as she had done so many times while she and her husband sat there
together. The settle could be taken to the attic. She had not the heart
to carry out one secret resolve indulged in moments of impatient
bitterness,--to split it up for firewood. But it could at least be
exiled. She would have a good cook-stove, and the great fireplace should
be walled up. The tin kitchen, sitting now beside the hearth in shining
quaintness, should also go into the attic. The old clock--But at that
instant the clash of bells shivered the frosty air, and Amelia threw her
vain imaginings aside like a garment, and sprang to her feet. She
clasped her hands in a spontaneous gesture of rapt attention; and when
the sound paused at her gate, with one or two sweet, lingering clingles,
"I knew it!" she said aloud. Yet she did not go to the window to look
into the moonlit night. Standing there in the middle of the room, she
awaited the knock which was not long in coming. It was imperative,
insistent. Amelia, who had a spirit responsive to the dramatic
exigencies of life, felt a little flush spring into her face, so hot
that, on the way to the door, she involuntarily put her hand to her
cheek and held it there. The door came open grumblingly. It sagged upon
the hinges, but, well-used to its vagaries, she overcame it with a
regardless haste.
"Come in," she said, at once, to the man on the step. "It's cold. Oh,
come in!"
He stepped inside the entry, removing his fur cap, and disclosing a
youthful face charged with that radiance which made him, at thirty-five,
almost the counterpart of his former self. It may have come only from
the combination of curly brown hair, blue eyes, and an aspiring lift of
the chin, but it always seemed to mean a great deal more. In the
kitchen, he threw off his heavy coat, while Amelia, bright-eyed and
breathing quickly, stood by, quite silent. Then he looked at her.
"You expected me, didn't you?" he asked.
A warmer color surged into her cheeks. "I didn't know," she said
perversely.
"I guess you did. It's one day over a year. You knew I'd wait a year."
"It ain't a year over the services," said Amelia, trying to keep the
note of vital expectancy out of her voice. "It won't be that till
Friday."
"Well, Saturday I'll come again." He went over to the fire and stretched
out his hands to the blaze. "Come here," he said imperatively, "while I
talk to you."
Amelia stepped forward obediently, like a good little child. The old
fascination was still as dominant as at its birth, sixteen years ago.
She realized, with a strong, splendid sense of the eternity of things,
that always, even while it would have been treason to recognize it, she
had known how ready it was to rise and live again. All through her
married years, she had sternly drugged it and kept it sleeping. Now it
had a right to breathe, and she gloried in it.
"I said to myself I wouldn't come to-day," went on Laurie, without
looking at her. A new and excited note had come into his voice,
responsive to her own. He gazed down at the fire, musing the while he
spoke. "Then I found I couldn't help it. That's why I'm so late. I
stayed in the shop till seven, and some fellows come in and wanted me to
play. I took up the fiddle, and begun. But I hadn't more'n drew a note
before I laid it down and put for the door. 'Dick, you keep shop,' says
I. And I harnessed up, and drove like the devil."
Amelia felt warm with life and hope; she was taking up her youth just
where the story ended.
"You ain't stopped swearin' yet!" she remarked, with a little excited
laugh. Then, from an undercurrent of exhilaration, it occurred to her
that she had never laughed so in all these years.
"Well," said Laurie abruptly, turning upon her, "how am I goin' to start
out? Shall we hark back to old scores? I know what come between us. So
do you. Have we got to talk it out, or can we begin now?"
"Begin now," replied Amelia faintly. Her breath choked her. He stretched
out his arms to her in sudden passion. His hands touched her sleeves
and, with an answering rapidity of motion, she drew back. She shrank
within herself, and her face gathered a look of fright. "No! no! no!"
she cried strenuously.
His arms fell at his sides, and he looked at her in amazement.
"What's the matter?" he demanded.
Amelia had retreated, until she stood now with one hand on the table.
She could not look at him, and when she answered, her voice shook.
"There's nothin' the matter," she answered. "Only you mustn't--yet."
A shade of relief passed over his face, and he smiled.
"There, there!" he said, "never you mind. I understand. But if I come
over the last of the week, I guess it will be different. Won't it be
different, Milly?"
"Yes," she owned, with a little sob in her throat, "it will be
different."
Thrown out of his niche of easy friendliness with circumstance, he stood
there in irritated consciousness that here was some subtile barrier
which he had not foreseen. Ever since John Porter's death, there had
been strengthening in him a joyous sense that Milly's life and his own
must have been running parallel all this time, and that it needed only a
little widening of channels to make them join. His was no crass
certainty of finding her ready to drop into his hand; it was rather a
childlike, warm-hearted faith in the permanence of her affection for
him, and perhaps, too, a shrewd estimate of his own lingering youth
compared with John Porter's furrowed face and his fifty-five years. But
now, with this new whiffling of the wind, he could only stand rebuffed
and recognize his own perplexity.
"You do care, don't you, Milly?" he asked, with a boy's frank ardor.
"You want me to come again?"
All her own delight in youth and the warm naturalness of life had rushed
back upon her.
"Yes," she answered eagerly. "I'll tell you the truth. I always did tell
you the truth. I do want you to come."
"But you don't want me to-night!" He lifted his brows, pursing his lips
whimsically; and Amelia laughed.
"No," said she, with a little defiant movement of her own crisp head, "I
don't know as I do want you to-night!"
Laurie shook himself into his coat. "Well," he said, on his way to the
door, "I'll be round Saturday, whether or no. And Milly," he added
significantly, his hand on the latch, "you've got to like me then!"
Amelia laughed. "I guess there won't be no trouble!" she called after
him daringly.
She stood there in the biting wind, while he uncovered the horse and
drove away. Then she went shaking back to her fire; but it was not
altogether from cold. The sense of the consistency of love and youth,
the fine justice with which nature was paying an old debt, had raised
her to a stature above her own. She stood there under the mantel, and
held by it while she trembled. For the first time, her husband had gone
utterly out of her life. It was as though he had not been.
"Saturday!" she said to herself. "Saturday! Three days till then!"
Next morning, the spring asserted itself,--there came a whiff of wind
from the south and a feeling of thaw. The sled-runners began to cut
through to the frozen ground, and about the tree-trunks, where thin
crusts of ice were sparkling, came a faint musical sound of trickling
drops. The sun was regnant, and little brown birds flew cheerily over
the snow and talked of nests.
Amelia finished her housework by nine o'clock, and then sat down in her
low rocker by the south window, sewing in thrifty haste. The sun fell
hotly through the panes, and when she looked up, the glare met her eyes.
She seemed to be sitting in a golden shower, and she liked it. No
sunlight ever made her blink, or screw her face into wrinkles. She
throve in it like a rose-tree. At ten o'clock, one of the slow-moving
sleds, out that day in premonition of a "spell o' weather," swung
laboriously into her yard and ground its way up to the side-door. The
sled was empty, save for a rocking-chair where sat an enormous woman
enveloped in shawls, her broad face surrounded by a pumpkin hood. Her
dark brown front came low over her forehead, and she wore spectacles
with wide bows, which gave her an added expression of benevolence. She
waved a mittened hand to Amelia when their eyes met, and her heavy face
broke up into smiles.
"Here I be!" she called in a thick, gurgling voice, as Amelia hastened
out, her apron thrown over her head. "Didn't expect me, did ye? Nobody
looks for an old rheumatic creatur'. She's more out o' the runnin' 'n a
last year's bird's-nest."
"Why, aunt Ann!" cried Amelia, in unmistakable joy. "I'm tickled to
death to see you. Here, Amos, I'll help get her out."
The driver, a short, thick-set man of neutral, ashy tints and a
sprinkling of hair and beard, trudged round the oxen and drew the
rocking-chair forward without a word. He never once looked in Amelia's
direction, and she seemed not to expect it; but he had scarcely laid
hold of the chair when aunt Ann broke forth:--
"Now, Amos, ain't you goin' to take no notice of 'Melia, no more'n if
she wa'n't here? She ain't a bump on a log, nor you a born fool."
Amos at once relinquished his sway over the chair, and stood looking
abstractedly at the oxen, who, with their heads low, had already fallen
into that species of day-dream whereby they compensate themselves for
human tyranny. They were waiting for Amos, and Amos, in obedience to
some inward resolve, waited for commotion to cease.
"If ever I was ashamed, I be now!" continued aunt Ann, still with an
expression of settled good-nature, and in a voice all jollity though
raised conscientiously to a scolding pitch. "To think I should bring
such a creatur' into the world, an' set by to see him treat his own
relations like the dirt under his feet!"
Amelia laughed. She was exhilarated by the prospect of company, and this
domestic whirlpool had amused her from of old.
"Law, aunt Ann," she said, "you let Amos alone. He and I are old
cronies. We understand one another. Here, Amos, catch hold! We shall all
get our deaths out here, if we don't do nothin' but stand still and
squabble."
The immovable Amos had only been awaiting his cue. He lifted the laden
chair with perfect ease to one of the piazza steps, and then to another;
when it had reached the topmost level, he dragged it over the sill into
the kitchen, and, leaving his mother sitting in colossal triumph by the
fire, turned about and took his silent way to the outer world.
"Amos," called aunt Ann, "do you mean to say you're goin' to walk out o'
this house without speakin' a civil word to anybody? Do you mean to say
that?"
"I don't mean to say nothin'," confided Amos to his worsted muffler, as
he took up his goad, and began backing the oxen round.
Undisturbed and not at all daunted by a reply for which she had not even
listened, aunt Ann raised her voice in cheerful response: "Well, you be
along 'tween three an' four, an' you'll find me ready."
"Mercy, aunt Ann!" said Amelia, beginning to unwind the visitor's wraps,
"what makes you keep houndin' Amos that way? If he hasn't spoke for
thirty-five years, it ain't likely he's goin' to begin now."
Aunt Ann was looking about her with an expression of beaming delight in
unfamiliar surroundings. She laughed a rich, unctuous laugh, and
stretched her hands to the blaze.
"Law," she said contentedly, "of course it ain't goin' to do no good.
Who ever thought 't would? But I've been at that boy all these years to
make him like other folks, an' I ain't goin' to stop now. He never shall
say his own mother didn't know her duty towards him. Well, 'Melia, you
_air_ kind o' snug here, arter all! Here, you hand me my bag, an' I'll
knit a stitch. I ain't a mite cold."
Amelia was bustling about the fire, her mind full of the possibilities
of a company dinner.
"How's your limbs?" she asked, while aunt Ann drew out a long stocking,
and began to knit with an amazing rapidity of which her fat fingers gave
no promise.
"Well, I ain't allowed to forgit 'em very often," she replied
comfortably. "Rheumatiz is my cross, an' I've got to bear it. Sometimes
I wish 't had gone into my hands ruther 'n my feet, an' I could ha' got
round. But there! if 't ain't one thing, it's another. Mis' Eben Smith's
got eight young ones down with the whoopin'-cough. Amos dragged me over
there yisterday; an' when I heerd 'em tryin' to see which could bark the
loudest, I says, 'Give me the peace o' Jerusalem in my own house, even
if I don't stir a step for the next five year no more'n I have for the
last.' I dunno what 't would be if I hadn't a darter. I've been greatly
blessed."
The talk went on in pleasant ripples, while Amelia moved back and forth
from pantry to table. She brought out the mixing-board, and began to put
her bread in the pans, while the tin kitchen stood in readiness by the
hearth. The sunshine flooded all the room, and lay insolently on the
paling fire; the Maltese cat sat in the broadest shaft of all, and,
having lunched from her full saucer in the corner, made her second
toilet for the day.
"'Melia," said aunt Ann suddenly, looking down over her glasses at the
tin kitchen, "ain't it a real cross to bake in that thing?"
"I always had it in mind to buy me a range," answered Amelia reservedly,
"but somehow we never got to it."
"That's the only thing I ever had ag'inst John. He was as grand a man as
ever was, but he did set everything by such truck. Don't turn out the
old things, I say, no more'n the old folks; but when it comes to makin'
a woman stan' quiddlin' round doin' work back side foremost, that beats
me."
"He'd have got me a stove in a minute," burst forth Amelia in haste,
"only he never knew I wanted it!"
"More fool you not to ha' said so!" commented aunt Ann, unwinding her
ball. "Well, I s'pose he would. John wa'n't like the common run o' men.
Great strong creatur' he was, but there was suthin' about him as soft as
a woman. His mother used to say his eyes 'd fill full o' tears when he
broke up a settin' hen. He was a good husband to you,--a good provider
an' a good friend."
Amelia was putting down her bread for its last rising, and her face
flushed.
"Yes," she said gently, "he _was_ good."
"But there!" continued aunt Ann, dismissing all lighter considerations,
"I dunno's that's any reason why you should bake in a tin kitchen, nor
why you should need to heat up the brick oven every week, when 't was
only done to please him, an' he ain't here to know. Now, 'Melia, le's
see what you could do. When you got the range in, 't would alter this
kitchen all over. Why don't you tear down that old-fashioned mantelpiece
in the fore-room?"
"I could have a marble one," responded Amelia in a low voice. She had
taken her sewing again, and she bent her head over it as if she were
ashamed. A flush had risen in her cheeks, and her hand trembled.
"Wide marble! real low down!" confirmed aunt Ann, in a tone of triumph.
"So fur as that goes, you could have a marble-top table." She laid down
her knitting, and looked about her, a spark of excited anticipation in
her eyes. All the habits of a lifetime urged her on to arrange and
rearrange, in pursuit of domestic perfection. People used to say, in her
first married days, that Ann Doby wasted more time in planning
conveniences about her house than she ever saved by them "arter she got
'em." In her active years, she was, in local phrase, "a driver." Up and
about early and late, she directed and managed until her house seemed to
be a humming hive of industry and thrift. Yet there was never anything
too urgent in that sway. Her beaming good-humor acted as a buffer
between her and the doers of her will; and though she might scold, she
never rasped and irritated. Nor had she really succumbed in the least to
the disease which had practically disabled her. It might confine her to
a chair and render her dependent upon the service of others, but over
it, also, was she spiritual victor. She could sit in her kitchen and
issue orders; and her daughter, with no initiative genius of her own,
had all aunt Ann's love of "springin' to it." She cherished, besides, a
worshipful admiration for her mother; so that she asked no more than to
act as the humble hand under that directing head. It was Amos who
tacitly rebelled. When a boy in school, he virtually gave up talking,
and thereafter opened his lips only when some practical exigency was to
be filled. But once did he vouchsafe a reason for that eccentricity. It
was in his fifteenth year, as aunt Ann remembered well, when the
minister had called; and Amos, in response to some remark about his hope
of salvation, had looked abstractedly out of the window.
"I'd be ashamed," announced aunt Ann, after the minister had
gone,--"Amos, I _would_ be ashamed, if I couldn't open my head to a
minister o' the gospel!"
"If one head's open permanent in a house, I guess that fills the bill,"
said Amos, getting up to seek the woodpile. "I ain't goin' to interfere
with nobody else's contract."
His mother looked after him with gaping lips, and, for the space of half
an hour, spoke no word.
To-day she saw before her an alluring field of action; the prospect
roused within her energies never incapable of responding to a spur.
"My soul, 'Melia!" she exclaimed, looking about the kitchen with a
dominating eye, "how I should like to git hold o' this house! I al'ays
did have a hankerin' that way, an' I don't mind tellin' ye. You could
change it all round complete."
"It's a good house," said Amelia evasively, taking quick, even stitches,
but listening hungrily to the voice of outside temptation. It seemed to
confirm all the long-suppressed ambitions of her own heart.
"You're left well on 't," continued aunt Ann, her shrewd blue eyes
taking on a speculative look. "I'm glad you sold the stock. A woman
never undertakes man's work but she comes out the little eend o' the
horn. The house is enough, if you keep it nice. Now, you've got that
money laid away, an' all he left you besides. You could live in the
village, if you was a mind to."
A deep flush struck suddenly into Amelia's cheek. She thought of Saltash
and Laurie Morse.
"I don't want to live in the village," she said sharply, thus reproving
her own errant mind. "I like my home."
"Law, yes, of course ye do," replied aunt Ann easily, returning to her
knitting. "I was only spec'latin'. The land, 'Melia, what you doin' of?
Repairin' an old coat?"
Amelia bent lower over her sewing. "'T was his," she answered in a voice
almost inaudible. "I put a patch on it last night by lamplight, and when
daytime come, I found it was purple. So I'm takin' it off, and puttin'
on a black one to match the stuff."
"Goin' to give it away?"
"No, I ain't," returned Amelia, again with that sharp, remonstrant note
in her voice. "What makes you think I'd do such a thing as that?"
"Law, I didn't mean no harm. You said you was repairin' on 't,--that's
all."
Amelia was ashamed of her momentary outbreak. She looked up and smiled
sunnily.
"Well, I suppose it _is_ foolish," she owned,--"too foolish to tell. But
I've been settin' all his clothes in order to lay 'em aside at last. I
kind o' like to do it."
Aunt Ann wagged her head, and ran a knitting-needle up under her cap on
a voyage of discovery.
"You think so now," she said wisely, "but you'll see some time it's
better by fur to give 'em away while ye can. The time never'll come when
it's any easier. My soul, 'Melia, how I should like to git up into your
chambers! It's six year now sence I've seen 'em."
Amelia laid down her work and considered the possibility.
"I don't know how in the world I could h'ist you up there," she
remarked, from an evident background of hospitable good-will.
"H'ist me up? I guess you couldn't! You'd need a tackle an' falls. Amos
has had to come to draggin' me round by degrees, an' I don't go off the
lower floor. Be them chambers jest the same, 'Melia?"
"Oh, yes, they're just the same. Everything is. You know he didn't like
changes."
"Blue spread on the west room bed?"
"Yes."
"Spinnin'-wheels out in the shed chamber, where his gran'mother Hooper
kep' 'em?"
"Yes."
"Say, 'Melia, do you s'pose that little still's up attic he used to have
such a royal good time with, makin' essences?"
Amelia's eyes filled suddenly with hot, unmanageable tears.
"Yes," she said; "we used it only two summers ago. I come across it
yesterday. Seemed as if I could smell the peppermint I brought in for
him to pick over. He was too sick to go out much then."
Aunt Ann had laid down her work again, and was gazing into vistas of
rich enjoyment.
"I'll be whipped if I shouldn't like to see that little still!"
"I'll go up and bring it down after dinner," said Amelia soberly,
folding her work and taking off her thimble. "I'd just as soon as not."
All through the dinner hour aunt Ann kept up an inspiring stream of
question and reminiscence.
"You _be_ a good cook, 'Melia, an' no mistake," she remarked, breaking
her brown hot biscuit. "This your same kind o' bread, made without
yeast?"
"Yes," answered Amelia, pouring the tea. "I save a mite over from the
last risin'."
Aunt Ann smelled the biscuit critically. "Well, it makes proper nice
bread," she said, "but seems to me that's a terrible shif'less way to go
about it. However 'd you happen to git hold on 't? You wa'n't never
brought up to 't."
"His mother used to make it so. 'T was no great trouble, and 't would
have worried him if I'd changed."
When the lavender-sprigged china had been washed and the hearth swept
up, the room fell into its aspect of afternoon repose. The cat, after
another serious ablution, sprang up into a chair drawn close to the
fireplace, and coiled herself symmetrically on the faded patchwork
cushion. Amelia stroked her in passing. She liked to see puss
appropriate that chair; her purr from it renewed the message of domestic
content.
"Now," said Amelia, "I'll get the still."
"Bring down anything else that's ancient!" called aunt Ann. "We've
pretty much got red o' such things over t' our house, but I kind o' like
to see 'em."
When Amelia returned, she staggered under a miscellaneous burden: the
still, some old swifts for winding yarn, and a pair of wool-cards.
"I don't believe you know so much about cardin' wool as I do," she said,
in some triumph, regarding the cards with the saddened gaze of one who
recalls an occupation never to be resumed. "You see, you dropped all
such work when new things come in. I kept right on because he wanted me
to."
Aunt Ann was abundantly interested and amused.
"Well, now, if ever!" she repeated over and over again. "If this don't
carry me back! Seems if I could hear the wheel hummin' an' gramma Balch
steppin' back an' forth as stiddy as a clock. It's been a good while
sence I've thought o' such old days."
"If it's old days you want"--began Amelia, and she sped upstairs with a
fresh light of resolution in her eyes.
It was a long time before she returned,--so long that aunt Ann exhausted
the still, and turned again to her thrifty knitting. Then there came a
bumping noise on the stairs, and Amelia's shuffling tread.
"What under the sun be you doin' of?" called her aunt, listening, with
her head on one side. "Don't you fall, 'Melia! Whatever 't is, I can't
help ye."
But the stairway door yielded to pressure from within: and first a rim
of wood appeared, and then Amelia, scarlet and breathless, staggering
under a spinning-wheel.
"Forever!" ejaculated aunt Ann, making one futile effort to rise, like
some cumbersome fowl whose wings are clipped. "My land alive! you'll
break a blood-vessel, an' then where'll ye be?"
Amelia triumphantly drew the wheel to the middle of the floor, and then
blew upon her dusty hands and smoothed her tumbled hair. She took off
her apron and wiped the wheel with it rather tenderly, as if an ordinary
duster would not do.
"There!" she said. "Here's some rolls right here in the bedroom. I
carded them myself, but I never expected to spin any more."
She adjusted a roll to the spindle, and, quite forgetting aunt Ann,
began stepping back and forth in a rhythmical march of feminine service.
The low hum of her spinning filled the air, and she seemed to be wrapped
about by an atmosphere of remoteness and memory. Even aunt Ann was
impressed by it; and once, beginning to speak, she looked at Amelia's
face, and stopped. The purring silence continued, lulling all lesser
energies to sleep, until Amelia, pausing to adjust her thread, found her
mood broken by actual stillness, and gazed about her like one awakened
from dreams.
"There!" she said, recalling herself. "Ain't that a good smooth thread?
I've sold lots of yarn. They ask for it in Sudleigh."
"'Tis so!" confirmed aunt Ann cordially. "An' you've al'ays dyed it
yourself, too!"
"Yes, a good blue; sometimes tea-color. There, now, you can't say you
ain't heard a spinnin'-wheel once more!"