There had been additions to Calvin Stammark's house--the half story
raised, and the length increased by a room. This was now furnished as
the parlor and had an entrance from the porch extended across the face
of the dwelling; the middle lower room was his; the chamber designed
for his married life was a seldom used dining room; while Ettie and Lucy
were above. A number of sheds for stabling and implements, chicken coops
and pig pen had accumulated at the back; the corn and buckwheat climbed
the mountain; and the truck patch was wide and luxuriant.
A narrow strip, bright, in season, with the petunias and cinnamon pinks
which Ettie tended, separated the dwelling from the public road; and
the flowers more than anything else attracted Hannah's daughter. Calvin
talked with her infrequently, but a great deal of his silent attention
was directed at the child.
Already Lucy had a quality of appeal to which he watched Ettie respond.
The latter took a special pride in making Lucy as pretty as possible;
in the afternoon she would dress her in sheer white with a ribbon in
her hair. She spared Lucy many of the details of housework in which the
latter could have easily assisted her; and when Calvin protested she
replied that she was so accustomed to doing that it was easier for her
to go ahead.
Calvin's feelings were mixed. At first he had told himself that Lucy
would be, in a way, his daughter; he would bring her up as his own;
and in the end what he had would be hers, just as it should have been
Hannah's. However, his attitude was never any that might be recognized
as that of parenthood. He never grew completely accustomed to her
presence, she was always a subject of interest and speculation. He
continued to get pleasure from her slender graceful being and the little
airs of delicacy she assumed.
He was conscious, certainly, that Lucy was growing older--yet not so
fast as he--but he had a shock of surprise when she informed him that
she was fifteen. Calvin pinched her cheek, and, sitting on the porch,
heard her within issuing a peremptory direction to Ettie. The elder made
no reply and, he knew, did as Lucy wished. This disturbed him. There
wasn't a finer woman living than Ettie Stammark, and he didn't purpose
to have Lucy impudent to her. Lucy, he decided, was getting a little
beyond them. She was quick at her lessons, the Greenstream teacher said.
Lucy would have considerable property when he died; he'd like her to
have all the advantages possible; and--very suddenly--Calvin decided to
send her away to school, to Stanwick, the small city to and from which
the Greenstream stage drove.
She returned from her first term at Christmas, full of her experiences
with teachers and friends, to which Ettie and he listened with absorbed
attention. Now she seemed farther from him than before; and he saw that
a likeness to Hannah was increasing; not in appearance--though that
was not dissimilar--but in the quality that had established Hannah's
difference from other girls, the quality for which he had never found
a name. The assumptions of Lucy's childhood had become strongly marked
preferences for the flowers of existence, the ease of the portico rather
than the homely labor of the back of the house.
Neither his sister nor he resented this or felt that Lucy was evading
her just duties; rather they enjoyed its difference from their own
practical beings and affairs. They could afford to have her in fresh
laundered frills and they secretly enjoyed the manner in which she
instructed them in social conventions.
At her home-coming for the summer she brought to an end the meals in the
kitchen; but when she left once more for Stanwick and school Ettie and
Calvin without remark drifted back to the comfortable convenience of the
table near the cooking stove.
This period of Lucy's experience at an end she arrived in Greenstream on
a hot still June evening. Neither Calvin nor his sister had been able to
go to Stanwick for the school commencement, and Calvin had been too late
to meet the stage. After the refreshing cold water in the bright tin
basin by the kitchen door he went to his room for a presentable necktie
and handkerchief--Lucy was very severe about the latter--and then walked
into the dining room.
The lamp was not yet lit, the light was elusive, tender, and his heart
contracted violently at the youthful yet mature back toward him. She
turned slowly, a hand resting on the table, and Calvin Stammark's senses
swam. An inner confusion invaded him, pierced by a sharp unutterable
longing.
“Hannah,” he whispered.
She smiled and advanced; but, his heart pounding, Calvin retreated. He
must say something reasonable, tell her that they were glad to have her
back--mustn't leave them again. She kissed him, and, his eyes shut, the
touch of her lips re-created about him the parlor of the Braleys,--the
stiffly arranged furniture with its gay plush, the varnished fretwork of
the organ, the pink glow of the lamp.
She was Hannah! The resemblance was so perfect--her cheek's turn,
her voice, sweet with a trace of petulance, her fingers--that it was
sustained in a flooding illumination through the commonplace revealing
act of supper. It was as if the eighteen years since Hannah, his Hannah,
was a reality were but momentary, the passage of the valley. His love
for her was unchanged--no, here at least, was a difference; it was
greater, keener; exactly as if during the progress of their intimacy he
had been obliged to go away from her for a while.
She accompanied Ettie to the kitchen and Calvin sat on the porch in
a gathering darkness throbbing with frogs and perfumed with drifting
locust blooms. Constellation by constellation the stars glimmered into
being. Hannah, Lucy! They mingled and in his fiber were forever one. He
gave himself up to the beauty of his passion, purified and intense from
long patience and wanting, amazed at the miracle that had brought back
everything infinitely desirable.
He forgot his age, and, preparing for the night, saw with a sense of
personal outrage his seamed countenance reflected in the mirror of the
bureau. Yet in reality he wasn't old--forty-something--still, not fifty.
He was as hard and nearly as springy as a hickory sapling. There was
a saying in which he found vast comfort--the prime, the very prime of
life.