her chair. Her energy had fled, leaving her hushed and tremulous. But
not for that did aunt Ann relinquish her quest for the betterment of the
domestic world. Her tongue clicked the faster as Amelia's halted. She
put away her work altogether, and sat, with wagging head and eloquent
hands, still holding forth on the changes which might be wrought in the
house: a bay window here, a sofa there, new chairs, tables, and
furnishings. Amelia's mind swam in a sea of green rep, and she found
herself looking up from time to time at her mellowed four walls, to see
if they sparkled in desirable yet somewhat terrifying gilt paper.
At four o'clock, when Amos swung into the yard with the oxen, she was
remorsefully conscious of heaving a sigh of relief; and she bade him in
to the cup of tea ready for him by the fire with a sympathetic sense
that too little was made of Amos, and that perhaps only she, at that
moment, understood his habitual frame of mind. He drank his tea in
silence, the while aunt Ann, with much relish, consumed doughnuts and
cheese, having spread a wide handkerchief in her lap to catch the
crumbs. Amos never varied in his rôle of automaton; and Amelia talked
rapidly, in the hope of protecting him from verbal avalanches. But she
was not to succeed. At the very moment of parting, aunt Ann, enthroned
in her chair, with a clogging stick under the rockers, called a halt,
just as the oxen gave their tremulous preparatory heave.
"Amos!" cried she, "I'll be whipped if you've spoke one word to 'Melia
this livelong day! If you ain't ashamed, I be! If you can't speak, I
can!"
Amos paused, with his habitual resignation to circumstances, but Amelia
sped forward and clapped him cordially on the arm; with the other hand,
she dealt one of the oxen a futile blow.
"Huddup, Bright!" she called, with a swift, smiling look at Amos. Even
in kindness she would not do him the wrong of an unnecessary word.
"Good-by, aunt Ann! Come again!"
Amos turned half about, the goad over his shoulder. His dull-seeming
eyes had opened to a gleam of human feeling, betraying how bright and
keen they were. Some hidden spring had been touched, though only they
would tell its story. Amelia thought it was gratitude. And then aunt
Ann, nodding her farewells in assured contentment with herself and all
the world, was drawn slowly out of the yard.
When Amelia went indoors and warmed her chilled hands at the fire, the
silence seemed to her benignant. What was loneliness before had
miraculously translated itself into peace. That worldly voice, strangely
clothing her own longings with form and substance, had been stilled;
only the clock, rich in the tranquillity of age, ticked on, and the cat
stretched herself and curled up again. Amelia sat down in the waning
light and took a last stitch in her work; she looked the coat over
critically with an artistic satisfaction, and then hung it behind the
door in its accustomed place, where it had remained undisturbed now for
many months. She ate soberly and sparingly of her early supper, and
then, leaving the lamp on a side-table, where it brought out great
shadows in the room, she took a little cricket and sat down by the fire.
There she had mused many an evening which seemed to her less dull than
the general course of her former life, while her husband occupied the
hearthside chair and told her stories of the war. He had a childlike
clearness and simplicity of speech, and a self-forgetful habit of
reminiscence. The war was the war to him, not a theatre for boastful
individual action; but Amelia remembered now that he had seemed to hold
heroic proportions in relation to that immortal past. One could hardly
bring heroism into the potato-field and the cow-house; but after this
lapse of time, it began to dawn upon her that the man who had fought at
Gettysburg and the man who marked out for her the narrow rut of an
unchanging existence were one and the same. And as if the moment had
come for an expected event, she heard again the jangling of bells
without, and the old vivid color rushed into her cheeks, reddened before
by the fire-shine. It was as though the other night had been a
rehearsal, and as if now she knew what was coming. Yet she only clasped
her hands more tightly about her knees and waited, the while her heart
hurried its time. The knocker fell twice, with a resonant clang. She did
not move. It beat again, the more insistently. Then the heavy outer door
was pushed open, and Laurie Morse came in, looking exactly as she knew
he would look--half angry, wholly excited, and dowered with the beauty
of youth recalled. He took off his cap and stood before her.
"Why didn't you come?" he asked imperatively. "Why didn't you let me
in?"
The old wave of irresponsible joy rose in her at his presence; yet it
was now not so much a part of her real self as a delight in some
influence which might prove foreign to her. She answered him, as she was
always impelled to do, dramatically, as if he gave her the cue, calling
for words which might be her sincere expression, and might not.
"If you wanted it enough, you could get in," she said perversely, with
an alluring coquetry in her mien. "The door was unfastened."
"I did want to enough," he responded. A new light came into his eyes. He
held out his hands toward her. "Get up off that cricket!" he commanded.
"Come here!"
Amelia rose with a swift, feminine motion, but she stepped backward, one
hand upon her heart. She thought its beating could be heard.
"It ain't Saturday," she whispered.
"No, it ain't. But I couldn't wait. You knew I couldn't. You knew I'd
come to-night."
The added years had had their effect on him; possibly, too, there had
been growing up in him the strength of a long patience. He was not an
heroic type of man; but noting the sudden wrinkles in his face and the
firmness of his mouth, Amelia conceived a swift respect for him which
she had never felt in the days of their youth.
"Am I goin' to stay," he asked sternly, "or shall I go home?"
As if in dramatic accord with his words, the bells jangled loudly at the
gate. Should he go or stay?
"I suppose," said Amelia faintly, "you're goin' to stay."
Laurie laid down his cap, and pulled off his coat. He looked about
impatiently, and then, moving toward the nail by the door, he lifted the
coat to place it over that other one hanging there. Amelia had watched
him absently, thinking only, with a hungry anticipation, how much she
had needed him; but as the garment touched her husband's, the real woman
burst through the husk of her outer self, and came to life with an
intensity that was pain. She sprang forward.
"No! no!" she cried, the words ringing wildly in her own ears. "No! no!
don't you hang it there! Don't you! don't you!" She swept him aside, and
laid her hands upon the old patched garment on the nail. It was as if
they blessed it, and as if they defended it also. Her eyes burned with
the horror of witnessing some irrevocable deed.
Laurie stepped back in pure surprise. "No, of course not," said he.
"I'll put it on a chair. Why, what's the matter, Milly? I guess you're
nervous. Come back to the fire. Here, sit down where you were, and let's
talk."
The cat, roused by a commotion which was insulting to her egotism,
jumped down from the cushion, stretched into a fine curve, and made a
silhouette of herself in a corner of the hearth. Amelia, a little
ashamed, and not very well understanding what it was all about, came
back, with shaking limbs, and dropped upon the settle, striving now to
remember the conventionalities of saner living. Laurie was a kind man.
At this moment, he thought only of reassuring her. He drew forward the
chair left vacant by the cat, and beat up the cushion.
"There," said he, "I'll take this, and we'll talk."
Amelia recovered herself with a spring. She came up straight and tall, a
concluded resolution in every muscle. She laid a hand upon his arm.
"Don't you sit there!" said she. "Don't you!"
"Why, Amelia!" he ejaculated, in a vain perplexity. "Why, Milly!"
She moved the chair back out of his grasp, and turned to him again.
"I understand it now," she went on rapidly. "I know just what I feel and
think, and I thank my God it ain't too late. Don't you see I can't bear
to have your clothes hang where his belong? Don't you see 't would kill
me to have you sit in his chair? When I find puss there, it's a comfort.
If 't was you--I don't know but I might do you a mischief!" Her voice
sank, in awe of herself and her own capacity for passionate emotion.
Laurie Morse had much swift understanding of the human heart. His own
nature partook of the feminine, and he shared its intuitions and its
fears.
"I never should lay that up against you, Milly," he said kindly. "But we
wouldn't have these things. You'd come to Saltash with me, and we'd
furnish all new."
"Not have these things!" called Amelia, with a ringing note of
dismay,--"not have these things he set by as he did his life! Why, what
do you think I'm made of, after fifteen years? What did _I_ think I was
made of, even to guess I could? You don't know what women are like,
Laurie Morse,--you don't know!"
She broke down in piteous weeping. Even then it seemed to her that it
would be good to find herself comforted with warm human sympathy; but
not a thought of its possibility remained in her mind. She saw the
boundaries beyond which she must not pass. Though the desert were arid
on this side, it was her desert, and there in her tent must she abide.
She began speaking again between sobbing breaths:--
"I did have a dull life. I used up all my young days doin' the same
things over and over, when I wanted somethin' different. It _was_ dull;
but if I could have it all over again, I'd work my fingers to the bone.
I don't know how it would have been if you and I'd come together then,
and had it all as we planned; but now I'm a different woman. I can't any
more go back than you could turn Sudleigh River, and coax it to run
up-hill. I don't know whether 't was meant my life should make me a
different woman; but I _am_ different, and such as I am, I'm his woman.
Yes, till I die, till I'm laid in the ground 'longside of him!" Her
voice had an assured ring of triumph, as if she were taking again an
indissoluble marriage oath.
Laurie had grown very pale. There were forlorn hollows under his eyes;
now he looked twice his age.
"I didn't suppose you kept a place for me," he said, with an unconscious
dignity. "That wouldn't have been right, and him alive. And I didn't
wait for dead men's shoes. But somehow I thought there was something
between you and me that couldn't be outlived."
Amelia looked at him with a frank sweetness which transfigured her face
into spiritual beauty.
"I thought so, too," she answered, with that simplicity ever attending
our approximation to the truth. "I never once said it to myself; but all
this year, 'way down in my heart, I knew you'd come back. And I wanted
you to come. I guess I'd got it all planned out how we'd make up for
what we'd lost, and build up a new life. But so far as I go, I guess I
didn't lose by what I've lived through. I guess I gained somethin' I'd
sooner give up my life than even lose the memory of."
So absorbed was she in her own spiritual inheritance that she quite
forgot his pain. She gazed past him with an unseeing look; and striving
to meet and recall it, he faced the vision of their divided lives.
To-morrow Amelia would remember his loss and mourn over it with maternal
pangs; to-night she was oblivious of all but her own. Great human
experiences are costly things; they demand sacrifice, not only of
ourselves, but of those who are near us. The room was intolerable to
Laurie. He took his hat and coat, and hurried out. Amelia heard the
dragging door closed behind him. She realized, with the numbness born of
supreme emotion, that he was putting on his coat outside in the cold;
and she did not mind. The bells stirred, and went clanging away. Then
she drew a long breath, and bowed her head on her hands in an
acquiescence that was like prayer.
It seemed a long time to Amelia before she awoke again to temporal
things. She rose, smiling, to her feet, and looked about her as if her
eyes caressed every corner of the homely room. She picked up puss in a
round, comfortable ball, and carried her back to the hearthside chair;
there she stroked her until her touchy ladyship had settled down again
to purring content. Then Amelia, still smiling, and with an absent look,
as if her mind wandered through lovely possibilities of a sort which
can never be undone, drew forth the spinning-wheel, and fitted a roll to
the spindle. She began stepping back and forth as if she moved to the
measure of an unheard song, and the pleasant hum of her spinning broke
delicately upon the ear. It seemed to waken all the room into new
vibrations of life. The clock ticked with an assured peace, as if
knowing it marked eternal hours. The flames waved softly upward without
their former crackle and sheen; and the moving shadows were gentle and
rhythmic ones come to keep the soul company. Amelia felt her thread
lovingly.
"I guess I'll dye it blue," she said, with a tenderness great enough to
compass inanimate things. "He always set by blue, didn't he, puss?"
THE FLAT-IRON LOT
The fields were turning brown, and in the dusty gray of the roadside,
closed gentians gloomed, and the aster burned like a purple star. It was
the finest autumn for many years. People said, with every clear day,
"Now this must be a weather-breeder;" but still the storm delayed. Then
they anxiously scanned the heavens, as if, weeks beforehand, the signs
of the time might be written there; for this was the fall of all others
when wind and sky should be kind to Tiverton. She was going to celebrate
her two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and she was big with the
importance of it.
On a still afternoon, over three weeks before that happy day, a slender
old man walked erectly along the country road. He carried a cane over
his shoulder, and, slung upon it, a small black leather bag, bearing the
words, painted in careful letters, "Clocks repaired by N. Oldfield." As
he went on, he cast a glance, now and then, to either side, from
challenging blue eyes, strong yet in the indomitable quality of youth.
He knew every varying step of the road, and could have numbered, from
memory, the trees and bushes that fringed its length; and now, after a
week's absence, he swept the landscape with the air of a manorial lord,
to see what changes might have slipped in unawares. At one point, a flat
triangular stone had been tilted up on edge, and an unpracticed hand had
scrawled on it, in chalk, "4 M to Sudleigh." The old man stopped, took
the bag from his shoulder, and laid it tenderly on a stone of the wall.
Then, with straining hands, he pulled the rock down into the worn spot
where it had lain, and gave a sigh of relief when it settled into its
accustomed place, and the tall grass received it tremulously. Now he
opened his bag, took from it a cloth, carefully folded, and rubbed the
rock until those defiling chalk marks were partially effaced.
"Little varmints!" he said, apostrophizing the absent school children
who had wrought the deed. "Can't they let nothin' alone?" He took up his
bag, and went on.
Nicholas Oldfield, as he walked the road that day, was a familiar figure
to all the county round. He had a smooth, carefully shaven face, with a
fine outline of nose and chin, and his straight gray hair shone from
faithful brushing. He was almost aggressively clean. Even his blue eyes
had the appearance of having just been washed, like a spring day after a
shower. It was a frequent remark that he looked as if he had come out
of a bandbox; and one critic even went so far as to assert that on
Sundays he sandpapered his eyes and gave a little extra polish to his
bones. But these were calumnies; though to-day his suit of home-made
blue was quite speckless, and the checked gingham neckerchief, which
made his ordinary wear, still kept its stiff, starched creases.
"Dirt don't stick to _you_, Mr. Oldfield," once said a seeking widow.
"Your washing can't be much. I guess anybody 'd be glad to undertake it
for you." Mr. Oldfield nodded gravely, as one receiving the tribute
which was justly his, and continued to do his washing himself.
As he walked the dusty road, bearing his little bag, so he had walked it
for years, sometimes within a few miles of home, and again at the
extreme limit of the county edge. The clocks of the region were all his
clients, some regarded with compassion ("ramshackle things" that needed
perpetual tinkering) and others with a holy awe. "The only thing
Nicholas Oldfield bows the knee before is a double-back-action clock a
thousand years old," said Brad Freeman, the regardless. "That's how he
reads Ancient of Days." The justice of the remark was acknowledged,
though, as touching Mr. Oldfield, it was felt to be striking rather too
keenly at the root of things. For Nicholas Oldfield was looked upon
with a respect not so much inspired by his outward circumstances as by
his method of taking them. There are, indeed, ways and ways among us who
serve the public. When Tom O'Neil went round peddling essences, children
saw him from afar, ran to meet him, and, falling on his pack, besought
him for "two-three-drops-o'-c'logne" with such fervor that the mothers
had to haul them off by main force, in order themselves to approach his
redolence; but when the clock-mender appeared, with his little bag,
propriety walked before him, and the naughtiest scion of the flock would
come soberly in, to announce:--
"Mother, here's Mr. Oldfield."
It is true that this little old man did exemplify the dignity and
restraint of life to such a degree that, had it not been for his one
colossal weakness, the town might have condemned him, in good old
Athenian fashion. Clock-mending was a legitimate industry; but there
were those who felt it to be, in his case, a mere pretext for nosing
round and identifying ridiculous old things which nobody prized until
Nicholas Oldfield told them it was conformable so to do. Some believed
him and some did not; but it was known that a MacDonough's Victory
tea-set drove him to an almost outspoken rapture, and that the mere
mention of the Bay Psalm Book (a copy of which he sought with the
haggard fervor of one who worships but has ceased to hope) was enough
to make him "wild as a hawk." Old papers, too, drew him by their very
mildew; and when his townsfolk were in danger of respecting him too
tediously, they recalled these amiable puerilities, drew a breath of
relief, and marked his value down.
Many facts in his life were not in the least understood, because he
never saw the possibility of talking about them. For example, when at
the marriage of his son, Young Nick, he made over the farm, and kept his
own residence in the little gambrel-roofed house where he had been born,
and his father and grandfather before him, the act was, for a time,
regarded somewhat gloomily by the public at large. There were Young Nick
and his Hattie, living in the big new house, with its spacious piazza
and cool green blinds; there the two daughters were born and bred, and
the elder of them was married. The new house had its hired girl and man;
and meantime the other Nicholas (nobody ever dreamed of calling him Old
Nick) was cooking his own meals, and even, of a Saturday, scouring his
kitchen floor. It was easy to see in him the pathetic symbol of a bygone
generation relegated to the past. A little wave of sympathy crept to his
very feet, and then, finding itself unnoted, ebbed away again. Only one
village censor dared speak, saying slyly to Young Nick's Hattie:--
"Ain't no room for grandpa in the new house, is there?"
Hattie opened her eyes wide at this discovery, though now she realized
that echoes of a like benevolence had reached her ears before. She went
home very early from the quilting, and that night she said to her
husband, as they sat on the doorstone, waiting for the milk to cool:--
"Nicholas, little things I've got hold of, first an' last, make me
conclude folks pity father. Do you s'pose they do?"
Young Nick selected a fat plantain spike, and began stripping the seeds.
"Well, I dunno what for," said he, after consideration. "Father seems to
be pretty rugged."
Hattie was one of those who find no quicker remedy than that of
plentiful speech; and later in the evening, she sped over to the little
house, across the dewy orchard. Mr. Oldfield had come home only that
afternoon, and now he had drawn up at his kitchen table, which was
covered by a hand-woven cloth, beautifully ironed, and set with
old-fashioned dishes. He had hot biscuits and apple-pie, and the odor of
them rose soothingly to Hattie's nostrils, dissipating, for a moment,
her consciousness of tragedy and wrong. A man could not be quite forlorn
who cooked such "victuals," and sat before them so serenely.
"See here, father," said she, with the desperation of speaking her mind
for the first time to one from whom she had hitherto kept awesomely
remote; "when we moved into the new house, I dunno's there was any talk
about your comin', too. I guess it never entered into our heads you'd do
anything but to stick to the old place. An' now, after it's all past an'
gone, the neighbors say"--
Nicholas Oldfield had been smiling his slight, dry smile. At this point,
he took up a knife, and cut a careful triangle of pie. He did all these
things as if each one were very important.
"Here, Hattie," said he, "you taste o' this dried apple. I put a mite o'
lemon in."
Hattie, somehow abashed by the mental impact of the little man, ate her
pie meekly, and thenceforth waived the larger issue. All the same, she
knew the neighbors "pitied father," and that they would continue to pity
him so long as he lived alone in the little peaceful house, doing his
own washing and making his own pie.
To-night was a duplication of many another when Nicholas Oldfield had
turned the corner and come in sight of his own home; but often as it had
been repeated, the experience was never the same. Some would have named
his springing emotion delight; but it neither quickened his pace nor
made him draw his breath the faster. Perhaps he even walked a little
more slowly, to enjoy the taste, for he was a saving man. There was the
little house, white as paint could make it, and snug in bowering
foliage. He noted, with an approving eye, that the dahlias in the front
yard, set in stiff nodding rows, were holding their own bravely against
the dry fall weather, and that the asters were blooming profusely,
purple and pink. A rare softness came over his features when he stepped
into the yard; and though he examined the roof critically in passing, it
was with the eye of love. He fitted the key in the lock; the sound of
its turning made music in his ears, and, setting his foot upon the sill,
he was a man for whom that little was enough. Nicholas Oldfield was at
home.
He laid down his bag, and went, without an instant's pause, straight
through to the sitting-room, and stood before the tall eight-day clock.
He put his hand on the woodwork, as if it might have been the shoulder
of a friend, and looked up understandingly in its face.
"Well, here we be," said he. "You'd ha' hil' out till mornin', though."
For wherever he might travel, he always made it a point to be home in
time to wind the clocks; and however early he might hurry away again,
under stress of some antiquarian impulse, they were left alive and
pulsing behind him. There was one in each room, besides the tall
eight-day in the parlor, and they were all soft-voiced and leisurely,
reminiscent of another age than ours. Though three of them had been
inherited, it almost seemed as if Nicholas must have selected the entire
company, so harmonious were they, so serenely fitted to the calm decorum
of his own desires.
In half an hour he had accomplished many things, and his fire sent a
spiral breath toward heaven. The dark old kitchen lay open, door and
window, to the still opulent sun, and from the pantry and a corner
cupboard came gleams of color, to delight the eye. Here were riches,
indeed: old India china, an unbroken set of Sheltered Peasant, and, on
the top shelf, little mugs and cups of a pink lustre, soft and sweet as
flowers. Many a collector had wooed Nicholas Oldfield to part with his
china (for the fame of it had spread afar,) but his only response to
solicitation was to open the doors more widely on his treasures,
remarking, without emphasis:--