Some one has said that anniversaries are days to make other people
happy in, but sometimes when they come they seem to be full of shadows,
and the power of giving joy to others, that inalienable right which
ought to lighten the saddest heart, the most indifferent sympathy,
sometimes even this seems to be withdrawn.
So poor old Mary Ann Robb sat at her window on the afternoon before
Thanksgiving and felt herself poor and sorrowful indeed. Across the
frozen road she looked eastward over a great stretch of cold meadow
land, brown and wind-swept and crossed by icy ditches. It seemed to
her as if before this, in all the troubles that she had known and
carried, there had always been some hope to hold: as if she had never
looked poverty full in the face and seen its cold and pitiless look
before. She looked anxiously down the road, with a horrible shrinking
and dread at the thought of being asked, out of pity, to join in some
Thanksgiving feast, but there was nobody coming with gifts in hand.
Once she had been full of love for such days, whether at home or
abroad, but something chilled her very heart now.
Her nearest neighbor had been foremost of those who wished her to go to
the town farm, and he had said more than once that it was the only
sensible thing. But John Mander was waiting impatiently to get her
tiny farm into his own hands; he had advanced some money upon it in her
extremity, and pretended that there was still a debt, after he cleared
her wood lot to pay himself back. He would plough over the graves in
the field corner and fell the great elms, and waited now like a spider
for his poor prey. He often reproached her for being too generous to
worthless people in the past and coming to be a charge to others now.
Oh, if she could only die in her own house and not suffer the pain of
homelessness and dependence!
It was just at sunset, and as she looked out hopelessly across the gray
fields, there was a sudden gleam of light far away on the low hills
beyond; the clouds opened in the west and let the sunshine through.
One lovely gleam shot swift as an arrow and brightened a far cold
hillside where it fell, and at the same moment a sudden gleam of hope
brightened the winter landscape of her heart.
"There was Johnny Harris," said Mary Ann Robb softly. "He was a
soldier's son, left an orphan and distressed. Old John Mander scolded,
but I could n't see the poor boy in want. I kept him that year after
he got hurt, spite o' what anybody said, an' he helped me what little
he could. He said I was the only mother he 'd ever had. 'I 'm goin'
out West, Mother Robb,' says he. 'I sha'n't come back till I get
rich,' an' then he 'd look at me an' laugh, so pleasant and boyish. He
wa'n't one that liked to write. I don't think he was doin' very well
when I heard,--there, it's most four years ago now. I always thought
if he got sick or anything, I should have a good home for him to come
to. There 's poor Ezra Blake, the deaf one, too,--he won't have any
place to welcome him."
The light faded out of doors, and again Mrs. Robb's troubles stood
before her. Yet it was not so dark as it had been in her sad heart.
She still sat by the window, hoping now, in spite of herself, instead
of fearing; and a curious feeling of nearness and expectancy made her
feel not so much light-hearted as light-headed.
"I feel just as if somethin' was goin' to happen," she said. "Poor
Johnny Harris, perhaps he's thinkin' o' me, if he's alive."
It was dark now out of doors, and there were tiny clicks against the
window. It was beginning to snow, and the great elms creaked in the
rising wind overhead.