Mary, taking off her shawl, wiped her eyes surreptitiously on a corner of it, and Abby whispered to her husband, "Dear creatur'!" John and Ezra turned, by one consent, to put the horses in the barn; and the children, conscious that some mysterious affair had been settled, threw themselves into the occasion with an irresponsible delight. The room became at once vocal with talk and laughter, and Lucy Ann felt, with a swelling heart, what ahappy universe it is where so many bridges lie between this world and that unknown state we call the next. But no moment of that evening was half so sweet to her as the one when little John, the youngest child of all, crept up to her and pulled at her poplin skirt, until she bent down to hear.
"Grandma," said he, "when 'd you get well?"
THE EXPERIENCE OF HANNAH PRIME
Tiverton Hollow had occasionally an evening meeting; this came about naturally whenever religious zeal burned high, or when the congregation felt, with some uneasiness, that it had remained too long aloof from spiritual things. To-night, the schoolhouse had been designated for an assembling place, and the neighborhood trooped thither, animated by an excited importance, and doing justice to the greatness of the occasion by "dressing up." Farmers had laid aside their ordinary mood, with overalls and jumpers, and donned an uncomfortable solemnity, an enforced attitude of theological reflection, with their stocks. Wives had urged their patient fingers into cotton gloves, and in cashmere shawls, and bonnets retrimmed with reference to this year's style, pressed into the uncomfortable chairs, and folded their hands upon the desks before them in a sweet seriousness not unmingled with the desire of thriftily completing a duty no less exigent than pickle-making, or the work of spring and fall. Last came the boys, clattering with awkward haste over the dusty floor which hadknown the touch of their bare feet on other days. They looked about the room with some awe and a puzzled acceptance of its being the same, yet not the same. It was their own. There were the maps of North and South America; the yellowed evergreens, relic of "Last Day," still festooned the windows, and an intricate "sum," there explained to the uncomprehending admiration of the village fathers, still adorned the blackboard. Yet the room had strangely transformed itself into an alien temple, invaded by theology and the breath of an unknown world. But though sobered, they were not cast down; for the occasion was enlivened, in their case, by a heaven-defying profligacy of intent. Every one of them knew that Sammy Forbes had in his pocket a pack of cards, which he meant to drop, by wicked but careless design, just when Deacon Pitts led in prayer, and that Tom Drake was master of a concealed pea-shooter, which he had sworn, with all the asseverations held sacred by boys, to use at some dramatic moment. All the band were aware that neither of these daring deeds would be done. The prospective actors themselves knew it; but it was a darling joy to contemplate the remote possibility thereof.
Deacon Pitts opened the meeting, reminding his neighbors how precious a privilege it is for two or three to be gathered together. His companion had not been able to come. (Theentire neighborhood knew that Mrs. Pitts had been laid low by an attack of erysipelas, and that she was, at the moment, in a dark bedroom at home, helpless under elderblow.)
"She lays there on a bed of pain," said the deacon. "But she says to me, 'You go. Better the house o' mournin' than the house o' feastin',' she says. Oh, my friends! what can be more blessed than the counsel of an aged and feeble companion?"
The deacon sat down, and Tom Drake, his finger on the pea-shooter, assured himself, in acute mental triumph, that he had almost done it that time.
Then followed certain incidents eminently pleasing to the boys. To their unbounded relief, Sarah Frances Giles rose to speak, weeping as she began. She always wept at prayer meeting, though at the very moment of asserting her joy that she cherished a hope, and her gratitude that she was so nearly at an end of this earthly pilgrimage and ready to take her stand on the sea of glass mingled with fire. The boys reveled in her testimony. They were in a state of bitter uneasiness before she rose, and gnawed with a consuming impatience until she began to cry. Then they wondered if she could possibly leave out the sea of glass; and when it duly came, they gave a sigh of satiated bliss and sank into acquiescence in whatever might happen. This was a rich occasion totheir souls, for Silas Marden, who was seldom moved by the spirit, fell upon his knees to pray; but at the same unlucky instant, his sister-in-law, for whom he cherished an unbounded scorn, rose (being "nigh-eyed" and ignorant of his priority) and began to speak. For a moment, the two held on together, "neck and neck," as the happy boys afterward remembered, and then Silas got up, dusted his knees, and sat down, not to rise again at any spiritual call. "An' a madder man you never see," cried all the Hollow next day, in shocked but gleeful memory.
Taking it all in all, the meeting had thus far mirrored others of its class. If the droning experiences were devoid of all human passion, it was chiefly because they had to be expressed in the phrases of strict theological usage. There was an unspoken agreement that feelings of this sort should be described in a certain way. They were not the affairs of the hearth and market; they were matters pertaining to that awful entity called the soul, and must be dressed in the fine linen which she had herself elected to wear.
Suddenly, in a wearisome pause, when minds had begun to stray toward the hayfield and to-morrow's churning, the door was pushed open, and the Widow Prime walked in. She was quite unused to seeking her kind, and the little assembly at once awoke, under the stimulus ofsurprise. They knew quite well where she had been walking: to Sudleigh Jail, to visit her only son, lying there for the third time, not, as usual, for drunkenness, but for house-breaking. She was a wiry woman, a mass of muscles animated by an eager energy. Her very hands seemed knotted with clenching themselves in nervous spasms. Her eyes were black, seeking, and passionate, and her face had been scored by fine wrinkles, the marks of anxiety and grief. Her chocolate calico was very clean, and her palm-leaf shawl and black bonnet were decent in their poverty. The vague excitement created by her coming continued in a rustling like that of leaves. The troubles of Hannah Prime's life had been very bitter—so bitter that she had, as Deacon Pitts once said, after undertaking her conversion, turned from "me and the house of God." A quickening thought sprang up now in the little assembly that she was "under conviction," and that it had become the present duty of every professor to lead her to the throne of grace. This was an exigency for which none were prepared. At so strenuous a challenge, the old conventional ways of speech fell down and collapsed before them, like creatures filled with air. Who should minister to one set outside their own comfortable lives by bitter sorrow and wounded pride? What could they offer a woman who had, in one way or another, sworn to curse God and die? Itwas Deacon Pitts who spoke, but in a tone hushed to the key of the unexpected.
"Has any one an experience to offer? Will any brother or sister lead in prayer?"
The silence was growing into a thing to be recognized and conquered, when, to the wonder of her neighbors, Hannah Prime herself rose. She looked slowly about the room, gazing into every face as if to challenge an honest understanding. Then she began speaking in a low voice thrilled by an emotion not yet explained. Unused to expressing herself in public, she seemed to be feeling her way. The silence, pride, endurance, which had been her armor for many years, were no longer apparent; she had thrown down all her defenses with a grave composure, as if life suddenly summoned her to higher issues.
"I dunno's I've got an experience to offer," she said. "I dunno's it's religion. I dunno what 't is. Mebbe you'd say it don't belong to a meetin'. But when I come by an' see you all settin' here, it come over me I'd like to tell somebody. Two weeks ago I was most crazy"—She paused of necessity, for something broke in her voice.
"That's the afternoon Jim was took," whispered a woman to her neighbor. Hannah Prime went on.
"I jest as soon tell it now. I can tell ye all together what I couldn't say to one on ye alone;an' if anybody speaks to me about it arterwards, they'll wish they hadn't. I was all by myself in the house. I set down in my clock-room, about three in the arternoon, an' there I set. I didn't git no supper. I couldn't. I set there an' heard the clock tick. Byme-by it struck seven, an' that waked me up. I thought I'd gone crazy. The figgers on the wall-paper provoked me most to death; an' that red-an'-white tidy I made, the winter I was laid up, seemed to be talkin' out loud. I got up an' run outdoor jest as fast as I could go. I run out behind the house an' down the cart-path to that pile o' rocks that overlooks the lake; an' there I got out o' breath an' dropped down on a big rock. An' there I set, jest as still as I'd been settin' when I was in the house."
Here a little girl stirred in her seat, and her mother leaned forward and shook her, with alarming energy. "I never was so hard with Mary L. afore," she explained the next day, "but I was as nervous as a witch. I thought, if I heard a pin drop, I should scream."
"I dunno how long I set there," went on Hannah Prime, "but byme-by it begun to come over me how still the lake was. 'Twas like glass; an' way over where it runs in 'tween them islands, it burnt like fire. Then I looked up a little further, to see what kind of a sky there was. 'T was light green, with clouds in it, all fire, an' it begun to seem to me as if itwas a kind o' land an' water up there—like our'n, on'y not solid. I set there an' looked at it; an' I picked out islands, an' ma'sh-land, an' p'ints running out into the yeller-green sea. An' everything grew stiller an' stiller. The loons struck up, down on the lake, with that kind of a lonesome whinner; but that on'y made the rest of it seem quieter. An' it begun to grow dark all 'round me. I dunno's I ever noticed before jest how the dark comes. It sifted down like snow, on'y you couldn't see it. Well, I set there, an' I tried to keep stiller an' stiller, like everything else. Seemed as if I must. An' pretty soon I knew suthin' was walkin' towards me over the lot. I kep' my eyes on the sky; for I knew 'twould break suthin' if I turned my head, an' I felt as if I couldn't bear to. An' It come walkin', walkin', without takin' any steps or makin' any noise, till It come right up 'side o' me an' stood still. I didn't turn round. I knew I mustn't. I dunno whether It touched me; I dunno whether It said anything—but I know It made me a new creatur'. I knew then I shouldn't be afraid o' things no more—nor sorry. I found out 't was all right. 'I'm glad I'm alive,' I said. 'I'm thankful!' Seemed to me I'd been dead for the last twenty year. I'd come alive.
"An' so I set there an' held my breath, for fear 'twould go. I dunno how long, but themoon riz up over my left shoulder, an' the sky begun to fade. An' then it come over me 'twas goin'. I knew 'twas terrible tender of me, an' sorry, an' lovin', an' so I says, 'Don't you mind; I won't forgit!' An' then It went. But that broke suthin', an' I turned an' see my own shadder on the grass; an' I thought I see another, 'side of it. Somehow that scairt me, an' I jumped up an' whipped it home without lookin' behind me. Now that's my experience," said Hannah Prime, looking her neighbors again in the face, with dauntless eyes. "I dunno what 'twas, but it's goin' to last. I ain't afraid no more, an' I ain't goin' to be. There ain't nuthin' to worry about. Everything's bigger'n we think." She folded her shawl more closely about her and moved toward the door. There she again turned to her neighbors.
"Good-night!" she said, and was gone.
They sat quite still until the tread of her feet had ceased its beating on the dusty road. Then, by one consent, they rose and moved slowly out. There was no prayer that night, and "Lord dismiss us" was not sung.
HONEY AND MYRRH
The neighborhood, the township, and the world had been snowed in. Snow drifted the road in hills and hollows, and hung in little eddying wreaths, where the wind took it, on the pasture slopes. It made solid banks in the dooryards, and buried the stone walls out of sight. The lacework of its fantasy became daintily apparent in the conceits with which it broidered over all the common objects familiar in homely lives. The pump, in yards where that had supplanted the old-fashioned curb, wore a heavy mob-cap. The vane on the barn was delicately sifted over, and the top of every picket in the high front-yard fence had a fluffy peak. But it was chiefly in the woods that the rapture and flavor of the time ran riot in making beauty. There every fir branch swayed under a tuft of white, and the brown refuse of the year was all hidden away.
That morning, no one in Tiverton Hollow had gone out of the house, save to shovel paths and do the necessary chores. The road lay untouched until ten o'clock, when a selectman gave notice that it was an occasion for "breakin' out," by starting with his team, and gatheringoxen by the way until a conquering procession ground through the drifts, the men shoveling at intervals where the snow lay deepest, the oxen walking swayingly, head to the earth, and the faint wreath of their breath ascending and cooling on the air. It was "high times" in Tiverton Hollow when a road needed opening; some idea of the old primitive way of battling with the untouched forces of nature roused the people to an exhilaration dashed by no uncertainty of victory.
By afternoon, the excitement had quieted. The men had come in, reddened by cold, and eaten their noon dinner in high spirits, retailing to the less fortunate women-folk the stories swapped on the march. Then, as one man, they succumbed to the drowsiness induced by a morning of wind in the face, and sat by the stove under some pretense of reading the county paper, but really to nod and doze, waking only to put another stick of wood on the fire. So passed all the day before Christmas, and in the evening the shining lamps were lighted (each with a strip of red flannel in the oil, to give color), and the neighborhood rested in the tranquil certainty that something had really come to pass, and that their communication with the world was reëstablished.
Susan Peavey sat by the fire, knitting on a red mitten, and the young schoolmaster presided over the other hearth corner, readingvery hard, at intervals, and again sinking into a drowsy study of the flames. There was an impression abroad in Tiverton that the schoolmaster was going to be somebody, some time. He wrote for the papers. He was always receiving through the mail envelopes marked "author's proofs," which, the postmistress said, indicated that he was an author, whatever proofs might be. She had an idea they might have something to do with photographs; perhaps his picture was going into a book. It was very well understood that teaching school at the Hollow, at seven dollars a week, was an interlude in the life of one who would some day write a spelling-book, or exercise senatorial rights at Washington. He was a long-legged, pleasant looking youth, with a pale cheek, dark eyes, and thick black hair, one lock of which, hanging low over his forehead, he twisted while he read. He kept glancing up at Miss Susan and smiling at her, whenever he could look away from his book and the fire, and she smiled back. At last, after many such wordless messages, he spoke.
"What lots of red mittens you do knit! Do you send them all away to that society?"
Miss Susan's needles clicked.
"Every one," said she.
She was a tall, large woman, well-knit, with no superfluous flesh. Her head was finely set, and she carried it with a simple unconsciousness better than dignity. Everybody in Tiverton thought it had been a great cross to Susan Peavey to be so overgrown. They conceded that it was a mystery she had not turned out "gormin'." But that was because Susan had left her vanity behind with early youth, in the days when, all legs and arms, she had given up the idea of beauty. Her face was strong-featured, overspread by a healthy color, and her eyes looked frankly out, as if assured of finding a very pleasant world. The sick always delighted in Susan's nearness; her magnificent health and presence were like a supporting tide, and she seemed to carry outdoor air in her very garments. The schoolmaster still watched her. She rested and fascinated him at once by her strength and homely charm.
"I shall call you the Orphans' Friend," said he.
She laid down her work.
"Don't you say one word," she answered, with an air of abject confession. "It don't interest me a mite! I give because it's my bounden duty, but I'll be whipped if I want to knit warm mittens all my life, an' fill poor barrels. Sometimes I wisht I could git a chance to provide folks with what they don't need ruther'n what they do."
"I don't see what you mean," said the schoolmaster. "Tell me."
Miss Susan was looking at the hearth. Awarmer flush than that of firelight alone lay on her cheek. She bent forward and threw on a pine knot. It blazed richly. Then she drew the cricket more securely under her feet, and settled herself to gossip.
"Anybody'd think I'd most talked myself out sence you come here to board," said she, "but you're the beatemest for tolin' anybody on. I never knew I had so much to say. But there! I guess we all have, if there's anybody 't wants to listen. I never've said this to a livin' soul, an' I guess it's sort o' heathenish to think, but I'm tired to death o' fightin' ag'inst poverty, poverty! I s'pose it's there, fast enough, though we're all so well on 't we don't realize it; an' I'm goin' to do my part, an' be glad to, while I'm above ground. But I guess heaven'll be a spot where we don't give folks what they need, but what they don't."
"There is something in your Bible," began the schoolmaster hesitatingly, "about a box of precious ointment." He always said "your Bible," as if church members held a proprietary right.
"That's it!" replied Miss Susan, brightening. "That's what I al'ays thought. Spill it all out, I say, an' make the world smell as sweet as honey. My! but I do have great projicks settin' here by the fire alone! Great projicks!"
"Tell me some!"
"Well, I dunno's I can, all of a piece, so tospeak; but when it gits along towards eight o'clock, an' the room's all simmerin', an' the moon lays out on the snow, it does seem as if we made a pretty poor spec' out o' life. We don't seem to have no color in it. Why, don't you remember 'Solomon in all his glory'? I guess 't wouldn't ha' been put in jest that way if there wa'n't somethin' in it. I s'pose he had crowns an' rings an' purple velvet coats an' brocade satin weskits, an' all manner o' things. Sometimes seems as I could see him walkin' straight in through that door there." She was running a knitting needle back and forth through her ball of yarn as she spoke, without noticing that some one had been stamping the snow from his feet on the doorstone outside. The door, after making some bluster of refusal, was pushed open, and on the heels of her speech a man walked in.
"My land!" cried Miss Susan, aghast. Then she and the schoolmaster, by one accord, began to laugh.
But the man did not look at them until he had scrupulously wiped his feet on the husk mat, and stamped them anew. Then he turned down the legs of his trousers, and carefully examined the lank green carpet-bag he had been carrying.
"I guess I trailed it through some o' the drifts," he remarked. "The road's pretty narrer, this season o' the year."
"You give us a real start," said Susan. "We thought be sure 't was Solomon, an' mebbe the Queen o' Sheba follerin' arter. Why, Solon Slade, you ain't walked way over to Tiverton Street!"
"Yes, I have," asserted Solon. He was a slender, sad-colored man, possibly of her own age, and he spoke in a very soft voice. He was Susan's widowed brother-in-law, and the neighbors said he was clever, but hadn't no more spunk'n a wet rag.
Susan had risen and laid down her knitting. She approached the table and rested one hand on it, a hawk-like brightness in her eyes.
"What you got in that bag?" asked she.
Solon was enjoying his certainty that he held the key to the situation.
"I got a mite o' cheese," he answered, approaching the fire and spreading his hands to the blaze.
"You got anything else? Now, Solon, don't you keep me here on tenter-hooks! You got a letter?"
"Well," said Solon, "I thought I might as well look into the post-office an' see."
"You thought so! You went a-purpose! An' you walked because you al'ays was half shackled about takin' horses out in bad goin'. You hand me over that letter!"
Solon approached the table, a furtive twinkle in his blue eyes. He lifted the bag and openedit slowly. First, he took out a wedge-shaped package.
"That's the cheese," said he. "Herb."
"My land!" ejaculated Miss Susan, while the schoolmaster looked on and smiled. "You better ha' come to me for cheese. I've got a plenty, tansy an' sage, an' you know it. I see it! There! you gi' me holt on 't!" It was a fugitive white gleam in the bottom of the bag; she pounced upon it and brought up a letter. Midway in the act of tearing it open, she paused and looked at Solon with droll entreaty. "It's your letter, by rights!" she added tentatively.
"Law!" said he, "I dunno who it's directed to, but I guess it's as much your'n as anybody's."
Miss Susan spread open the sheets with an air of breathless delight. She bent nearer the lamp. "'Dear father and auntie,'" she began.
"There!" remarked Solon, in quiet satisfaction, still warming his hands at the blaze. "There! you see't isto both."
"My! how she does run the words together! Here!" Miss Susan passed it to the schoolmaster. "You read it. It's from Jenny. You know she's away to school, an' we didn't think best for her to come home Christmas. I knew she'd write for Christmas. Solon, I told you so!"
The schoolmaster took the letter, and read italoud. It was a simple little message, full of contentment and love and a girl's new delight in life. When he had finished, the two older people busied themselves a moment without speaking, Solon in picking up a chip from the hearth, and Susan in mechanically smoothing the mammoth roses on the side of the carpet-bag.
"Well, I 'most wish we'd had her come home," said he at last, clearing his throat.
"No, you don't either," answered Miss Susan promptly. "Not with this snow, an' comin' out of a house where it's het up, into cold beds an' all. Now I'm goin' to git you a mite o' pie an' some hot tea."
She set forth a prodigal supper on a leaf of the table, and Solon silently worked his will upon it, the schoolmaster eating a bit for company. Then Solon took his way home to the house across the yard, and she watched at the window till she saw the light blaze up through his panes. That accomplished, she turned back with a long breath and began clearing up.
"I'm worried to death to have him over there all by himself," said she. "S'pose he should be sick in the night!"
"You'd go over," answered the schoolmaster easily.
"Well, s'pose he couldn't git me no word?"
"Oh, you'd know it! You're that sort."
Miss Susan laughed softly, and so seemedto put away her recurrent anxiety. She came back to her knitting.
"How long has his wife been dead?" asked the schoolmaster.
"Two year. He an' Jenny got along real well together, but sence September, when she went away, I guess he's found it pretty dull pickin'. I do all I can, but land! 't ain't like havin' a woman in the house from sunrise to set."
"There's nothing like that," agreed the wise young schoolmaster. "Now let's play some more. Let's plan what we'd like to do to-morrow for all the folks we know, and let's not give them a thing they need, but just the ones they'd like."
Miss Susan put down her knitting again. She never could talk to the schoolmaster and keep at work. It made her dreamy, exactly as it did to sit in the hot summer sunshine, with the droning of bees in the air.
"Well," said she, "there's old Ann Wheeler that lives over on the turnpike. She don't want for nothin', but she keeps her things packed away up garret, an' lives like a pig."
"'Sold her bed and lay in the straw.'"
"That's it, on'y she won't sell nuthin'. I'd give her a house all winders, so 't she couldn't help lookin' out, an' velvet carpets 't she'd got to walk on."
"Well, there's Cap'n Ben. The boys sayhe's out of his head a good deal now; he fancies himself at sea and in foreign countries."
"Yes, so they say. Well, I'd let him set down a spell in Solomon's temple an' look round him. My sake! do you remember about the temple? Why, the nails was all gold. Don't you wish we'd lived in them times? Jest think about the wood they had—cedars o' Lebanon an' fir-trees. You know how he set folks to workin' in the mountains. I've al'ays thought I'd like to ben up on them mountains an' heard the axes ringin' an' listened to the talk. An' then there was pomegranates an' cherubim, an' as for silver an' gold, they were as common as dirt. When I was a little girl, I learnt them chapters, an' sometimes now, when I'm settin' by the fire, I say over that verse about the 'man of Tyre, skillful to work in gold, and in silver, in brass, in iron, in stone, and in timber, in purple, in blue, and in fine linen, and in crimson.' My! ain't it rich?"
She drew a long breath of surfeited enjoyment. The schoolmaster's eyes burned under his heavy brows.
"Then things smelt so good in them days," continued Miss Susan. "They had myrrh an' frankincense, an' I dunno what all. I never make my mincemeat 'thout snuffin' at the spice-box to freshen up my mind. No matter where I start, some way or another I al'ays git back to Solomon. Well, if Cap'n Ben wants to seeforeign countries, I guess he'd be glad to set a spell in the temple. Le's have on another stick—that big one there by you. My! it's the night afore Christmas, ain't it? Seems if I couldn't git a big enough blaze. Pile it on. I guess I'd as soon set the chimbly afire as not!"
There was something overflowing and heady in her enjoyment. It exhilarated the schoolmaster, and he lavished stick after stick on the ravening flames. The maple hardened into coals brighter than its own panoply of autumn; the delicate bark of the birch flared up and perished.
"Miss Susan," said he, "don't you want to see all the people in the world?"
"Oh, I dunno! I'd full as lieves set here an' think about 'em. I can fix 'em up full as well in my mind, an' perhaps they suit me better'n if I could see 'em. Sometimes I set 'em walkin' through this kitchen, kings an' queens an' all. My! how they do shine, all over precious stones. I never see a di'mond, but I guess I know pretty well how 't would look."
"Suppose we could give a Christmas dinner,—what should we have?"
"We'd have oxen roasted whole, an' honey—an'—but that's as fur as I can git."
The schoolmaster had a treasury of which she had never learned, and he said musically:—
... "'a heapOf candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;With jellies soother than the creamy curd,And lucid syrops, tinct with cinnamon;Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'dFrom Fez; and spicéd dainties, every one,From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.'"
"Yes, that has a real nice sound. It ain't like the Bible, but it's nice."
They sat and dreamed and the fire flared up into living arabesques and burnt blue in corners. A stick parted and fell into ash, and Miss Susan came awake. She had the air of rousing herself with vigor.
"There!" said she, "sometimes I think it's most sinful to make believe, it's so hard to wake yourself up. Arter all this, I dunno but when Solon comes for the pigs' kittle to-morrer, I shall ketch myself sayin', 'Here's the frankincense!'"
They laughed together, and the schoolmaster rose to light his lamp. He paused on his way to the stairs, and came back to set it down again.
"There are lots of people we haven't provided for," he said. "We haven't even thought what we'd give Jenny."
"I guess Jenny's got her heart's desire." Miss Susan nodded sagely. "I've sent her a box, with a fruit-cake an' pickles and cheese. She's all fixed out."
The schoolmaster hesitated, and turned thelamp-wick up and down. Then he spoke, somewhat timidly, "What should you like to give her father?"
Miss Susan's face clouded with that dreamy look which sometimes settled upon her eyes like haze.
"Well," said she, "I guess whatever I should give him 'd only make him laugh."
"Flowers—and velvet—and honey—and myrrh?"
"Yes," answered Miss Susan with gravity. "Perhaps it's jest as well some things ain't to be had at the shops."
The schoolmaster took up his lamp again and walked to the door.
"We never can tell," he said. "It may be people want things awfully without knowing it. And suppose they do laugh! They'd better laugh than cry.Ishould give all I could. Good-night."
Miss Susan banked up the fire and set her rising of dough on the hearth, after a discriminating peep to see whether it was getting on too fast. After that, she covered her plants by the window and blew out the light, so that the moon should have its way. She lingered for a moment, looking out into a glittering world. Not a breath stirred. The visible universe lay asleep, and only beauty waked. She was aching with a tumultuous emotion—the sense that life might be very fair and shining, if we only daredto shape it as it seems to us in dreams. The loveliness and repose of the earth appealed to her like a challenge; they alone made it seem possible for her also to dare.
Next morning, she rose earlier than usual, while the schoolmaster was still fast bound in sleep. She stayed only to start her kitchen fire, and then stood motionless a moment for a last decision. The great white day was beginning outside with slow, unconscious royalty. The pale winter dawn yielded to a flush of rose; nothing in the aspect of the heavens contradicted the promise of the night before. It seemed to her a wonderful day, dramatic, visible in peace, because, on that morning, all the world was thinking of the world and not of individual desires. She went to the bureau drawer in the sitting-room and looked, a little scornfully, at two packages hidden there. Handkerchiefs for the schoolmaster, stockings and gloves for Solon! Shutting the drawer, she hurried out into the kitchen, snatching her scissors from the work-basket by the way. She gave herself no time to think, but went up to her flower-stand and began to cut the geranium blossoms and the rose. The fuchsias hung in flaunting grace. They were dearer to her than all. She snipped them recklessly, and because the bunch seemed meagre still, broke the top from her sweet-scented geranium and disposed the flowers hastily in the midst. Her posy wassweet-smelling and good; it spoke to the heart. Putting a shawl over her head, she rolled the flowers in her apron from the frost, and stepped out into the brilliant day. The little cross-track between her house and the other was snowed up; but she took the road and, hurrying between banks of carven whiteness, went up Solon's path to the side door. She walked in upon him where he was standing over the kitchen stove, warming his hands at the first blaze. Susan's cheeks were red with the challenge of the stinging air, but she had the look of one who, living by a larger law, has banished the foolishness of fear. She walked straight up to him and proffered him her flowers.
"Here, Solon," she said, "it's Christmas. I brought you these."
Solon looked at her and at them, in slow surprise. He put out both hands and took them awkwardly.
"Well!" he said. "Well!"
Susan was smiling at him. It seemed to her at that moment that the world was a very rich place, because you may take all you want and give all you choose, while nobody is the wiser.
"Well," remarked Solon again, "I guess I'll put 'em into water." He laid them down on a chair. "Susan, do you remember that time I walked over to Pine Hill to pick you some mayflowers, when you was gittin' over the lung fever?"
She nodded.
"Susan," said he desperately, "what if I should ask you to forgit old scores an' begin all over?"
"I ain't laid up anything," answered Susan, looking him full in the face with her brilliant smile.
"There's suthin' I've wanted to tell ye, this two year. I never s'posed you knew, but that night I kissed your sister in the entry an' asked her, I thought 'twas you."
"Yes, I knew that well enough. I was in the buttery and heard it all. There, le's not talk about it."
Solon came a step nearer.
"But will you, Susan?" he persisted. "Will you? I know Jenny'd like it."
"I guess she would, too," said Susan. "There! we don't need to talk no further! You come over to breakfast, won't you? I'm goin' to fry chicken. It's Christmas mornin'." She nodded at him and went out, walking perhaps more proudly than usual down the shining path. Solon, regardless of his cooling kitchen, stood at the door and watched her. Solon never said very much, but he felt as if life were beginning all over again, just as he had wished to make it at the very start. He forgot his gray hair and furrowed face, just as he forgot the cold and snow. It was the spring of the year.
When Miss Susan entered her kitchen, the schoolmaster had come down and was putting a stick of wood into the stove.
"Merry Christmas!" he called, "and here's something for you."
A long white package lay on the table at the end where her plate was always set. She opened it with delicate touches, it seemed so precious.
"My sake!" said she. "It's a fan!" She lifted it out, and the fragrance of an Eastern wood filled all the room. She swept open the feathers. They were white and wonderful.
"It was never used except by one very beautiful woman," said the schoolmaster, without looking at her. "She was a good deal older than I; but somehow she seemed to belong to me. She died, and I thought I should like to have you keep this."
Susan was waving it back and forth before her face, stirring the air to fragrance. Her eyes were full of dreams. "My! ain't it rich!" she murmured. "The Queen o' Sheba never had no better. An' Solon's comin' over to breakfast."
A SECOND MARRIAGE
Amelia Porter sat by her great open fireplace, where the round, consequential black kettle hung from the crane, and breathed out a steamy cloud to be at once licked up and absorbed by the heat from a snatching flame below. It was exactly a year and a day since her husband's death, and she had packed herself away in his own corner of the settle, her hands clasped across her knees, and her red-brown eyes brooding on the nearer embers. She was not definitely speculating on her future, nor had she any heart for retracing the dull and gentle past. She had simply relaxed hold on her mind; and so, escaping her, it had gone wandering off into shadowy prophecies of the immediate years. For, as Amelia had been telling herself for the last three months, since she had begun to outgrow the habit of a dual life, she was not old. Whenever she looked in the glass, she could not help noting how free from wrinkles her swarthy face had been kept, and that the line of her mouth was still scarlet over white, even teeth. Her crisp black hair, curling in those tight fine rolls which a bashful admirer had once commended as "full of littlejerks," showed not a trace of gray. All this evidence of her senses read her a fair tale of the possibilities of the morrow; and without once saying, "I will take up a new life," she did tacitly acknowledge that life was not over.
It was a "snapping cold" night of early spring, so misplaced as to bring with it a certain dramatic excitement. The roads were frozen hard, and shone like silver in the ruts. All day sleds had gone creaking past, set to that fine groaning which belongs to the music of the year. The drivers' breath ascended in steam, the while they stamped down the probability of freezing, and yelled to Buck and Broad until that inner fervor raised them one degree in warmth. The smoking cattle held their noses low, and swayed beneath the yoke.
Amelia, shut snugly in her winter-tight house, had felt the power of the day without sharing its discomforts; and her eyes deepened and burned with a sense of the movement and warmth of living. To-night, under the spell of some vague expectancy, she had sat still for a long time, her sewing laid aside and her room scrupulously in order. She was waiting for what was not to be acknowledged even to her own intimate self. But as the clock struck nine, she roused herself, and shook off her mood in impatience and a disappointment which she would not own. She looked about the room, as she often had of late, and began toenumerate its possibilities in case she should desire to have it changed. Amelia never went so far as to say that change should be; she only felt that she had still a right to speculate upon it, as she had done for many years, as a form of harmless enjoyment. While every other house in the neighborhood had gone from the consistently good to the prosperously bad in the matter of refurnishing, John Porter had kept his precisely as his grandfather had left it to him. Amelia had never once complained; she had observed toward her husband an unfailing deference, due, she felt, to his twenty years' seniority; perhaps, also, it stood in her own mind as the only amends she could offer him for having married him without love. It was her father who made the match; and Amelia had succumbed, not through the obedience claimed by parents of an elder day, but from hot jealousy and the pique inevitably born of it. Laurie Morse had kept the singing-school that winter. He had loved Amelia; he had bound himself to her by all the most holy vows sworn from aforetime, and then, in some wanton exhibit of power—gone home with another girl. And for Amelia's responsive throb of feminine anger, she had spent fifteen years of sober country living with a man who had wrapped her about with the quiet tenderness of a strong nature, but who was not of her own generation either in mind or in habit; andLaurie had kept a music-store in Saltash, seven miles away, and remained unmarried.
Now Amelia looked about the room, and mentally displaced the furniture, as she had done so many times while she and her husband sat there together. The settle could be taken to the attic. She had not the heart to carry out one secret resolve indulged in moments of impatient bitterness,—to split it up for firewood. But it could at least be exiled. She would have a good cook-stove, and the great fireplace should be walled up. The tin kitchen, sitting now beside the hearth in shining quaintness, should also go into the attic. The old clock—But at that instant the clash of bells shivered the frosty air, and Amelia threw her vain imaginings aside like a garment, and sprang to her feet. She clasped her hands in a spontaneous gesture of rapt attention; and when the sound paused at her gate, with one or two sweet, lingering clingles, "I knew it!" she said aloud. Yet she did not go to the window to look into the moonlit night. Standing there in the middle of the room, she awaited the knock which was not long in coming. It was imperative, insistent. Amelia, who had a spirit responsive to the dramatic exigencies of life, felt a little flush spring into her face, so hot that, on the way to the door, she involuntarily put her hand to her cheek and held it there. The door came open grumblingly.It sagged upon the hinges, but, well-used to its vagaries, she overcame it with a regardless haste.
"Come in," she said, at once, to the man on the step. "It's cold. Oh, come in!"
He stepped inside the entry, removing his fur cap, and disclosing a youthful face charged with that radiance which made him, at thirty-five, almost the counterpart of his former self. It may have come only from the combination of curly brown hair, blue eyes, and an aspiring lift of the chin, but it always seemed to mean a great deal more. In the kitchen, he threw off his heavy coat, while Amelia, bright-eyed and breathing quickly, stood by, quite silent. Then he looked at her.
"You expected me, didn't you?" he asked.
A warmer color surged into her cheeks. "I didn't know," she said perversely.
"I guess you did. It's one day over a year. You knew I'd wait a year."
"It ain't a year over the services," said Amelia, trying to keep the note of vital expectancy out of her voice. "It won't be that till Friday."
"Well, Saturday I'll come again." He went over to the fire and stretched out his hands to the blaze. "Come here," he said imperatively, "while I talk to you."
Amelia stepped forward obediently, like a good little child. The old fascination was stillas dominant as at its birth, sixteen years ago. She realized, with a strong, splendid sense of the eternity of things, that always, even while it would have been treason to recognize it, she had known how ready it was to rise and live again. All through her married years, she had sternly drugged it and kept it sleeping. Now it had a right to breathe, and she gloried in it.
"I said to myself I wouldn't come to-day," went on Laurie, without looking at her. A new and excited note had come into his voice, responsive to her own. He gazed down at the fire, musing the while he spoke. "Then I found I couldn't help it. That's why I'm so late. I stayed in the shop till seven, and some fellows come in and wanted me to play. I took up the fiddle, and begun. But I hadn't more'n drew a note before I laid it down and put for the door. 'Dick, you keep shop,' says I. And I harnessed up, and drove like the devil."
Amelia felt warm with life and hope; she was taking up her youth just where the story ended.
"You ain't stopped swearin' yet!" she remarked, with a little excited laugh. Then, from an undercurrent of exhilaration, it occurred to her that she had never laughed so in all these years.
"Well," said Laurie abruptly, turning upon her, "how am I goin' to start out? Shall wehark back to old scores? I know what come between us. So do you. Have we got to talk it out, or can we begin now?"
"Begin now," replied Amelia faintly. Her breath choked her. He stretched out his arms to her in sudden passion. His hands touched her sleeves and, with an answering rapidity of motion, she drew back. She shrank within herself, and her face gathered a look of fright. "No! no! no!" she cried strenuously.
His arms fell at his sides, and he looked at her in amazement.
"What's the matter?" he demanded.
Amelia had retreated, until she stood now with one hand on the table. She could not look at him, and when she answered, her voice shook.
"There's nothin' the matter," she answered. "Only you mustn't—yet."
A shade of relief passed over his face, and he smiled.
"There, there!" he said, "never you mind. I understand. But if I come over the last of the week, I guess it will be different. Won't it be different, Milly?"
"Yes," she owned, with a little sob in her throat, "it will be different."
Thrown out of his niche of easy friendliness with circumstance, he stood there in irritated consciousness that here was some subtile barrier which he had not foreseen. Ever since JohnPorter's death, there had been strengthening in him a joyous sense that Milly's life and his own must have been running parallel all this time, and that it needed only a little widening of channels to make them join. His was no crass certainty of finding her ready to drop into his hand; it was rather a childlike, warm-hearted faith in the permanence of her affection for him, and perhaps, too, a shrewd estimate of his own lingering youth compared with John Porter's furrowed face and his fifty-five years. But now, with this new whiffling of the wind, he could only stand rebuffed and recognize his own perplexity.
"You do care, don't you, Milly?" he asked, with a boy's frank ardor. "You want me to come again?"
All her own delight in youth and the warm naturalness of life had rushed back upon her.
"Yes," she answered eagerly. "I'll tell you the truth. I always did tell you the truth. I do want you to come."
"But you don't want me to-night!" He lifted his brows, pursing his lips whimsically; and Amelia laughed.
"No," said she, with a little defiant movement of her own crisp head, "I don't know as I do want you to-night!"
Laurie shook himself into his coat. "Well," he said, on his way to the door, "I'll be round Saturday, whether or no. And Milly," he addedsignificantly, his hand on the latch, "you've got to like me then!"
Amelia laughed. "I guess there won't be no trouble!" she called after him daringly.
She stood there in the biting wind, while he uncovered the horse and drove away. Then she went shaking back to her fire; but it was not altogether from cold. The sense of the consistency of love and youth, the fine justice with which nature was paying an old debt, had raised her to a stature above her own. She stood there under the mantel, and held by it while she trembled. For the first time, her husband had gone utterly out of her life. It was as though he had not been.
"Saturday!" she said to herself. "Saturday! Three days till then!"
Next morning, the spring asserted itself,—there came a whiff of wind from the south and a feeling of thaw. The sled-runners began to cut through to the frozen ground, and about the tree-trunks, where thin crusts of ice were sparkling, came a faint musical sound of trickling drops. The sun was regnant, and little brown birds flew cheerily over the snow and talked of nests.
Amelia finished her housework by nine o'clock, and then sat down in her low rocker by the south window, sewing in thrifty haste. The sun fell hotly through the panes, and when she looked up, the glare met her eyes. She seemedto be sitting in a golden shower, and she liked it. No sunlight ever made her blink, or screw her face into wrinkles. She throve in it like a rose-tree. At ten o'clock, one of the slow-moving sleds, out that day in premonition of a "spell o' weather," swung laboriously into her yard and ground its way up to the side-door. The sled was empty, save for a rocking-chair where sat an enormous woman enveloped in shawls, her broad face surrounded by a pumpkin hood. Her dark brown front came low over her forehead, and she wore spectacles with wide bows, which gave her an added expression of benevolence. She waved a mittened hand to Amelia when their eyes met, and her heavy face broke up into smiles.
"Here I be!" she called in a thick, gurgling voice, as Amelia hastened out, her apron thrown over her head. "Didn't expect me, did ye? Nobody looks for an old rheumatic creatur'. She's more out o' the runnin' 'n a last year's bird's-nest."
"Why, aunt Ann!" cried Amelia, in unmistakable joy. "I'm tickled to death to see you. Here, Amos, I'll help get her out."
The driver, a short, thick-set man of neutral, ashy tints and a sprinkling of hair and beard, trudged round the oxen and drew the rocking-chair forward without a word. He never once looked in Amelia's direction, and she seemed not to expect it; but he had scarcely laid hold of the chair when aunt Ann broke forth:—
"Now, Amos, ain't you goin' to take no notice of 'Melia, no more'n if she wa'n't here? She ain't a bump on a log, nor you a born fool."
Amos at once relinquished his sway over the chair, and stood looking abstractedly at the oxen, who, with their heads low, had already fallen into that species of day-dream whereby they compensate themselves for human tyranny. They were waiting for Amos, and Amos, in obedience to some inward resolve, waited for commotion to cease.
"If ever I was ashamed, I be now!" continued aunt Ann, still with an expression of settled good-nature, and in a voice all jollity though raised conscientiously to a scolding pitch. "To think I should bring such a creatur' into the world, an' set by to see him treat his own relations like the dirt under his feet!"
Amelia laughed. She was exhilarated by the prospect of company, and this domestic whirlpool had amused her from of old.
"Law, aunt Ann," she said, "you let Amos alone. He and I are old cronies. We understand one another. Here, Amos, catch hold! We shall all get our deaths out here, if we don't do nothin' but stand still and squabble."
The immovable Amos had only been awaiting his cue. He lifted the laden chair with perfect ease to one of the piazza steps, and then to another; when it had reached the topmost level, he dragged it over the sill into the kitchen, and, leaving his mother sitting in colossal triumph by the fire, turned about and took his silent way to the outer world.
"Amos," called aunt Ann, "do you mean to say you're goin' to walk out o' this house without speakin' a civil word to anybody? Do you mean to say that?"
"I don't mean to say nothin'," confided Amos to his worsted muffler, as he took up his goad, and began backing the oxen round.
Undisturbed and not at all daunted by a reply for which she had not even listened, aunt Ann raised her voice in cheerful response: "Well, you be along 'tween three an' four, an' you'll find me ready."
"Mercy, aunt Ann!" said Amelia, beginning to unwind the visitor's wraps, "what makes you keep houndin' Amos that way? If he hasn't spoke for thirty-five years, it ain't likely he's goin' to begin now."
Aunt Ann was looking about her with an expression of beaming delight in unfamiliar surroundings. She laughed a rich, unctuous laugh, and stretched her hands to the blaze.
"Law," she said contentedly, "of course it ain't goin' to do no good. Who ever thought 't would? But I've been at that boy all these years to make him like other folks, an' I ain't goin' to stop now. He never shall say his own mother didn't know her duty towards him.Well, 'Melia, youairkind o' snug here, arter all! Here, you hand me my bag, an' I'll knit a stitch. I ain't a mite cold."
Amelia was bustling about the fire, her mind full of the possibilities of a company dinner.
"How's your limbs?" she asked, while aunt Ann drew out a long stocking, and began to knit with an amazing rapidity of which her fat fingers gave no promise.
"Well, I ain't allowed to forgit 'em very often," she replied comfortably. "Rheumatiz is my cross, an' I've got to bear it. Sometimes I wish 't had gone into my hands ruther 'n my feet, an' I could ha' got round. But there! if 't ain't one thing, it's another. Mis' Eben Smith's got eight young ones down with the whoopin'-cough. Amos dragged me over there yisterday; an' when I heerd 'em tryin' to see which could bark the loudest, I says, 'Give me the peace o' Jerusalem in my own house, even if I don't stir a step for the next five year no more'n I have for the last.' I dunno what 't would be if I hadn't a darter. I've been greatly blessed."
The talk went on in pleasant ripples, while Amelia moved back and forth from pantry to table. She brought out the mixing-board, and began to put her bread in the pans, while the tin kitchen stood in readiness by the hearth. The sunshine flooded all the room, and lay insolently on the paling fire; the Maltese cat satin the broadest shaft of all, and, having lunched from her full saucer in the corner, made her second toilet for the day.
"'Melia," said aunt Ann suddenly, looking down over her glasses at the tin kitchen, "ain't it a real cross to bake in that thing?"
"I always had it in mind to buy me a range," answered Amelia reservedly, "but somehow we never got to it."
"That's the only thing I ever had ag'inst John. He was as grand a man as ever was, but he did set everything by such truck. Don't turn out the old things, I say, no more'n the old folks; but when it comes to makin' a woman stan' quiddlin' round doin' work back side foremost, that beats me."
"He'd have got me a stove in a minute," burst forth Amelia in haste, "only he never knew I wanted it!"
"More fool you not to ha' said so!" commented aunt Ann, unwinding her ball. "Well, I s'pose he would. John wa'n't like the common run o' men. Great strong creatur' he was, but there was suthin' about him as soft as a woman. His mother used to say his eyes 'd fill full o' tears when he broke up a settin' hen. He was a good husband to you,—a good provider an' a good friend."
Amelia was putting down her bread for its last rising, and her face flushed.
"Yes," she said gently, "hewasgood."
"But there!" continued aunt Ann, dismissing all lighter considerations, "I dunno's that's any reason why you should bake in a tin kitchen, nor why you should need to heat up the brick oven every week, when 't was only done to please him, an' he ain't here to know. Now, 'Melia, le's see what you could do. When you got the range in, 't would alter this kitchen all over. Why don't you tear down that old-fashioned mantelpiece in the fore-room?"
"I could have a marble one," responded Amelia in a low voice. She had taken her sewing again, and she bent her head over it as if she were ashamed. A flush had risen in her cheeks, and her hand trembled.
"Wide marble! real low down!" confirmed aunt Ann, in a tone of triumph. "So fur as that goes, you could have a marble-top table." She laid down her knitting, and looked about her, a spark of excited anticipation in her eyes. All the habits of a lifetime urged her on to arrange and rearrange, in pursuit of domestic perfection. People used to say, in her first married days, that Ann Doby wasted more time in planning conveniences about her house than she ever saved by them "arter she got 'em." In her active years, she was, in local phrase, "a driver." Up and about early and late, she directed and managed until her house seemed to be a humming hive of industry and thrift. Yet there was never anything too urgent in thatsway. Her beaming good-humor acted as a buffer between her and the doers of her will; and though she might scold, she never rasped and irritated. Nor had she really succumbed in the least to the disease which had practically disabled her. It might confine her to a chair and render her dependent upon the service of others, but over it, also, was she spiritual victor. She could sit in her kitchen and issue orders; and her daughter, with no initiative genius of her own, had all aunt Ann's love of "springin' to it." She cherished, besides, a worshipful admiration for her mother; so that she asked no more than to act as the humble hand under that directing head. It was Amos who tacitly rebelled. When a boy in school, he virtually gave up talking, and thereafter opened his lips only when some practical exigency was to be filled. But once did he vouchsafe a reason for that eccentricity. It was in his fifteenth year, as aunt Ann remembered well, when the minister had called; and Amos, in response to some remark about his hope of salvation, had looked abstractedly out of the window.
"I'd be ashamed," announced aunt Ann, after the minister had gone,—"Amos, Iwouldbe ashamed, if I couldn't open my head to a minister o' the gospel!"
"If one head's open permanent in a house, I guess that fills the bill," said Amos, getting up to seek the woodpile. "I ain't goin' to interfere with nobody else's contract."
His mother looked after him with gaping lips, and, for the space of half an hour, spoke no word.
To-day she saw before her an alluring field of action; the prospect roused within her energies never incapable of responding to a spur.
"My soul, 'Melia!" she exclaimed, looking about the kitchen with a dominating eye, "how I should like to git hold o' this house! I al'ays did have a hankerin' that way, an' I don't mind tellin' ye. You could change it all round complete."
"It's a good house," said Amelia evasively, taking quick, even stitches, but listening hungrily to the voice of outside temptation. It seemed to confirm all the long-suppressed ambitions of her own heart.
"You're left well on 't," continued aunt Ann, her shrewd blue eyes taking on a speculative look. "I'm glad you sold the stock. A woman never undertakes man's work but she comes out the little eend o' the horn. The house is enough, if you keep it nice. Now, you've got that money laid away, an' all he left you besides. You could live in the village, if you was a mind to."
A deep flush struck suddenly into Amelia's cheek. She thought of Saltash and Laurie Morse.
"I don't want to live in the village," shesaid sharply, thus reproving her own errant mind. "I like my home."
"Law, yes, of course ye do," replied aunt Ann easily, returning to her knitting. "I was only spec'latin'. The land, 'Melia, what you doin' of? Repairin' an old coat?"
Amelia bent lower over her sewing. "'T was his," she answered in a voice almost inaudible. "I put a patch on it last night by lamplight, and when daytime come, I found it was purple. So I'm takin' it off, and puttin' on a black one to match the stuff."
"Goin' to give it away?"
"No, I ain't," returned Amelia, again with that sharp, remonstrant note in her voice. "What makes you think I'd do such a thing as that?"
"Law, I didn't mean no harm. You said you was repairin' on 't,—that's all."
Amelia was ashamed of her momentary outbreak. She looked up and smiled sunnily.
"Well, I suppose itisfoolish," she owned,—"too foolish to tell. But I've been settin' all his clothes in order to lay 'em aside at last. I kind o' like to do it."
Aunt Ann wagged her head, and ran a knitting-needle up under her cap on a voyage of discovery.
"You think so now," she said wisely, "but you'll see some time it's better by fur to give 'em away while ye can. The time never'll come when it's any easier. My soul, 'Melia,how I should like to git up into your chambers! It's six year now sence I've seen 'em."
Amelia laid down her work and considered the possibility.
"I don't know how in the world I could h'ist you up there," she remarked, from an evident background of hospitable good-will.
"H'ist me up? I guess you couldn't! You'd need a tackle an' falls. Amos has had to come to draggin' me round by degrees, an' I don't go off the lower floor. Be them chambers jest the same, 'Melia?"
"Oh, yes, they're just the same. Everything is. You know he didn't like changes."
"Blue spread on the west room bed?"
"Yes."
"Spinnin'-wheels out in the shed chamber, where his gran'mother Hooper kep' 'em?"
"Yes."
"Say, 'Melia, do you s'pose that little still's up attic he used to have such a royal good time with, makin' essences?"
Amelia's eyes filled suddenly with hot, unmanageable tears.
"Yes," she said; "we used it only two summers ago. I come across it yesterday. Seemed as if I could smell the peppermint I brought in for him to pick over. He was too sick to go out much then."
Aunt Ann had laid down her work again, and was gazing into vistas of rich enjoyment.
"I'll be whipped if I shouldn't like to see that little still!"
"I'll go up and bring it down after dinner," said Amelia soberly, folding her work and taking off her thimble. "I'd just as soon as not."
All through the dinner hour aunt Ann kept up an inspiring stream of question and reminiscence.
"Youbea good cook, 'Melia, an' no mistake," she remarked, breaking her brown hot biscuit. "This your same kind o' bread, made without yeast?"
"Yes," answered Amelia, pouring the tea. "I save a mite over from the last risin'."
Aunt Ann smelled the biscuit critically. "Well, it makes proper nice bread," she said, "but seems to me that's a terrible shif'less way to go about it. However 'd you happen to git hold on 't? You wa'n't never brought up to 't."
"His mother used to make it so. 'T was no great trouble, and 't would have worried him if I'd changed."
When the lavender-sprigged china had been washed and the hearth swept up, the room fell into its aspect of afternoon repose. The cat, after another serious ablution, sprang up into a chair drawn close to the fireplace, and coiled herself symmetrically on the faded patchwork cushion. Amelia stroked her in passing. Sheliked to see puss appropriate that chair; her purr from it renewed the message of domestic content.
"Now," said Amelia, "I'll get the still."
"Bring down anything else that's ancient!" called aunt Ann. "We've pretty much got red o' such things over t' our house, but I kind o' like to see 'em."
When Amelia returned, she staggered under a miscellaneous burden: the still, some old swifts for winding yarn, and a pair of wool-cards.
"I don't believe you know so much about cardin' wool as I do," she said, in some triumph, regarding the cards with the saddened gaze of one who recalls an occupation never to be resumed. "You see, you dropped all such work when new things come in. I kept right on because he wanted me to."
Aunt Ann was abundantly interested and amused.
"Well, now, if ever!" she repeated over and over again. "If this don't carry me back! Seems if I could hear the wheel hummin' an' gramma Balch steppin' back an' forth as stiddy as a clock. It's been a good while sence I've thought o' such old days."
"If it's old days you want"—began Amelia, and she sped upstairs with a fresh light of resolution in her eyes.
It was a long time before she returned,—so long that aunt Ann exhausted the still, andturned again to her thrifty knitting. Then there came a bumping noise on the stairs, and Amelia's shuffling tread.
"What under the sun be you doin' of?" called her aunt, listening, with her head on one side. "Don't you fall, 'Melia! Whatever 't is, I can't help ye."
But the stairway door yielded to pressure from within: and first a rim of wood appeared, and then Amelia, scarlet and breathless, staggering under a spinning-wheel.
"Forever!" ejaculated aunt Ann, making one futile effort to rise, like some cumbersome fowl whose wings are clipped. "My land alive! you'll break a blood-vessel, an' then where'll ye be?"
Amelia triumphantly drew the wheel to the middle of the floor, and then blew upon her dusty hands and smoothed her tumbled hair. She took off her apron and wiped the wheel with it rather tenderly, as if an ordinary duster would not do.
"There!" she said. "Here's some rolls right here in the bedroom. I carded them myself, but I never expected to spin any more."
She adjusted a roll to the spindle, and, quite forgetting aunt Ann, began stepping back and forth in a rhythmical march of feminine service. The low hum of her spinning filled the air, and she seemed to be wrapped about by an atmosphere of remoteness and memory. Even auntAnn was impressed by it; and once, beginning to speak, she looked at Amelia's face, and stopped. The purring silence continued, lulling all lesser energies to sleep, until Amelia, pausing to adjust her thread, found her mood broken by actual stillness, and gazed about her like one awakened from dreams.
"There!" she said, recalling herself. "Ain't that a good smooth thread? I've sold lots of yarn. They ask for it in Sudleigh."
"'Tis so!" confirmed aunt Ann cordially. "An' you've al'ays dyed it yourself, too!"
"Yes, a good blue; sometimes tea-color. There, now, you can't say you ain't heard a spinnin'-wheel once more!"
Amelia moved the wheel to the side of the room, and went gravely back to her chair. Her energy had fled, leaving her hushed and tremulous. But not for that did aunt Ann relinquish her quest for the betterment of the domestic world. Her tongue clicked the faster as Amelia's halted. She put away her work altogether, and sat, with wagging head and eloquent hands, still holding forth on the changes which might be wrought in the house: a bay window here, a sofa there, new chairs, tables, and furnishings. Amelia's mind swam in a sea of green rep, and she found herself looking up from time to time at her mellowed four walls, to see if they sparkled in desirable yet somewhat terrifying gilt paper.
At four o'clock, when Amos swung into the yard with the oxen, she was remorsefully conscious of heaving a sigh of relief; and she bade him in to the cup of tea ready for him by the fire with a sympathetic sense that too little was made of Amos, and that perhaps only she, at that moment, understood his habitual frame of mind. He drank his tea in silence, the while aunt Ann, with much relish, consumed doughnuts and cheese, having spread a wide handkerchief in her lap to catch the crumbs. Amos never varied in his rôle of automaton; and Amelia talked rapidly, in the hope of protecting him from verbal avalanches. But she was not to succeed. At the very moment of parting, aunt Ann, enthroned in her chair, with a clogging stick under the rockers, called a halt, just as the oxen gave their tremulous preparatory heave.