Isabel," said she rapidly, "I saw the chest. Have you burnt the
things?"

"No," answered Isabel in wonder. "No."

"Then don't you! don't you touch 'em for the world." She went back into
the sitting-room, and Isabel followed. The candle was guttering, and
aunt Mary Ellen pushed it toward her. "I don't know where the snuffers
are," she said. "Lamp smoke?"

Isabel did not answer, but she lighted the lamp. She had never seen her
aunt so full of decision, so charged with an unfamiliar power. She felt
as if strange things were about to happen. The parson was standing
awkwardly. He wondered whether he ought to go; Aunt Mary Ellen smoothed
her brown hair with both hands, sat down, and pointed to his chair.

"Sit a spell," she said. "I guess I shall have something to talk over
with you."

The parson sat down. He tried to put his fingers together, but they
trembled, and he clasped his hands instead.

"It's a long time since we've seen you in Tiverton," he began.

"It would have been longer," she answered, "but I felt as if my niece
needed me."

Here Isabel, to her own surprise, gave a little sob, and then another.
She began crying angrily into her handkerchief.

"Isabel," said her aunt, "is there a fire in the kitchen?"

"Yes," sobbed the girl.

"Well, you go out there and lie down on the lounge till you feel
better. Cover you over and don't be cold. I'll call you when there's
anything for you to do."

Tall Isabel rose and walked out, wiping her eyes. Her little aunt sat
mistress of the field. For many minutes there was silence, and the
clock ticked. The parson felt something rising in his throat. He blew
his nose vigorously.

"Mary Ellen"--he began. "But I don't know as you want me to call you
so!"

"You can call me anything you're a mind to," she answered calmly. She
was nearsighted, and had always worn spectacles. She took them off and
laid them on her knee. The parson moved involuntarily in his chair. He
remembered how she had used to do that when they were talking
intimately, so that his eager look might not embarrass her. "Nothing
makes much difference when folks get to be as old as you and I are."

"I don't feel old," said the parson resentfully. "I do _not_! And you
don't look so."

"Well, I am. We're past our youth. We've got to the point where the
only way to renew it is to look out for the young ones."

The parson had always had with her a way of reading her thought and
bursting out boyishly into betrayal of his own.

"Mary Ellen," he cried, "I never should have explained it so, but
Isabel looks like you!"

She smiled sadly. "I guess men make themselves think 'most anything
they want to," she answered. "There may be a family look, but I can't
see it. She's tall, too, and I was always a pint o' cider--so father
said."

"She's got the same look in her eyes," pursued the parson hotly. "I've
always thought so, ever since she was a little girl."

"If you begun to notice it then," she responded, with the same gentle
calm, "you'd better by half ha' been thinking of your own wife and her
eyes. I believe they were black."

"Mary Ellen, how hard you are on me! You didn't use to be. You never
were hard on anybody. You wouldn't have hurt a fly."

Her face contracted slightly. "Perhaps I wouldn't! perhaps I wouldn't!
But I've had a good deal to bear this afternoon, and maybe I do feel a
little different towards you from what I ever have felt. I've been
hearing a loose-tongued woman tell how my own niece has been made
town-talk because a man old enough to know better was running after
her. I said, years ago, I never would come into this place while you
was in it; but when I heard that, I felt as if Providence had marked
out the way. I knew I was the one to step into the breach. So I had Tim
harness up and bring me over, and here I am. William, I don't want you
should make a mistake at your time of life!"

The minister seemed already a younger man. A strong color had risen in
his face. He felt in her presence a fine exhilaration denied him
through all the years without her. Who could say whether it was the
woman herself or the resurrected spirit of their youth? He did not feel
like answering her. It was enough to hear her voice. He leaned forward,
looking at her with something piteous in his air.

"Mary Ellen," he ventured, "you might as well say 'another mistake.' I
did make one. You know it, and I know it."

She looked at him with a frank affection, entirely maternal. "Yes,
William," she said, with the same gentle firmness in her voice, "we've
passed so far beyond those things that we can speak out and feel no
shame. You did make a mistake. I don't know as 'twould be called so to
break with me, but it was to marry where you did. You never cared about
her. You were good to her. You always would be, William; but 'twas a
shame to put her there."

The parson had locked his hands upon his knees. He looked at them, and
sad lines of recollection deepened in his face.

"I was desperate," he said at length, in a low tone. "I had lost you.
Some men take to drink, but that never tempted me. Besides, I was a
minister. I was just ordained. Mary Ellen, do you remember that day?"
"Yes," she answered softly, "I remember." She had leaned back in her
chair, and her eyes were fixed upon vacancy with the suffused look of
tears forbidden to fall.

"You wore a white dress," went on the parson, "and a bunch of Provence
roses. It was June. Your sister always thought you dressed too gay, but
you said to her, 'I guess I can wear what I want, to, to-day of all
times."

"We won't talk about her. Yes, I remember."

"And, as God is my witness, I couldn't feel solemn, I was so glad! I
was a minister, and my girl--the girl that was going to marry me--sat
down there where I could see her, dressed in white. I always thought of
you afterwards with that white dress on. You've stayed with me all my
life, just that way."

Mary Ellen put up her hand with a quick gesture to hide her middle-aged
face. With a thought as quick, she folded it resolutely upon the other
in her lap. "Yes, William," she said. "I was a girl then. I wore white
a good deal."

But the parson hardly heeded her. He was far away. "Mary Ellen," he
broke out suddenly, a smile running warmly over his face, and creasing
his dry, hollow cheeks, "do you remember that other sermon, my trial
one? I read it to you, and then I read it to Parson Sibley. And do you
remember what he said?"

"Yes, I remember. I didn't suppose you did." Her cheeks were pink. The
corners of her mouth grew exquisitely tender.

"You knew I did! 'Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art
fair; thou hast doves' eyes.' I took that text because I couldn't think
of anything else all summer. I remember now it seemed to me as if I was
in a garden--always in a garden. The moon was pretty bright, that
summer. There were more flowers blooming than common. It must have been
a good year. And I wrote my sermon lying out in the pine woods, down
where you used to sit hemming on your things. And I thought it was the
Church, but do all I could, it was a girl--or an angel!"

"No, no!" cried Mary Ellen, in bitterness of entreaty.

"And then I read the sermon to you under the pines, and you stopped
sewing, and looked off into the trees; and you said 'twas beautiful.
But I carried it to old Parson Sibley that night, and I can see just
how he looked sitting there in his study, with his great spectacles
pushed up on his forehead, and his hand drumming on a book. He had the
dictionary put in a certain place on his table because he found he'd
got used to drumming on the Bible, and he was a very particular man.
And when I got through reading the sermon, his face wrinkled all up,
though he didn't laugh out loud, and he came over to me and put his
hand on my shoulder. 'William,' says he, 'you go home and write a
doctrinal sermon, the stiffest you can. _This one's about a girl_. You
might give it to Mary Ellen North for a wedding-present.'"

The parson had grown almost gay under the vivifying influence of
memory. But Mary Ellen did not smile.

"Yes," she repeated softly, "I remember."

"And then I laughed a little, and got out of the study the best way I
could, and ran over to you to tell you what he said. And I left the
sermon in your work-basket. I've often wished, in the light of what
came afterwards--I've often wished I'd kept it. Somehow 'twould have
brought me nearer to you."

It seemed as if she were about to rise from her chair, but she quieted
herself and dulled the responsive look upon her face.

"Mary Ellen," the parson burst forth, "I know how I took what came on
us the very next week, but I never knew how you took it. Should you
just as lieves tell me?"

She lifted her head until it held a noble pose. Her eyes shone
brilliantly, though indeed they were doves' eyes.

"I'll tell you," said she "I couldn't have told you ten years ago,--no,
nor five! but now it's an old woman talking to an old man. I was given
to understand you were tired of me, and too honorable to say so. I
don't know what tale was carried to you"--

"She said you'd say 'yes' to that rich fellow in Sudleigh, if I'd give
you a chance!"

"I knew 'twas something as shallow as that. Well, I'll tell you how I
took it. I put up my head and laughed. I said, 'When William Bond wants
to break with me, he'll say so.' And the next day you did say so."

The parson wrung his hands in an involuntary gesture of appeal.

"Minnie! Minnie!" he cried, "why didn't you save me? What made you let
me _be_ a fool?"

She met his gaze with a tenderness so great that the words lost all
their sting.

"You always were, William," she said quietly. "Always rushing at things
like Job's charger, and having to rush back again. Never once have I
read that without thinking of you. That's why you fixed up an angel out
of poor little Isabel."

The parson made a fine gesture of dissent. He had forgotten Isabel.

"Do you want to know what else I did?" Her voice grew hard and
unfamiliar. "I'll tell you. I went to my sister Eliza, and I said:
'Some way or another, you've spoilt my life. I'll forgive you just as
soon as I can--maybe before you die, maybe not. You come with me!' and
I went up garret, where she kept the chest with things in it that
belonged to them that had died. There it sets now. I stood over it with
her. 'I'm going to put my dead things in here,' I said. If you touch a
finger to 'em, I'll get up in meeting and tell what you've done. I'm
going to put in everything left from what you've murdered; and every
time you come here, you'll remember you were a murderer.' I frightened
her. I'm glad I did. She's dead and gone, and I've forgiven her; but
I'm glad now!"

The parson looked at her with amazement. She seemed on fire. All the
smouldering embers of a life denied had blazed at last. She put on her
glasses and walked over to the chest.

"Here!" she continued; "let's uncover the dead. I've tried to do it
ever since she died, so the other things could be burned; but my
courage failed me. Could you turn these screws, if I should get you a
knife? They're in tight. I put 'em in myself, and she stood by."

The little lid of the till had been screwed fast. The two middle-aged
people bent over it together, trying first the scissors and then the
broken blade of the parson's old knife. The screws came slowly. When
they were all out, he stood back a pace and gazed at her. Mary Ellen
looked no longer alert and vivified. Her face was haggard.

"I shut it," she said, in a whisper. "You lift it up."

The parson lifted the lid. There they lay, her poor little relics,--a
folded manuscript, an old-fashioned daguerreotype, and a tiny locket.
The parson could not see. His hand shook as he took them solemnly out
and gave them to her. She bent over the picture, and looked at it, as
we search the faces of the dead. He followed her to the light, and,
wiping his glasses, looked also.

"That was my picture," he said musingly. "I never've had one since. And
that was mother's locket. It had"--He paused and looked at her.

"Yes," said Mary Ellen softly; "it's got it now." She opened the little
trinket; a warm, thick lock of hair lay within, and she touched it
gently with her finger. "Should you like the locket, because 'twas your
mother's?"

She hesitated; and though the parson's tone halted also, he answered at
once:--

"No, Mary Ellen, not if you'll keep it. I should rather think 'twas
with you."

She put her two treasures in her pocket, and gave him the other.

"I guess that's your share," she said, smiling faintly. "Don't read it
here. Just take it away with you."

The manuscript had been written in the cramped and awkward hand of his
youth, and the ink upon the paper was faded after many years. He turned
the pages, a smile coming now and then.

"'Thou hast doves' eyes,'" he read,--"'thou hast doves' eyes!'" He
murmured a sentence here and there. "Mary Ellen," he said at last,
shaking his head over the manuscript in a droll despair, "it isn't a
sermon. Parson Sibley had the rights of it. It's a love-letter!" And
the two old people looked in each other's wet eyes and smiled.

The woman was the first to turn away.

"There!" said she, closing the lid of the chest; "we've said enough.
We've wiped out old scores. We've talked more about ourselves than we
ever shall again; for if old age brings anything, it's thinking of
other people--them that have got life before 'em. These your rubbers?"

The parson put them on, with a dazed obedience. His hand shook in
buckling them. Mary Ellen passed him his coat, but he noticed that she
did not offer to hold it for him. There was suddenly a fine remoteness
in her presence, as if a frosty air had come between them. The parson
put the sermon in his inner pocket, and buttoned his coat tightly over
it. Then he pinned on his shawl. At the door he turned.

"Mary Ellen," said he pleadingly, "don't you ever want to see the
sermon again? Shouldn't you like to read it over?"

She hesitated. It seemed for a moment as if she might not answer at
all. Then she remembered that they were old folks, and need not veil
the truth.

"I guess I know it 'most all by heart," she said quietly. "Besides, I
took a copy before I put it in there. Good-night!"

"Good-night!" answered the parson joyously. He closed the door behind
him and went crunching down the icy path. When he had unfastened the
horse and sat tucking the buffalo-robe around him, the front door was
opened in haste, and a dark figure came flying, down the walk.

"Mr. Bond!" thrilled a voice.

"Whoa!" called the parson excitedly. He was throwing back the robe to
leap from the sleigh when the figure reached him. "Oh!" said he;
"Isabel!"

She was breathing hard with excitement and the determination grown up
in her mind during that last half hour of her exile in the kitchen.

"Parson,"--forgetting a more formal address, and laying her hand on his
knee,--"I've got to say it! Won't you please forgive me? Won't you,
please? I can't explain it"--

"Bless your heart, child!" answered the parson cordially; "you needn't
try to. I guess I made you nervous."

"Yes," agreed Isabel, with a sigh of relief, "I guess you did." And the
parson drove away.

Isabel ran, light of heart and foot, back into the warm sitting-room,
where aunt Mary Ellen was standing just where he had left her. She had
her glasses off, and she looked at Isabel with a smile so vivid that
the girl caught her breath, and wondered within herself how aunt Mary
Ellen had looked when she was young.

"Isabel," said she, "you come here and give me a corner of your apron
to wipe my glasses. I guess it's drier'n my handkerchief."




HORN O' THE MOON


If you drive along Tiverton Street, and then turn to the left, down the
Gully Road, you journey, for the space of a mile or so, through a
bewildering succession of damp greenery, with noisy brooks singing
songs below you, on either side, and the treetops on the level with
your horse's feet. Few among the older inhabitants ever take this
drive, save from necessity, because it is conceded that the dampness
there is enough, even in summer, to "give you your death o' cold;" and
as for the young, to them the place wears an eerie look, with its
miniature suggestion of impassable gulfs and roaring torrents. Yet no
youth reaches his majority without exploring the Gully. He who goes
alone is the more a hero; but even he had best leave two or three
trusty comrades reasonably near, not only to listen, should he call,
but to stand his witnesses when he afterwards declares where he has
been. It is a fearsome thing to explore that lower stratum of this
round world, so close to the rushing brook that it drowns your
thoughts, though not your apprehensions, and to go slipping about over
wet boulders and among dripping ferns; but your fears are fears of the
spirit. They are inherited qualms. You shiver because your grandfathers
and fathers and uncles have shivered there before you. If you are very
brave indeed, and naught but the topmost round of destiny will content
you, possibly you penetrate still further into green abysses, and come
upon the pool where, tradition says, an ancient trout has his
impregnable habitation. Apparently, nobody questions that the life of a
trout may be indefinitely prolonged, under the proper conditions of a
retired dusk; and the same fish that served our grandfathers for a
legend now enlivens our childish days. When you meet a youngster,
ostentatiously setting forth for the Gully Road, with bait-box and
pole, you need not ask where he is going; though if you have any human
sympathy in the pride of life, you will not deny him his answer:--

"Down to have a try for the old trout!"

The pool has been still for many years. Not within the memory of aged
men has the trout turned fin or flashed a speckled side; but he is to
this day an historical present. He has lived, and therefore he lives
always.

Those who do not pause upon the Gully Road, but keep straight on into
the open, will come into the old highway leading up and up to Horn o'
the Moon. It is an unshaded, gravelly track, pointing duly up-hill for
three long miles; and it has become a sober way to most of us, in this
generation: for we never take it unless we go on the solemn errand of
getting Mary Dunbar, that famous nurse, to care for our sick or dead.
There is a tradition that a summer visitor once hired a "shay," and
drove, all by herself, up to Horn o' the Moon, drawn on by the elusive
splendor of its name. But she met such a dissuading flood of comment by
the way as to startle her into the state of mind commonly associated
with the Gully Road. Farmers, haying in the field, came forward, to
lean on the fence, and call excitedly,--

"Where ye goin'?"

"Horn o' the Moon," replied she, having learned in Tiverton the value
of succinct replies.

"Who's sick?"

"Nobody."

"Got any folks up there?"

"No. Going to see the place."

The effect of this varied. Some looked in amazement; one ventured to
say, "Well, that's the beater!" and another dropped into the cabalistic
remark which cannot be defined, but which has its due significance,
"Well, you _must_ be sent for!" The result of all this running
commentary was such that, when the visitor reached the top of the hill
where Horn o' the Moon lies, encircled by other lesser heights, she was
stricken by its exceeding desolation, and had no heart to cast more
than a glance at the noble view below. She turned her horse, and
trotted, recklessly and with many stumblings, down again into friendly
Tiverton.

Horn o' the Moon is unique in its melancholy. It has so few trees, and
those of so meagre and wind-swept a nature, that it might as well be
entirely bald. No apples grow there; and in the autumn, the inhabitants
make a concerted sally down into Tiverton Street, to purchase their
winter stock, such of them as can afford it. The poorer folk--and they
are all poor enough--buy windfalls, and string them to dry; and so
common is dried-apple-pie among them that, when a Tivertonian finds
this makeshift appearing too frequently on his table, he has only to
remark, "I should think this was Horn o' the Moon!" and it disappears,
to return no more until the slur is somewhat outworn.

There is very little grass at the top of the lonely height, and that of
a husky, whispering sort, in thin ribbons that flutter low little songs
in the breeze. They never cease; for, at Horn o' the Moon, there is
always a wind blowing, differing in quality with the season. Sometimes
it is a sighing wind from other heights, happier in that they are sweet
with firs. Sometimes it is exasperating enough to make the March
breezes below seem tender; then it tosses about in snatching gusts,
buffeting, and slapping, and excoriating him who stands in its way.
Somehow, all the peculiarities of Horn o' the Moon seem referable, in a
mysterious fashion, to the wind. The people speak in high, strenuous
voices, striving to hold their own against its wicked strength. Most of
them are deaf. Is that because the air beats ceaselessly against the
porches of their ears? They are a stunted race; for they have grown
into the habit of holding the head low, and plunging forward against
that battling element. Even the fowl at Horn o' the Moon are not of the
ordinary sort. Their feathers grow the wrong way, standing up in a
ragged and disorderly fashion; and they, too, have the effect of having
been blown about and disarranged, until nature yielded, and agreed to
their permanent roughness.

Moreover, all the people are old or middle-aged; and possibly that is
why, again, the settlement is so desolate. It is a disgrace for us
below to marry with Horn o' the Mooners, though they are a sober folk;
and now it happens that everybody up there is the cousin of everybody
else. The race is dying out, we say, as if we considered it a distinct
species; and we agree that it would have been wiped away long ago, by
weight of its own eccentricity, had not Mary Dunbar been the making of
it. She is the one righteous among many. She is the good nurse whom we
all go to seek, in our times of trouble, and she perpetually saves her
city from the odium of the world.

Mary was born in Tiverton Street. We are glad to remember that, we who
condemn by the wholesale, and are assured that no good can come out of
Nazareth. When she was a girl of eighteen, her father and mother died;
and she fell into a state of spiritual exaltation, wherein she dreamed
dreams, and had periods of retirement within her house, communing with
other intelligences. We said Mary had lost her mind; but that was
difficult to believe, since no more wholesome type of womanhood had
ever walked our streets. She was very tall, built on the lines of a
beauty transcending our meagre strain. Nobody approved of those broad
shoulders and magnificent arms. We said it was a shame for any girl to
be so overgrown; yet our eyes followed her, delighted by the harmony of
line and action. Then we whispered that she was as big as a moose, and
that, if we had such arms, we never'd go out without a shawl. Her
"mittins" must be wide enough for any man!

Mary did everything perfectly. She walked as if she went to meet the
morning, and must salute it worthily. She carried a weight as a goddess
might bear the infant Bacchus; and her small head, poised upon that
round throat, wore the crown of simplicity, and not of pride. But we
only told how strong she was, and how much she could lift. We loved
Mary, but sensibility had to shrink from those great proportions and
that elemental strength.

One snowy morning, Mary's spiritual vision called her out of our midst,
to which she never came back save as we needed her. The world was very
white that day, when she rose, in her still house, dressed herself
hastily, and roused a neighbor, begging him to harness, and drive her
up to Horn o' the Moon. Folks were sick there, with nobody to take care
of them. The neighbor reasoned, and then refused, as one might deny a
person, however beloved, who lives by the intuitions of an unseen
world. Mary went home again, and, as he believed, to stay. But she had
not hesitated in her allegiance to the heavenly voice. Somehow, through
the blinding snow and unbroken road, she ploughed her way up to Horn o'
the Moon, where she found an epidemic of diphtheria; and there she
stayed. We marveled over her guessing how keenly she was needed; but
since she never explained, it began to be noised abroad that some
wandering peddler told her. That accounted for everything; and Mary had
no time for talk. She was too busy, watching with the sick, and going
about from house to house, cooking delicate gruels and broiling chicken
for those who were getting well. It is said that she even did the barn
work, and milked the cows, during that tragic time. We were not
surprised. Mary was a great worker, and she was fond of "creatur's."

Whether she came to care for these stolid people on the height, or
whether the vision counseled her, Mary gave up her house in the
village, and bought a little old dwelling under an overhanging
hillside, at Horn o' the Moon. It was a nest built into the rock, its
back sitting snugly there. The dark came down upon it quickly. In
winter, the sun was gone from the little parlor as early as three
o'clock; but Mary did not mind. That house was her temporary shell; she
only slept in it in the intervals of hurrying away, with blessed feet,
to tend the sick, and hold the dying in untiring arms. I shall never
forget how, one morning, I saw her come out of the door, and stand
silent, looking toward the rosy east. There was the dawn, and there was
she, its priestess, while all around her slept. I should not have been
surprised had her lips, parted already in a mysterious smile, opened
still further in a prophetic chanting to the sun. But Mary saw me, and
the alert, answering look of one who is a messenger flashed swiftly
over her face. She advanced like the leader of a triumphal procession.

"Anybody want me?" she called. "I'll get my bunnit."

It was when she was twenty, and not more than settled in the little
house at Horn o' the Moon, that her story came to her. The Veaseys were
her neighbors, perhaps five doors away; and one summer morning, Johnnie
Veasey came home from sea. He brought no money, no coral from foreign
parts, nor news of grapes in Eshcol. He simply came empty-handed, as he
always did, bearing only, to vouch for his wanderings, a tanned face,
and the bright, red-brown eyes that had surely looked on things we
never saw. Adam Veasey, his brother; had been paralyzed for years. He
sat all day in the chimney corner, looking at his shaking hands, and
telling how wide a swathe he could cut before he was afflicted. Mattie,
Adam's wife, had long dealt with the problem of an unsupported
existence. She had turned into a flitting little creature with eager
eyes, who made it her business to prey upon a more prosperous world.
Mattie never went about without a large extra pocket attached to her
waist; into this, she could slip a few carrots, a couple of doughnuts,
or even a loaf of bread. She laid a lenient tax upon the neighbors and
the town below. Was there a frying of doughnuts at Horn o' the Moon? No
sooner had the odor risen upon the air, than Mattie stood on the spot,
dumbly insistent on her toll. Her very clothes smelled of food; and it
was said that, in fly-time, it was a sight to see her walk abroad,
because of the hordes of insects settling here and there on her
odoriferous gown. When Johnnie Veasey appeared, Mattie's soul rose in
arms. Their golden chance had come at last.

"You got paid off?" she asked him, three minutes after his arrival, and
Johnnie owned, with the cheerfulness of those rich only in hope, that
he did get paid, and lost it all, the first night on shore. He got into
the wrong boarding-house, he said. It was the old number, but new
folks.

Mattie acquiesced, with a sigh. He would make his visit and go again,
and, that time, perhaps fortune might attend him.. So she went over to
old Mrs. Hardy's, to borrow a "riz loaf," and the wanderer was feasted,
according to her little best.

Johnnie stayed, and Horn o' the Moon roused itself, finding that he had
brought the antipodes with him. He was the teller of tales. He
described what he had seen, and then, by easy transitions, what others
had known and he had only heard, until the intelligence of these
stunted, wind-blown creatures, on their island hill, took fire; and
every man vowed he wished he had gone to sea, before it was too late,
or even to California, when the gold craze was on. Johnnie had the
tongue of the improvisator, and he loved a listener. He liked to sit
out on a log, in the sparse shadow of the one little grove the hill
possessed, and, with the whispering leaves above him tattling
uncomprehended sayings brought them by the wind, gather the old men
about him, and talk them blind. As he sat there, Mary came walking
swiftly by, a basket in her hand. Johnnie came bolt upright, and took
off his cap. He looked amazingly young and fine, and Mary blushed as
she went by.

"Who's that?" asked Johnnie of the village fathers.

"That's only Mary Dunbar. Guess you ain't been here sence she moved
up."

Johnnie watched her walking away, for the rhythm of her motion
attracted him. He did not think her pretty; no one ever thought that.

It happened, then, that he spent two or three evenings at the Hardys',
where Mary went, every night, to rub grandmother and put her to bed;
and while she sat there in the darkened room, soothing the old woman
for her dreary vigil, she heard his golden tales of people in strange
lands. It seemed very wonderful to Mary. She had not dreamed there were
such lands in all the world; and when she hurried home, it was to hunt
out her old geography, and read it until after midnight. She followed
rivers to their sources, and dwelt upon mountains with amazing names.
She was seeing the earth and its fullness, and her heart beat fast.

Next day she went away for a long case, giving only one little sigh in
the going, to the certainty that, when she came back, Johnnie Veasey
would be off on another voyage to lands beyond the sea. Mary was not of
the sort who cry for the moon just because they have seen it. She had
simply begun to read a fairy tale, and somebody had taken it away from
her and put it high on the shelf. But on the very first morning after
her return, when she rose early, longing for the blissful air of her
own bleak solitude, Mattie Veasey stood there at her door. Mary had but
one first question for every comer:--

"Anybody sick?"

"You let me step in," answered Mattie, a determined foot on the sill.
"I want to tell you how things stand."

It was evident that Mattie was going on a journey. She was an
exposition of the domestic resources of Horn o' the Moon. Her dress
came to the tops of her boots. It was the plaid belonging to Stella
Hardy, who had died in her teens. It hooked behind; but that was no
matter, for the enveloping shawl, belonging to old Mrs. Titcomb,
concealed that youthful eccentricity. Her shoes--congress, with
world-weary elastics at the side--were her own, inherited from an aunt;
and her bonnet was a rusty black, with a mourning veil. There was, at
that time, but one new bonnet at Horn o' the Moon, and its owner had
sighed, when Mattie proposed for it, brazenly saying that she guessed
nobody'd want anything that set so fur back. Whereupon the suppliant
sought out Mrs. Pillsbury, whose mourning headgear, bought in a brief
season of prosperity, nine years before, had become, in a manner,
village property. It was as duly in public requisition as the hearse;
and its owner cherished a melancholy pride in this official state. She
never felt as if she owned it,--only that she was the keeper of a
sacred trust; and Mattie, in asking for it, knew that she demanded no
more than her due, as a citizen should. It was an impersonal matter
between her and the bonnet; and though she should wear it on a secular
errand, the veil did not signify. She knew everybody else knew whose
bonnet it was; and that if anybody supposed she had met with a loss,
they had only to ask, and she to answer. So, in the consciousness of an
armor calculated to meet the world, she skillfully brought her congress
boots into Mary's kitchen, and sat down, her worn little hands clasped
under the shawl.

"You've just got home," said she. "I s'pose you ain't heard what's
happened to Johnnie?"

Mary rose, a hand upon her chair.

"No! no! He don't want no nussin'. You set down. I can't talk so--ready
to jump an' run. My! how good that tea does smell!"

Mary brought a cup, and placed it at her hand, with the deft manner of
those who have learned to serve. Mattie sugared it, and tasted, and
sugared again.

"My! how good that is!" she repeated. "You don't steep it to rags, as
some folks do. I have to, we're so nigh the wind. Well, you hadn't been
gone long before Johnnie had a kind of a fall. 'T wa'n't much of a one,
neither,--down the ledge. I dunno how he done it--he climbs like a
cat--seems as if the Old Boy was in it--but half his body he can't
move. Palsy, I s'pose; numb, not shakin', like Adam's."

Mary listened gravely; her hands on her knees.

"How long's he been so?"

"Nigh on to five weeks."

"Had the doctor?"

"Yes, we called in that herb-man over to Saltash, an' he says there
ain't no chance for him. He's goin' to be like Adam, only wuss. An'
I've been down to the Poor Farm, to tell 'em they've got to take him
in." Her little hands worked; her eager eyes ate their way into the
heart. Mary could see exactly how she had had her way with the
selectmen. "I told 'em they'd got to," she repeated. "He ain't got no
money, an' we ain't got nuthin', an' have two paraletics on my hands I
can't. So they told me they'd give me word to-day; an' I'm goin' down
to settle it. I'm in hopes they'll bring me back, an' take him along
down."

"Yes," answered Mary gravely. "Yes."

"Well, now I've come to the beginnin' o' my story." Mattie took that
last delicious sip of tea at the bottom of the cup. "He's layin' in
bed, an' Adam's settin' by the stove; an' I wanted to know if you
wouldn't run in, long towards noon, an' warm up suthin' for 'em."

"Yes, indeed," said Mary Dunbar. "I'll be there."

She rose, and Mattie, albeit she dearly loved to gossip, felt that she
must rise, too, and be on her way. She tried to amplify on what she had
already said, but Mary did not seem to be listening; so, treading
carefully, lest the dust and dew beset her precious shoes, she took her
way down the hill, like a busy little ant, born to scurry and gather.

Mary looked hastily about the room, to see if its perfect order needed
a farewell touch; and then she drank her cup of tea, and stepped out
into the morning. The air was fresh and sweet. She wore no shawl, and
the wind lifted the little brown rings on her forehead, and curled them
closer. Mary held a hand upon them, and hurried on. She had no more
thought of appearances than a woman in a desert land, or in the desert
made by lack of praise; for she knew no one looked at her. To be clean
and swift was all her life demanded.

Adam sat by the stove, where the ashes were still warm. It was not a
day for fires, but he loved his accustomed corner. He was a middle-aged
man, old with the suffering which is not of years, and the pathos of
his stricken state hung about him, from his unkempt beard to the dusty
black clothing which had been the Tiverton minister's outworn suit. One
would have said he belonged to the generation before his brother.

"That you, Mary?" he asked, in his shaking voice. "Now, ain't that
good? Come to set a spell?"

"Where is he?" responded Mary, in a swift breathlessness quite new to
her.

"In there. We put up a bed in the clock-room."

It was the unfinished part of the house. The Veaseys had always meant
to plaster, but that consummation was still afar. The laths showed
meagrely; it was a skeleton of a room,--and, sunken in the high
feather-bed between the two windows, lay Johnnie Veasey, his buoyancy
all gone, his face quite piteous to see, now that its tan had faded.
Mary went up to the bedside, and laid one cool, strong hand upon his
wrist. His eyes sought her with a wild entreaty; but she knew, although
he seemed to suffer, that this was the misery of delirium, and not the
conscious mind. Adam had come trembling to the door, and stood there,
one hand beating its perpetual tattoo upon the wall. Mary looked up at
him with that abstracted gaze with which we weigh and judge.

"He's feverish," said she. "Mattie didn't tell me that. How long's he
been so?"

"I dunno. I guess a matter o' two days."

"Two days?"

"Well, it might be off an' on ever sence he fell." Adam was helpless.
He depended upon Mattie, and Mattie was not there.

"What did the doctor leave?"

Adam looked about him. "'T was the Herb doctor," he said. "He had her
steep some trade in a bowl."

Mary Dunbar drew her hand away, and walked two or three times up and
down the bare, bleak room. The seeking eyes were following her. She
knew how little their distended agony might mean; but nevertheless they
carried an entreaty. They leaned upon her, as the world, her sick
world, was wont to lean. Mary was, in many things, a child; but her
attitude had grown to be maternal. Suddenly she turned to Adam, where
he stood, shaking and hesitating, in the doorway.

"You goin' to send him off?"

"Pears as if that's the only way," shuffled Adam.

"To-day?"

"Well, I dunno 's they'll come"--

Mary walked past him, her mind assured.

"There, that'll do," said she. "You set down in your corner. I'll be
back byme-by."

She hurried out into the bleak world which was her home, and, at that
moment, it looked very fair and new. The birds were singing, loudly as
they ever sang up here where there were few leaves to nest in. Mary
stopped an instant to listen, and lifted her face wordlessly to the
clear blue sky. It seemed as if she had been given a gift. There,
before one of the houses, she called aloud, with a long, lingering
note, "Jacob!" and Jacob Pease rose from; his milking-stool, and came
forward. Jacob was tall and snuff-colored, a widower of three years'
standing. There was a theory that he wanted Mary, and lacked the
courage to ask her.

"That you, Mary Dunbar?" said he. "Anything on hand?"

"I want you to come and help me lift," answered Mary.

Jacob set down his milk pail, and followed her into the Veaseys'
kitchen. She drew out the tin basin, and filled it at the sink.

"Wash your hands," said she. "Adam, you set where you generally do.
You'll be in the way."

Jacob followed her into the sick-room, and Adam weakly shuffled in
behind.

"For the land's sake!" he began, but Mary was at the head of the bed,
and Jacob at the foot.

"I'll carry his shoulders," she said, in the voice that admits no
demur. "You take his feet and legs. Sort o' fold the feather-bed up
round him, or we never shall get him through the door."

"Which way?" asked Jacob, still entirely at rest on a greater mind.

"Out!" commanded Mary,--"out the front door."

Adam, in describing that dramatic moment, always declared that nobody
but Mary Dunbar could have engineered a feather-bed through the narrow
passage, without sticking midway. He recalled an incident of his
boyhood when, in the Titcomb fire, the whole family had spent every
available instant before the falling of the roof, in trying to push the
second-best bed through the attic window, only to leave it there to
burn. But Mary Dunbar took her patient through the doorway as Napoleon
marched over the Alps; she went with him down the road toward her own
little house under the hill. Only then did Adam, still shuffling on
behind, collect his intelligence sufficiently to shout after her,--

"Mary, what under the sun be you doin' of? What you want me to tell
Mattie? S'pose she brings the selec'men, Mary Dunbar!"

She made no reply, even by a glance. She walked straight on, as if her
burden lightened, and into her own cave-like house and her little neat
bedroom.

"Lay him down jest as he is," she said to Jacob. "We won't try to shift
him to-day. Let him get over this."

Jacob stretched himself, after his load, put his hands in his pockets,
and made up his mouth into a soundless whistle.

"Yes! well!" said he. "Guess I better finish milkin'."

Mary put her patient "to-rights," and set some herb drink on the back
of the stove. Presently the little room was filled with the steamy odor
of a bitter healing, and she was on the battlefield where she loved to
conquer. In spite of her heaven-born instinct, she knew very little
about doctors and their ways of cure. Earth secrets were hers, some of
them inherited and some guessed at, and luckily she had never been
involved in those greater issues to be dealt with only by an exalted
science. Later in her life, she was to get acquainted with the young
doctor, down in Tiverton Street, and hear from him what things were
doing in his world. She was to learn that a hospital is not a slaughter
house incarnadined with writhing victims, as some of us had thought.
She was even to witness the magic of a great surgeon; though that was
in her old age, when her attitude toward medicine had become one of
humble thankfulness that, in all her daring, she had done no harm.
To-day, she thought she could set a bone or break up a fever; and there
was no doubt in her mind that, if other deeds were demanded of her, she
should be led in the one true way. So she sat down by her patient, and
was watching there, hopeful of moisture on his palm, when Mattie broke
into the front room, impetuous as the wind. Mary rose and stepped out
to meet her, shutting the door as she went. Passing the window, she saw
the selectmen, in the vehicle known as a long-reach, waiting at the
gate.

"Hush, Mattie!" said she, "you'll wake him."

Mattie, in her ill-assorted respectabilities of dress, seemed to have
been involved but recently in some bacchanalian orgie. Her shawl was
dragged to one side, and her bonnet sat rakishly. She was intoxicated
with her own surprise.

"Mary Dunbar!" cried she, "I'd like to know the meanin' of all this
go-round!"

"There!" answered Mary, with a quietude like that of the sea at ebb, "I
can't stop to talk. I'll settle it with the selec'men. You come, too."

Mattie's eyes were seeking the bedroom. Leave her alone, and her feet
would follow. "You come along," repeated Mary, and Mattie came.

When the three selectmen saw Mary Dunbar stepping down the little
slope, they gathered about them all their official dignity. Ebenezer
Tolman sat a little straighter than usual, and uttered a portentous
cough. Lothrop Wilson, mild by nature, and rather prone to whiffling in
times of difficulty, frowned, with conscious effort; but that was only
because he knew, in his own soul, how loyally he loved the under-dog,
let justice go as it might. Then there was Eli Pike, occupying himself
in pulling a rein from beneath the horse's tail. These two hated
warfare, and were nervously conscious, that, should they fail in
firmness, Ebenezer would deal with them. Mary went swiftly up to the
wagon, and laid one hand upon the wheel.

"I've got John Veasey in my house," she began rapidly. "I can't stop to
talk. He's pretty sick."

Ebenezer cleared his throat again.

"We understood his folks had put him on the town," said he.

Mattie made a little eager sound, and then stopped.

"He ain't on the town yet," said Mary. "He's in my bedroom. An' there
he's goin' to stay. I've took this job." She turned away from them,
erect in her decision, and went up the path. Eli Pike looked after her,
with an understanding sympathy. He was the man who had walked two
miles, one night, to shoot a fox, trapped, and left there helpless with
a broken leg. Lothrop gazed straight ahead, and said nothing.

"Look here!" called Ebenezer. "Mary! Mary! you look here!"

Mary turned about at the door. She was magnificent in her height and
dignity. Even Ebenezer felt almost ashamed of what he had to say; but
still the public purse must be regarded.

"You can't bring in a bill for services," he announced. "If he's on the
town, he'll have to go right into the Poorhouse with the rest."

Mary made no answer. She stood there a second, looking at him, and he
remarked to Eli, "I guess you might drive on."

But Mattie, following Mary up to the house, to talk it over, tried the
door in vain.

"My land!" she ejaculated, "if she ain't bolted it!" So the nurse and
her patient were left to themselves.

As to the rest of the story, I tell it as we hear it still in Tiverton.
At first, it was reckoned among the miracles; but when the new doctor
came, he explained that it accorded quite honestly with the course of
violated nature, and that, with some slight pruning here and there, the
case might figure in his books. What science would say about it, I do
not know; tradition was quite voluble.

It proved a very long time before Johnnie grew better, and in all those
days Mary Dunbar was a happy woman. She stepped about the house,
setting it in order, watching her charge, and making delicate possets
for him to take. When the "herb-man" came, she turned him away from the
door with a regal courtesy. It was not so much that she despised his
knowledge, as that he knew no more than she, and this was her patient.
The young doctor in Tiverton told her afterwards that she had done a
dangerous thing in not calling in some accredited wearer of the cloth;
but Mary did not think of that. She went on her way of innocence,
delightfully content. And all those days, Johnnie Veasey, as soon as he
came out of his fever, lay there and watched her with eyes full of a
listless wonder. He was still in that borderland of helplessness where
the unusual seems only a part of the new condition of things. Neighbors
called, and Mary refused them entrance, with a finality which admitted
no appeal.

"I've got sickness here," she would say, standing in the doorway
confronting them. "He's too weak to see anybody; I guess I won't ask
you in."

But one day, the minister appeared, his fat gray horse climbing
painfully up from the Gully Road. It was a warm afternoon; and as soon
as Mary saw him, she went out of her house, and closed the door behind
her. When he had tied his horse, he came toward her, brushing the dust
of the road from his irreproachable black. He was a new minister, and
very particular. Mary shook hands with him, and then seated herself on
the step.

"Won't you set down here?" she asked. "I've got sickness, an' I can't
have talkin' any nearer. I'm glad it's a warm day."

The minister looked at the step, and then at Mary. He felt as if his
dignity had been mildly assaulted, and he preferred to stand.

"I should like to offer prayer for the young man," he said. "I had
hoped to see him."

Mary smiled at him in that impersonal way of hers.

"I don't let anybody see him," said she. "I guess we shall all have to
pray by ourselves."

The minister was somewhat nettled. He was young enough to feel the
slight to his official position; and moreover, there were things which
his rigid young wife, primed by the wonder of the town, had enjoined
upon him to say. He flushed to the roots of his smooth brown hair.

"I suppose you know," said he, "that you're taking a very peculiar
stand."

Mary turned her head, to listen. She thought she heard her patient
breathing, and her mind was with him.

"You seem," said the minister, "to have taken in a man who has no claim
on you, instead of letting him stay with his people. If you are going
to marry him, let me advise you to do it now, and not wait for him to
get well. The opinion of the world is, in a measure, to be
respected,--though only in a measure."

Mary had risen to go in, but now she turned upon him.

"Married!" she repeated; and then again, in a hushed voice,--"married!"

"Yes," replied the minister testily, standing by his guns, "married."

Mary looked at him a moment, and then again she moved away. She glanced
round at him, as she entered the door, and said very gently, "I guess
you better go now. Good-day."

She closed the door, and the minister heard her bolt it. He told his
wife briefly, on reaching home, that there wasn't much chance to talk
with Mary, and perhaps the less there was said about it the better.

But as Mary sat down by her patient's bed, her face settled into
sadness, because she was thinking about the world. It had not,
heretofore, been one of her recognized planets; now that it had swung
her way, she marveled at it.

The very next night, while she was eating her supper in the kitchen,
the door opened, and Mattie walked in. Mattie had been washing late
that afternoon. She always washed at odd times, and often in dull
weather her undried clothes hung for days upon the line. She was "all
beat out," for she had begun at three, and steamed through her work, to
have an early supper at five.

"There, Mary Dunbar!" cried she; "I said I'd do it, an' I have. There
ain't a neighbor got into this house for weeks, an' folks that want you
to go nussin' have been turned away. I says to Adam, this very
afternoon, 'I'll be whipped if I don't git in an' see what's goin' on!'
There's some will have it Johnnie's got well, an' drove away without
saying good-by to his own folks, an' some say he ain't likely to live,
an' there he lays without a last word to his own brother! As for the
childern, they've got an idea suthin' 's been done to uncle Johnnie,
an' you can't mention him but they cry."

Mary rose calmly and began clearing her table. "I guess I wouldn't
mention him, then," said she.

A muffled sound came from the bedroom. It might have been laughter.
Then there was a little crack, and Mary involuntarily looked at the
lamp chimney. She hurried into the bedroom, and stopped short at sight
of her patient, lying there in the light of the flickering fire. His
face had flushed, and his eyes were streaming.

"I laughed so," he said chokingly. "She
always makes me. And something snapped into place in my neck. I don't
know what it was,--but _I can move_!"

He held out his hand to her. Mary did not touch it; she only stood
looking at him with a wonderful gaze of pride and recognition, and yet
a strange timidity. She, too, flushed, and tears stood in her eyes.

"I'll go and tell Mattie," said she, turning toward the door. "You want
to see her?"

"For God's sake, no! not till I'm on my feet." He was still laughing.
"I guess I can get up to-morrow."

Mary went swiftly out, and shut the door behind her.

"I guess you better not see him to-night," she said. "You can come in
to-morrer. I shouldn't wonder if he'd be up then."

"I told Adam"--began Mattie, but Mary put a hand on her thin little
arm, and held it there.

"I'd rather talk to-morrer," said she gently. "Don't you come in before
'leven; but you come. Tell Adam to, if he wants. I guess your
brother'll be gettin' away before long." She opened the outer door, and
Mattie had no volition but to go. "It's a nice night, ain't it?" called
Mary cheerfully, after her. "Seems as if there never was so many
stars."

Then she went back into the kitchen, and with the old thrift and
exactitude prepared her patient's supper. He was sitting upright,
bolstered against the head of the bed; and he looked like a great
mischievous boy, who had, in some way, gained a long-desired prize.

"See here!" he called. "Tell me I can't get up to-morrow? Why, I could
walk!"

They had a very merry time while he ate. Mary remembered that
afterwards, with a bruised wonder that laughter comes so cheap. Johnnie
talked incessantly, not any more of the wonders of the deep, but what
he meant to do when he got into the world again.

"How'd I come here in your house, any way?" he asked. "Mattie and Adam
put me here to get rid of me? Tell me all over again."

"I take care of folks, you know," answered Mary briefly. "I have, for
more 'n two years. It's my business."

Johnnie looked at her a moment, crimsoning as he tried to speak.

"What you goin' to ask?"

Mary started. Then she answered steadily--

"That's all right. I don't ask much, anyway; but when folks don't have
ready money, I never ask anything. There, you mustn't talk no more,
even if you are well. I've got to wash these dishes."

She left him to his meditations, and only once more that evening did
they speak together. When she came to the door, to say good-night, he
was flat among his pillows, listening for her.

"Say!" he called, "you come in. No, you needn't unless you want to; but
if ever I earn another cent of money, you'll see. And I ain't the only
friend you've got. There's a girl down in Southport would do anything
in the world for you, if she only knew."

Next morning, Johnnie walked weakly out of doors, despite his nurse's
cautions; for, not knowing what had happened to him, she was in a
wearying dark as to whether it might not happen again. After his
breakfast, he got a ride with Jacob Pease, who was going down Sudleigh
way, and Jacob came back without him. He bore a message, full of
gratitude, to Mary. At Sudleigh, Johnnie had telegraphed, to find out
whether the ship Firewing was still in port; and he had heard that he
must lose no time in joining her. He should never forget what Mary had
done for him. So Jacob said; but he was a man of tepid words, and
perhaps he remembered the message too coldly.

When Mattie came over, that afternoon, to make her call, she found the
house closed. Mary had gone on foot down into Tiverton, where old Mrs.
Lamson, who was sick with a fever, lay still in need. It was many weeks
before she came home again to Horn o' the Moon; and then Grandfather
Sinclair had broken his leg, so that interest in her miracle became
temporarily inactive.

Two years had gone when there came to her a little package, through the
Tiverton mail. It was tied with the greatest caution, and directed in a
straggling hand. Mary opened it just as she struck into the Gully Road,
on her way home. Inside was a little purse, and three gold pieces. She
paused there, under the branches, the purse in one hand, and the gold
lying within her other palm. For a long time she stood looking at them,
her face set in that patient sadness seen in those whose only holding
is the past. It was all over and done, and yet it had never been at
all. She thought a little about herself, and that was very rare, for
Mary. She was not the poorer for what her soul desired; she was
infinitely the richer, and she remembered the girl at Southport, not
with the pang that once afflicted her heart, but with a warm,
outrushing sense of womanly sympathy. If he had money, perhaps he could
marry. Perhaps he was married now. Coming out of the Gully Road, she
opened the purse again, and the sun struck richly upon the gold within.
Mary smiled a little, wanly, but still with a sense of the good, human
kinship in life.

"I won't ever spend 'em," she said to herself. "I'll keep 'em to bury
me."




A STOLEN FESTIVAL


David Macy's house stood on the spur of a breezy upland at the end of a
road. The faraway neighbors, who lived on the main highway and could
see the passin', often thanked their stars that they had been called to
no such isolation; you might, said they, as well be set down in the
middle of pastur'. They wondered how David's Letty could stand it. She
had been married 'most a year, and before that she was forever on the
go. But there! if David Macy had told her the sun rose in the west,
she'd ha' looked out for it there every identical mornin'.

The last proposition had some color in it; for Letty was very much in
love. To an impartial view, David was a stalwart fellow with clear gray
eyes and square shoulders, a prosperous yeoman of the fibre to which
America owes her being. But according to Letty he was something
superhuman in poise and charm. David had no conception of his heroic
responsibilities; nothing could have puzzled him more than to guess how
the ideal of him grew and strengthened in her maiden mind, and how her
after-worship exalted it into something thrilling and passionate, not
to be described even by a tongue more facile than hers. Letty had a
vivid nature, capable of responding to those delicate influences which
move to spiritual issues. There were throes of love within her, of
aspiration, of an ineffable delight in being. She never tried to
understand them, nor did she talk about them; but then, she never tried
to paint the sky or copy the robin's song. Life was very mysterious;
but one thing was quite as mysterious as another. She did sometimes
brood for a moment over the troubled sense that, in some fashion, she
spoke in another key from "other folks," who did not appear to know
that joy is not altogether joy, but three-quarters pain, and who had
never learned how it brings its own aching sense of incompleteness; but
that only seemed to her a part of the general wonder of things. There
had been one strange May morning in her life when she went with her
husband into the woods, to hunt up a wild steer. She knew every foot of
the place, and yet one turn of the path brought them into the heart of
a picture thrillingly new with the unfamiliarity of pure and living
beauty. The evergreens enfolded them in a palpable dusk; but
entrancingly near, shimmering under a sunny gleam, stood a company of
birches in their first spring wear. They were trembling, not so much
under the breeze as from the hurrying rhythm of the year. Their green
was vivid enough to lave the vision in light; and Letty looked beyond
it to a brighter vista still. There, in an opening, lay a bank of
violets, springing in the sun. Their blue was a challenge to the skyey
blue above; it pierced the sight, awaking new longings and strange
memories. It seemed to Letty as if some invisible finger touched her on
the heart and made her pause. Then David turned, smiling kindly upon
her, and she ran to him with a little cry, and put her arms about his
neck.

"What is it?" he asked, stroking her hair with a gentle hand. "What is
it, little child?"

"Oh, it's nothin'!'" said Letty chokingly. "It's only--I like you so!"

The halting thought had no purple wherein to clothe itself; but it
meant as much as if she had read the poets until great words had become
familiar, and she could say "love." He was the spring day, the sun, the
blue of the sky, the quiver of leaves; and she felt it, and had a pain
at her heart.

Now, on an autumn morning, David was standing within the great space in
front of the barn, greasing the wheels preliminary to a drive to
market; and Letty stood beside him, bareheaded, her breakfast dishes
forgotten. She was a round thing, with quick movements not ordinarily
belonging to one so plump; her black hair was short, and curled
roughly, and there were freckles on her little snub nose. David looked
up at her red cheeks and the merry shine of her eyes, and smiled upon
her.

"You look pretty nice this mornin'," he remarked.

Letty gave a little dancing step and laughed. The sun was bright; there
was a purple haze over the hills, and the nearer woods were yellow. The
world was a jewel newly set for her.

"I _am_ nice!" said she. "David, do you know our anniversary's comin'
on? It's 'most a year since we were married,--a year the fifteenth."

David loosened the last wheel, and rose to look at her.

"Sho!" said he, with great interest "Is that so? Well, 't was a good
bargain. Best trade I ever made in _my_ life!"

"And we've got to celebrate," said Letty masterfully. "I'll tell you
how. I've had it all planned for a month. We'll get up at four, have
our breakfast, ride over to Star Pond, and picnic all day long. We'll
take a boat and go out rowin', and we'll eat our dinner on the water!"

David smiled back at her, and then, with a sudden recollection, pursed
his lips.

"I'm awful sorry, Letty," he said honestly, "but I've got to go over to
Long Pastur' an' do that fencin', or I can't put the cattle in there
before we turn 'em into the shack. You know that fence was all done up
in the spring, but that cussed breachy cow o' Tolman's hooked it down;
an' if I wait for him to do it--well, you know what he is!"

"Oh, you can put off your fencin'!" cried Letty. "Only one day! Oh, you
can!"

"I could 'most any other time," said David, with reason, "but here it
is 'most Saturday, an' next week the thrashin'-machine's comin'. I'm
awful sorry, Letty. I am, honest!"

Letty turned half round like a troubled child, and began grinding one
heel into the turf. She was conscious of an odd mortification. It was
not, said her heart, that the thing itself was so dear to her; it was
only that David ought to want immeasurably to do it. She always put
great stress upon the visible signs of an invisible bond, and she would
be long in getting over her demand for the unreason of love.

David threw down the monkey-wrench, and put an arm about her waist.

"Come, now, you don't care, do you?" he asked lovingly. "One day's the
same as another, now ain't it?"

"Is it?" said Letty, a smile running over her face and into her wet
eyes. "Well, then, le's have Fourth o' July fireworks next Sunday
mornin'!"

David looked a little hurt; but that was only because he was puzzled.
His sense of humor wore a different complexion from Letty's. He liked a
joke, and he could tell a good story, but they must lie within the
logic of fun. Letty could put her own interpretation on her griefs, and
twist them into shapes calculated to send her into hysterical mirth.

"You see," said David soothingly, "we're goin' to be together as long
as we live. It ain't as if we'd got to rake an' scrape an' plan to git
a minute alone, as it used to be, now is it? An' after the fencin' 's
done, an' the thrashin', an' we've got nothin' on our minds, we'll take
both horses an' go to Star Pond. Come, now! Be a good girl!"

The world seemed very quiet because Letty was holding silence, and he
looked anxiously down at the top of her head. Then she relented a
little and turned her face up to his--her rebellious eyes and unsteady
mouth. But meeting the loving honesty of his look, her heart gave a
great bound of allegiance, and she laughed aloud.

"There!" she said. "Have it so. I won't say another word. _I_ don't
care!"

These were David's unconscious victories, born, not of his strength or
tyranny, but out of the woman's maternal comprehension, her lavish
concession of all the small things of life to the one great code. She
had taken him for granted, and thenceforth judged him by the intention
and not the act.

David was bending to kiss her, but he stopped midway, and his arm fell.

"There's Debby Low," said he. "By jinks! I ain't more 'n half a man
when she's round, she makes me feel so sheepish. I guess it's that eye
o' her'n. It goes through ye like a needle."

Letty laughed light-heartedly, and looked down the path across the lot.
Debby, a little, bent old woman, was toiling slowly along, a large
carpet-bag swinging from one hand. Letty drew a long breath and tried
to feel resigned.

"She's got on her black alpaca," said she. "She's comin' to spend the
day!"

David answered her look with one of commiseration, and, gathering up
his wrench and oil, "put for" the barn.

"I'd stay, if I could do any good," he said hastily, "but I can't. I
might as well stan' from under."

Debby threw her empty carpet-bag over the stone wall, and followed it,
clambering slowly and painfully. Her large feet were clad in congress
boots; and when she had alighted, she regarded them with deep
affection, and slowly wiped them upon either ankle, a stork-like
process at which David, safe in the barn, could afford to smile.

"If it don't rain soon," she called fretfully, "I guess you'll find
yourselves alone an' forsaken, like pelicans in the wilderness. Anybody
must want to see ye to traipse up through that lot as I've been doin',
an' git their best clo'es all over dirt."

"You could ha' come in the road," said Letty, smiling. Letty had a very
sweet temper, and she had early learned that it takes all sorts o'
folks to make a world. It was a part of her leisurely and generous
scheme of life to live and let live.

"Ain't the road dustier 'n the path?" inquired Debby contradictorily.
"My stars! I guess 't is. Well, now, what do you s'pose brought me up
here this mornin'?"

Letty's eyes involuntarily sought the bag, whose concave sides flapped
hungrily together; but she told her lie with cheerfulness. "I don't
know."

"I guess ye don't. No, I ain't comin' in. I'm goin' over to Mis'
Tolman's, to spend the day. I'm in hopes she's got b'iled dish. You
look here!" She opened the bag, and searched portentously, the while
Letty, in some unworthy interest, regarded the smooth, thick hair under
her large poke-bonnet. Debby had an original fashion of coloring it;
and this no one had suspected until her little grandson innocently
revealed the secret. She rubbed it with a candle, in unconscious
imitation of an actor's make-up, and then powdered it with soot from
the kettle. "I believe to my soul she does!" said Letty to herself.

But Debby, breathing hard, had taken something from the bag, and was
holding it out on the end of a knotted finger.

"There!" she said, "ain't that your'n? Vianna said 't was your
engagement ring."

Letty flushed scarlet, and snatched the ring tremblingly. She gave an
involuntary look at the barn, where David was whistling a merry stave.

"Oh, my!" she breathed. "Where'd you find it?"

"Well, that's the question!" returned Debby triumphantly, "Where'd ye
lose it?"

But Letty had no mind to tell. She slipped the ring on her finger, and
looked obstinate.

"Can't I get you somethin' to put in your bag?" she asked cannily.
Debby was diverted, though only for the moment.

"I should like a mite o' pork," she answered, lowering her voice and
giving a glance, in her turn, at the barn. "I s'pose ye don't want
_him_ to know of it?"

"I should like to be told why!" flamed Letty, in an indignation
disproportioned to its cause. Debby had unconsciously hit the raw. "Do
you s'pose I'd do anything David can't hear?"

"Law, I didn't know," said Debby, as if the matter were of very little
consequence. "Mis' Peleg Chase, she gi'n me a beef-bone, t'other day,
an' she says, 'Don't ye tell _him_!' An' Mis' Squire Hill gi'n me a
pail o' lard; but she hid it underneath the fence, an' made me come for
't after dark. I dunno how you're goin' to git along with men-folks, if
ye offer 'em the whip-hand. They'll take it, anyways. Well, don't you
want to know where I come on this ring?"

Letty had taken a few hasty steps toward the house. "Yes, I do," owned
she, turning about. "Where was it?"

"Well, Sammy was in swimmin', an' he dove into the Old Hole, to see 'f
't had any bottom to 't. Vianna made him vow he wouldn't go in whilst
he had that rash; but he come home with his shirt wrong side out, an'
she made him own up. But he'd ha' told anyway, he was so possessed to
show that ring. He see suthin' gleamin' on a willer root nigh the bank,
an' he dove, an' there 't was. I told Sammy mebbe you'd give him
suthin' for 't, an' he said there wa'n't nothin' in the world he wanted
but a mite o' David's solder, out in the shed-chamber."

"He shall have it," said Letty hastily. "I'll get it now. Don't you say
anything!" And then she knew she had used the formula she detested, and
that she was no better than Mrs. Peleg Chase, or the wife of Squire
Hill.

She ran frowning into the house, and down and up from kitchen to
cellar. Presently she reappeared, panting, with a great tin pan borne
before her like a laden salver. She set it down at Debby's feet, and
began packing its contents into the yawning bag.

"There!" she said, working with haste. "There's the solder, all of it.
And here's some of our sweet corn. We planted late."

Debby took an ear from the pan, and, tearing open the husk, tried a
kernel with a critical thumb.

"Tough, ain't it?" she remarked, disparagingly. "Likely to be, this
time o' year. Is that the pork?"

It was a generous cube, swathed in a fresh white cloth.

"Yes, it is," said Letty breathlessly, thrusting it in and shutting the
bag. "There!"

"Streak o' fat an' streak o' lean?" inquired Debby remorselessly.

"It's the best we've got; that's all I can say. Now I've got to speak
to David before he harnesses. Good-by!"

In a fever of impatience, she fled away to the barn.

"Well, if ever!" ejaculated Debby, lifting the bag and turning slowly
about, to take her homeward path. "Great doin's _I_ say!" And she made
no reply when Letty, prompted by a tardy conscience, stopped in the
barn doorway and called to her, "Tell Sammy I'm much obliged. Tell him
I shall make turnovers to-morrow." Debby was thinking of the pork, and
the likelihood of its being properly diversified.

Letty swept into the barn like a hurrying wind. The horses backed, and
laid their ears flat, and David, grooming one of them, gentled him and
inquired of him confidentially what was the matter.

"Oh, David, come out here! please come out!" called Letty breathlessly.
"I've got to see you."

David appeared, with some wonderment on his face, and Letty
precipitated herself upon him, mindless of curry-comb and horse-hairs
and the fact that she was presently to do butter. "David," she cried,
"I can't stand it. I've got to tell you. You know this ring?"

David looked at it, interested and yet perplexed.

"Seems if I'd seen you wear it," said he.

Letty gave way, and laughed hysterically.

"Seems if you had!" she repeated. "I've wore it over a year. There
ain't a girl in town but knows it. I showed it to 'em all. I told 'em
'twas my engagement ring."

David looked at it, and then at her. She seemed to him a little mad. He
could quiet the horses, but not a woman, in so vague an exigency.

"What made you tell 'em that?" he asked, at a venture.

"Don't you see? There wasn't one of 'em that was engaged but had a
ring--and presents, David--and they knew I never had anything, or I'd
have showed 'em."

David was not a dull man; he had very sound views on the tariff, and,
though social questions might thrive outside his world, the town
blessed him for an able citizen. But he felt troubled; he was
condemned, and it was the world's voice which had condemned him.

"I don't know's I ever did give you anything, Letty," he said, with a
new pain stirring in his face. "I don't b'lieve I ever thought of it.
It wasn't that I begrudged anything."

"Oh, my soul, no!" cried Letty, in an agony of her own. "I knew how 't
was. It wa'n't your way, but they didn't know that. And I couldn't have
'em thinkin' what they did think, now could I? So I bought me--David, I
bought me that high comb I used to wear, and--and a blue
handkerchief--and a thimble--and--and--this ring. And I said you give
'em to me. And I trusted to chance for your never findin' it out. But I
always hated the things; and as soon as we were married, I broke the
comb, and burnt up the handkerchief, and hammered the thimble into a
little wad, and buried it. But I didn't dare to stop wearin' the ring,
for fear folks would notice. Then t'other day I felt so about it I
knew the time had come, and I went down to the Old Hole and threw it
in. And now that hateful Sammy's found it and brought it back, and I've
sent him your solder, and Debby's promised me she wouldn't tell you
about the pork, and I--I'm no better than the rest of 'em that lie and
lie and don't let their men-folks know!" Letty was sobbing bitterly,
and David drew her into his arms and laid his cheek down on her hair.
His heart was aching too. They had all the passionate sorrow of
children over some grief not understood.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked at length.

"When?" said Letty chokingly.

"Then--when folks expected things--before we were married."

"Oh, David, I couldn't!"

"No," said David sadly, "I s'pose you couldn't."

Letty had been holding one hand very tightly clenched. It was a plump
hand, with deep dimples and firm, short fingers. She unclasped it, and
stretched out toward him a wet, pink palm.

"There!" she said despairingly. "There's the ring."

Again David felt his inadequacy to the situation. "Don't you want to
wear it?" he hesitated. "It's real pretty. What's that red stone?"

"I hate it!" cried Letty viciously. "It's a garnet. Oh, David, don't
you ever let me set eyes on it again!"

David took it slowly from her hand. He drew out his pocket-book, opened
it, and dropped the ring inside. "There!" he said, "I guess't won't do
me no hurt to come acrost it once in a while." Then they kissed each
other again, like two children; Letty's tears wet his face, and he felt
them bitterer than if they had been his own.

But for Letty the air had cleared. Now, she felt, there was no trouble
in her path. She had all the irresponsible joy of one who has had a
secret, and feels the burden roll away. She was like Christian without
his pack. She put her hands on David's shoulders, and looked at him
radiantly.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" she cried. "I'm just as wicked as I was before; but
it don't seem to make any difference, now you know it!"

Though David also smiled, he was regarding her with a troubled wonder.
He never expected to follow these varying moods. They were like
swallow-flights, and he was content to see the sun upon their wings. So
he drove thoughtfully off, and Letty went back to her work with a
singing heart. She was not quite sure that it was right to be happy
again, all at once, but she could not still her blood. To be forgiven,
to find herself free from the haunting consciousness that she could
deceive the creature to whom she held such passionate allegiance--this
was enough to shape a new heaven and a new earth. Her simple household
duties took on the significance of noble ceremonies. She sang as she
went about them, and the words were those of a joyous hymn. She seemed
to be serving in a temple, making it clean and fragrant in the name of
love.

Saturday was a day born of heavenly intentions. Letty ran out behind
the house, where the ground rose abruptly, and looked off, entranced,
into the blue distance. It was the stillest day of all the fall. Not a
breath stirred about her; but in the maple grove at the side of the
house, where the trees had turned early under the chill of an
unseasonable night, yellow leaves were sifting down without a sound.
Goldenrod was growing dull, clematis had ripened into feathery spray,
and she knew how the closed gentians were painting great purple dashes
by the side of the road. "Oh!" she cried aloud, in rapture. It was her
wedding day; a year ago the sun had shone as warmly and benignantly as
he was shining now, and the same haze had risen, like an exhalation,
from the hills. She saw a special omen in it, and felt herself the
child of happy fortune, to be so mothered by the great blue sky. Then
she ran in to give David his breakfast, and tell him, as they sat down,
that it was their wedding morning. As she went, she tore a spray of
blood-red woodbine from the wall, and bound it round her waist.

But David was not ready for breakfast; he was talking with a man at the
barn, and half an hour later came hurrying in to his retarded meal.

"I've got to eat an' run," said he; "Job Fisher kep' me. It's about
that ma'sh. But the time wa'n't wasted. He'll sell ten acres for twenty
dollars less'n he said last week. Too bad to keep you waitin'! You'd
ought to eat yours while't was hot."

Letty, with a little smile all to herself, sat demurely down and poured
coffee; this was no time to talk of anniversaries. David ate in haste,
and said good-by.

"I'm goin' down the lot to get my withes," said he. "Whilst I'm gone,
you put me up a mite o' luncheon, I sha'n't lay off to come home till
night."

"Oh, David!" said Letty, with a little cry. Then the same knowing smile
crept over her face. "No, I sha'n't," added she willfully. "I'm goin'
to bring it to you."

"Fetch me my dinner? Why, it's a mile and a half 'cross lots! I guess
you won't!"

"You go right along, David," said Letty decisively. "I don't want to
hear another word. I ain't seen the Long Pastur' this summer, and I'm
comin'. Good-by!" She disappeared down the cellar stairs with the
butter-plate poised on a pyramid of dishes, and David, having no time
to argue, went off to his work.

About ten o'clock Letty took her way down to the Long Pasture; she was
a very happy woman, and she could hold her happiness before her face,
regarding it frankly and with a full delight. The material joys of life
might seem to escape her; but she could have them, after all. The great
universe, warm with sun and warm with love, was on her side. Even the
day seemed something tangible in gracious being; and as Letty trudged
along, her basket on her arm, she reasoned upon her own riches and
owned she had enough. David was not like anybody else; but he was
better than anybody else, and he was hers. Even his faults were dearer
than other men's virtues. She heard the sound of his axe upon the
stakes, breaking the lovely stillness with a significance lovelier
still.

"David!" she called, long before reaching the little brook that runs
beneath the bank, and he leaped the fence and came to meet her.
"David!" she repeated, and looked up in his face with eyes so solemn
and so full of light that he held her still a moment to look at her.

"Letty," he said, "you're real pretty!" And then they both laughed, and
walked on together through the shade.

The day knit up its sweet, long minutes full of the serious beauty of
the woods. David worked hard, and for a time Letty lingered near him;
then she strayed away, and came back to him, from moment to moment,
with wonderful treasures. Now it was cress from the spring, now a
palm-full of partridge berries, or a cluster of checkerberry leaves for
a "cud," or a bit of wood-sorrel. By and by the fall stillness gave out
a breath of heat, and the sun stood high overhead. Letty spread out her
dinner, and David made her a fire among the rocks. The smoke rose in a
blue efflorescence; and with the sweet tang of burning wood yet in the
air, they sat down side by side, drinking from one cup, and smiling
over the foolish nothings of familiar talk. At the end of the meal,
Letty took a parcel from the basket, something wrapped in a very fine
white napkin. She flushed a little, unrolling it, and her eyes
deepened.

"What's all this?" asked David, sniffing the air. "Fruit-cake?"

Letty nodded without looking at him; there was a telltale quivering in
her face. She divided the cake carefully, and gave her husband half.
David had lain back on a piny bank; and as he ate, his eyes followed
the treetops, swaying a little now in a rhythmic wind. But Letty ate
her piece as if it were sacramental bread. She put out her hand to him,
and he stroked the short, faithful fingers, and then held them close.
He smiled at her; and for a moment he mused again over that starry
light in her eyes. Then his lids fell, and he had a little nap, while
Letty sat and dreamed back over the hours, a year and more ago, when
her mother's house smelled of spices, and this cake was baked for her
wedding day.

When they went home again, side by side, the fencing was all done, and
David had an after-consciousness of happy playtime. He carried the
basket, with his axe, and Letty, like an untired little dog, took brief
excursions of discovery here and there, and came back to his side with
her weedy treasures. Once--was it something in the air?--he called to
her:--

"Say, Letty, wa'n't it about this kind o' weather the day we were
married?"

But Letty gave a little cry, and pointed out a frail white butterfly on
a mullein leaf. "See there, David! how cold he looks! I'd like to take
him along. He'll freeze to-night." David forgot his question, and she
was glad. Some inner voice was at her heart, warning her to leave the
day unspoiled. Her joy lay in remembering; it seemed a small thing to
her that he should forget.

"We've had a real good time," he said, as he gave her the basket at the
kitchen door. "Now, as soon as thrashin' 's done, we'll go to Star
Pond."

After supper they covered up the squashes, for fear of a frost; and
then they stood for a moment in the field, and looked at the harvest
moon, risen in a great effrontery of splendor.

"Letty," asked David suddenly, "shouldn't you like to put on your
little ring? It's right here in my pocket."

"No! no!" said Letty hastily. "I never want to set eyes on it again."

"I guess I'll get you another one 't you could wear. I looked t'other
day when I went to market; but there was so many I didn't das't to make
a choice unless you was with me."

Letty clung to him passionately. "Oh, David," she cried, with a break
in her voice, "I don't want any rings. I want just you."

David put out one hand and softly touched the little blue kerchief
about her head. "Anyway," he said, "we won't have any more secrets from
one another, will we?"

Letty gave a little start, and she caught her breath before
answering:--

"No, we won't--not unless they're nice ones!"




A LAST ASSEMBLING


This happened in what Dilly Joyce, in deference to a form of speech,
was accustomed to call her young days; though really her spirit seemed
to renew itself with every step, and her body was to the last a willing
instrument. She lived in a happy completeness which allowed her to
carry on the joys of youth into the maturity of years. But things did
happen to her from twenty to thirty-five which could never happen
again. When Dilly was a girl, she fell in love, and was very heartily
and honestly loved back again. She had been born into such willing
harmony with natural laws, that this in itself seemed to belong to her
life. It partook rather of the faithfulness of the seasons than of
human tragedy or strenuous overthrow. Even so early she felt great
delight in natural things; and when her heart turned to Jethro Moore,
she had no doubt whatever of the straightness of its path. She trusted
all the primal instincts without knowing she trusted them. She was
thirsty; here was water, and she drank. Jethro was a little older than
she, the son of a minister in a neighboring town. His father had marked
out his plan of life; but Jethro had had enough to do with the church
on hot summer Sundays, when "fourthly" and "sixthly" lulled him into a
pleasing coma, and when even the shimmer of Mrs. Chase's shot silk
failed to awaken his deep eyes to their accustomed delight in fabric
and color. To him, the church was a concrete and very dull institution:
to his father, it was a city set on a hill, whence a shining path led
direct to God's New Jerusalem. Therefore it was easy enough for the boy
to say he preferred business, and that he wanted uncle Silas to take
him into his upholstery shop; and he never, so long as he lived,
understood his father's tragic silence over the choice. He had broken
the succession in a line of priests; but it seemed to him that he had
simply told what he wanted to do for a living. So he went away to the
city, and news came flying back of his wonderful fitness for the trade.
He understood colors, fabrics, design; he had been sent abroad for
ideas, and finally he was dispatched to the Chicago house, to oversee
the business there. Thus it was many years before Dilly met him again;
but they remained honestly faithful, each from a lovely simplicity of
nature, but a simplicity quite different in kind. Jethro did not grow
rich very fast (uncle Silas saw to that), but he did prosper; and he
was ready to marry his girl long before she owned herself ready to
marry him. She took care of a succession of aged relatives, all
afflicted by a strange and interesting diversity of trying diseases;
and then, after the last death, she settled down, quite poor, in a
little house on the Tiverton Road, and "went out nussin'," the
profession for which her previous life had fitted her. With a careless
generosity, she made over to her brother the old farmhouse where they
were born, because he had a family and needed it. But he died, and was
soon followed by his wife and child; and now Dilly was quite alone with
the house and the family debts. The time had come, wrote Jethro, for
them to marry. She was free, at last, and he had enough. Would she take
him, now? Dilly answered quite frankly and from a serenity born of
faith in the path before her and a certainty that no feet need slip.
She was ready, she wrote. She hoped he was willing she should sell the
old place, to pay Tom's debts. That would leave her without a cent; but
since he was coming for her, and she needn't go to Chicago alone, she
didn't know that there was anything to worry about. He would buy her
ticket. There was an ineffable simplicity about Dilly. She had no
respect whatever for money, save as a puzzling means to a few necessary
ends. And now the place had been sold, and Jethro was coming in a
month. Meanwhile Dilly was to pack up the few family effects she could
afford to keep, and the rest would go by auction.

Little as she was accustomed to dread experiences which came in the
inevitable order of nature, she did think of the last day and night in
the old house as something of an ordeal. People felt that the human
meant very little to Dilly; but that was not true. It was only true
that she held herself remote from personal intimacies; but all the
fine, invisible bonds of race and family took hold of her like
irresistible factors, and welded her to the universe anew.

As she started out from her little house, this summer morning, and
began her three-mile walk to the old homestead, she felt as if some
solemn event in her life were about to happen; her heart beat higher,
and brought about the suffocating feeling of a hand laid upon the
throat. She was a slight creature, with a delicate face and fine black
hair. Her slender body seemed all made for action, and the poise of an
assured motion dwelt in it and wrapped about its angularity like a
gracious charm. She was walking down a lane, her short skirts brushed
by the morning dew. She chose to go 'cross lots, not because in this
case it was nearer than the road, but because it seemed impossible to
go another way. Yet never in her life had she seen less of the outward
garment of things than she was seeing this morning. A flouting bobolink
flew from stake to stake in front of her, and bubbled out in melody.
She heard a scythe swishing in a neighboring field, and the musical
call of the mowing-machine afar, and she did not look up. Dumb to the
beautiful outer world, she was broad awake to human souls: the souls of
the Joyces, alive so long before her and stretching back into an
unknown past. They had lived, one after another, in the old house,
since colonial times; and now, after this quiet act of a concluding
drama, Dilly was going to lower the curtain, and sweep them from the
stage.

Her mind was peopled with figures. She thought of Jethro, too. He
seemed to be coming ever nearer and nearer. She could hear his tread
marching into her life, and could see his face. It was very moving, as
she remembered it. A long line of scholarly forbears had dowered him
with a refinement and grace quite startling in this unornamented spot,
and some old Acadian ancestor had lent him beauty. His eyes were dark,
and they held an unfathomable melancholy. The line of his forehead and
nose ran haughtily and yet delicate; and even after years of absence,
Dilly sometimes caught her breath when she thought of the way his head
was set upon his shoulders. She had never in her life seen a man or
woman who was entirely beautiful, and he saturated her longing like a
prodigal stream.

She was a little dazed when she climbed the low stone wall, crossed the
road, and came into the grassy wilderness of the Joyce back yard.
Nature had triumphed riotously, as she will when niggardly thrift is
away. The grass lay rich and shining, lodged by last night's shower,
and gate and cellar-case were choked by it. The cinnamon roses bloomed
in a spicy hardiness of pink, and the gnarled apple-trees had shed
their broken branches, and were covered with little green buttons of
fruit. Dilly stopped to look about her, and her eyes filled. The tears
were hot; they hurt her, and so recalled her to the needs of life.

"There!" she said, "I mustn't do so!"--and she walked straight forward
through the open shed, and fitted her key in the lock. The door sagged;
but she pushed it open and stepped in. The deserted kitchen lay there
in desolate order, and the old Willard clock slept upon the wall. Dilly
hastily pushed a chair before it (this was the only chair old Daniel
Joyce would allow the children to climb in) and wound the clock. It
began ticking slowly, with the old, remembered sound. Somehow it seemed
beautiful to Dilly that the clock should speak with the voice of all
those years agone; it was a kind of loyalty which appealed to the soul
like a piercing miracle. Then she ran through to the sitting-room, and
started the old eight-day in the corner; and the house breathed and was
alive again. She threw open the windows, all save those on the Dilloway
side (lest kindly neighbors should discover she was at home), and the
soft rose-scented air flooded the rooms like an invisible presence, and
bore out the smell of age upon gracious wings. Now, Dilly worked fast
and steadily, lest some human thing should come upon her. She tied up
bedclothes, and opened long-closed cupboards. She made careful piles of
clothing from the attic; and finally, her mind a little tired, she sat
down on the floor and began looking over papers and daguerreotypes from
her father's desk. Just as she had lost herself in the ancient history
of which they were the signs, there came a knock at the back door. So
assured had become her idea of a continued housekeeping, that the
summons did not seem in the least strange. The house lived again; it
had thrown open its arms to human kind.

"Come in!" she called; and a light step sounded in the kitchen and
crossed the sill. It was a man, dark-eyed and very handsome. "Oh!"
murmured Dilly, catching her breath and holding both hands clasped upon
the papers in her lap. "Jethro!"

The stranger was much moved, and his black eyes deepened. He looked at
her kindly, perhaps lovingly, too. "Yes," he said, at last. "So you'd
know me?"

Dilly got lightly up, and the papers fell about her in a shower; yet
she made no motion toward him. "Oh, yes," she said softly, "I should
know you. You ain't changed at all."

That was not true. He looked ten years older than his real age; yet
time had only dowered him with a finer grace and charm. All the lines
in his face were those of gentleness and truth. His mouth had the old
delicate curves. One meeting him that day might have said, with a throb
of involuntary homage, "How beautiful he must have been when he was
young!" But to Dilly he bore even a more subtile distinction than in
that far-away time; he had ripened into something harmonizing with her
own years. He came forward a little, and held out both hands; but Dilly
did not take them, and he dropped the left one. Then she laid her
fingers lightly in his, and they greeted each other like old
acquaintances. A flush rose in her smooth brown cheek. Her eyes grew
bright with that startled questioning which is of the woods. He looked
at her the more intently, and his breath quickened. She had none of the
blossomy charm of more robust womanhood; but he recognized the old
gypsy element which had once bewitched him, and felt he loved her
still.

"Well," he said, and his voice shook a little, "are you glad to see
me?"

Dilly moved back, and sat down in her mother's little sewing-chair by
the desk. "

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/9370