By the end of the summer the family interest had risen so high that Mehetabel was given a little stand in the sitting-room where she could keep her pieces, and work in odd minutes. She almost wept over such kindness, and resolved firmly not to take advantage of it by neglecting her work, which she performed with a fierce thoroughness. But the whole atmosphere of her world was changed. Things had a meaning now. Through the longest task of washing milk-pans there rose the rainbow of promise of her variegated work. She took her place by the little table and put the thimble on her knotted, hard finger with the solemnity of a priestess performing a sacred rite.
She was even able to bear with some degree of dignity the extreme honor of having the minister and the minister’s wife comment admiringly on her great project. The family felt quite proud of Aunt Mehetabel as Minister Bowman had said it was work as fine as any he had ever seen, “and he didn’t know but finer!” The remark was repeated verbatim to the neighbors in the following weeks when they dropped in and examined in a perverse silence some astonishingly difficult _tour de force_ which Mehetabel had just finished.
The family especially plumed themselves on the slow progress of the quilt. “Mehetabel has been to work on that corner for six weeks, come Tuesday, and she ain’t half done yet,” they explained to visitors. They fell out of the way of always expecting her to be the one to run on errands, even for the children. “Don’t bother your Aunt Mehetabel,” Sophia would call. “Can’t you see she’s got to a ticklish place on the quilt?”
The old woman sat up straighter and looked the world in the face. She was a part of it at last. She joined in the conversation and her remarks were listened to. The children were even told to mind her when she asked them to do some service for her, although this she did but seldom, the habit of self-effacement being too strong.
One day some strangers from the next town drove up and asked if they could inspect the wonderful quilt which they had heard of, even down in their end of the valley. After that such visitations were not uncommon, making the Elwells’ house a notable object. Mehetabel’s quilt came to be one of the town sights, and no one was allowed to leave the town without having paid tribute to its worth. The Elwells saw to it that their aunt was better dressed than she had ever been before, and one of the girls made her a pretty little cap to wear on her thin white hair.
A year went by and a quarter of the quilt was finished, a second year passed and half was done. The third year Mehetabel had pneumonia and lay ill for weeks and weeks, overcome with terror lest she die before her work was completed. A fourth year and one could really see the grandeur of the whole design; and in September of the fifth year, the entire family watching her with eager and admiring eyes, Mehetabel quilted the last stitches in her creation. The girls held it up by the four corners, and they all looked at it in a solemn silence. Then Mr. Elwell smote one horny hand within the other and exclaimed: “By ginger! That’s goin’ to the county fair!”
Mehetabel blushed a deep red at this. It was a thought which had occurred to her in a bold moment, but she had not dared to entertain it. The family acclaimed the idea, and one of the boys was forthwith dispatched to the house of the neighbor who was chairman of the committee for their village. He returned with radiant face, “Of course he’ll take it. Like’s not it may git a prize, so he says; but he’s got to have it right off, because all the things are goin’ to-morrow morning.”
Even in her swelling pride Mehetabel felt a pang of separation as the bulky package was carried out of the house. As the days went on she felt absolutely lost without her work. For years it had been her one preoccupation, and she could not bear even to look at the little stand, now quite bare of the litter of scraps which had lain on it so long. One of the neighbors, who took the long journey to the fair, reported that the quilt was hung in a place of honor in a glass case in “Agricultural Hall.” But that meant little to Mehetabel’s utter ignorance of all that lay outside of her brother’s home. The family noticed the old woman’s depression, and one day Sophia said kindly, “You feel sort o’ lost without the quilt, don’t you, Mehetabel?”
“They took it away so quick!” she said wistfully; “I hadn’t hardly had one real good look at it myself.”
Mr. Elwell made no comment, but a day or two later he asked his sister how early she could get up in the morning.
“I dun’no’. Why?” she asked.
“Well, Thomas Ralston has got to drive clear to West Oldton to see a lawyer there, and that is four miles beyond the fair. He says if you can git up so’s to leave here at four in the morning he’ll drive you over to the fair, leave you there for the day, and bring you back again at night.”
Mehetabel looked at him with incredulity. It was as though someone had offered her a ride in a golden chariot up to the gates of heaven. “Why, you can’t _mean_ it!” she cried, paling with the intensity of her emotion. Her brother laughed a little uneasily. Even to his careless indifference this joy was a revelation of the narrowness of her life in his home. “Oh, ’tain’t so much to go to the fair. Yes, I mean it. Go git your things ready, for he wants to start to-morrow morning.”
All that night a trembling, excited old woman lay and stared at the rafters. She, who had never been more than six miles from home in her life, was going to drive thirty miles away–it was like going to another world. She who had never seen anything more exciting than church supper was to see the county fair. To Mehetabel it was like making the tour of the world. She had never dreamed of doing it. She could not at all imagine what would be like.
Nor did the exhortations of the family, as they bade good-by to her, throw any light on her confusion. They had all been at least once to the scene of gayety she was to visit, and as she tried to eat her breakfast they called out conflicting advice to her till her head whirled. Sophie told her to be sure and see the display of preserves. Her brother said not to miss inspecting the stock, her niece said the fancywork was the only thing worth looking at and her nephews said she must bring them home an account of the races. The buggy drove up to the door, she was helped in, and her wraps tucked about her. They all stood together and waved good-by to her as she drove out of the yard. She waved back, but she scarcely saw them. On her return home that evening she was very pale, and so tired and stiff that her brother had to lift her out bodily, but her lips were set in a blissful smile. They crowded around her with thronging questions, until Sophia pushed them all aside, telling them Aunt Mehetabel was too tired to speak until she had had her supper. This was eaten in an enforced silence on the part of the children, and then the old woman was helped into an easy-chair before the fire. They gathered about her, eager for news of the great world, and Sophia said, “Now, come, Mehetabel, tell us all about it!”
Mehetabel drew a long breath. “It was just perfect!” she said; “finer even than I thought. They’ve got it hanging up in the very middle of a sort o’ closet made of glass, and one of the lower corners is ripped and turned back so’s to show the seams on the wrong side.”
“What?” asked Sophia, a little blankly.
“Why, the quilt!” said Mehetabel in surprise. “There are a whole lot of other ones in that room, but not one that can hold a candle to it, if I do say it who shouldn’t. I heard lots of people say the same thing. You ought to have heard what the women said about that corner, Sophia. They said–well, I’d be ashamed to _tell_ you what they said. I declare if I wouldn’t!”
Mr. Elwell asked, “What did you think of that big ox we’ve heard so much about?”
“I didn’t look at the stock,” returned his sister indifferently. “That set of pieces you gave me, Maria, from your red waist, come out just lovely!” she assured one of her nieces. “I heard one woman say you could ‘most smell the red silk roses.”
“Did any of the horses in our town race?” asked young Thomas.
“I didn’t see the races.”
“How about the preserves?” asked Sophia.
“I didn’t see the preserves,” said Mehetabel calmly.
“You see, I went right to the room where the quilt was and then I didn’t want to leave it. It had been so long since I’d seen it. I had to look at it first real good myself and then I looked at the others to see if there was any that could come up to it. And then the people begin comin’ in and I got so interested in hearin’ what they had to say I couldn’t think of goin’ anywheres else. I ate my lunch right there too, and I’m as glad as can be I did, too; for what do you think?”–she gazed about her with kindling eyes–“while I stood there with a sandwich in one hand didn’t the head of the hull concern come in and open the glass door and pin ‘First Prize’ right in the middle of the quilt!”
There was a stir of congratulation and proud exclamation. Then Sophia returned again to the attack, “Didn’t you go to see anything else?” she queried.
“Why, no,” said Mehetabel. “Only the quilt. Why should I?”
She fell into a reverie where she saw again the glorious creation of her hand and brain hanging before all the world with the mark of highest approval on it. She longed to make her listeners see the splendid vision with her. She struggled for words; she reached blindly after unknown superlatives. “I tell you it looked like—-” she said, and paused, hesitating. Vague recollections of hymn-book phraseology came into her mind, the only form of literary expression she knew; but they were dismissed as being sacrilegious, and also not sufficiently forcible. Finally, “I tell you it looked real _well!_” she assured them, and sat staring into the fire, on her tired old face the supreme content of an artist who has realized his ideal.
PORTRAIT OF A PHILOSOPHER
I
The news of Professor Gridley’s death filled Middletown College with consternation. Its one claim to distinction was gone, for in spite of the excessive quiet of his private life, he had always cast about the obscure little college the shimmering aura of greatness. There had been no fondness possible for the austere old thinker, but Middletown village, as well as the college, had been touched by his fidelity to the very moderate attractions of his birthplace. When, as often happened, some famous figure was seen on the streets, people used to say first, “Here to see old Grid, I suppose,” and then, “Funny how he sticks here. They say he was offered seven thousand at the University of California.” In the absence of any known motive for this steadfastness, the village legend-making instinct had evolved a theory that he did not wish to move away from a State of which his father had been Governor, and where the name of Gridley was like a patent of nobility.
And now he was gone, the last of the race. His disappearance caused the usual amount of reminiscent talk among his neighbors. The older people recalled the bygone scandals connected with his notorious and popular father and intimated with knowing nods that there were plenty of other descendants of the old Governor who were not entitled legally to bear the name; but the younger ones, who had known only the severely ascetic life and cold personality of the celebrated scholar, found it difficult to connect him with such a father. In their talk they brought to mind the man himself, his quiet shabby clothes, his big stooping frame, his sad black eyes absent almost to vacancy as though always fixed on high and distant thoughts; and those who had lived near him told laughing stories about the crude and countrified simplicity of his old aunt’s housekeeping–it was said that the president of Harvard had been invited to join them once in a Sunday evening meal of crackers and milk–but the general tenor of feeling was, as it had been during his life, of pride in his great fame and in the celebrated people who had come to see him.
This pride warmed into something like affection when the day after his death, came the tidings that he had bequeathed to his college the Gino Sprague Falleres portrait of himself. Of course, at that time, no one in Middletown had seen the picture, for the philosopher’s sudden death had occurred, very dramatically, actually during the last sitting. He had, in fact, had barely one glimpse of it himself, as, according to Falleres’s invariable rule no one, not even the subject of the portrait, had been allowed to examine an unfinished piece of work. But though Middletown had no first-hand knowledge of the picture, there could be no doubt about the value of the canvas. As soon as it was put on exhibition in London, from every art-critic in the three nations who claimed Falleres for their own there rose a wail that this masterpiece was to be buried in an unknown college in an obscure village in barbarous America. It was confidently stated that it would be saved from such an unfitting resting-place by strong action on the part of an International Committee of Artists; but Middletown, though startled by its own good fortune, clung with Yankee tenacity to its rights. Raphael Collin, of Paris, commenting on this in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, cried out whimsically upon the woes of an art-critic’s life, “as if there were not already enough wearisome pilgrimages necessary to remote and uncomfortable places with jaw-breaking names, which must nevertheless be visited for the sake of a single picture!” And a burlesque resolution to carry off the picture by force was adopted at the dinner in London given in honor of Falleres the evening before he set off for America to attend the dedicatory exercises with which Middletown planned to install its new treasure.
For the little rustic college rose to its one great occasion. Bold in their confidence in their dead colleague’s name, the college authorities sent out invitations to all the great ones of the country. Those to whom Gridley was no more than a name on volumes one never read came because the portrait was by Falleres, and those who had no interest in the world of art came to honor the moralist whose noble clear-thinking had simplified the intimate problems of modern life. There was the usual residuum of those who came because the others did, and, also as usual, they were among the most brilliant figures in the procession which filed along, one October morning, under the old maples of Middletown campus.
It was a notable celebration. A bishop opened the exercises with prayer, a United States senator delivered the eulogy of the dead philosopher, the veil uncovering the portrait was drawn away by the mayor of one of America’s largest cities, himself an ardent Gridleyite, and among those who spoke afterward were the presidents of three great universities. The professor’s family was represented but scantily. He had had one brother, who had disappeared many years ago under a black cloud of ill report, and one sister who had married and gone West to live. Her two sons, middle-aged merchants from Ohio, gave the only personal note to the occasion by their somewhat tongue-tied and embarrassed presence, for Gridley’s aunt was too aged and infirm to walk with the procession from the Gymnasium, where it formed, to the Library building, where the portrait was installed.
After the inevitable photographers had made their records of the memorable gathering, the procession began to wind its many-colored way back to the Assembly Hall, where it was to lunch. Everyone was feeling relieved that the unveiling had gone off so smoothly, and cheerful at the prospect of food. The undergraduates began lustily to shout their college song, which was caught up by the holiday mood of the older ones. This cheerful tumult gradually died away in the distance, leaving the room of the portrait deserted in an echoing silence. A janitor began to remove the rows of folding chairs. The celebration was over.
Into the empty room there now limped forward a small, shabby old woman with a crutch. “I’m his aunt, that lived with him,” she explained apologetically, “and I want to see the picture.”
She advanced, peering nearsightedly at the canvas. The janitor continued stacking up chairs until he was stopped by a cry from the newcomer. She was a great deal paler than when she came in. She was staring hard at the portrait and now beckoned him wildly to do the same. “Look at it! Look at it!”
Surprised, he followed the direction of her shaking hand. “Sure, it’s Professor Grid to the life!” he said admiringly.
“Look at it! Look at it!” She seemed not to be able to find any other words.
After a prolonged scrutiny he turned to her with a puzzled line between his eyebrows. “Since you’ve spoken of it, ma’am, I will say that there’s a something about the expression of the eyes … and mouth, maybe … that ain’t just the professor. He was more absent-like. It reminds me of somebody else … of some face I’ve seen …”
She hung on his answer, her mild, timid old face drawn like a mask of tragedy. “Who? Who?” she prompted him.
For a time he could not remember, staring at the new portrait and scratching his head. Then it came to him suddenly: “Why, sure, I ought to ha’ known without thinkin’, seeing the other picture as often as every time I’ve swep’ out the president’s office. And Professor Grid always looked like him some, anyhow.”
The old woman leaned against the wall, her crutch trembling in her hand. Her eyes questioned him mutely.
“Why, ma’am, who but his own father, to be sure … the old Governor.”
II
While they had been duly sensible of the luster reflected upon them by the celebration in honor of their distinguished uncle, Professor Gridley’s two nephews could scarcely have said truthfully that they enjoyed the occasion. As one of them did say to the other, the whole show was rather out of their line. Their line was wholesale hardware and, being eager to return to it, it was with a distinct feeling of relief that they waited for the train at the station. They were therefore as much displeased as surprised by the sudden appearance to them of their great-aunt, very haggard, her usual extreme timidity swept away by overmastering emotion. She clutched at the two merchants with a great sob of relief: “Stephen! Eli! Come back to the house,” she cried, and before they could stop her was hobbling away. They hurried after her, divided between the fear of losing their train and the hope that some inheritance from their uncle had been found. They were not mercenary men, but they felt a not unnatural disappointment that Professor Gridley had left not a penny, not even to his aunt, his one intimate.
They overtook her, scuttling along like some frightened and wounded little animal. “What’s the matter, Aunt Amelia?” they asked shortly. “We’ve got to catch this train.”
She faced them. “You can’t go now. You’ve got to make them take that picture away.”
“Away!” Their blankness was stupefaction.
She raged at them, the timid, harmless little thing, like a creature distraught. “Didn’t you see it? Didn’t you _see_ it?”
Stephen answered: “Well, no, not to have a good square look at it. The man in front of me kept getting in the way.”
Eli admitted: “If you mean you don’t see anything in it to make all this hurrah about, I’m with you. It don’t look half finished. I don’t like that slap-dash style.”
She was in a frenzy at their denseness. “Who did it look like?” she challenged them.
“Why, like Uncle Grid, of course. Who else?”
“Yes, yes,” she cried; “who else? Who else?”
They looked at each other, afraid that she was crazed, and spoke more gently: “Why, I don’t know, I’m sure, who else. Like Grandfather Gridley, of course; but then Uncle Grid always did look like his father.”
At this she quite definitely put it out of their power to leave her by fainting away.
They carried her home and laid her on her own bed, where one of them stayed to attend her while the other went back to rescue their deserted baggage. As the door closed behind him the old woman came to herself. “Oh, Stephen,” she moaned, “I wish it had killed me, the way it did your uncle.”
“What _is_ the matter?” asked her great-nephew wonderingly. “What do you think killed him?”
“That awful, awful picture! I know it now as plain as if I’d been there. He hadn’t seen it all the time he was sitting for it, though he’d already put in his will that he wanted the college to have it, and when he did see it–” she turned on the merchant with a sudden fury: “How _dare_ you say those are your uncle’s eyes!”
He put his hand soothingly on hers. “Now, now, Aunt ‘Melia, maybe the expression isn’t just right, but the color is _fine_… just that jet-black his were … and the artist has got in exact that funny stiff way uncle’s hair stood up over his forehead.”
The old woman fixed outraged eyes upon him. “Color!” she said. “And hair! Oh, Lord, help me!”
She sat up on the bed, clutching her nephew’s hand, and began to talk rapidly. When, a half-hour later, the other brother returned, neither of them heard him enter the house. It was only when he called at the foot of the stairs that they both started and Stephen ran down to join him.
“You’ll see the president … you’ll fix it?” the old woman cried after him.
“I’ll see, Aunt ‘Melia,” he answered pacifyingly, as he drew his brother out of doors. He looked quite pale and moved, and drew a long breath before he could begin.
“Aunt Amelia’s been telling me a lot of things I never knew, Eli. It seems that … say, did you ever hear that Grandfather Gridley, the Governor, was such a bad lot?”
“Why, mother never said much about her father one way or the other, but I always sort of guessed he wasn’t all he might have been from her never bringing us on to visit here until after he died. She used to look queer, too, when folks congratulated her on having such a famous man for father. All the big politicians of his day thought a lot of him. He _was_ as smart as chain-lightning!”
“He was a disreputable old scalawag!” cried his other grandson. “Some of the things Aunt Amelia has been telling me make me never want to come back to this part of the country again. Do you know why Uncle Grid lived so poor and scrimped and yet left no money? He’d been taking care of a whole family grandfather had beside ours; and paying back some people grandfather did out of a lot of money on a timber deal fifty years ago; and making it up to a little village in the backwoods that grandfather persuaded to bond itself for a railroad that he knew wouldn’t go near it.”
The two men stared at each other an instant, reviewing in a new light the life that had just closed. “That’s why he never married,” said Eli finally.
“No, that’s what I said, but Aunt Amelia just went wild when I did. She said … gee!” he passed his hand over his eyes with a gesture of mental confusion. “Ain’t it strange what can go on under your eyes and you never know it? Why, she says Uncle Grid was just like his father.”
The words were not out of his mouth before the other’s face of horror made him aware of his mistake. “No! No! Not that! Heavens, no! I mean … made like him … _wanted_ to be that kind, ‘specially drink …” His tongue, unused to phrasing abstractions, stumbled and tripped in his haste to correct the other’s impression. “You know how much Uncle Grid used to look like grandfather … the same black hair and broad face and thick red lips and a kind of knob on the end of his nose? Well, it seems he had his father’s insides, too … _but his mother’s conscience!_ I guess, from what Aunt Amelia says, that the combination made life about as near Tophet for him …! She’s the only one to know anything about it, because she’s lived with him always, you know, took him when grandmother died and he was a child. She says when he was younger he was like a man fighting a wild beast … he didn’t dare let up or rest. Some days he wouldn’t stop working at his desk all day long, not even to eat, and then he’d grab up a piece of bread and go off for a long tearing tramp that’d last ‘most all night. You know what a tremendous physique all the Gridley men have had. Well, Uncle Grid turned into work all the energy the rest of them spent in deviltry. Aunt Amelia said he’d go on like that day after day for a month, and then he’d bring out one of those essays folks are so crazy about. She said she never could bear to _look_ at his books … seemed to her they were written in his blood. She told him so once and he said it was the only thing to do with blood like his.”
He was silent, while his listener made a clucking noise of astonishment. “My! My! I’d have said that there never was anybody more different from grandfather than uncle. Why, as he got on in years he didn’t even look like him any more.”
This reference gave Stephen a start. “Oh, yes, that’s what all this came out for. Aunt Amelia is just wild about this portrait. It’s just a notion of hers, of course, but after what she told me I could see, easy, how the idea would come to her. It looks this way, she says, as though Uncle Grid inherited his father’s physical make-up complete, and spent all his life fighting it … and won out! And here’s this picture making him look the way he would if he’d been the worst old … as if he’d been like the Governor. She says she feels as though she was the only one to defend uncle … as if it could make any difference to him! I guess the poor old lady is a little touched. Likely it’s harder for her, losing uncle, than we realized. She just about worshiped him. Queer business, anyhow, wasn’t it? Who’d ha’ thought he was like that?”
He had talked his unwonted emotion quite out, and now looked at his brother with his usual matter-of-fact eye. “Did you tell the station agent to hold the trunk?”
The other, who was the younger, looked a little abashed. “Well, no; I found the train was so late I thought maybe we could … you know there’s that business to-morrow …!”
His senior relieved him of embarrassment. “That’s a good idea. Sure we can. There’s nothing we could do if we stayed. It’s just a notion of Aunt ‘Melia’s, anyhow. I agree with her that it don’t look so awfully like Uncle Grid, but, then, oil-portraits are never any good. Give me a photograph!”
“It’s out of our line, anyhow,” agreed the younger, looking at his watch.
III
The president of Middletown College had been as much relieved as pleased by the success of the rather pretentious celebration he had planned. His annoyance was correspondingly keen at the disturbing appearance, in the afternoon reception before the new portrait, of the late professor’s aunt, “an entirely insignificant old country woman,” he hastily assured M. Falleres after she had been half forced, half persuaded to retire, “whose criticisms were as negligible as her personality.”
The tall, Jove-like artist concealed a smile by stroking his great brown beard. When it came to insignificant country people, he told himself, it was hard to draw lines in his present company. He was wondering whether he might not escape by an earlier train.
To the president’s remark he answered that no portrait-painter escaped unreasonable relatives of his sitters. “It is an axiom with our guild,” he went on, not, perhaps, averse to giving his provincial hosts a new sensation, “that the family is never satisfied, and also that the family has no rights. A sitter is a subject only, like a slice of fish. The only question is how it’s done. What difference does it make a century from now, if the likeness is good? It’s a work of art or it’s nothing.” He announced this principle with a regal absence of explanation and turned away; but his thesis was taken up by another guest, a New York art-critic.
“By Jove, it’s inconceivable, the ignorance of art in America!” he told the little group before the portrait. “You find everyone so incurably personal in his point of view … always objecting to a masterpiece because the watch-chain isn’t the kind usually worn by the dear departed.”
Someone else chimed in. “Yes, it’s incredible that anyone, even an old village granny, should be able to look at that canvas and not be struck speechless by its quality.”
The critic was in Middletown to report on the portrait and he now began marshaling his adjectives for that purpose. “I never saw such use of pigment in my life … it makes the Whistler ‘Carlyle’ look like burnt-out ashes … the luminous richness of the blacks in the academic gown, the masterly generalization in the treatment of the hair, the placing of those great talons of hands on the canvas carrying out the vigorous lines of the composition, and the unforgettable felicity of those brutally red lips as the one ringing note of color. As for life-likeness, what’s the old dame talking about! I never saw such eyes! Not a hint of meretricious emphasis on their luster and yet they fairly flame.”
The conversation spread to a less technical discussion as the group was joined by the professor of rhetoric, an ambitious young man with an insatiable craving for sophistication, who felt himself for once entirely in his element in the crowd of celebrities. “It’s incredibly good luck that our little two-for-a-cent college should have so fine a thing,” he said knowingly. “I’ve been wondering how such an old skinflint as Gridley ever got the money loose to have his portrait done by–“
A laugh went around the group at the idea. “It was Mackintosh, the sugar king, who put up for it. He’s a great Gridleyite, and persuaded him to sit.”
“_Persuade_ a man to sit to Falleres!” The rhetoric professor was outraged at the idea.
“Yes, so they say. The professor was dead against it from the first. Falleres himself had to beg him to sit. Falleres said he felt a real inspiration at the sight of the old fellow … knew he could make a good thing out of him. He _was_ a good subject!”
The little group turned and stared appraisingly at the portrait hanging so close to them that it seemed another living being in their midst. The rhetoric professor was asked what kind of a man the philosopher had been personally, and answered briskly: “Oh, nobody knew him personally … the silent old codger. He was a dry-as-dust, bloodless, secular monk–“
He was interrupted by a laugh from the art-critic, whose eyes were still on the portrait.
“Excuse me for my cynical mirth,” he said, “but I must say he doesn’t look it. I was prepared for any characterization but that. He looks like a powerful son of the Renaissance, who might have lived in that one little vacation of the soul after medievalism stopped hag-riding us, and before the modern conscience got its claws on us. And you say he was a blue-nosed Puritan!”
The professor of rhetoric looked an uneasy fear that he was being ridiculed. “I only repeated the village notion of him,” he said airily. “He may have been anything. All I know is that he was as secretive as a clam, and about as interesting personally.”
“Look at the picture,” said the critic, still laughing; “you’ll know all about him!”
The professor of rhetoric nodded. “You’re right, he doesn’t look much like my character of him. I never seem to have had a good, square look at him before. I’ve heard several people say the same thing, that they seemed to understand him better from the portrait than from his living face. There was something about his eyes that kept you from thinking of anything but what he was saying.”
The critic agreed. “The eyes are wonderful … ruthless in their power … fires of hell.” He laughed a deprecating apology for his overemphatic metaphor and suggested: “It’s possible that there was more to the professorial life than met the eye. Had he a wife?”
“No; it was always a joke in the village that he would never look at a woman.”
The critic glanced up at the smoldering eyes of the portrait and smiled. “I’ve heard of that kind of a man before,” he said. “Never known to drink, either, I suppose?”
“Cold-water teetotaler,” laughed the professor, catching the spirit of the occasion.
“Look at the color in that nose!” said the critic. “I fancy that the ascetic moralist–“
A very young man, an undergraduate who had been introduced as the junior usher, nodded his head. “Yep, a lot of us fellows always thought old Grid a little too good to be true.”
An older man with the flexible mouth of a politician now ventured a contribution to a conversation no longer bafflingly esthetic: “His father, old Governor Gridley, wasn’t he … Well, I guess you’re right about the son. No halos were handed down in _that_ family!”
The laugh which followed this speech was stopped by the approach of Falleres, his commanding presence dwarfing the president beside him. He was listening with a good-natured contempt to the apparently rather anxious murmurs of the latter.
“Of course I know, Mr. Falleres, it is a great deal to ask, but she is so insistent … she won’t go away and continues to make the most distressing spectacle of herself … and several people, since she has said so much about it, are saying that the expression is not that of the late professor. Much against my will I promised to speak to you–“
His mortified uneasiness was so great that the artist gave him a rescuing hand. “Well, Mr. President, what can I do in the matter? The man is dead. I cannot paint him over again, and if I could I would only do again as I did this time, choose that aspect which my judgment told me would make the best portrait. If his habitual vacant expression was not so interesting as another not so permanent a habit of his face … why, the poor artist must be allowed some choice. I did not know I was to please his grandmother, and not posterity.”
“His aunt,” corrected the president automatically.
The portrait-painter accepted the correction with his tolerant smile. “His aunt,” he repeated. “The difference is considerable. May I ask what it was you promised her?”
The president summoned his courage. It was easy to gather from his infinitely reluctant insistence how painful and compelling had been the scene which forced him to action. “She wants you to change it … to make the expression of the–“
For the first time the artist’s equanimity was shaken. He took a step backward. “Change it!” he said, and although his voice was low the casual chat all over the room stopped short as though a pistol had been fired.
“It’s not _my_ idea!” The president confounded himself in self-exoneration. “I merely promised, to pacify her, to ask you if you could not do some little thing that would–“
The critic assumed the role of conciliator. “My dear sir, I don’t believe you quite understand what you are asking. It’s as though you asked a priest to make just a little change in the church service and leave out the ‘not’ in the Commandments.”
“I only wish to know Mr. Falleres’s attitude,” said the president stiffly, a little nettled by the other’s note of condescension. “I presume he will be willing to take the responsibility of it himself and explain to the professor’s aunt that _I_ have done–“
The artist had recovered from his lapse from Olympian to calm and now nodded, smiling: “Dear me, yes, Mr. President, I’m used to irate relatives.”
The president hastened away and the knots of talkers in other parts of the room, who had been looking with expectant curiosity at the group before the portrait, resumed their loud-toned chatter. When their attention was next drawn in the same direction, it was by a shaky old treble, breaking, quavering with weakness. A small, shabby old woman, leaning on a crutch, stood looking up imploringly at the tall painter.
“My dear madam,” he broke in on her with a kindly impatience, “all that you say about Professor Gridley is much to his credit, but what has it to do with me?”
“You painted his portrait,” she said with a simplicity that was like stupidity. “And I am his aunt. You made a picture of a bad man. I know he was a good man.”
“I painted what I saw,” sighed the artist wearily. He looked furtively at his watch.
The old woman seemed dazed by the extremity of her emotion. She looked about her silently, keeping her eyes averted from the portrait that stood so vividly like a living man beside her. “I don’t know what to do!” she murmured with a little moan. “I can’t _bear_ it to have it stay here–people forget so. Everybody’ll think that Gridley looked like _that_! And there isn’t anybody but me. He never had anybody but me.”
The critic tried to clear the air by a roundly declaratory statement of principles. “You’ll pardon my bluntness, madam; but you must remember that none but the members of Professor Gridley’s family are concerned in the exact details of his appearance. Fifty years from now nobody will remember how he looked, one way or the other. The world is only concerned with portraits as works of art.”
She followed his reasoning with a strained and docile attention and now spoke eagerly as though struck by an unexpected hope: “If that’s all, why put his name to it? Just hang it up, and call it anything.”
She shrank together timidly and her eyes reddened at the laughter which greeted this naive suggestion.
Falleres looked annoyed and called his defender off. “Oh, never mind explaining me,” he said, snapping his watch shut. “You’ll never get the rights of it through anybody’s head who hasn’t himself sweat blood over a composition only to be told that the other side of the sitter’s profile is usually considered the prettier. After all, we have the last word, since the sitter dies and the portrait lives.”
The old woman started and looked at him attentively.
“Yes,” said the critic, laughing, “immortality’s not a bad balm for pin-pricks.”
The old woman turned very pale and for the first time looked again at the portrait. An electric thrill seemed to pass through her as her eyes encountered the bold, evil ones fixed on her. She stood erect with a rigid face, and “Immortality!” she said, under her breath.
Falleres moved away to make his adieux to the president, and the little group of his satellites straggled after him to the other end of the room. For a moment there no one near the old woman to see the crutch furiously upraised, hammer-like, or to stop her sudden passionate rush upon the picture.
At the sound of cracking cloth, they turned back, horrified. They saw her, with an insane violence, thrust her hands into the gaping hole that had been the portrait’s face and, tearing the canvas from end to end, fall upon the shreds with teeth and talon.
All but Falleres flung themselves toward her, dragging her away. With a movement as instinctive he rushed for the picture, and it was to him, as he stood aghast before the ruined canvas, that the old woman’s shrill treble was directed, above the loud shocked voices of those about her: “There ain’t anything immortal but souls!” she cried.
FLINT AND FIRE
My husband’s cousin had come up from the city, slightly more fagged and sardonic than usual, and as he stretched himself out in the big porch-chair he was even more caustic than was his wont about the bareness and emotional sterility of the lives of our country people.
“Perhaps they had, a couple of centuries ago, when the Puritan hallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religious intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is a flatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all emotions but the pettiest sorts–“
I pushed the pitcher nearer him, clinking the ice invitingly, and directed his attention to our iris-bed as a more cheerful object of contemplation than the degeneracy of the inhabitants of Vermont. The flowers burned on their tall stalks like yellow tongues of flame. The strong, sword-like green leaves thrust themselves boldly up into the spring air like a challenge. The plants vibrated with vigorous life.
In the field beyond them, as vigorous as they, strode Adoniram Purdon behind his team, the reins tied together behind his muscular neck, his hands grasping the plow with the masterful sureness of the successful practitioner of an art. The hot, sweet spring sunshine shone down on ‘Niram’s head with its thick crest of brown hair, the ineffable odor of newly turned earth steamed up about him like incense, the mountain stream beyond him leaped and shouted. His powerful body answered every call made on it with the precision of a splendid machine. But there was no elation in the grimly set face as ‘Niram wrenched the plow around a big stone, or as, in a more favorable furrow, the gleaming share sped steadily along before the plowman, turning over a long, unbroken brown ribbon of earth.
My cousin-in-law waved a nervous hand toward the sternly silent figure as it stepped doggedly behind the straining team, the head bent forward, the eyes fixed on the horses’ heels.
“There!” he said. “There is an example of what I mean. Is there another race on earth which could produce a man in such a situation who would not on such a day sing, or whistle, or at least hold up his head and look at all the earthly glories about him?”
I was silent, but not for lack of material for speech. ‘Niram’s reasons for austere self-control were not such as I cared to discuss with a man of my cousin’s mental attitude. As we sat looking at him the noon whistle from the village blew and the wise old horses stopped in the middle of a furrow. ‘Niram unharnessed them, led them to the shade of a tree, and put on their nose-bags. Then he turned and came toward the house.
“Don’t I seem to remember,” murmured my cousin under his breath, “that, even though he is a New-Eng-lander, he has been known to make up errands to your kitchen to see your pretty Ev’leen Ann?”
I looked at him hard; but he was only gazing down, rather cross-eyed, on his grizzled mustache, with an obvious petulant interest in the increase of white hairs in it. Evidently his had been but a chance shot. ‘Niram stepped up on the grass at the edge of the porch. He was so tall that he overtopped the railing easily, and, reaching a long arm over to where I sat, he handed me a small package done up in yellowish tissue-paper. Without hat-raisings, or good-mornings, or any other of the greetings usual in a more effusive civilization, he explained briefly:
“My stepmother wanted I should give you this. She said to thank you for the grape-juice.” As he spoke he looked at me gravely out of deep-set blue eyes, and when he had delivered his message he held his peace.
I expressed myself with the babbling volubility of one whose manners have been corrupted by occasional sojourns in the city. “Oh, ‘Niram!” I cried protestingly, as I opened the package and took out an exquisitely wrought old-fashioned collar. “Oh, ‘Niram! How _could_ your stepmother give such a thing away? Why, it must be one of her precious old relics. I don’t _want_ her to give me something every time I do some little thing for her. Can’t a neighbor send her in a few bottles of grape-juice without her thinking she must pay it back somehow? It’s not kind of her. She has never yet let me do the least thing for her without repaying me with something that is worth ever so much more than my trifling services.”
When I had finished my prattling, ‘Niram repeated, with an accent of finality, “She wanted I should give it to you.”
The older man stirred in his chair. Without looking at him I knew that his gaze on the young rustic was quizzical and that he was recording on the tablets of his merciless memory the ungraceful abruptness of the other’s action and manner.
“How is your stepmother feeling to-day, ‘Niram?” I asked.
“Worse.”
‘Niram came to a full stop with the word. My cousin covered his satirical mouth with his hand.
“Can’t the doctor do anything to relieve her?” I asked.
‘Niram moved at last from his Indian-like immobility. He looked up under the brim of his felt hat at the skyline of the mountain, shimmering iridescent above us. “He says maybe ‘lectricity would help her some. I’m goin’ to git her the batteries and things soon’s I git the rubber bandages paid for.”
There was a long silence. My cousin stood up, yawning, and sauntered away toward the door. “Shall I send Ev’leen Ann out to get the pitcher and glasses?” he asked in an accent which he evidently thought very humorously significant.
The strong face under the felt hat turned white, the jaw muscles set hard, but for all this show of strength there was an instant when the man’s eyes looked out with the sick, helpless revelation of pain they might have had when ‘Niram was a little boy of ten, a third of his present age, and less than half his present stature. Occasionally it is horrifying to see how a chance shot rings the bell.
“No, no! Never mind!” I said hastily. “I’ll take the tray in when I go.”
Without salutation or farewell ‘Niram Purdon turned and went back to his work.
The porch was an enchanted place, walled around with starlit darkness, visited by wisps of breezes shaking down from their wings the breath of lilac and syringa, flowering wild grapes, and plowed fields. Down at the foot of our sloping lawn the little river, still swollen by the melted snow from the mountains, plunged between its stony banks and shouted its brave song to the stars.
We three middle-aged people–Paul, his cousin, and I–had disposed our uncomely, useful, middle-aged bodies in the big wicker chairs and left them there while our young souls wandered abroad in the sweet, dark glory of the night. At least Paul and I were doing this, as we sat, hand in hand, thinking of a May night twenty years before. One never knows what Horace is thinking of, but apparently he was not in his usual captious vein, for after a long pause he remarked, “It is a night almost indecorously inviting to the making of love.”
My answer seemed grotesquely out of key with this, but its sequence was clear in my mind. I got up, saying: “Oh, that reminds me–I must go and see Ev’leen Ann. I’d forgotten to plan to-morrow’s dinner.”
“Oh, everlastingly Ev’leen Ann!” mocked Horace from his corner. “Can’t you think of anything but Ev’leen Ann and her affairs?”
I felt my way through the darkness of the house, toward the kitchen, both doors of which were tightly closed. When I stepped into the hot, close room, smelling of food and fire, I saw Ev’leen Ann sitting on the straight kitchen chair, the yellow light of the bracket-lamp beating down on her heavy braids and bringing out the exquisitely subtle modeling of her smooth young face. Her hands were folded in her lap. She was staring at the blank wall, and the expression of her eyes so startle and shocked me that I stopped short and would have retreated if it had not been too late. She had seen me, roused herself, and said quietly, as though continuing conversation interrupted the moment before:
“I had been thinking that there was enough left of the roast to make hash-balls for dinner”–“hash-balls” is Ev’leen Ann’s decent Anglo-Saxon name for croquette–“and maybe you’d like a rhubarb pie.”
I knew well enough she had been thinking of no such thing, but I could as easily have slapped a reigning sovereign on the back as broken in on the regal reserve of Ev’leen Ann in her clean gingham.
“Well, yes, Ev’leen Ann,” I answered in her own tone of reasonable consideration of the matter; “that would be nice, and your pie-crust is so flaky that even Mr. Horace will have to be pleased.”
“Mr. Horace” is our title for the sardonic cousin whose carping ways are half a joke, and half a menace in our family.
Ev’leen Ann could not manage the smile which should have greeted this sally. She looked down soberly at the white-pine top of the kitchen table and said, “I guess there is enough sparrow-grass up in the garden for a mess, too, if you’d like that.”
“That would taste very good,” I agreed, my heart aching for her.
“And creamed potatoes,” she finished bravely, thrusting my unspoken pity from her.
“You know I like creamed potatoes better than any other kind,” I concurred.
There was a silence. It seemed inhuman to go and leave the stricken young thing to fight her trouble alone in the ugly prison, her work-place, though I thought I could guess why Ev’leen Ann had shut the doors so tightly. I hung near her, searching my head for something to say, but she helped me by no casual remark. Niram is not the only one of our people who possesses so the full the supreme gift of silence. Finally I mentioned the report of a case of measles in the village, and Ev’leen Ann responded in kind with the news that her Aunt Emma had bought a potato-planter. Ev’leen Ann is an orphan, brought up by a well-to-do spinster aunt, who is strong-minded and runs her own farm. After a time we glided by way of similar transitions to the mention of his name.
“‘Niram Purdon tells me his stepmother is no better,” I said. “Isn’t it too bad?” I thought it well for Ev’leen Ann to be dragged out of her black cave of silence once in a while, even if it could be done only by force. As she made no answer, I went on. “Everybody who knows Niram thinks it splendid of him to do so much for his stepmother.”
Ev’leen Ann responded with a detached air, as though speaking of a matter in China: “Well, it ain’t any more than what he should. She was awful good to him when he was little and his father got so sick. I guess ‘Niram wouldn’t ha’ had much to eat if she hadn’t ha’ gone out sewing to earn it for him and Mr. Purdon.” She added firmly, after a moment’s pause, “No, ma’am, I don’t guess it’s any more than what ‘Niram had ought to do.”
“But it’s very hard on a young man to feel that he’s not able to marry,” I continued. Once in a great while we came so near the matter as this. Ev’leen Ann made no answer. Her face took on a pinched look of sickness. She set her lips as though she would never speak again. But I knew that a criticism of ‘Niram would always rouse her, and said: “And really, I think ‘Niram makes a great mistake to act as he does. A wife would be a help to him. She could take care of Mrs. Purdon and keep the house.”
Ev’leen Ann rose to the bait, speaking quickly with some heat: “I guess ‘Niram knows what’s right for him to do! He can’t afford to marry when he can’t even keep up with the doctor’s bills and all. He keeps the house himself, nights and mornings, and Mrs. Purdon is awful handy about taking care of herself, for all she’s bedridden. That’s her way, you know. She can’t bear to have folks do for her. She’d die before she’d let anybody do anything for her that she could anyways do for herself!”
I sighed acquiescingly. Mrs. Purdon’s fierce independence was a rock on which every attempt at sympathy or help shattered itself to atoms. There seemed to be no other emotion left in her poor old work-worn shell of a body. As I looked at Ev’leen Ann it seemed rather a hateful characteristic, and I remarked, “It seems to me it’s asking a good deal of ‘Niram to spoil his life in order that his stepmother can go on pretending she’s independent.”
Ev’leen Ann explained hastily: “Oh, ‘Niram doesn’t tell her anything about–She doesn’t know he would like to–he don’t want she should be worried–and, anyhow, as ’tis, he can’t earn enough to keep ahead of all the: doctors cost.”
“But the right kind of a wife–a good, competent girl–could help out by earning something, too.”
Ev’leen Ann looked at me forlornly, with no surprise. The idea was evidently not new to her. “Yes, ma’am, he could. But ‘Niram says he ain’t the kind of man to let his wife go out working.” Even while she drooped under the killing verdict of his pride she was loyal to his standards and uttered no complaint. She went on, ‘Niram wants Aunt Em’line to have things the way she wants ’em, as near as he can give ’em to her–and it’s right she should.”
“Aunt Emeline?” I repeated, surprised at her absence of mind. “You mean Mrs. Purdon, don’t you?”
Ev’leen Ann looked vexed at her slip, but she scorned to attempt any concealment. She explained dryly, with the shy, stiff embarrassment our country people have in speaking of private affairs: “Well, she _is_ my Aunt Em’line, Mrs. Purdon is, though I don’t hardly ever call her that. You see, Aunt Emma brought me up, and she and Aunt Em’line don’t have anything to do with each other. They were twins, and when they were girls they got edgeways over ‘Niram’s father, when ‘Niram was a baby and his father was a young widower and come courting. Then Aunt Em’line married him, and Aunt Emma never spoke to her afterward.”
Occasionally, in walking unsuspectingly along one of our leafy lanes, some such fiery geyser of ancient heat uprears itself in a boiling column. I never get used to it, and started back now.
“Why, I never heard of that before, and I’ve known your Aunt Emma and Mrs. Purdon for years!”
“Well, they’re pretty old now,” said Ev’leen Ann listlessly, with the natural indifference of self-centered youth to the bygone tragedies of the preceding generation.
“It happened quite some time ago. And both of them were so touchy, if anybody seemed to speak about it, that folks got in the way of letting it alone. First Aunt Emma wouldn’t speak to her sister because she’d married the man she’d wanted, and then when Aunt Emma made out so well farmin’ and got so well off, why, then Mrs. Purdon wouldn’t try to make it up because she was so poor. That was after Mr. Purdon had had his stroke of paralysis and they’d lost their farm and she’d taken to goin’ out sewin’–not but what she was always perfectly satisfied with her bargain. She always acted as though she’d rather have her husband’s old shirt stuffed with straw than any other man’s whole body. He was a real nice man, I guess, Mr. Purdon was.”
There I had it–the curt, unexpanded chronicle of two passionate lives. And there I had also the key to Mrs. Purdon’s fury of independence. It was the only way in which she could defend her husband against the charge, so damning in her world, of not having provided for his wife. It was the only monument she could rear to her husband’s memory. And her husband had been all there was in life for her!
I stood looking at her young kinswoman’s face, noting the granite under the velvet softness of its youth, and divining the flame underlying the granite. I longed to break through her wall and to put my arms about her, and on the impulse of the moment I cast aside the pretense of casualness in our talk.
“Oh, my dear!” I said. “Are you and ‘Niram always to go on like this? Can’t anybody help you?”
Ev’leen Ann looked at me, her face suddenly old and gray. “No, ma’am; we ain’t going to go on this way. We’ve decided, ‘Niram and I have, that it ain’t no use. We’ve decided that we’d better not go places together any more or see each other. It’s too–If ‘Niram thinks we can’t”–she flamed so that I knew she was burning from head to foot–“it’s better for us not–” She ended in a muffled voice, hiding her face in the crook of her arm.
Ah, yes; now I knew why Ev’leen Ann had shut out the passionate breath of the spring night!
I stood near her, a lump in my throat, but I divined the anguish of her shame at her involuntary self-revelation, and respected it. I dared do no more than to touch her shoulder gently.
The door behind us rattled. Ev’leen Ann sprang up and turned her face toward the wall. Paul’s cousin came in, shuffling a little, blinking his eyes in the light of the unshaded lamp, and looking very cross and tired. He glanced at us without comment as he went over to the sink. “Nobody offered me anything good to drink,” he complained, “so I came in to get some water from the faucet for my nightcap.”
When he had drunk with ostentation from the tin dipper he went to the outside door and flung it open.
“Don’t you people know how hot and smelly it is in here?” he said, with his usual unceremonious abruptness.
The night wind burst in, eddying, and puffed out the lamp with a breath. In an instant the room was filled with coolness and perfumes and the rushing sound of the river. Out of the darkness came Ev’leen Ann’s young voice. “It seems to me,” she said, as though speaking to herself, “that I never heard the Mill Brook sound loud as it has this spring.”
I woke up that night with the start one has at a sudden call. But there had been no call. A profound silence spread itself through the sleeping house. Outdoors the wind had died down. Only the loud brawl of the river broke the stillness under the stars. But all through the silence and this vibrant song there rang a soundless menace which brought me out of bed and to my feet before I was awake. I heard Paul say, “What’s the matter?” in a sleepy voice, and “Nothing,” I answered, reaching for my dressing-gown and slippers. I listened for a moment, my head ringing with all the frightening tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs through the character of our reticent people. There was still no sound. I went along the hall and up the stairs to Ev’leen Ann room, and I opened the door without knocking. The room was empty.
Then how I ran! Calling loudly for Paul to join me, I ran down the two flights of stairs, out of the open door and along the hedged path which leads down to the little river. The starlight was clear. I could see everything as plainly as though in early dawn. I saw the river, and saw–Ev’leen Ann!
There was a dreadful moment of horror, which I shall never remember very clearly, and then Ev’leen Ann and I–both very wet–stood on the bank, shuddering in each other’s arms.
Into our hysteria there dropped, like a pungent caustic the arid voice of Horace, remarking, “Well, are you two people crazy, or are you walking in your sleep?” I could feel Ev’leen Ann stiffen in my arms, and I nearly stepped back from her in astonished admiration as I heard her snatch at the straw thus offered, and still shuddering horribly from head to foot, force herself to say quite connectedly: “Why–yes–of course–I’ve always heard about my grandfather Parkman’s walking in his sleep. Folks _said_ ‘twould come out in the family some time.”
Paul was close behind Horace–I wondered a little at his not being first–and with many astonished and inane ejaculations, such as people always make on startling occasions, we made our way back into the house to hot blankets and toddies. But I slept no more that night. Some time after dawn, however, I did fall into a troubled unconsciousness full of bad dreams, and only awoke when the sun was quite high. I opened my eyes to see Ev’leen Ann about to close the door. “Oh, did I wake you up?” she said. “I didn’t mean to. That little Harris boy is here with a letter for you.”
She spoke with a slightly defiant tone of self-possession. I tried to play up to her interpretation of her role. “The little Harris boy?” I said, sitting up in bed. “What in the world is he bringing me a letter for?” Ev’leen Ann, with her usual clear perception of the superfluous in conversation, vouchsafed no opinion on a matter where she had no information, but went downstairs and brought back the note. It was of four lines, and–surprisingly enough–from old Mrs. Purdon, who asked me abruptly if I would have my husband take me to see her. She specified, and underlined the specification, that I was to come “right off, and in the automobile.” Wondering extremely at this mysterious bidding I sought out Paul, who obediently cranked up our small car and carried me off. There was no sign of Horace about the house, but some distance on the other side of the village we saw his tall, stooping figure swinging along the road. He carried a cane and was characteristically occupied in violently switching off the heads from the wayside weeds as he walked. He refused our offer to take him in, alleging that he was out for exercise and to reduce his flesh–an ancient jibe at his bony frame which made him for an instant show a leathery smile.
There was, of course, no one at Mrs. Purdon’s to let us into the tiny, three-roomed house, since the bedridden invalid spent her days there alone while ‘Niram worked his team on other people’s fields. Not knowing what we might find, Paul stayed outside in the car, while I stepped inside in answer to Mrs. Purdon’s “Come _in_, why don’t you!” which sounded quite as dry as usual. But when I saw her I knew that things were not as usual.
She lay flat on her back, the little emaciated wisp of humanity, hardly raising the piecework quilt enough to make the bed seem occupied, and to account for the thin, worn old face on the pillow. But as I entered the room her eyes seized on mine, and I was aware of nothing but them and some fury of determination behind them. With a fierce heat of impatience at my first natural but quickly repressed exclamation of surprise she explained briefly that she wanted Paul to lift her into the automobile and take her into the next township to the Hulett farm. “I’m so shrunk away to nothin’, I know I can lay on the back seat if I crook myself up,” she said, with a cool accent but a rather shaky voice. Seeming to realize that even her intense desire to strike the matter-of-fact note could not take the place of any and all explanation of her extraordinary request, she added, holding my eyes steady with her own: “Emma Hulett’s my twin sister. I guess it ain’t so queer, my wanting to see her.”
I thought, of course, we
were to be used as the medium for some strange, sudden family reconciliation, and went out to ask Paul if he thought he could carry the old invalid to the car. He replied that, so far as that went, he could carry so thin an old body ten times around the town, but that he refused absolutely to take such a risk without authorization from her doctor. I remembered the burning eyes of resolution I had left inside, and sent him to present his objections to Mrs. Purdon herself.
In a few moments I saw
him emerge from the house with the old woman in his arms. He had evidently taken her up just as she lay. The piecework quilt hung down in long folds, flashing its brilliant reds and greens in the sunshine, which shone so strangely upon the pallid old countenance, facing the open sky for the first time in years.
We drove in silence through the green and gold lyric of the spring day, an elderly company sadly out of key with the triumphant note of eternal youth which rang through all the visible world. Mrs. Purdon looked at nothing, said nothing, seemed to be aware of nothing but the purpose in her heart, whatever that might be. Paul and I, taking a leaf from our neighbors’ book, held, with a courage like theirs, to their excellent habit of saying nothing when there is nothing to say. We arrived at the fine old Hulett place without the exchange of a single word.
“Now carry me in,” said Mrs. Purdon briefly, evidently hoarding her strength.
“Wouldn’t I better go and see if Miss Hulett is at home?” I asked.
Mrs. Purdon shook her head impatiently and turned her compelling eyes on my husband, I went up the path before them to knock at the door, wondering what the people in the house would possibly be thinking of us There was no answer to my knock. “Open the door and go in,” commanded Mrs. Purdon from out her quilt.
There was no one in the spacious, white-paneled hall and no sound in all the big, many-roomed house.
“Emma’s out feeding the hens,” conjectured Mrs. Purdon, not, I fancied, without a faint hint of relief in her voice. “Now carry me up-stairs to the first room on the right.”
Half hidden by his burden, Paul rolled wildly inquiring eyes at me; but he obediently staggered up the broad old staircase, and, waiting till I had opened the first door to the right, stepped into the big bedroom.
“Put me down on the bed, and open them shutters,” Mrs. Purdon commanded.
She still marshaled her forces with no lack of decision, but with a fainting voice which made me run over to her quickly as Paul laid her down on the four-poster. Her eyes were still indomitable, but her mouth hung open slackly and her color was startling. “Oh, Paul, quick! quick! Haven’t you your flask with you?”
Mrs. Purdon informed me in a barely audible whisper, “In the corner cupboard at the head of the stairs,” and I flew down the hallway. I returned with a bottle, evidently of great age. There was only a little brandy in the bottom, but it whipped up a faint color into the sick woman’s lips.
As I was bending over her and Paul was thrusting open the shutters, letting in a flood of sunshine and flecky leaf-shadows, a firm, rapid step came down the hall, and a vigorous woman, with a tanned face and a clean, faded gingham dress, stopped short in the doorway with an expression of stupefaction.
Mrs. Purdon put me on one side, and although she was physically incapable of moving her body by a hair’s breadth, she gave the effect of having risen to meet the newcomer. “Well, Emma, here I am,” she said in a queer voice, with involuntary quavers in it. As she went on she had it more under control, although in the course of her extraordinarily succinct speech it broke and failed her occasionally. When it did, she drew in her breath with an audible, painful effort, struggling forward steadily in what she had to say. “You see, Emma, it’s this way: My ‘Niram and your Ev’leen Ann have been keeping company–ever since they went to school together–you know that’s well as I do, for all we let on we didn’t, only I didn’t know till just now how hard they took it. They can’t get married because ‘Niram can’t keep even, let alone get ahead any, because I cost so much bein’ sick, and the doctor says I may live for years this way, same’s Aunt Hettie did. An’ ‘Niram is thirty-one, an’ Ev’leen Ann is twenty-eight, an’ they’ve had ’bout’s much waitin’ as is good for folks that set such store by each other. I’ve thought of every way out of it–and there ain’t any. The Lord knows I don’t enjoy livin’ any, not so’s to notice the enjoyment, and I’d thought of cutting my throat like Uncle Lish, but that’d make ‘Niram and Ev’leen Ann feel so–to think why I’d done it; they’d never take the comfort they’d ought in bein’ married; so that won’t do. There’s only one thing to do. I guess you’ll have to take care of me till the Lord calls me. Maybe I won’t last so long as the doctor thinks.”
When she finished, I felt my ears ringing in the silence. She had walked to the sacrificial altar with so steady a step, and laid upon it her precious all with so gallant a front of quiet resolution, that for an instant I failed to take in the sublimity of her self-immolation. Mrs. Purdon asking for charity! And asking the one woman who had most reason to refuse it to her.
Paul looked at me miserably, the craven desire to escape a scene written all over him. “Wouldn’t we better be going, Mrs. Purdon?” I said uneasily. I had not ventured to look at the woman in the doorway.
Mrs. Purdon motioned me to remain, with an imperious gesture whose fierceness showed the tumult underlying her brave front. “No; I want you should stay. I want you should hear what I say, so’s you can tell folks, if you have to. Now, look here, Emma,” she went on to the other, still obstinately silent; “you must look at it the way ’tis. We’re neither of us any good to anybody, the way we are–and I’m dreadfully in the way of the only two folks we care a pin about–either of us. You’ve got plenty to do with, and nothing to spend it on. I can’t get myself out of their way by dying without going against what’s Scripture and proper, but–” Her steely calm broke. She burst out in a screaming, hysterical voice: “You’ve just _got_ to, Emma Hulett! You’ve just _got_ to! If you don’t, I won’t never go back to ‘Niram’s house! I’ll lie in the ditch by the roadside till the poor-master comes to git me–and I’ll tell everybody that it’s because my own twin sister, with a house and a farm and money in the bank, turned me out to starve–” A fearful spasm cut her short. She lay twisted and limp, the whites of her eyes showing between the lids.
“Good God, she’s gone!” cried Paul, running to the bed.
I was aware that the woman in the doorway had relaxed her frozen immobility and was between Paul and me as we rubbed the thin, icy hands and forced brandy between the flaccid lips. We all three thought her dead or dying, and labored over her with the frightened thankfulness for one another’s living presence which always marks that dreadful moment. But even as we fanned and rubbed, and cried out to one another to open the windows and to bring water, the blue lips moved to a ghostly whisper: “Em, listen–” The old woman went back to the nickname of their common youth. “Em–your Ev’leen Ann–tried to drown herself–in the Mill Brook last night … That’s what decided me–to–” And then we were plunged into another desperate struggle with Death for the possession of the battered old habitation of the dauntless soul before us.
“Isn’t there any hot water in the house?” cried Paul, and “Yes, yes; a tea-kettle on the stove!” answered the woman who labored with us. Paul, divining that she meant the kitchen, fled down-stairs. I stole a look at Emma Hulett’s face as she bent over the sister she had not seen in thirty years, and I knew that Mrs. Purdon’s battle was won. It even seemed that she had won another skirmish in her never-ending war with death, for a little warmth began to come back into her hands.
When Paul returned with the tea-kettle, and a hot-water bottle had been filled, the owner of the house straightened herself, assumed her rightful position as mistress of the situation, and began to issue commands. “You git right in the automobile, and go git the doctor,” she told Paul. “That’ll be the quickest. She’s better now, and your wife and I can keep her goin’ till the doctor gits here.”
As Paul left the room she snatched something white from a bureau-drawer, stripped the worn, patched old cotton nightgown from the skeleton-like body, and, handling the invalid with a strong, sure touch, slipped on a soft, woolly outing-flannel wrapper with a curious trimming of zigzag braid down the front. Mrs. Purdon opened her eyes very slightly, but shut them again at her sister’s quick command, “You lay still, Em’line, and drink some of this brandy.” She obeyed without comment, but after a pause she opened her eyes again and looked down at the new garment which clad her. She had that moment turned back from the door of death, but her first breath was used to set the scene for a return to a decent decorum.
“You’re still a great hand for rick-rack work, Em, I see,” she murmured in a faint whisper. “Do you remember how surprised Aunt Su was when you made up a pattern?”
“Well, I hadn’t thought of it for quite some time,” returned Miss Hulett, in exactly the same tone of everyday remark. As she spoke she slipped her arm under the other’s head and poked the pillow up to a more comfortable shape. “Now you lay perfectly still,” she commanded in the hectoring tone of the born nurse; “I’m goin’ to run down and make you up a good hot cup of sassafras tea.”
I followed her down into the kitchen and was met by the same refusal to be melodramatic which I had encountered in Ev’leen Ann. I was most anxious to know what version of my extraordinary morning I was to give out to the world, but hung silent, positively abashed by the cool casualness of the other woman as she mixed her brew. Finally, “Shall I tell ‘Niram–What shall I say to Ev’leen Ann? If anybody asks me–” I brought out with clumsy hesitation.
At the realization that her reserve and family pride were wholly at the mercy of any report I might choose to give, even my iron hostess faltered. She stopped short in the middle of the floor, looked at me silently, piteously, and found no word.
I hastened to assure her that I would attempt no hateful picturesqueness of narration. “Suppose I just say that you were rather lonely here, now that Ev’leen Ann has left you, and that you thought it would be nice to have your sister come to stay with you, so that ‘Niram and Ev’leen Ann can be married?”
Emma Hulett breathed again. She walked toward the stairs with the steaming cup in her hand. Over her shoulder she remarked, “Well, yes, ma’am; that would be as good a way to put it as any, I guess.”
‘Niram and Ev’leen Ann were standing up to be married. They looked very stiff and self-conscious, and Ev’leen Ann was very pale. ‘Niram’s big hands, bent in the crook of a man who handles tools, hung down by his new black trousers. Ev’leen Ann’s strong fingers stood out stiffly from one another. They looked hard at the minister and repeated after him in low and meaningless tones the solemn and touching words of the marriage service. Back of them stood the wedding company, in freshly washed and ironed white dresses, new straw hats, and black suits smelling of camphor. In the background, among the other elders, stood Paul and Horace and I–my husband and I hand in hand; Horace twiddling the black ribbon which holds his watch, and looking bored. Through the open windows into the stuffiness of the best room came an echo of the deep organ note of midsummer.
“Whom God hath joined together–” said the minister, and the epitome of humanity which filled the room held its breath–the old with a wonder upon their life-scarred faces, the young half frightened to feel the stir of the great wings soaring so near them.
Then it was all over. ‘Niram and Ev’leen Ann were married, and the rest of us were bustling about to serve the hot biscuit and coffee and chicken salad, and to dish up the ice-cream. Afterward there were no citified refinements of cramming rice down the necks of the departing pair or tying placards to the carriage in which they went away. Some of the men went out to the barn and hitched up for ‘Niram, and we all went down to the gate to see them drive off. They might have been going for one of their Sunday afternoon “buggy-rides” except for the wet eyes of the foolish women and girls who stood waving their hands in answer to the flutter of Ev’leen Ann’s handkerchief as the carriage went down the hill.
We had nothing to say to one another after they left, and began soberly to disperse to our respective vehicles. But as I was getting into our car a new thought suddenly struck me.
“Why,” I cried, “I never thought of it before! However in the world did old Mrs. Purdon know about Ev’leen Ann–that night?”
Horace was pulling at the door, which was badly adjusted and shut hard. He closed it with a vicious slam. “_I_ told her,” he said crossly.
A SAINT’S HOURS
In the still cold before the sun HER LAUDS Her brothers and her sisters small She woke, and washed and dressed each one.
And through the morning hours all, PRIME Singing above her broom, she stood And swept the house from hall to hall.
At noon she ran with tidings good TERCE Across the field and down the lane To share them with the neighborhood.
Four miles she walked and home again, SEXT To sit through half the afternoon And hear a feeble crone complain;
But when she saw the frosty moon NONES And lakes of shadow on the hill Her maiden dreams grew bright as noon.
She threw her pitying apron frill VESPERS Over a little trembling mouse
When the sleek cat yawned on the sill,
In the late hours and drowsy house. COMPLINE At last, too tired, beside her bed She fell asleep … her prayers half said.
IN MEMORY OF L.H.W.
He began life characteristically, depreciated and disparaged. When he was a white, thin, big-headed baby, his mother, stripping the suds from her lean arms, used to inveigh to her neighbors against his existence. “Wa’n’t it just like that _do_-less Lem Warren, not even to leave me foot-free when he died, but a baby coming!”
“_Do_-less,” in the language of our valley, means a combination of shiftless and impractical, particularly to be scorned.
Later, as he began to have some resemblance to the appearance he was to wear throughout life, her resentment at her marriage, which she considered the one mistake of her life, kept pace with his growth. “Look at him!” she cried to anyone who would listen. “Ain’t that Warren, all over? Did any of _my_ folks ever look so like a born fool? Shut your mouth, for the Lord’s sake, Lem, and maybe you won’t scare folks quite so much.”
Lem had a foolish, apologetic grin with which he always used to respond to these personalities, hanging his head to one side and opening and shutting his big hands nervously.
The tumble-down, two-roomed house in which the Warrens lived was across the road from the schoolhouse, and Mrs. Warren’s voice was penetrating. Lem was accepted throughout his school-life at the home estimate. The ugly, overgrown boy, clad in cast-off, misfit clothing was allowed to play with the other children only on condition that he perform all the hard, uninteresting parts of any game. Inside the schoolroom it was the same.
He never learned to shut his mouth, and his speech was always halting and indistinct, so that he not only did not recite well in class, but was never in one of the school entertainments. He chopped the wood and brought it in, swept the floor and made the fires, and then listened in grinning, silent admiration while the others, arrayed in their best, spoke pieces and sang songs.
He was not “smart at his books” and indeed did not learn even to read very fluently. This may have been partly because the only books he ever saw were old school books, the use of which was given him free on account of his mother’s poverty. He was not allowed, of course to take them from the schoolroom. But if he was not good at book-learning he was not without accomplishments. He early grew large for his age, and strong from much chopping of wood and drawing of water for his mother’s washings, and he was the best swimmer of all those who bathed in the cold, swift mountain stream which rushes near the schoolhouse. The chief consequence of this expertness was that in the summer he was forced to teach each succeeding generation of little boys to swim and dive. They tyrannized over him unmercifully–as, in fact, everyone did.
Nothing made his mother more furious than such an exhibition of what she called “Lem’s meachin’ness.” “Ain’t you got no stand-up _in_ ye?” she was wont to exhort him angrily. “If you don’t look out for yourself in this world, you needn’t think anybody else is gunto!”
The instructions in ethics he received at her hands were the only ones he ever knew, for, up to his fourteenth year, he never had clothes respectable enough to wear to church, and after that he had other things to think of. Fourteen years is what we call in our State “over school age.” It was a date to which Mrs. Warren had looked forward with eagerness. After that, the long, unprofitable months of enforced schooling would be over, Lem would be earning steady wages, and she could sit back and “live decent.”
It seemed to her more than she could bear, that, almost upon her son’s birthday, she was stricken down with paralysis. It was the first calamity for which she could not hold her marriage responsible, and her bitterness thereupon extended itself to fate in general. She cannot have been a cheerful house-mate during the next ten years, when Lem was growing silently to manhood.
He was in demand as “help” on the farms about him, on account of his great strength and faithfulness, although the farmers found him exasperatingly slow and, when it was a question of animals, not always sure to obey orders. He could be trusted to be kind to horses, unlike most hired men we get nowadays, but he never learned “how to get the work out of their hide.” It was his way, on a steep hill with a heavy load, to lay down the whip, get out, and put his own powerful shoulder to the wheel. If this failed, he unloaded part of the logs and made two trips of it. The uncertainty of his progress can be imagined. The busy and impatient farmer and sawyer at the opposite ends of his route were driven to exhaust their entire vocabulary of objurgation on him. He was, they used to inform him in conclusion, “the most _do_-less critter the Lord ever made!”
He was better with cows and sheep–“feller-feelin,” his mother said scornfully, watching him feed a sick ewe–and he had here, even in comparison with his fellow-men, a fair degree of success. It was indeed the foundation of what material prosperity he ever enjoyed. A farmer, short of cash, paid him one year with three or four ewes and a ram. He worked for another farmer to pay for the rent of a pasture and had, that first year, as everybody admitted, almighty good luck with them. There were several twin lambs born that spring and everyone lived. Lem used to make frequent night visits during lambing-time to the pasture to make sure that all was well.
I remember as a little girl starting back from some village festivity late one spring night and seeing a lantern twinkle far up on the mountainside. “Lem Warren out fussin’ with his sheep,” some one of my elders remarked. Later, as we were almost home, we saw the lantern on the road ahead of us and stopped the horses, country-fashion, for an interchange of salutation. Looking out from under the shawl in which I was wrapped, I saw his tall figure stooping over something held under his coat. The lantern lighted his weather-beaten face and the expression of his eyes as he looked down at the little white head against his breast.
“You’re foolish, Lem,” said
my uncle. “The ewe won’t own it if you take it away so long the first night.”
“I–I–know,” stuttered Lem, bringing out the words with his usual difficulty; “but it’s mortal cold up on the mounting for little fellers! I’ll bring him up as a cosset.”
The incident reminded me vaguely of something I had read about, and it has remained in my memory.
After we drove on I remember that there were laughing speculations about what language old Ma’am Warren would use at having another cosset brought to the house. Not that it could make any more work for her, since Lem did all that was done about the housekeeping. Chained to her chair by her paralyzed legs, as she was, she could accomplish nothing more than to sit and cavil at the management of the universe all day, until Lem came home, gave her her supper, and put her to bed.
Badly run as she thought the world, for a time it was more favorable to her material prosperity than she had ever known it. Lem’s flock of sheep grew and thrived. For years nobody in our valley has tried to do much with sheep because of dogs, and all Lem’s neighbors told him that some fine morning he would find his flock torn and dismembered. They even pointed out the particular big collie dog who would most likely go “sheep-mad.” Lena’s heavy face drew into anxious, grotesque wrinkles at this kind of talk, and he visited the uplying pasture more and more frequently.
One morning, just before dawn, he came, pale and shamefaced, to the house of the owner of the collie. The family, roused from bed by his knocking, made out from his speech, more incoherent than usual, that he was begging their pardon for having killed their dog. “I saw wh-where he’d bit th-the throats out of two ewes that w-was due to lamb in a few days and I guess I–I–I must ha’ gone kind o’ crazy. They was ones I liked special. I’d brought ’em up myself. They–they was all over blood, you know.”
They peered at him in the gray light, half-afraid of the tall apparition. “How _could_ you kill a great big dog like Jack?” They asked wonderingly.
In answer he held out his great hands and his huge corded arms, red with blood up to the elbow. “I heard him worrying another sheep and I–I just–killed him.”
One of the children now cried out: “But I shut Jackie up in the woodshed last night!”
Someone ran to open the door and the collie bounded out. Lem turned white in thankfulness, “I’m _mortal_ glad,” he stammered. “I felt awful bad–afterward. I knew your young ones thought a sight of Jack.”
“But what dog did you kill?” they asked.
Some of the men went back up on the mountain with him and found, torn in pieces and scattered wide in bloody fragments, as if destroyed by some great revenging beast of prey, the body of a big gray wolf. Once in a while one wanders over the line from the Canada forests and comes down into our woods, following the deer.
The hard-headed farmers who looked on that savage scene drew back from the shambling man beside them in the only impulse of respect they ever felt for him. It was the one act of his life to secure the admiration of his fellow-men; it was an action of which he himself always spoke in horror and shame.
Certainly his marriage aroused no admiration. It was universally regarded as a most addle-pated, imbecile affair from beginning to end. One of the girls who worked at the hotel in the village “got into trouble,” as our vernacular runs, and as she came originally from our district and had gone to school there, everyone knew her and was talking about the scandal. Old Ma’am Warren was of the opinion, spiritedly expressed, that “Lottie was a fool not to make that drummer marry her. She could have, if she’d gone the right way to work.” But the drummer remained persistently absent.
One evening Lem, starting for his sheep-pasture for his last look for the night, heard someone crying down by the river and then, as he paused to listen, heard it no more. He jumped from the bridge without stopping to set down his lantern, knowing well the swiftness of the water, and caught the poor cowardly thing as she came, struggling and gasping, down with the current. He took her home and gave her dry clothes of his mother’s. Then leaving the scared and repentant child by his hearth, he set out on foot for the minister’s house and dragged him back over the rough country roads.
When Ma’am Warren awoke the next morning, Lem did not instantly answer her imperious call, as he had done for so many years. Instead, a red-eyed girl in one of Mrs. Warren’s own nightgowns came to the door and said shrinkingly: “Lem slept in the barn last night. He give his bed to me; but he’ll be in soon. I see him fussin’ around with the cow.”
Ma’am Warren stared, transfixed with a premonition of irremediable evil. “What you doin’ here?” she demanded, her voice devoid of expression through stupefaction.
The girl held down her head. “Lem and I were married last night,” she said.
Then Mrs. Warren found her voice.
When Lem came in it was to a scene of the furious wrangling which was henceforth to fill his house.
“… to saddle himself with such trash as you!” his mother was saying ragingly.
His wife answered in kind, her vanity stung beyond endurance. “Well, you can be sure he’d never have got him a wife any other way! Nobody but a girl hard put to it would take up with a drivel-headed fool like Lem Warren!”
And then the bridegroom appeared at the door and both women turned their attention to him.
When the baby was born, Lottie was very sick. Lem took care of his mother, his wife, and the new baby for weeks and weeks. It was at lambing-time, and his flock suffered from lack of attention, although as much as he dared he left his sick women and tended his ewes. He ran in debt, too, to the grocery-stores, for he could work very little and earned almost nothing. Of course the neighbors helped out, but it was no cheerful morning’s work to care for the vitriolic old woman, and Lottie was too sick for anyone but Lem to handle. We did pass the baby around from house to house during the worst of his siege, to keep her off Lem’s hands; but when Lottie began to get better it was haying-time; everybody was more than busy, and the baby was sent back.
Lottie lingered in semi-invalidism for about a year and then died, Lem holding her hand in his. She tried to say something to him that last night, so the neighbors who were there reported, but her breath failed her and she could only lie staring at him from eyes that seemed already to look from the other side of the grave.
He was heavily in debt when he was thus left with a year-old child not his own, but he gave Lottie a decent funeral and put up over her grave a stone stating that she was “Charlotte, loved wife of Lemuel Warren,” and that she died in the eighteenth year of her life. He used to take the little girl and put flowers on the grave, I remember.
Then he went to work again. His sandy hair was already streaked with gray, though he was but thirty. The doctor said the reason for this phenomenon was the great strain of his year of nursing; and indeed throughout that period of his life no one knew when he slept, if ever. He was always up and dressed when anyone else was, and late at night we could look across and see his light still burning and know that he was rubbing Lottie’s back or feeding little Susie.
All that was changed now, of course. Susie was a strong, healthy child who slept all through the night in her little crib by her stepfather’s corded bed, and in the daytime went everywhere he did. Wherever he “worked out” he used to give her her nap wrapped in a horse blanket on the hay in the barn; and he carried her in a sling of his own contrivance up to his sheep-pasture. Old Ma’am Warren disliked the pretty, laughing child so bitterly that he was loath to leave her at home; but when he was there with her, for the first time he asserted himself against his mother, bidding her, when she began to berate the child’s parentage, to “be still!” with so strange and unexpected an accent of authority that she was quite frightened.
Susie was very fond of her stepfather at first, but when she came of school age, mixed more with the other children, and heard laughing, contemptuous remarks about him, the frank and devouring egotism of childhood made her ashamed of her affection, ashamed of him with his uncouth gait, his mouth always sagging open, his stammering, ignorant speech, which the other children amused themselves by mocking. Though he was prospering again with his sheep, owned the pasture and his house now, and had even built on another room as well as repairing the older part, he spent little on his own adornment. It all went for pretty clothes for Susie, for better food, for books and pictures, for tickets for Susie to go to the circus and the county fair. Susie knew this and loved him by stealth for it, but the intolerably sensitive vanity of her twelve years made her wretched to be seen in public with him.
Divining this, he ceased going with her to school-picnics and Sunday-school parties, where he had been a most useful pack-animal, and, dressing her in her best with his big calloused hands, watched her from the window join a group of the other children. His mother predicted savagely that his “spoilin’ on that bad-blooded young one would bring her to no good end,” and when, at fifteen, Susie began to grow very pretty and saucy and willful and to have beaux come to see her, the old woman exulted openly over Lem’s helpless anxiety.
He was quite gray now, although not yet forty-five, and so stooped that he passed for an old man. He owned a little farm, his flock of sheep was the largest in the township, and Susie was expected to make a good marriage in spite of her antecedents.
And then Frank Gridley’s oldest son, Ed, came back from business college with store clothes and city hats and polished tan shoes, and began idling about, calling on the girls. From the first, he and Susie ran together like two drops of water. Bronson Perkins, a cousin of mine, a big, silent, ruminative lad who had long hung about Susie, stood no show at all. One night in county-fair week, Susie, who had gone to the fair with a crowd of girl friends, was not at home at ten o’clock. Lem, sitting in his doorway and watching the clock, heard the approach of the laughing, singing straw-ride in which she had gone, with a long breath of relief; but the big hay-wagon did not stop at his gate.
He called after it in a harsh voice and was told that “Ed Gridley and she went off to the hotel to get supper. He said he’d bring her home later.”
Lem went out to the barn, hitched up the faster of his two heavy plow-horses and drove from his house to Woodville, eight miles and up-hill, in forty-five minutes. When he went into the hotel, the clerk told him that the two he sought had had supper served in a private room. Lem ascertained which room and broke the door in with one heave of his shoulders. Susie sprang up from the disordered supper-table and ran to him like a frightened child, clinging to him desperately and crying out that Ed scared her so!
“It’s all right now, Susie,” he said gently, not looking at the man. “Poppa’s come to take you home.”
The man felt his dignity wounded. He began to protest boisterously and to declare that he was ready to marry the girl–“_now_, this instant, if you choose!”
Lem put one arm about Susie. “I didn’t come to make you marry her. I come to keep you from doin’ it,” he said, speaking clearly for once in his life. “Susie shan’t marry a hound that’d do this.” And as the other advanced threateningly on him, he struck him a great blow across the mouth that sent him unconscious to the ground.
Then Lem went out, paid for the broken lock, and drove home with Susie behind the foundered plow-horse.
The next spring her engagement to Bronson Perkins was announced, though everybody said they didn’t see what use it was for folks to get engaged that couldn’t ever get married. Mr. Perkins, Bronson’s father, was daft, not enough to send him to the asylum, but so that he had to be watched all the time to keep him from doing himself a hurt. He had a horrid way, I remember, of lighting matches and holding them up to his bared arm until the smell of burning flesh went sickeningly through the house and sent someone in a rush to him. Of course it was out of the question to bring a young bride to such a home. Apparently there were years of waiting before them, and Susie was made of no stuff to endure a long engagement.
As a matter of fact, they were married that fall, as soon as Susie could get her things ready. Lem took old Mr. Perkins into the room Susie left vacant. “‘Twon’t be much more trouble taking care of two old people than one,” he explained briefly.
Ma’am Warren’s comments on this action have been embalmed forever in the delighted memories of our people. We have a taste for picturesque and forceful speech.
From that time we always saw the lunatic and the bent shepherd together. The older man grew quieter under Lem’s care than he had been for years, and if he felt one of his insane impulses overtaking him, ran totteringly to grasp his protector’s arm until, quaking and shivering, he was himself again. Lem used to take him up to the sheep-pasture for the day sometimes. He liked it up there himself, he said, and maybe ‘twould be good for Uncle Hi. He often reported with pride that the old man talked as sensible as anybody, “get him off where it’s quiet.” Indeed, when Mr. Perkins died, six years later, we had forgotten that he was anything but a little queer, and he had known many happy, lucid hours with his grandchildren.
Susie and Bronson had two boys–sturdy, hearty children, in whom Lem took the deepest, shyest pride. He loved to take them off into the woods with him and exulted in their quick intelligence and strong little bodies. Susie got into the way of letting him take a good deal of the care of them.
It was Lem who first took alarm about the fall that little Frank had, down the cellar stairs. He hurt his spine somehow–our local doctor could not tell exactly how–and as the injury only made him limp a little, nobody thought much about it, until he began to have difficulty in walking. Then Lem sent for a doctor from Rutland who, as soon as he examined the child, stuck out his lower lip and rubbed his chin ominously. He pronounced the trouble something with a long name which none of us had ever heard, and said that Frank would be a hopeless cripple if it, were not cured soon. There was, he said, a celebrated doctor from Europe now traveling in this country who had a wonderful new treatment for this condition. But under the circumstances–he looked about the plain farm sitting-room–he supposed that was out of the question.
“What did the doctor from foreign parts ask?” queried Bronson, and, being informed of some of the customary prices for major operations, fell back hopeless. Susie, her pretty, childish face drawn and blanched into a wan beauty, put her arms about her sick little son and looked at her stepfather. He had never failed her.
He did not fail her now. He sold the land he had accumulated field by field; he sold the great flock of sheep, every one of which he could call by name; he mortgaged the house over the protesting head of his now bedridden mother; he sold the horse and cow, and the very sticks of furniture from the room where Susie had grown up and where the crazy grandfather of Susie’s children had known a peaceful old age and death. Little Frank was taken to New York to the hospital to have the great surgeon operate on him–he is there yet, almost completely recovered and nearly ready to come home.
Back in Hillsboro, Lem now began life all over again, hiring out humbly to his neighbors and only stipulating that he should have enough free time to take care of his mother. Three weeks ago she had her last stroke of paralysis and, after lying speechless for a few days, passed away, grim to the last, by the expression in her fierce old eyes.
The day after her funeral Lem did not come to work as he was expected. We went over to his house and found, to our consternation, that he was not out of bed.
“Be ye sick, Lem?” asked my uncle.
He looked at us over the bedclothes with his old foolish, apologetic smile. “Kind o’ lazy, I guess,” he whispered, closing his eyes.
The doctor was put out by the irregularity of the case.
“I can’t make out anything _really_ the trouble!” he said. “Only the wheels don’t go round as fast as they ought. Call it failing heart action if you want a label.”
The wheels ran more and more slowly until it was apparent to all of us that before long they would stop altogether. Susie and Bronson were in New York with little Frank, so that Lem’s care during his last days devolved on the haphazard services of the neighbors. He was out of his head most of the time, though never violent, and all through the long nights lay flat on his back, looking at the ceiling with bright, blank eyes, driving his ox-team, skidding logs, plowing in stony ground and remembering to favor the off-horse whose wind wasn’t good, planting, hoeing, tending his sheep, and teaching obstinate lambs to drink. He used quaint, coaxing names for these, such as a mother uses for her baby. He was up in the mountain-pasture a good deal, we gathered, and at night, from his constant mention of how bright the stars shone. And sometimes, when he was in evident pain, his delusion took the form that Susie, or the little boys, had gone up with him, and got lost in the woods.
I was on duty the night he died. We thought a change was near, because he had lain silent all day, and we hoped he would come to himself when he awoke from this stupor. Near midnight he began to talk again, and I could not make out at first whether he was still wandering or not. “Hold on hard, Uncle Hi,” I heard him whisper.
A spoon fell out of my hand and clattered against a plate. He gave a great start and tried to sit up. “Yes, mother–coming!” he called hoarsely, and then looked at me with his own eyes. “I must ha’ forgot about mother’s bein’ gone,” he apologized sheepishly.
I took advantage of this lucid interval to try to give him some medicine the doctor had left. “Take a swallow of this,” I said, holding the glass to his lips.
“What’s it for?” he asked.
“It’s a heart stimulant,” I explained. “The doctor said if we could get you through to-night you have a good chance.”
His face drew together in grotesque lines of anxiety. “Little Frank worse?”
“Oh, no, he’s doing finely.”
“Susie all right?”
“Why, yes,” I said wonderingly.
“Nothing the matter with her other boy?”
“Why, no, no,” I told him. “Everybody’s all right Here, just take this down.”
He turned away his head on the pillow and murmured something I did not catch. When I asked him what he said, he smiled feebly as in deprecation of his well-known ridiculous ways. “I’m just as much obliged to you,” he said, “but if everybody’s all right, I guess I won’t have any medicine.” He looked at me earnestly. “I’m–I’m real tired,” he said.
It came out in one great breath–apparently his last, for he did not move after that, and his ugly, slack-mouthed face was at once quite still. Its expression made me think of the time I had seen it as a child, by lantern-light, as he looked down at the new-born lamb on his breast.
IN NEW NEW ENGLAND
I.
This is a true story, for I have heard it ever so many times from my grandmother. She heard it from her grandmother, who told it about her own mother; and it began and ended right here in our village of Hillsboro, Vermont, in 1762.
Probably you think at once of the particular New England old town you know, and imagine Hillsboro of that date as an elm-shaded, well-kept street, with big, white, green-shuttered houses, full of shining mahogany furniture and quaint old silver. But my grandmother gives an entirely different picture of old times in this corner of Vermont. Conditions here, at that time, were more as they had been in Connecticut and Massachusetts a hundred and forty years before. Indeed, the Pilgrim Fathers endured no more hardships as pioneers in a wild, new country than did the first Vermonters.
Hillsboro had been settled only about fifteen years before this story begins, and the people had had to make for themselves whatever they possessed, since there was no way to reach our dark, narrow valley except by horseback over the ridge of the Green Mountains. There were no fine houses, because there was no sawmill. There were little, low log cabins of two rooms each, and the furniture, such as it was, was rough-hewn out of native woods. Our great-grandfathers were too busy clearing the forest and planting their crops to spend much time designing or polishing table-legs.
And the number of things they did not have! No stoves, no matches, no books, no lamps, and very few candles; no doctors, no schools, no clocks, and so nearly no money that what they had is not worth mentioning But the fact that there were no schools did not mean that life was one long vacation for the children.
“No, indeedy!” as grandmother always says emphatically.
In the urgent bustle of pioneer life, the children could not be spared from work for long school-hours. They picked up what they could from the elders of their families, and worked, as grandmother puts it, “as tight as they could leg it” from morning to night. Everybody else worked that same way, so the children did not know that they were being abused. Indeed, grandmother seemed to doubt if they were.
At any rate, they all ran about as fast as ants in an ant-hill, and the busiest of all was sixteen-year-old Hannah Sherwin. Since she was my grandmother’s grand mother’s mother, at last the story is really begun.
Hannah had been a baby of eighteen months when the Sherwins came over the mountains from the old home in Connecticut, so she knew nothing about any other way of living than what she saw in rough little Hillsboro. But her elder sister, Ann Mary, who was a tall girl of nineteen, remembered–or thought she remembered–big houses that were made all over of sawn planks, and chairs that were so shiny you could see your face in them or else stuffed and cushioned in brocade as soft–“as soft as a feather tick!” she told Hannah.
Her listener, having no idea of what brocade might be, and taking the feather-tick simile literally, must have imagined a very queer kind of chair.
Hannah was a short, fair, rosy-cheeked child, who passed for good-looking enough; but Ann Mary was slender and dark and a real beauty, although Hillsboro people did not realize it. She looked fragile, as if she could not do much hard work and that is always a serious blemish in feminine beauty to the eyes of pioneers.
So far in her life she had not been forced to do any hard work, because Hannah had done it all for her. Their mother had died when they were both little girls, and their father was so busy outdoors, every minute he was awake, that, for all his affection for them, he did not know or care which of his daughters cooked and washed, and swept and spun, so long as these things were done. And Hannah delighted to do them, because she adored Ann Mary, and could not bear to have her sister troubled with any of the coarse tasks which made up her own happy, busy day.
Now, all that grandmother ever tells me about the beginning of this story is that when the lovely Ann Mary was nineteen years old she “fell into a decline,” as they called it. She grew pale and thin, never smiled, could not eat or sleep, and lay listlessly on the bed all day, looking sadly at Hannah as she bustled about.