"You let the tree alone."
But Jim had no thought of touching it. He was working silently at his
task. Sophy went into the house, trembling. She had spoken first. But it
was to save the tree.
The warm spring days went on, and Annie Darling had not come. Weeds
began to devastate her garden, and Wilfred used to look over the fence
and wish uncle Jim would do something. Once he spoke to uncle Jim about
it, in the way everybody had of making him responsible for the floral
well-being of the neighborhood; but Gardener Jim would hardly listen.
"You 'tend to it! you 'tend to it!" he cried testily. "I've got all I
can do to git them Miller gals' pieces into shape so 't they can sow a
few seeds."
But one morning he sought out Wilfred, mending a gap in his own orchard
wall by the road.
"Wilfred," said Gardener Jim, "have you 'tended to Annie's gardin?"
He had laid down his hoe and put up a foot on a stone in good position
for talk.
Wilfred dropped his crowbar and came forward.
"Why, no," said he, irritated, he hardly knew why, as if by a call to a
forgotten task. "Nobody's asked me to 'tend to it."
Jim stood for a moment looking through the tree-spaces, and then his
gaze came back to his nephew, and Wilfred, with a start, realized that
he had never before had the chance to look into uncle Jim's eyes. Now he
found them direct and rather stern.
"Wilfred," said Gardener Jim, "don't you be a 'tarnal fool."
Wilfred said nothing, but immediately, he could not tell why, he seemed
to be looking upon a picture of Annie standing among the flowers in her
little plain dress. His heart was beating faster, and he said to himself
that, after all, it would be sort of nice if Annie would come home.
Gardener Jim was speaking laboriously, as if he dragged out conclusions
he had perhaps reached long ago and had not yet compared with any one.
"There's a time for everything. There's a time to graft a tree an' a
time to cut it down. Well, it's your time o' life to make a 'tarnal fool
o' yourself. Don't ye do it. If you do, like 's not when you're my age
you'll be all soul alone, like me, an' goin' round 'tendin' to other
folks's gardins."
Wilfred stared at him in wonder.
"I don't know," he found himself saying. "I might fix it, but I guess
'twould be kind o' queer."
Gardener Jim screwed up his face until his eyes were quite eclipsed.
"Queer!" said he. "Nothin' 's queer if you go ahead an' do it an' say
nothin' to nobody. What if they do call ye crazed? That's another way to
make 'em stan' from under an' let ye go it. There! I've said my say.
Ain't that your axe over there by the well? You take it an' come along
o' me. I'd ha' brought mine, only I thought mebbe I shouldn't need it
till to-morrer. But I guess I shall. I guess I shall."
Wilfred followed him along the road to the Miller house, and there they
saw the twins. Sophy, obscured by a sun-bonnet, was on her knees, sowing
seeds in a bed Jim had made for her the day before; but Eliza stood
quite still among the peonies, looking off down the road.
Gardener Jim took his way into Eliza's part of the yard. She turned and
looked at him uneasily, as if she wondered what exactions he might make
to-day. Wilfred thought her face had changed of late. There were marks
of agitation upon it, as if she had been stirred by unaccustomed
thoughts and then had tried to hide them. Her eyes were troubled.
Gardener Jim walked over to the tall fence.
"Here, Wilfred," said he, "you take your axe an' knock off them boards.
The posts'll go too, give 'em a chance. They're pretty nigh rotted off."
Eliza came awake.
"Don't you touch my fence!" she called. "Don't you so much as lay a
finger on it."
Wilfred gave her a compliant look.
"You can't do that, you know," he said, in an undertone, to Gardener
Jim. "It's their fence. They don't want it down."
Gardener Jim made no answer. He took the axe from Wilfred's hand and
dealt the fence a stroke, and then another, and at every one it seemed
as if something fell. Eliza strode over to him, and, without reason,
stood there. Sophy left her seed-sowing on the other side and came also,
and she, too, watched the boards falling. The women were pale and their
eyes showed terror, whether at the unchained power of the man or at the
wonder of life, no one could have told.
Wilfred sauntered away to the old apple-tree, and began picking off
twigs here and there, to drop them on the grass.
Gardener Jim threw down the axe at last and wiped his forehead.
"Where you want them boards piled?" he asked Eliza briefly.
"Down there by the wood-shed." Her voice trembled. "They'll make good
kindlin'."
Over the space where two or three sound posts were standing, she spoke
to her sister. There was something strident in her voice, as if she
pleaded for strength to break the web of years.
"You better have some o' them boards."
"Mebbe I had," said Sophy.
"Here, Wilfred," called Gardener Jim. "You pile them boards an' I'll see
if I can't loosen up the dirt a mite round this old phlox. Anybody must
be a 'tarnal fool to build up a high board-fence an' cut off the sun
from things when they're tryin' to grow."
Sophy looked timidly at her sister.
"I s'pose 'tis foolish to try to have anything if you don't take care on
't," she said.