Saturday came and went without the party. Once, and sometimes twice a
day the doctor’s car turned into the broad pebbled driveway and the
children went around with subdued voices and anxious faces. Even Lydia,
down in her kitchen domain, looked foreboding, and told Rebecca that she
had dreamed three times of three blackbirds perching on the chimneys,
which was a sure sign of death, anyone could tell you, in her own
country.
“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” Becky laughed back. “If I were you,
Lydia, I’d take something for my liver and go to bed a little earlier at
night.”
All the same, her own face looked worried when she entered the sick room
and looked down at Mr. Craig’s face on the pillows.
“It seems ridiculous for me to be lying here, Becky,” he would say to
her, with the whimsical boyish smile she loved. “Why, there isn’t
anything the matter with me only I’m tired out. Machinery’s out of whack
is all.”
“No, nothing special only that you can’t eat or walk or sit up without
keeling over.” Her keen hazel eyes were amused as she looked at him.
“You know, Tom Craig, if it wasn’t for Margie, the girls, and Tommy, I’d
take you straight home with me.”
He looked from her to the window. Jean had just brought in a bunch of
daffodils in a slender glass vase and had set them in the sunlight.
“You’re not going soon, are you, Becky?”
Rebecca seated herself in the chair beside his bed. As she would have
put it, there was a time for all things, and this seemed an opportune
one for her to get something off her mind.
“I’ll have to pretty soon. It looks like an early spring, Tom, and
there’s a heap of work waiting for me up there. Of course Matt knows how
things go as well as I do, but I’ve been away over a month now, and I
like to have the oversight of things. Men are only boys, after all, and
you can’t expect too much from them. I want to get the barn shingled,
and some more hen runs set out before the chicks begin to hatch, and all
my berry patches need clearing out. You know that mass of blackberries
along the stone wall in the clover patch below the lane—what’s the
matter, Tom?” She glanced at him in alarm.
He had closed his eyes as if in pain, and his hand closed suddenly over
her own as it lay on the blanket.
“It makes me homesick to hear you talk, Becky.”
Their glances met in a long look of sympathetic remembrance of the old
days at Maple Grove.
“If it were not for the children,” he went on slowly. “They are all at
an age now when they need the advantages of being near the city.”
“Well, I’m not so sure of that,” answered Becky dubiously. “I suppose
you feel that you can do more for them down here, Tom, and it is a
beautiful place to live, but you did pretty well yourself up at the old
Green District, didn’t you?”
He smiled and nodded his head.
“I wonder what Margie would say to the Green District schoolhouse?” he
asked. A vision of it arose out of the memories of the past, the little
red schoolhouse that stood at the crossroads, with rocky pastures rising
high behind it, and the long white dusty road curving before it. He had
been just a country boy, born and bred within a few miles of Maple Grove
at the old Craig homestead. He knew every cow path through the woods
around Elmhurst, every big chestnut and hickory tree for five miles
around, every fork and bend in the course of the wild little river that
cut through the valley meadows. Somehow, in these days of weakness and
fear that he was losing his grip on life, there had grown a great
yearning to be home again, to find himself back in the shelter of the
protecting hills. They had always been the hills of rest to him as a
boy. He had often turned his thoughts to them longingly while he sloshed
through jungles in the Pacific, but now they beckoned to him even more
urgently to come back to peace and health.
“She isn’t country-bred, is she, Tom?”
The question called him to reality from his dreams. “No,” he answered
gently, “no, Margie’s from California. I believe her people went out
originally from New York State, but she herself was born in San Diego.
Later, she lived on her father’s ranch for a while in the Coronado
Valley, but she was educated in the city. She doesn’t know anything
about farm life as we do.”
Rebecca looked nonplussed. California might just as well be Borneo, so
far as her knowledge of it was concerned. It did seem rather too bad
that Margie had come from such far-off stock, but still, she thought, a
great deal could be excused in her on account of it, since it wasn’t
given to everybody to be born in New England.
“Would she mind it just for a summer, do you suppose?”
“It would have to be for a longer time than one summer, Becky.”
Something in his voice made her suspicious. Mrs. Craig had walked out to
meet the girls on their way home from the movies. A lone adventurous fly
crept up the window curtain and Rebecca promptly slapped him with a
ready hand.
“Pesky thing, doesn’t it know it’s not time for them to start pestering
us,” she said. “What did you say, Tom?”
“I said that it would have to be for a longer time than just one summer.
Things have not gone well with me for the past year. I haven’t got the
guts to break the news to Margie now.”
“You should have,” said Becky promptly. “It isn’t fair to her not to
share your sorrows with her as well as your joys.”
“Margie had enough to worry about in the years I was away when she was
managing alone to keep the family together. I don’t want to have her
worrying about money now.”
“Just like a man. So now you’ve backed yourself up against a stone wall
and can’t see a way out. Can I help you? How much money do you need to
tide you over?”
He laughed unsteadily.
“Dear old Becky. You’d give anyone your left ear if they needed it,
wouldn’t you? You don’t understand how we live. It takes nearly every
cent I get from the government to cover our current expenses. We’ve
already made a large hole in our savings in order to get medicine and
things. I’m wondering what we are going to do, and I dread even
mentioning it to Margie.”
“Then let me do it,” said Miss Craig promptly. “I’d love to. Better yet,
talk it over with the whole family if you’re strong enough. How long can
you hold out here?”
“I’m not certain.” He looked weary and harassed. “We only rent the place
and the lease is up the first of May.”
“I’ll wager you can rent a good farm up home for what you pay here,
Tom—house, barns, pasture, hay fields, wood lots and all,” said Rebecca
thoughtfully. “It’s a nice place here, but the cost of living is so
high.” She looked out at the clean park-like territory around the large
modern house. Winding drives swept in and out. Each residence stood in
its own spacious grounds. There was an artificial pond where the
children skated in winter, and the country club crowned the hill with a
golf course sloping away to the shore on the north.
Down in the ravine stood the gray stone railroad station matching the
real estate office over the way, and farther along were the village
stores, the new high school of brick and concrete, and the two churches.
Back and forth along the smooth highway slipped a never-ending line of
cars and trucks coming and going like ants over an ant hill.
Becky turned her head toward the bed once more and asked, “Would you
rather stay here than go up home with me?”
“It isn’t what I’d rather do. It’s what we may have to do unless I gain
my old strength.”
“You’ll never get a bit better lying there worrying over unpaid bills
and new ones stacking up. I’m going to talk to Margie.”
He shook his head with a little smile of doubt.
“But it would never be fair to take them away from this sort of thing,
Becky. You don’t understand. Their friends are all here. And Jean has
been taking up a course in applied design and ceramics, and Doris has
her music. Kit’s deep in schoolwork and belongs to about five clubs
outside of that. Even Tommy has a swimming class keeping him busy after
school two days a week. Margie’s on more committees and things than I
can count, and she believes we owe it to the children to give them the
best social environment that we can. Perhaps we can get along in some
way. There’s a little left at the bank.”
“How much?” demanded Rebecca uncompromisingly. “I mean, after you’ve
paid up everything. I’ll bet there isn’t five thousand left.”
“Five thousand! I doubt much whether there is one thousand. Don’t tell
Margie that. I still have a few securities I might sell and realize
something on.”
“And you think that you’ve been a good husband to her. Land alive, what
are men made of! Here she stands a chance of being left alone in the
world with four children to bring up and you’ve never bothered her about
your business. The sooner you get to it the better, I think.” Rebecca
stood up and adjusted her glasses resolutely. She had seen what he could
not, Margie coming leisurely up the walk, a loose cluster of pussy
willows in her arms, and the girls following, all except Kit. “There
they come now. I won’t say anything till you do, Tom.”
Just then Kit’s voice sounded at the door. Her short curls were rumpled
and unbrushed, her eyes wide with excitement, as she hugged a heating
pad to her face.
“I’ve heard almost every word you said,” she burst out. “I had an
earache and stayed home this afternoon, and I’ve been asleep in there on
the couch. Please don’t worry, Dad. I think it would be glorious for us
all to go up into the country.”
She stopped as the front door banged and Tommy came crashing upstairs
completely out of breath from a strenuous game of baseball.
“Well, child, keep your mouth shut till we know where we’re at,” warned
Becky quickly. “Go back and lie down. Here they come.”
But Kit stood her ground, and Jean and Doris seemed to catch from her
the fact that something was up as they came in behind their mother.
“It was a lovely walk,” said Mrs. Craig, removing her gloves as she sat
down beside the bed and smiled at the patient. “We went past the
Dunderdale place, Tom. It is simply lovely there. I never saw so many
shrubs and trees and such beautiful landscaping. It made me think of the
homes out in California. You’d enjoy the garden so this summer, and
there is a screened-in porch across the back of the house. The garage is
small, but it will do if we don’t get a new car this year.”
Right here Rebecca sniffed, a real, unmistakable sniff. She was a
believer in quick action. If you had anything to do, the quicker you did
it and got over it the better, she always said. So now she raised her
head as they looked at her, and set them all back on their heels.
“You won’t get a new car this year, Margie, my dear, and you’re not
going to move to any expensive house, either. I’m going to take the
whole lot of you to Elmhurst, and see if Tom can’t get his health back
up in that peaceful countryside.”