Mariana Blake, on her way home from Jake Preble's in the autumn
twilight, heard women's voices sounding clearly at a distance,
increasing in volume as they neared. She knew the turn of the road would
hide her from them for a minute or two to come, and depending on that
security she stepped over the wall and crouched behind the undergrowth
at the foot of a wild cherry. They were only her neighbors, Sophronia
Jackson and Lizzie Ann West, with whom she was on the kindliest terms;
but for some reason she felt sensitive to the social eye whenever she
was carrying Jake a basket of her excellent cookery or returning with
the empty dishes. Other neighbors, it was true, contributed delicacies
to his rudimentary housekeeping, though chiefly at festal times like
Thanksgiving and Christmas; but Mariana was conscious that she had kept
an especial charge over him since his sister died and left him alone.
Yet this she was never willing to confess, and though she treasured what
she had elected as her responsibility, it was with an exceptional
shyness.
The voices came nearer at a steady pace, accompanied at length by the
steady tread of Sophronia's low-heeled shoes and the pattering of Lizzie
Ann on the harder side of the road. When they were nearly opposite the
old cherry-tree, Sophronia spoke.
"Mercy! I stepped into a hole."
"Can't you remember that hole?" Lizzie Ann inquired, with her
inconsequent titter. "I've had that in mind ever since I went to school.
I always thought if I was one of the board o' selectmen, I guess I could
manage to fill up that hole."
"I guess I shall have to set down here and shake the gravel out o' my
shoe," said Sophronia. "You have this nice flat place, and I'll set
where I can get my foot up easy."
There was the softest accompanying rustle, and they had both sat down.
Mariana, over the wall, gripped her basket with a tenser hand, as if the
dishes, of their own accord, might clink. She held her breath, too,
smiling because she knew the need of caution would be brief. The instant
they were settled, she told herself, they would talk down any such
trifling sound as an unconsidered breath. She could foretell exactly
what they would say, once they had exhausted the topic of gravel in the
shoe. It would be either the new church cushions, or mock mince-pies for
the sociable, or the minister's daughter's old canary that had ceased
to sing or to echo the chirping of others, and yet was regarded with a
devotion the parishioners could not indorse. Mariana had seen both her
friends that day, and each of them had been more keenly alive to these
topics than any.
"I don't see what makes you so sure," said Sophronia, in a jerky
fashion, accompanying the attempt to draw her foot into the position
indicated for unlacing.
"Because I am," said Lizzie Ann. "So you are, too. Mariana Blake
never'll marry in the world. She ain't that kind."
"I don't know why she ain't," said her friend, in an argumentative tone
of the sort adopted to carry on brilliantly a conversation of which both
participants know the familiar moves. "Mariana's a real pretty woman,
prettier by far than she was when she's a girl. I know she's gettin'
along. She was forty-three last April, but age ain't everything. Look at
aunt Grinnell. She married when she's fifty-three, and she was homely 's
a hedge fence and hadn't any faculty. Nor she didn't bring him a cent,
either."
"Well, nobody'd say Mariana was homely. But she won't marry. Nor she
wouldn't if she was eighteen. She ain't that kind."
"There, I've got it laced up," said Sophronia. She seemed to settle into
an easier attitude, and Mariana could hear the scratch of the heel as
she thrust the rehabilitated foot afar from her on the lichened rock.
"Well, I guess you're right, but I don't know why it's so, after all. If
I was a man, seems if I should think Jake Preble, now, was a real likely
fellow to marry."
"Jake Preble!" Such distaste animated the tone of that response that
Mariana involuntarily raised herself from her listening posture, and the
dishes clinked. "What's that? Didn't you hear suthin'? Why, Jake
Preble's a kind of a hind wheel. He goes rollin' along after t'others,
never askin' why nor wherefore, and he thinks it's his own free will. He
never so much as dreams 'tis the horse that's haulin' him."
"Well, what is 't he thinks 'tis that's haulin' him?" asked Sophronia,
who was not imaginative.
"Why, all I mean is, he don't take things for what they're wuth. He
believes every goose's a swan till it up and honks, and he's jest as
likely to think a swan's a goose."
"You don't mean he ain't suited with Mariana?"
"No, no. I mean Mariana's cosseted him and swep' his path afore him,
carryin' his victuals and cleanin' up the house when he's out hayin' or
cuttin' wood, till he thinks it ain't so bad to bach it after all. If
she'd just let him alone after Hattie died, and starved him out, he'd
ha'nted her place oftener'n she's been over to his, and 'twouldn't ha'
been long before he learnt the taste of her apple-pies and where they
ought to be made. Now he knows they're to be picked mostly off'n his
kitchen table when he comes in from work."
"Mercy, you don't mean to say you think it's all victuals, do you?"
inquired Sophronia, with her unctuous laugh. "You never had much opinion
o' menfolks, anyways, Lizzie Ann."
"Well, they've got to eat, ain't they?" inquired Lizzie Ann. "That's all
I say. Come, ain't you got your shoe on yet? Why, yes, you have. Come
along. There's a kind of chill in the air, if 'tis September."
Mariana heard them rising, Sophronia contributing soft thuds of a
good-sized middle-aged body and Lizzie with a light scramble suited to
her weight.
"Mercy!" said Sophronia, "ain't you stiff?"
Then they went on together, and Mariana heard in the near distance the
familiar patter dealing with Sophronia's proficiency in mock mince-pies.
They were safely away, but she did not move. The cool September breeze
rustled the blackberry-vines on her side of the wall, but it did not
chill her. She was hot with some emotion she could not name,--anger,
perhaps, though it hardly seemed like that, resentment that her friends
could talk her over; and some hurt in the very centre of feeling because
the shyness of her soul had been invaded. It seemed so simple to carry
Jake Preble a pie of her own baking, as natural as for him to cut her
wood and shovel paths for her in the worst winter weather. When it was a
beautiful clearing-off day after a storm, she loved to sweep her paths
herself, and Jake knew it; but he was always near to rescue her when the
drifts piled too high. But then Cap'n Hanscom came, too, and he was a
widower, and once Sophronia's own husband had taken a hand at the snowy
citadel. Angry maidenhood in her kept hurling questions into the
deepening dusk. Mariana was learning that in a world of giving in
marriage, no woman and no man who have not accorded hostages to fortune
can live unchallenged.
When her ireful mood had worn itself away, she got up with the stiffness
of the mind's depression intensifying the body's chill, and made her way
swiftly toward home. She walked fast, because it seemed to her she could
not possibly bear to meet a neighbor. Even through the dusk her
tell-tale basket would be visible, the dishes in it clinking to the tune
that Mariana was no sort of a woman to marry.
When she reached home, she fled up the path to the door, feeling at
every step the friendliness of the way. The late fall flowers nodded
kindly to her through the dark, and underfoot were the stones and
hollows of the pathway familiar to her from a life's acquaintanceship.
"My sakes," breathed Mariana.
A man was sitting on her steps, and because Jake was so vividly present
to her mind, she almost spoke his name. But it was only Cap'n Hanscom,
rising as she neared him, and opening the door gallantly.
"I says to myself, she'll be along in a minute or two," he told her.
The cap'n had a soft voice touched here and there with whimsical tones.
When he was absent, Mariana often thought how much she liked his voice;
but whenever she saw him she consumed her friendly interest in wishing
he wouldn't wear a beard. She was a fastidious woman, and a beard seemed
to her untidy.
"You stay here in the settin'-room," said she. "I'll get the lamp."
She slipped through the kitchen into the pantry and put her basket
softly down, lest he should hear that shameful clink. Even Cap'n Hanscom
could not be allowed, she thought, to know she had been carrying pies to
a man who would not marry her because she was not the kind of woman to
marry. When she came back, bearing the shining lamp, the cap'n looked
at her in a frank approval.
Mariana was a round, pleasant body with pink cheeks, kindly eyes, and,
bearing witness to her character, a determined mouth; but now she seemed
to be enveloped by some transforming aura. Her auburn hair, touched with
gray, had blown about her head in an unusual abandon, her cheeks were
flaming, and her eyes had pin-points of light. She set the lamp down on
the table with a steady hand and drew the shades. Then she became aware
that the cap'n was looking at her. He had a fatherly gaze for everybody,
the index of his extreme kindliness, but it had apparently been startled
into some keener interest.
"Well," said Mariana, and found that she was speaking irritably. "What's
the matter? You look as if you never see anybody before."
She and the cap'n had been schoolfellows, though he was older, and often
she treated him with scanty ceremony; now, after she had tossed him that
aged formula of banter, she laughed to soften it. But she was still
unaccountably angry.
"Well," said the cap'n slowly, "I dunno 's I ever did see just such a
kind of a body before."
The words seemed to be echoing from the stolen conversation too warmly
alive in her memory. He, too, she thought, was probably considering her
a nice proper-looking woman, but one no man would think of marrying.
"Take a chair," she said, and the cap'n went over to the hearth where a
careful fire was laid.
"Goin' to touch it off?" he inquired.
Mariana, with a jealous eye, noted that he was looking at the fire, not
at her. She wondered if Lizzie Ann West would say a man had to be warmed
as well as fed.
"Touch it off," she said, with a disproportioned recklessness. "There's
the matches on the mantel-tree."
The cap'n did it, kneeling to adjust the sticks more nicely; and when
one fell forward with the burning of the kindling, lifted it and laid it
back solicitously. Then with a turkey-wing he swept up the hearth, its
specklessness invaded by a rolling bit of coal, put the wing in place,
and stood looking down at what seemed to be his own handiwork.
"There!" said he.
He took the big armchair by the hearth, and Mariana drew her little
rocker to the other corner. She seated herself in it, her hands rather
tensely folded, and the cap'n regarded her mildly.
"Ain't you goin' to sew?" he inquired.
"Why, no," said Mariana, "I dunno 's I be. I dunno 's I feel like
sewin' all the time."
"Well, I dunno 's there's any law to make a woman set an' sew," the
cap'n ruminated. "Sewin' or knittin', either. Only, I've got so used to
seein' you with a piece o' work in your hands, didn't look hardly
nat'ral not to." He regarded her again with his kindly stare. "Mariana,"
said he, "you look like a different creatur'. What is 't's got hold of
you?"
"Nothin', I guess," said Mariana. "Maybe I'm mad."
"Mad? What ye mad about?"
"Oh, I dunno. I guess I'm just mad in general. Nothin' particular, as I
see."
"Well, if anybody's goin' to be mad it ought to be me," said the cap'n,
lifting his brows with that droll look he wore when he intended to
indicate that he was fooling. "I guess I've got to wash my own dishes
an' bake my own johnny-cake for a spell. Mandy's goin' to leave."
"Mandy goin' to leave! Well, you will be put to 't. What's she leavin'
for?"
"Goin' to be married."
"For mercy sakes! Who's Mandy Hill goin' to marry?"
"Goin' to marry the peddler."
"The one from the Pines?"
Cap'n Hanscom nodded.
"He's been round consid'able this fall, but I never so much as thought
he'd got anything but carpet-rags in his head. Well, seems he had. Now
't I know it, I realize Mandy's been stockin' up with tin for quite a
spell. Seems to me I never see a woman that needed so much tinware, nor
took so long to pick it out. I never got it through my noddle she an'
the peddler was makin' on 't up between 'em."
"Well, suz," said Mariana. "I never so much as thought Mandy Hill'd ever
marry."
"I never did, either," said the cap'n. "But come to that, it'd be queer
'f she didn't sooner or later. Mandy Hill's just the sort of a woman
nine men out o' ten'd be possessed to marry. Wonder to me she ain't done
it afore."
Mariana shot a glance at him. There was fire in it, kindled of what fuel
she knew not; but the flame of it seemed to scorch her. The cap'n was
staring at the andirons and did not see it.
"I'd give a good deal," he said musingly, "if I thought I could ever
come acrost such a housekeeper as you be, Mariana. But there! that's
snarin' a white blackbird."
"Cap'n," said Mariana.
Her tone seemed to leap at him, and he had to look at her.
"Why, Mariana!" he returned. Her face amazed him. It was full of light,
but a light that glittered. "By George," said he, "you looked that
minute for all the world jest as your brother Elmer did when Si Thomson
struck him in town meetin'. Si was drunk an' Elmer never laid up a thing
after the blow was over an' done; but that first minute he looked as if
he was goin' to jump. What is it, Mariana?"
"Cap'n," said Mariana. She was used to calling him by his first name in
their school-day fashion, but her new knowledge of life seemed for the
moment to have made all the world alien to her. "Cap'n, if anybody said
you couldn't do a thing, wouldn't you say to yourself you'd be--wouldn't
you say you'd do it?"
"Why, I dunno," said the cap'n, wondering. "Mebbe I would if 'twas
somethin' I thought best to do."
"No, no. If 'twas somethin'--well, s'pose somebody said you was a
Chinyman, wouldn't you prove you wa'n't?"
"Why," said the cap'n mildly, "anybody'd see I wa'n't, minute they
looked into my face. Nobody'd say anybody was a Chinyman if they
wa'n't."
Mariana was able to laugh a little here, though a tear did run over her
cheek in a hateful, betraying way. She wiped it off, but the cap'n saw
it.
"See here, Mariana," said he stoutly, "who's been rilin' you up?
Somebody has. You tell me, an' I'll kick 'em from here to the state o'
Maine."
"Oh, it's nothin'," said Mariana. "Here, you lay on another stick. I was
only thinkin' when you spoke of Mandy, what a fool she was to tie
herself up to the best man in the world if she could get good wages,
nice easy place same as yours is. Well, there, Eben! I do get kind o'
blue when the winter comes on and I sit here by the fire watchin' my
hair turn gray. If anybody was to offer me a job, I'd take it."
"You would?" said Cap'n Hanscom.
She saw a thought run into his eyes, and hated it. She liked Eben
Hanscom, but all the decorous reserves were at once awake in her,
bidding him remember that she was not going to scale the trim, tight
fence of maidenly tradition. He began rather breathlessly, and she cut
him short.
"I'd come and be your housekeeper," said Mariana, hurriedly in her turn,
"for three dollars a week, same as you give Mandy, and be glad and
thankful. Only I'd want somebody else in the family. I dunno why, but
seems if folks would laugh if you and me settled down there together
like two old folks--"
"I dunno why they'd laugh," said the cap'n stoutly. His eyes were
glowing with the surprise of it and the happy anticipation of Mariana's
tidy ways. "Nobody laughed at me an' Mandy; leastways if they did, I
never got hold on 't."
"Well, you see, Mandy's day begun pretty soon after your wife was taken,
and folks were kinder softened down. Anyways, I couldn't do it. 'Tain't
that I'm young and 'tain't that I'm a fool, but I'd just like to have
one more in the family."
"Aunt Elkins might think she could make a home with us," said the cap'n,
pondering. "No, she wouldn't, either, come to think. Her son's sent her
her fare to go out to them this winter. Ain't you got some friend,
Mariana?"
"No," said Mariana. She was watching him with a steady gaze, as if she
had planted a magic seed and looked for its uprising. "If there was only
somebody else that's left alone as you and I be," she offered
speciously.
The cap'n felt a quick delight over his own cleverness.
"Why," said he, "there's Jake Preble."
"He never'd do it," said Mariana. She shook her head conclusively.
"Never 'n the world."
"I bet ye forty dollars," said the cap'n. "He could go over 'n' take
care of his stock an' do his choppin', an' come back to a warm house.
I'm goin' to ask him. I'm goin' this minute. You set up, an' I'll be
back an' tell ye."
"You take it from me," Mariana was calling after him. "He won't do it
and it's noways right he should. You tell him so from me."
"I bet ye forty dollars," cried the cap'n.
The door clanged behind him and he was gone. Mariana had never heard him
in such demented haste since the days when one squad of the boys
besieged another in the schoolhouse, and Eben Hanscom was deputed to run
for reinforcements of those that went home at noon. But she settled down
there by the fire and held herself quiet until he should come. She
seemed to have shut a gate behind her; but whether she had opened
another to lead into the unknown country where women are like their
sisters, triumphant over things, she could not tell. At the moment she
found herself in a little inclosure where everybody could see her and
laugh at her, and she could not answer back.
Before the forestick had burned in two, she heard him coming, but he was
not alone. She knew that other step, marking out a longer stride, and
the steady inarticulate responses when the cap'n talked. The cap'n
opened the door and they walked in. Jake Preble was ahead, a tall,
powerful creature in his working-clothes, his thin face with the bright
brown eyes interrogating her, his mouth, in spite of him, moving
nervously under the mustache.
"What's all this?" said he roughly, approaching her as if, Mariana
thought, he owned her.
That air of his had pleased her once: it gave her a curious little
thrill of acquiescent loyalty; but now it simply hurt, and the instinct
of resentment rose in her. What right had he to own her, she asked
herself, when it only made other women scornful of her? She lifted her
head and faced him. What he saw in her eyes he could not perhaps have
told, but it suddenly quieted him to a surprised humility.
"You goin' over to keep house for him?" he asked, with a motion of his
head toward the cap'n, who seemed to be petitioning the god of
domesticity lest his new hopes be confounded.
"Yes," said Mariana, "but I ain't goin' unless he can get one or two
more. I'm tired to death of settin' down to the table alone. One more
wouldn't be no better. Three's the kind of a crowd I like. Two's no
company. Don't you say so, cap'n?"
"I prefer to choose my company, that's all I say," the cap'n answered
gallantly.
Jake looked from one to the other and then back again. What he saw
scarcely pleased him, but it had to be accepted.
"All right," said he. "If you want a boarder, no reason why you
shouldn't have one. I'll shut up my place to-morrer."
The red surged up into Mariana's cheeks. She had not known it was easy
to cause such gates to open.
"When's Mandy goin'?" she asked indifferently.
"Week from Wednesday," said the cap'n. He was suffused with joy, and
Mariana, in one of those queer ways she had of thinking of inapposite
things, remembered him as she saw him once when, at the age of fourteen,
he sat before a plate of griddle-cakes and saw the syrup-pitcher coming.
"Thursday, then," she said. "I'll be along bright and early."
She rose and set her chair against the wall. That seemed as if they were
to go.
"You'd better by half stay where you be in your own home," she called
after Jake, shutting the door behind him. "You won't like settin' at
other folks' tables. You've set too long at your own."
He came back, and left the cap'n waiting for him in the path. There he
stood before her, the gaunt, big shape she had watched and brooded over
so many years. Something seemed to be moving in his brain, and he gave
it difficult expression.
"Depends on who else's settin' at the table," he remarked, and vanished
into the night.
Mariana, moved and wondering, wanted to call after him and ask him what
he meant; but she reflected that the women who inspired such speeches
probably refrained from insisting too crudely on their value. Then she
flew to the bedroom and began to sort her things for packing.
In two weeks she was settled at the cap'n's, and Jake Preble had come to
board, doggedly, even sulkily, at first, and then suddenly armed with
that quiet acceptance he had ready for all the changes in his life. But
Mariana smoothed his path to a pleasant familiarity with the big house
and its ways, and he began to look about the room, from his place at the
table with his book or paper, wonderingly and even pathetically, as she
thought, recalling the time before his sister died when his own house
had been full of the warm intimacies of an ordered life. The captain
reveled in the comfort of his state. He brought in wood until Mariana
had to bid him cease. He built fires and drew water, and his ruddy face
shone with contentment. She made his favorite dishes and seemed not to
notice when Jake, too, in his shy way, awoke to praise them. She even
read aloud to the cap'n on a Sunday night from the life of women who,
the title declared, debatably, had "Made India what It is." On such
nights of intellectual stress Jake betook himself to the kitchen and
ostentatiously pored over the "Scout in Early New England." The cap'n,
who was hospitality itself, trudged out there one night, in the midst of
a panegyric on Mrs. Judson, and besought him to come in.
"If you don't like that kind o' readin', Jake, we'll try suthin' else,"
he conceded generously. "I jest as soon play fox an' geese Sunday nights
if anybody wants to. I ain't one to tie up the cat's tail Sunday mornin'
so 's she won't play."
"I'll be in byme-by," said Jake, frowningly intent upon his page. "You
go on with your readin', cap'n. I'll be in."
But, instead, he walked out and down the road to his own lonely house,
and Mariana, though her brain followed him every step of the way, went
on reading in the clearest voice, minding her stops as she had been
taught when she was accounted the best reader in the class. But in those
days of reading-classes her heart had not ached. It ached all the time
now. She had shut the gate behind her, and the one she opened led into
an unfamiliar country. Mariana had been born to live ingenuously,
simply, like the child she was. Woman's wiles were not for her, and the
fruit they brought her had a bitter tang. But whether her campaign was a
righteous one or not, it was brilliantly successful. She could hardly
think that any women, looking on, were laughing at her, even in a
kindly way. She had taken her own stand and the world had patently
respected it. Immediately on her moving to the cap'n's she had gone out
in her best cashmere and made a series of calls, and far and wide she
had gayly announced herself as keeping house because she wanted the
money; in the spring, she told the neighborhood, she meant to take what
she had earned and make a journey to Canada to see cousin Liddy, who had
married into a nice family there, and over and over again had written
for her to come.
"I guess Eben Hanscom never'll let you step your foot out of his house
now he's tolled you into it," Lizzie Ann West remarked incisively one
afternoon, when Mariana, after a pleasant call on her, stood in the
doorway, saying the last words the visit had not left room for. "He
ain't goin' to bite into such pie-crust as yours, day in, day out, and
go back to baker's trade."
"I don't make no better pie-crust'n you do," said Mariana innocently.
"Mebbe you don't, but you're on the spot, and there's where you've got
the whip-hand. Eben Hanscom ain't goin' to let you go. He's no such
fool."
"Well," flashed Mariana, "I'd like to see anybody keep me when I've got
ready to go." She was on the doorstep now, and the spring wind was
bringing her faint, elusive odors. She felt like putting her head up in
the air like a lost four-footed creature and snuffing for her home.
"Oh, I guess you'll be glad enough to stay," said Lizzie Ann, with a
shrewdness Mariana hated. "The cap'n's takin' to clippin' his beard.
He's a nice-lookin' man, younger by ten years than he was when she's
alive, and neat 's a pin."
Mariana chose her way back along the muddy road, choking a temptation to
turn the corner to her own little house, build a fire there, and let
single men fight the domestic battle for themselves. But that night when
the spring wind was still moving and she stood on Cap'n Hanscom's
doorstone and looked at the dark lilac buds at her hand, the tears came,
and the cap'n, bearing in his last armful of wood for the night, saw
them and was undone. He went in speechlessly and piled the wood with
absent care. He stood a moment in thought, and then he called her.
"Mariana, you come here."
She went obediently.
"You ain't homesick, be you?" the cap'n inquired.
She nodded, like a child.
"I guess so," she responded. "Leastways, if 'tain't that I don't know
what 'tis."
The cap'n was looking at her pleadingly, all warm benevolence and
anxious care.
"I know how 'tis," he burst forth. "You've give up your home to come
here, an' you feel as if you hadn't anything of your own left. Ain't
that so, Mariana?"
"I guess so," Mariana returned at random. "Mebbe I'll go down and open
my winders to-morrow. I want to look over some o' my things."
The cap'n seemed to be breathing with difficulty. Mariana had heard him
speak in meeting, and thus stertorously was he accustomed to announce
his faith.
"Mariana," said he, "it's all yours, everything I got. It's your home.
You stay here an' enjoy it."
"Oh, no, it ain't," cried Mariana, in a fright. "I've got my own place
same 's you have. I'm contented enough, Eben. I just got kinder
thinkin'; I often do, come spring o' the year."
"Well, I ain't contented, if you be," said the cap'n valiantly. "I never
shall be till you an' me are man an' wife."
"O my soul!" Mariana cried out. "O my soul!"
"What's the matter?" said Jake Preble. He had just come over from his
own house with a spray of lilac that was really out, whereas the
cap'n's had only budded. Jake had felt a strange thrill of triumph at
the haste his bush had made. He thought Mariana ought to see it.
"There's nothin' the matter," she told him in a high, excited voice,
"except I've got to go home. I've told Cap'n Hanscom so, and I'll tell
you. I ain't goin' to eat another meal in this house. There's plenty
cooked," she continued, turning to the cap'n in a wistful haste, "and
I'll stop on the way down the road and tell Lizzie Ann West you want she
should come and see you through. Don't you stop me, either of you. I'm
goin' home."
She ran up the stairs to her room, and tossed her belongings into her
trunk. Over the first layer she cried, but then it suddenly came upon
her that she was having her own way and that it led into her dear spring
garden, and she laughed forthwith. Downstairs the cap'n stood pondering,
his eyes on the floor, and Jake regarded him at first keenly and in
anger, and then with a slow smile.
"Well," said Jake presently, "I guess I might 's well pack up, too."
"Don't ye do it, Jake," the cap'n besought him hoarsely. "I guess, think
it over, she'll make up her mind to stay."
"Guess not," said Jake. It was more cheerfully than he had spoken that
winter, the cap'n wonderingly thought. "I'll heave my things together
an' go back to the old place."
In a day or two it was all different. They had moved the pieces as if it
were some sober game, and now Mariana was in her own little house,
warming it to take out the winter chill, and treating it with a tender
haste, as if she had somehow done it wrong, and Lizzie Ann had gone to
Cap'n Hanscom's. Mariana had hesitated on the doorstone, at her leaving,
and there the cap'n bade her good-by, rather piteously and with
finality, though they were to be neighbors still.
"Well, Eben," she hesitated. There was something she had meant to say.
In spite of decency, in spite of feminine decorum, she had intended to
give him a little shove into the path that should lead him, still
innocently, to her own blazonment as a woman who could have her little
triumphs like the rest. "If you should ever feel to tell Lizzie Ann I
was a good housekeeper," she meant to say, "I should be obliged to you."
He would do it, she knew, and from that prologue more would follow. The
cap'n would go on to say he had besought her to marry him, never
guessing, under Lizzie Ann's superior system of investigation, that he
had disclosed himself at all. But as she mused absently on his face,
another spirit took possession of her, the one that had presided over
her humble hearth and welcomed the two men there in the neighborly
visits that seemed so pleasant in remembrance. What did it avail that
this or that woman should declare she was unsought? She was ashamed of
waging that unworthy war. She found herself speaking without
premeditation.
"You know what Lizzie Ann West says about you?"
"She ain't said she won't come?" He was dismayed and frankly terrified.
"She says you're dreadful spruce-lookin' and you're younger'n ever you
was."
The cap'n laughed.
"That all?" he inquired. "Well, she must be cross-eyed."
"No," said Mariana, "she ain't cross-eyed; only she thinks you're a
terrible likely man."
Then she walked away, and the cap'n watched her, blinking a little with
the sun in his eyes and the memory of her Indian pudding.
Mariana did not find her house just as she had left it. It seemed to her
a warmer, lighter, cleaner place than she had ever thought it, and, in
spite of the winter's closing, as sweet as spring. She went about
opening cupboard doors and looking at her china as if each piece were
friendly to her, from long association, and moving the mantel ornaments
to occupy the old places more exactly. Certain eccentricities of the
place had been faults; now they were beauties wherein she found no
blemish. The worn hollows in the kitchen floor, so hard to wash on a
Monday, seemed exactly to fit her feet. And while she stood with her
elbows on the window-sash, looking out and planning her garden, Jake
Preble came. Mariana was not conscious that she had expected him, but
his coming seemed the one note needed to complete recaptured harmony.
What she might have prepared to say to him if she had paused to remember
Lizzie Ann's ideal of woman's behavior, she did not think. She turned to
him, her face running over with pure delight, and put the comprehensive
question:--
"Ain't this elegant?"
"You bet it is," said Jake. He did not seem the same man, neither the
sombre dullard of the winter, nor the Jake of former years who had
fulfilled the routine of his life with no comment on its rigor or its
ease. His face was warmly flushed and his eyes shone upon her. "I don't
know 's I ever see a nicer place," said he, "except it's mine. Say,
Mariana, what you goin' to do?"
"When?" Mariana inquired innocently.
"Now. Right off, to-morrer, next day."
She laughed.
"I'm goin' to start my garden and wash my dishes and hang out clo'es,
and then I'm goin' to begin all over again and do the same things; but
it'll be my garden and my dishes and my clo'es. And I'm goin' to be as
happy as the day is long."
"Say," said Jake, "you don't s'pose you could come over to my house an'
do it?"
"Work out some more? Why, I ain't but just over one job. You expect me
to take another?"
Mariana was not in the least embarrassed. Lizzie Ann was right, she
thought. Men-folks studied their own comfort, and Jake, even, having had
a cosy nest all winter, had learned the way of making one of his own.
Suddenly she trembled. He was looking at her in a way she wondered at,
not as if he were Jake at all, but another like him, from warm,
beseeching eyes.
"You shouldn't do a hand's turn if you didn't want to," he was assuring
her, with that entreating look. "We'd keep a girl, an' Mondays I'd stay
home an' turn the wringer. Mariana, I know you set everything by your
house, but you could fix mine over any way you liked. You could throw
out a bay-winder if you wanted, or build a cupelow."
"Why," said Mariana, so softly that he bent to hear, "what's set you out
to want a housekeeper?"
"It ain't a housekeeper," said Jake. "I've had enough o' housekeepin'
long as I live, seein' you fetch an' carry for Eb Hanscom. Why, Mariana,
I just love you. I want a wife."
Mariana walked away from him to the window and stood looking out again,
only that, instead of the wet garden with the clumps of larkspur
feathering up, she seemed to see long beds of flowers in bloom. She even
heard the bees humming over them and the tumult of nesting birds. And
all the time Jake Preble waited, looking at her back and wondering if
after all the losses of his life he was to forfeit Mariana, who, he
knew, was life itself.
"Well," said he, in deep despondency, "I s'pose it's no use. I see how
you feel about it. Any woman would feel the same."
Mariana turned suddenly, and, seeing she was smiling, he took a hurried
step to meet her.
"I 'most forgot you," she said, with a whimsical lilt in her voice. "I
was thinkin' how elegant it is when we get home at last."
"Yes," said Jake dejectedly. "I s'pose you're considerin' your own house
an' your own gardin-spot's the best there is in the world."
"Why, no," said Mariana, with a little movement toward him. "I wa'n't
thinkin' o' my house nor my gardin particular. I guess I was thinkin' o'
yours. Leastways, I was thinkin' o' _you_."