Amelia Porter sat by her great open fireplace, where the round,
consequential black kettle hung from the crane, and breathed out a
steamy cloud to be at once licked up and absorbed by the heat from a
snatching flame below. It was exactly a year and a day since her
husband's death, and she had packed herself away in his own corner of
the settle, her hands clasped across her knees, and her red-brown eyes
brooding on the nearer embers. She was not definitely speculating on
her future, nor had she any heart for retracing the dull and gentle
past. She had simply relaxed hold on her mind; and so, escaping her, it
had gone wandering off into shadowy prophecies of the immediate years.
For, as Amelia had been telling herself for the last three months,
since she had begun to outgrow the habit of a dual life, she was not
old. Whenever she looked in the glass, she could not help noting how
free from wrinkles her swarthy face had been kept, and that the line of
her mouth was still scarlet over white, even teeth. Her crisp black
hair, curling in those tight fine rolls which a bashful admirer had
once commended as "full of little jerks," showed not a trace of gray.
All this evidence of her senses read her a fair tale of the
possibilities of the morrow; and without once saying, "I will take up a
new life," she did tacitly acknowledge that life was not over.
It was a "snapping cold" night of early spring, so misplaced as to
bring with it a certain dramatic excitement. The roads were frozen
hard, and shone like silver in the ruts. All day sleds had gone
creaking past, set to that fine groaning which belongs to the music of
the year. The drivers' breath ascended in steam, the while they stamped
down the probability of freezing, and yelled to Buck and Broad until
that inner fervor raised them one degree in warmth. The smoking cattle
held their noses low, and swayed beneath the yoke.
Amelia, shut snugly in her winter-tight house, had felt the power of
the day without sharing its discomforts; and her eyes deepened and
burned with a sense of the movement and warmth of living. To-night,
under the spell of some vague expectancy, she had sat still for a long
time, her sewing laid aside and her room scrupulously in order. She was
waiting for what was not to be acknowledged even to her own intimate
self. But as the clock struck nine, she roused herself, and shook off
her mood in impatience and a disappointment which she would not own.
She looked about the room, as she often had of late, and began to
enumerate its possibilities in case she should desire to have it
changed. Amelia never went so far as to say that change should be; she
only felt that she had still a right to speculate upon it, as she had
done for many years, as a form of harmless enjoyment. While every other
house in the neighborhood had gone from the consistently good to the
prosperously bad in the matter of refurnishing, John Porter had kept
his precisely as his grandfather had left it to him. Amelia had never
once complained; she had observed toward her husband an unfailing
deference, due, she felt, to his twenty years' seniority; perhaps,
also, it stood in her own mind as the only amends she could offer him
for having married him without love. It was her father who made the
match; and Amelia had succumbed, not through the obedience claimed by
parents of an elder day, but from hot jealousy and the pique inevitably
born of it. Laurie Morse had kept the singing-school that winter. He
had loved Amelia; he had bound himself to her by all the most holy vows
sworn from aforetime, and then, in some wanton exhibit of power--gone
home with another girl. And for Amelia's responsive throb of feminine
anger, she had spent fifteen years of sober country living with a man
who had wrapped her about with the quiet tenderness of a strong nature,
but who was not of her own generation either in mind or in habit; and
Laurie had kept a music-store in Saltash, seven miles away, and
remained unmarried.
Now Amelia looked about the room, and mentally displaced the furniture,
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, warmhearted 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 top-most 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 'twas
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, 'twould 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 end 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. "'Twas 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!"
Amelia moved the wheel to the side of the room, and went gravely back
to 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 'twould
kill me to have you sit in his chair? When I find puss there, it's a
comfort. If 'twas 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
uphill. 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 hearth-side 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?"