It seemed to Lydia Gale that from the moment she met Eben Jakes she
understood what fun it was to laugh. She and her mother and three
sisters lived together in a comfortable way, and Lydia, although she was
the youngest, had come to feel that she was declining into those middle
years when beauty wanes, and though the desire to charm may raise an
eager hand, no one will stay to look. She was a delicate blonde, and
when she began to recognize these bounds of life she faded a little into
a still neutrality that might soon have made an old woman of her. The
sisters were dark, wholesome wenches, known as trainers at the
gatherings they were always summoned to enliven; but Lydia seldom found
their mirth exhilarating. Only when Eben Jakes appeared at the door,
that spring twilight, a droll look peering from his blue eyes, and a
long forefinger smoothing out the smile from the two lines in his lean
cheeks, and asked, as if there were some richness of humor in the
supposition, "Anybody heard anything of anybody named Eunice Eliot round
here?" she found her own face creasing responsively. Eunice Eliot had
been her mother's maiden name, and it proved that she and Eben's mother
had been schoolmates. Eben's mother had died some years before; and now,
taking a little trip with his own horse and buggy to peddle essences and
see the country, he had included his mother's friend within the circle
of his wandering.
Mrs. Gale had a welcome ready for him and for the treasured
reminiscences of his mother's past, and the three older sisters trained
with him to their limit. Lydia sat by and listened, smiling all the
time. She thought Eben's long, lank, broad-shouldered figure very manly,
and it shocked her beyond speech to hear one of the trainers avow that,
for her part, she thought his thin, Yankee face, with its big features
and keen eyes, as homely as a hedge-fence. Lydia said nothing, but she
wondered what people could expect. She was a greedy novel-reader, and
she had shy thoughts of her own. It seemed to her that Eben, who also
had passed his first youth, must have been a great favorite in his day.
Every commonplace betrayal in those intimate talks with her mother
served to show her how good he had been, how simple and true. He had
taken care of his mother through a long illness, and then, after her
death, lived what must have been a dull life, but one still dutiful
toward established bonds, with old Betty, the "help" of many years. Now
Betty had died, and before beginning another chapter with some domestic
expedient, he had allowed himself this limited trip, to breathe another
air and see the world. Lydia felt that he had deserved his vacation. All
the weary steps to it, she knew, could scarcely have been climbed so
robustly save by a hero.
Eben had stayed a week, and on the morning set for his leaving, Mrs.
Gale and the three trainers harnessed in haste to drive over to Fairfax
to see the circus come in. Lydia had refused to go, because, for some
reason, she felt a little dull that morning, and Eben had soberly
declared his peddling would take him another way. He meant to be off
before the middle of the forenoon; and while he was in the barn,
foddering his horse and greasing the wheels, Lydia bethought her how he
had praised the doughnuts several nights before, and, with an aching
impulse to do something for him before he should go, hastily made up a
batch, judging that a dozen or so would please him upon the road. But
she was left-handed that morning, and as she began to fry, the fat
caught fire. Then Eben, seeing the blaze and smoke, dashed in, set the
kettle safely in the sink, and took Lydia into his arms.
"Say," he whispered to her hidden face, "what if you an' me should get
married an' go round some peddlin', an' make our way home towards fall?"
Lydia felt that this was the most beautiful invitation that could
possibly have been given her, and she answered accordingly:--
"I'd like it ever so much."
Within the next week they were married, and set out on their enchanted
progress, stopping at doors when they liked, and offering bottles
whereof the labels sounded delicious and sweet; or if a house looked
poor or stingy, passing it by. Sometimes, when Lydia felt very daring,
she went to the door herself to show her wares, and Eben stayed in the
carriage and laughed. He said she offered a bottle of vanilla as if it
were poison and she wanted to get rid of it, or as if it were water, and
of no use to anybody. Once, when she had been denied by a sour-faced
woman, he stopped under the shade of a tree farther on, and left Lydia
there while he went back and, by force of his smile and persuasive
tongue, sold the same bottle to the same woman, and came back chuckling
in a merry triumph.
This was the day that Lydia's summer happiness felt the touch of blight.
She remembered always just the moment when the wind of trouble touched
her. They were driving through a long stretch of maple woods with a
ravine below, where ferns grew darkly and water hurried over rocks.
Lydia was lying back in the carriage, swaying with its motion, and
jubilant to her finger-tips. It was young summer now, and she answered
back every pulse of the stirring earth with heart-beats of her own. Eben
was laughing.
"That's the way to do it," he was saying, in an exaggerated triumph.
"Why, you've got to talk to 'em till they think that bottle o' vanilla's
the water o' life, an' they'll have to knife ye if they can't git it no
other way."
"You're a born peddler," smiled Lydia. Then she asked, "How'd you happen
to start out?" She had heard the simple reason many times; but she loved
his talk, and her idle mind preferred old tales to new.
Eben fell in with her mood, as one begins an accustomed story to a
child.
"Well," he said, and he sobered a little, as memory recalled him, "you
know, when mother died, old Betty stayed an' kep' house for me. An' when
she died, this last spring, I kinder thought I'd git over it sooner if I
traveled round a mite to see the sights. I didn't want to git too fur
for fear I'd be sick on 't, like the feller that started off to go round
the world, an' run home to spend the first night. You sleepy now?"
He had shrewdly learned that she liked long, dull stories to lull her
into the swing of a nap.
"No," said Lydia drowsily. "You go on. Then what?"
"Well, so I got Jim Ross to take over the stock an' run the farm to the
halves. I took along a few essences to give me suthin' to think about,
an' when I got tired o' rovin' I expected to turn back home an' begin
bachin' on 't same's I'd got to end. An' then I stopped at your mother's
to kinder talk over old times when my mother was little; an' you come to
the door an' let me in."
"Eben," said Lydia, out of her dream and with all her story-book
knowledge at hand, "don't you s'pose 'twas ordered?"
"What?"
"Don't you s'pose 'twas just put into your head to start out that way so
't you could come an' find--me?"
She spoke timidly, but Eben answered with the bluff certainty he had in
readiness for such speculations:--
"Ain't a doubt of it. Sleepy now?"
He turned and looked at her as she lay back against the little pillow he
had bought for her on the way. The sun and wind had overlaid the
delicate bloom of her cheek with rose. The morning damp had curled her
hair into rings. Something known as happiness, for want of a better
word, hovered about the curves of her mouth and looked shyly out from
under her lids. Eben felt his heart stir wonderfully. He bent toward her
and spoke half breathlessly.
"Say, Lyddy, I don't know 's I knew half how pretty you were." Then he
laughed a little, as if he were ashamed. He was not a man of words, save
only when he was joking. Thus far his fondness for her had found
expression in an unfailing service and in mute caresses. He spoke
bluntly now, chirruping to the horse: "I dunno 's ever I see any eyes
quite so blue--unless 'twas my first wife's."
It was as if a sponge had passed over the quivering beauty of the earth
and wiped it out. For the moment Lydia felt as if she were not his wife
at all. At her silence, Eben turned and glanced at her; but her eyes
were closed.
"Tired?" he asked fondly, and she faltered:--
"I guess so."
Then, according to a tender custom, he put his arm about her and drew
her to him, and while he thought she slept, she lay there, her eyes
closed against his breast, and the hard certainty upon her of something
to think about. Blankness had seized upon her, not because he had
married a woman before her, but because he had not told. Possibly he had
told her mother in some of their desultory talks and had forgotten to
say more. The chill wonder of it sprang from her learning it too late.
She had to adapt herself to a new man. Until now she had believed that
it was spring with them, and that he had waited for her with an
involuntary fealty, as she had done for him. They had every guerdon of
young love, except that there were not so many years before them. But
even that paled beside the triumphant sense that no boy or girl could
possibly be as happy as they, with their ripened patience and sense of
fun. A phrase came into her mind as she lay there against his heart and
knew he was driving slowly to let her rest: "the wife of his youth." It
hurt her keenly, and she caught a breath so sharp and sudden that he
drew her closer, as one stirs a child to let it fall into an easier
pose.
That day they stopped at an old-fashioned tavern in a drowsy town, and
Lydia, after dinner, where she talked quite gayly about the house and
the garden and the farther hills, said she thought she would go upstairs
and lie down a spell. Eben looked at her with concern. She was always as
ready as he for "poking about" new places.
"Ain't you feelin' well?" he asked her.
"Oh, yes," said Lydia, "I'm all right. Only I'm kinder sleepy. I guess
this air makes me. It's higher up here than 'tis a few miles back."
"Yes," said Eben, "we've been kinder climbin' up for some days. Well,
you go an' sleep it off. Do you good. I'll have my pipe, an' then I'll
mog round an' see 'f I can't work off a few bottles on the unsuspectin'
populace."
When Eben came home from his successful sales, he found a changeling.
His wife was not so different in looks or words as in a subtle something
he could not define. She laughed at his jokes, and even, in a gentle
way, ventured pleasantries of her own; but a strange languor hung about
her. It might have been called patience, an acceptance of a situation
rather than her eager cheer in it.
"You tired?" he asked her over and over again that day, and she always
answered:--
"Mebbe I am, a mite."
So they settled down in the little tavern, and while Eben took
excursions round about to place his "trade," she stayed behind, and
either shut herself upstairs or sat meditatively in the garden. What
moved her now was an overwhelming curiosity. She wondered what the first
wife had been like, whether she could make doughnuts, and, above all, if
she had been pretty. Sometimes she remembered, with a wild impulse to
tell him because it seemed so desperately funny to her, the unhappy
couple that had formed a part of her childhood's memories, who used to
quarrel violently whenever the husband drank too much, and his wife, in
his helplessness, used to go through his pockets.
"Anybody can bear 'most anything," he used to declare, as he steadied
himself by the gate, in drunken majesty, and addressed the
school-children in a ring, "but goin' through anybody's pockets. That's
more'n anybody ought to be called upon to bear."
Lydia smiled sorrowfully upon herself in the midst of her daze, at the
wonder whether she also should be tempted to go through her husband's
pockets, not thriftily, to save his purse, but to discover the portrait
of his first wife. Yet she had resolved to ask him nothing; and then, in
the way of womankind, she opened her lips one day and said the thing she
would not.
They were sitting in the garden under the pear tree, with beautiful old
borders, all a lovely neglect, on both sides. Lydia had been talking
about flowers, and getting up now and then to pull a weed,--an
ineffectual service where weeds were so plentiful,--and stopping to
speak a word to a late sweet-william, as if it were a child. Eben was
smoking his pipe contentedly and watching her.
"You like 'em, don't you?" he said fondly, as she came back and took her
chair again.
"I guess I do," said Lydia. That day she felt particularly well and
freed from the assaults of memory. The sun was on her face and she
welcomed it, and a light breeze stirred her hair. "Mother always said I
was bewitched over gardens."
"You shall have all the land you can take care of," he avowed, "an' you
shall have a hired man of your own. I can foretell his name. It's Eben
Jakes."
Lydia laughed, and he went on: "We used to have a few beds, but when
mother was taken away I kinder let it slip."
Suddenly Lydia felt her heart beating hard. Something choked her, and
her voice stuck in her throat.
"Eben, how'd your mother look?"
"What say?" asked Eben. He was shaking the ashes from his pipe, and the
tapping of the bowl against his chair had drowned her mild attempt.
"How did your mother look?"
He pursed his lips and gazed off into the distance of the orchard. Then
he laughed a little at his own incompetence.
"I dunno 's I can tell. I ain't much of a hand at that. She was just
kinder old an' pindlin' to other folks. But she looked pretty nice to
me."
"Ain't you got a photograph of her here with you?"
He shook his head.
"I thought mebbe you'd carry one round."
"Mother never had any real good picture," said Eben meditatively. "I
dunno 's she ever set for a photograph. She had an ambrotype taken when
she was young, with kinder full sleeves an' her hair brought down over
her ears. No, mother never had a picture that was any comfort to me."
Then Lydia dared her first approach.
"Ain't you got any photographs here with you, any of your other folks?
I'd like to know how they look."
He shook his head.
"No. They're all to home. You'll find 'em in the album on the
centre-table. Gee! I hope the house won't be all full o' dust. I never
thought, when I set out, I should bring the quality back with me."
But she could not answer by a lifted eyelash the veiled fondness of his
tone. All his emotion had this way of taking little by-paths, as if he
skirted courtship without often finding the courage to enter boldly in.
It was delightful to her, but at this moment she could not even listen.
She was too busy with her own familiar quest. Now she spoke timidly, yet
with a hidden purpose.
"I think pictures of folks are a good deal of a comfort, don't
you--after death?"
Eben made no answer for a moment. He still gazed reflectively outward,
but whether it was into the future or his hidden past she could not
tell.
"It's queer about dyin'," he said at last.