Mrs. Dill and her husband, Myron, grown middle-aged together, and yet,
even through the attrition of the years, no more according in
temperament than at the start, sat on opposite sides of the hearth and
looked at each other, he with calmness, from his invincible authority,
and she fluttering a little, yet making no question but of a dutiful
concurrence. She had bright blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, a thin
face with a nose slightly aquiline, and reddish hair that was her cross,
because it curled by nature and she constrained it. Sometimes, when it
kinked unusually, either in moist weather or because she had forgotten
to smooth it, and when the pupils of her eyes enlarged under cumulative
excitement, she looked young and impetuously willful; but the times were
rare, and perhaps her husband had never, since their courting days,
noted any such exhilaration. He was a large, imperious-looking man, with
a cascade of silvery beard which he affected to tolerate because the
expenditure of time in shaving might be turned with profit into the
channel of business or of worship; but his wife, noting how he stroked
the beard at intervals of meditation, judged that he was moved by
something like pride in its luxuriance. Then she chided herself for the
thought.
It was balmy spring weather, but they had taken their places at the
hearthstone from old habit when a matter of importance had to be
considered. Their two chairs were the seats of authority in the domestic
realm.
Mrs. Dill stooped, took up the turkey-wing, and gave the clean hearth a
perfunctory flick. Then she returned the wing to its place and leaned
back in her chair, gazing absently at the shining andirons.
"Well," she said, "Henrietta Parkman was in this mornin', and she told
me you'd bought the medder; but I didn't hardly believe it."
"Yes," said Myron. He spoke in rather a consequential voice, and cleared
his throat frequently in the course of talking, as if to accord his
organs a good working chance. "The deeds were passed last week, and it's
bein' recorded."
"What you goin' to do with it?"
"I bought it because it lays next to the Turnbull place, and when that
come into my hands last fall, I knew 'twas only a matter o' time till I
got the medder, too."
"Well, what you goin' to do with it?"
A tinge of anxiety was apparent in her voice, a wistful suggestiveness,
as if she could conceive of uses that would be almost too fortunate to
be hoped for. Myron hesitated. It often looked as if he judged it unwise
to answer in any haste questions concerning the domestic polity, and
Mrs. Dill was used to these periods of incubation. She had even thought
once, in a moment of illuminative comparison, that her husband seemed to
submit a bill before one branch of his mental legislature before
carrying it on to the next.
"I'm goin' to pasture my cows in it," he responded. "I shall buy in some
more stock this spring, and I expect to set up a milk-route."
"How under the sun you goin' to manage that?" She seldom questioned her
lawful head, but the surprise of the moment spurred her into a query
more expressive of her own mood than a probing of his. "You can't keep
any more cows'n you've got now. The barn ain't big enough."
"The Turnbull barn is. I've seen the day when there was forty head o'
cattle tied up there from fall to spring."
"The Turnbull barn's twenty minutes' walk from here. You can't go over
there mornin' and evenin', milkin' and feedin' the critters. You'd be
all the time on the road."
"Yes," said Myron, "'tis a good stretch. So I've made up my mind we'd
move over there."
A significant note had come into his voice. It indicated a complexity of
understanding: chiefly that she would by nature resist what he had to
say, and then resume her customary acquiescence. But for a moment she
forgot that he was Mr. Dill, and that she had promised to obey him.
"Why, Myron," she said, with a mild passion, warmed by her incredulity,
"we've lived on this place thirty year."
"Yes, yes," said her husband. "I know that. What's the use o' goin' back
over the ground, and tellin' me things I know as well as you do? What if
'tis thirty year? Time we got into better quarters."
"But they ain't better. Only it's more work."
Myron got up and moved back his chair.
"I don't think o' movin' till long about the middle o' May," he
rejoined. "You can kinder keep your mind on it and, when you get round
to your spring cleanin', pick up as you go. Some things you can fold
right into chists, blankets and winter clo'es, and then you won't have
to handle 'em over twice. If Herman comes back from gettin' the horse
shod, you tell him to take an axe, and come down where I be in the long
lot, fencin'. I want him."
He paused for a hearty draught from the dipper at the pump, pulled his
hat on tightly, and went out through the shed to his forenoon's work.
Mrs. Dill rose from her seat, and stepped quickly to the window to
watch him away. She often did it when he had most puzzled her and roused
in her a resistance which was inevitable, she knew by long experience,
but also, as her dutiful nature agreed, the result in her of an
unconquerable old Adam which had never yet felt the transforming touch
of grace. When his tall, powerful figure had disappeared beyond the rise
at the end of the lot, she gave a great willful sigh, as if she depended
on it to ease her heart, put her apron to her eyes, and held it there,
pressing back the tears.
Herman drove into the yard, and she did not hear him. She went to the
fireplace now, and leaned her head against the corner of the mantel,
looking down, with a bitter stolidity, at the hearth. Herman
unharnessed, and came in, a tall brown-haired fellow with dark eyes full
of softness, and a deep simplicity of feeling. As his foot struck the
sill, his mother roused herself, and became at once animated by a
commonplace activity. She did not face him, for fear he should find the
tear-marks on her cheeks; but when he had thrown his cap into a chair,
and gone to the sink to plunge his face in cold water, and came out
dripping, she did steal a look at him, and at once softened into a
smiling pleasure. He was her handsome son always, but to-day he looked
brilliantly excited; eager, also, as if he had something to share with
her, and was timid about presenting it.
"Mother!" said Herman. He was standing before her now, smiling
invitingly, and she smiled back again and picked a bit of lint from his
collar for the excuse of coming near him, and proving to herself her
proud ownership. "I've had a letter."
"From Annie?"
He nodded.
"What's she say?" asked his mother. But before he could answer, she
threw in a caressing invitation. "You want I should get you a piece o'
gingerbread and a glass o' milk?"
"No, I ain't hungry. She says she's kep' school about long enough, and
if I'm goin' to farm it, she'll farm it, too. I guess she'd be married
the first o' the summer, if we could fetch it."
Mrs. Dill stepped over to the hearth and sank into her chair. It seemed
as if there were to be another family council. Her silence stirred him.
"I asked her," he hastened to say. "I coaxed her, mother. She ain't as
forward as I make it out, the way I've told it."
"No," said his mother absently. She was resting her elbows on the
chair-arm, and, with hands lightly clasped, gazing thoughtfully into
space. Fine lines had sprung into her forehead, and now she took off
her glasses and wiped them carefully on her apron, as if that would help
her to an inner vision. "No, I know that. Annie's a nice girl. There's
nothin' forward about Annie. But I was only wonderin' where you could
live. This house is terrible small."
"You know what I thought," Herman reminded her. He spoke impetuously as
if begging her to remember, and therefore throw the weight of her
expectation in with his. "When father bought the Turnbull place I
thought, as much as ever I did anything in my life, he meant to make it
over to me."
His mother's eyes stayed persistently downcast. A little flush rose to
her cheeks.
"Well," she temporized, "you ain't goin' to count your chickens before
they're hatched. It's a poor way. It never leads to anything but
disappointment in the end."
"Why, mother," said Herman warmly, "you thought so too. We talked it
over only night before last, and you said you guessed father'd put me on
to that farm."
"I said I didn't know what he'd bought it for, if 'twa'n't for that,"
she amended. "Don't you build on anything I said. Don't you do it,
Hermie."
Her son stood there frowning in perplexity, his hands deep in his
pockets, and his feet apart.
"But you said so yourself, mother," he persisted. "I told you how I'd
always helped father out, long past my majority, and never hinted for
anything beyond my board and clothes. And when I got engaged to Annie, I
went to him and said, 'Father, now's the time to give me a start, or let
me cut loose from here.' And he never answered me a word; but a couple
of weeks after that he bought the Turnbull place. And last week it was,
he said to me, kind of quick, as if he'd made up his mind to somethin',
and wa'n't quite ready to talk it over, 'I've got a sort of a new scheme
afoot.' And then 'twas I wrote to Annie and asked her how soon she could
be ready to come, if I was ready to have her. You know all that, mother.
What makes you act as if you didn't?"
The argument was too warm for Mrs. Dill. She rose from her chair and
began putting up the table-leaf and setting out the necessary dishes for
a batch of cake.
"Your father wanted you should take an axe and go down where he is in
the long lot," she remarked. "And I wouldn't open your head to him about
what we've been sayin', Hermie. You talk it over with mother. That's the
best way."
"Why, course I sha'n't speak of it till I have to." He took up his cap,
and then with an air of aggrieved dignity turned to the door. "But the
time'll come when I've got to speak of it. Lot Collins was tellin' me
only this mornin' over to the blacksmith's, how his father's took him
into partnership, and Lot's only twenty-one this spring. His father
ain't wasted a day."
"Well, that's a real business, blacksmithin' is," his mother hastened to
reply.
"So's farmin' a real business. And father's treated me from the word
'go' like a hired man and nothin' else. He's bought and sold without
openin' his head to me. I wonder I've grown up at all. I wonder I ain't
in tyers, makin' mud-pies. If 'twa'n't for you and Annie, I shouldn't
think I was any kind of a man."
His angry passion was terribly appealing to her. It made her heart ache,
and she had much ado to keep from taking him to her arms, big as he was,
and comforting him, as she used to, years ago, when he came in with
frostbitten fingers or the dire array of cuts and bruises. But she
judged it best, in the interest of domestic government, to quell emotion
that could have, she knew, no hopeful issue, and she began breaking eggs
into her mixing bowl and then beating them with a brisk hand.
"Father never was one to talk over his business with anybody, even the
nearest," she rejoined. "You know that, Hermie. We've got to take folks
as we find 'em. Now you go ahead down to the long lot. He'll be
wonderin' where you be."
Herman strode away, after one incredulous look at her, a shaft she felt
through her downcast lids. It demanded whether father and mother had
equally forsaken him, and gave her a quick, sharp pang, and a blinding
flash of tears. But she went on mixing cake, and battling arguments as
she worked, and when her tin was in the oven, washed her baking dishes
methodically and then sat down by the window to read the weekly paper.
But as she read, she glanced up, now and then, at the familiar walls of
her kitchen, and through the window at the trees just shimmering into
green and the skyey intervals over them. This was the pictured landscape
she had worked on, framed by these wide, low windows, for all the years
she had lived here, doing her wifely duties soberly, and her motherly
ones with a hidden and ecstatic buoyancy.
The house, the bit of the world it gave upon, seemed a part of her life,
the containing husk of all the fruitage born to her. It was incredible
that she was to give it up and undertake not only a heavier load of work
but a new scene for it, at a time when she longed to fold her hands and
sit musing while young things filled the picture with beautiful dancing
motions, and the loves and fears she remembered as a part of the warm
reality of it, but not now so intimately her own. It was as if the
heaped-up basket of earthly fruits had passed her by, to be given into
other hands; but she had eaten and was content, if only she might see
the banquet lamps and hear the happy laughter. She began to feel
light-headed from the pain of it all, the pleasures and sadnesses of
memory, the fear of anticipation, and turned again to her paper with the
intent of giving her mind to safe and homely things. But something
caught her eyes and held them. A window seemed to be opened before her.
She looked through it into her tumultuous past. Or was this a weapon put
into her hand for the exacting future?
That night Myron Dill came into the sitting-room after his chores were
done, and lay down on the lounge between the two front windows. He
composed himself on his back with his hands placidly folded, and there
his wife found him when she came in after her own completed list of
deeds. He did not look up at her, and she was glad. She did not know how
her eyes gleamed behind the glittering plane of their glasses, nor how
deep the red was in her cheeks; but she was conscious of an inward
tumult which must, she knew, somehow betray itself. For an instant she
stood and looked at her husband, in what might have been relenting or
anticipation of the road she had to take. She knew so well what mantle
of repose was over him: how he liked the peeping of the frogs through
the open window, and what measure of satisfaction there was for him in
the consciousness of full rest and the certainty that next day would
usher in a crowding horde of duties he felt perfectly able to
administer. Mrs. Dill was a feminine creature, charged to the full with
the love of service and unerring intuition as to the manner of it, and
she did love to "see menfolks comfortable."
"Don't you want I should pull your boots off?"
This she said unwillingly, because she was about to break the current of
his peace, and it seemed deceitful to offer him an alleviation that
would do him no good after all.
"No," said Myron sleepily. "Let 'em be as they are."
Mrs. Dill drew up a chair and sat down in it at his side, as if she were
the watcher by a sick-bed or the partner in a cosy conversation.
"Myron," said she. Her voice frightened her. It sounded hoarse and
strange, and yet there was very little of it, deserted by her failing
breath.
"What say?" he answered from his drowse.
"I found a real interestin' piece in the 'Monitor' this mornin'. It was
how some folks ain't jest one person, as we think, but they're two and
sometimes three. And mebbe one of 'em's good, and t'other two are bad,
and when they're bad they can't help it. They can't help it, Myron, the
bad ones can't, no matter how hard they try."
"Yes, I believe I come acrost it," said Myron. "Terrible foolish it was.
That's one o' the things doctors get up to feather their own nest."
"No, Myron, it ain't foolish," said his wife. She moved her chair
nearer, and her glasses glittered at him. "It ain't foolish, for I'm one
o' that same kind, and I know."
His eyes came open, and he turned his head to look at her.
"Ain't you feelin' well, Caddie?" he asked kindly.
"Oh, yes, I'm well as common," she answered. "But it ain't foolish,
Myron, and you've got to hear me. 'Double Personality,' that's what they
call it. Well, I've got it. I've got double personality."
Myron Dill put his feet to the floor, and sat upright. He was regarding
his wife anxiously, but he took pains to speak with a commonplace
assurance.
"We might as well be gettin' off to bed early, I guess. I'm tired, and
so be you."
"I've felt it for quite a long spell," said his wife earnestly. "I
don't know but I've always felt it--leastways, all through my married
life. It's somethin' that makes me as mad as tophet when you start me
out to do anything I don't feel it's no ways right to do, and it keeps
whisperin' to me I'm a fool to do it. That's what it says, Myron.
'You're a fool to do it!'"
Myron was touched at last, through his armor of esteem.
"I ain't asked you to do what ain't right, Caddie," he asseverated.
"What makes you tell me I have?"
"That's what it says to me," she repeated fixedly. "'You're a fool to do
it.' That's what it says. It's my double personality."
It seemed best to Myron to humor this inexplicable mood, until he could
persuade her back into a normal one.
"That wa'n't the way I understood it," he told her, "when I read the
piece. The folks that were afflicted seemed like different folks. Now,
you ain't any different, rain or shine. You're as even as anybody I
should wish to see. That's what I've liked about ye, Caddie."
The softness of the implication she swept aside, as if she hardly dared
regard it lest it weaken her resolve.
"Oh, I ain't goin' to be the same, day in, day out," she declared
eagerly. "I feel I ain't, Myron. It's gettin' the best of me, the other
creatur' that wants to have its own way. It's been growin' and growin',
same as a child grows up, and now it's goin' to take its course. Same 's
Hermie's growed up, you know. He's old enough to have his way, and lead
his life same's we've led ours, and we've got to stand one side and let
him do it."
Her husband gave her a sharp, sudden glance, and then fell again to the
contemplation of his knotted brown hands that seemed, like all his
equipment, informed with specialized power.
"Well," he said at length, "I guess you need a kind of a change. You'll
feel better when you get over to t'other house. There's a different
outlook over there, and you'll have more to take up your mind."
She answered instantly, in the haste that dares not wait upon
reflection. Her eyes were brighter now, and her hands worked nervously.
"Oh, I ain't goin' to move, Myron. I might as well tell you that now.
I'm goin' to stay right here where I be. I don't feel able to help it.
That's my double personality. It won't let me."
Her husband was looking at her now in what seemed to her a very
threatening way. His shaggy eyebrows were drawn together and his eyes
had lightning in them. She continued staring at him, held by the
fascination of her terror. In that instant she realized a great many
things: chiefly that she had never seen her husband angry with her,
because she had taken every path to avoid the possibility, and that it
was even more sickening than she could have thought. But she knew also
that the battle was on, and suddenly, for no reason she could formulate,
she remembered one of her own fighting ancestors who was said to have
died hard in the Revolution.
"That was old Abner Kinsman," she broke out; and when her husband asked,
out of his amaze at her irrelevance, "What's that you said?" she only
answered confusedly, "Nothin', I guess."
At that the storm seemed to Myron to be over, and his forehead cleared
of anger. He looked at her in much concern.
"I guess you better lay late to-morrer mornin'," he said, rising to
close the windows and wind the clock. "I'll ride over and get Sally Drew
to come and stay a spell and help you."
Something tightened through her tense body, and she answered instantly
in a clear, loud note,--
"I ain't goin' to have Sally Drew. Last time I had her she washed up the
hearth with the dish-cloth. If I want me a girl, I'll get one; but mebbe
I sha'n't want one till Hermie brings Annie into the neighborhood to
live."
She stood still in her place for a moment, trembling all over, and
wondering what would happen when Myron had wound the clock and closed
the windows and turned the wooden button of the door. He did not look at
her, nor did he speak again, and when she heard his deep, regular
breathing from the bedroom she slipped in softly, made ready for bed,
and lay down beside him.
She slept very little that night. He seemed to be a stranger, because
there had been outward division between them; and yet, curiously, she
felt nearer to him because she might have hurt him, and the jealous
partisanship within her kept prompting her to a more tumultuous
good-will, a warmer service.
Next morning, when Hermie had left them at the breakfast-table, and gone
silently to his tasks, his mother leaned across the table as if, for
some reason, she had to attract her husband's attention before speaking
to him. He was just taking the last swallow of coffee, and now he set
down his cup with decision, and moved away his plate. She knew what the
next step would be. He would push back his chair, clear his throat, and
then he would be gone.
"Myron!" she said. She spoke as something within Myron remembered the
school-teacher speaking, when she called him to the board. The
something within him responded to it, and without knowing why, he
straightened and looked attentive. "You noticed Hermie, didn't you?" she
adjured him. "You noticed he didn't have a word to say for himself, and
he wouldn't look neither of us in the face?"
"What's he been up to?" Myron queried, with his ready frown. "He done
somethin' out o' the way?"
"No, he ain't. I should think you'd be ashamed to hint such a thing,
Myron Dill, your own boy, too! All he's done is to stay here, and work
his fingers to the bone, and no thanks for it, and he's right down
discouraged. I know how the boy feels. Myron, I want you should do
somethin'. I want you should do it now."
Myron gave his chair the expected push, but he still sat there.
"Well," he said, "what is it? I've got to be off down to the
medderlands."
"I want you should make over the Turnbull place to Hermie, and have him
fetch Annie there as soon as ever she'll come, and let him farm it
without if or but from you and me."
Myron was on his feet. He looked portentously large and masterful.
"You better not think o' packin' the chiny," he said, in his ordinary
tone of generalship. "We can set it into baskets with a mite o' hay,
and it'll get as fur as that without any breakages."
His wife slipped out of her chair, and went round the table to him. She
laid a hand on his arm. Myron wanted, in the irritation of the moment,
to shake it off, but he was a man of dignity, and forbore. His wife was
speaking in a very gentle tone, but somehow different from the one he
was used to noting.
"Myron, ain't you goin' to hear me?"
"I ain't goin' to listen to any tomfoolery, and I ain't goin' to have
anybody dictatin' to me about my own business."
"It ain't your business, Myron, any more'n 'tis mine. Hermie's much my
son as he is your'n, and what you bought that place with is as much mine
as 'tis your'n. I helped you earn it. Myron, it's comin' up in me. I can
feel it."
"What is?"
In spite of all his old dull certainties, he felt the shock of wonder.
He looked at her, her scarlet cheeks and widening eyes. Even her pretty
hair seemed to have acquired a nervous life, and stood out in a
quivering aureole. Myron was much bound to his Caddie in his way of
being attached to his own life and breath. A change in her was horrible
to him, like the disturbance of illness in an ordered house.
"What is it?" he inquired again. "What is it you feel?"
"It's that," she said, with an added vehemence. "It's my double
personality."
Myron Dill could have wept from the surprise of it all, the assault upon
his wondering nerves.
"You spread up the bed in the bedroom, Caddie," he bade her, "and go lay
down a spell."
"No," said his wife, "I sha'n't lay down, and I sha'n't give up to you.
It's riz up in me, the one that's goin' to beat, no matter what comes of
it, same as old Abner Kinsman stood up ag'inst the British. Mebbe it'll
die fightin', same's he did, and I never'll hear no more from it,--and a
good riddance. But Myron, it's goin' to beat."
Her husband was frowning, not harshly now, but from the extremity of his
distress. He spoke in a tone of well-considered adjuration.
"Caddie, you know what you're doin' of? You're settin' up your will in
place o' mine."
"Oh, no, I ain't, Myron," she responded eagerly, with an earnest motion
toward him, as if she besought him to put faith in her. "It ain't me
that's doin' it."
"It ain't you? Who is it, then?"
"Why, it's my double personality. Ain't I just told you so?"
Myron stood gazing at her in the futility of comprehension he had felt
years ago, when Caddie, who had been "a great reader," as the neighbors
said, before the avalanche of household cares had overwhelmed her,
propounded to him, while he was drawing off his boots for an hour of
twilight somnolence before going to bed, problems that, he knew, no man
could answer. Neither were they to be illumined by Holy Writ, for he had
offered that loophole of exit, and Caddie had shaken her head at him
disconsolately, and implied that the prophets would not do. But when she
had seemed to forget that interrogative attitude toward life, he had
settled down to unquestioning content in knowing he had the best
housekeeper in the neighborhood. Now here it was again, the spectre of
her queerness rising to distress him.
She looked at him with wide, affrighted eyes.
"You set here with me a spell," she adjured him. "I'll lay down on the
sofy, and you take the big rocker. If you see it comin' up in me, you
kinder say somethin', and mebbe it'll go away."
Myron, though in extreme unwillingness, did as he was bidden. He wanted
to bundle the whole troop of her imaginings out of doors, and plod off,
like a sane man, to his fencing; but somehow her earnestness itself
forbade. When they were established, she on the sofa, with her bright
eyes piercing him, and he seated at an angle where a nurse might easiest
wait upon a patient's needs, the absurdity of it all swept over him. The
clock was ticking irritatingly behind him. He looked at his watch, and
took assurance from the vision of the flying day.
"Now, Caddie," said he, in that specious soothing we accord to children,
"you lay right still, and I'll go out a spell and do a few chores, and
then mebbe I'll come in and see how you be."
Caddie put out a hand, and fastened it upon his in an inexorable clasp.
"No, Myron," said she, "you ain't goin'. If I should be left here to
myself, and it come up in me, I dunno what I might do."
Myron felt himself yielding again, and clutched at confidence as the
spent swimmer reaches for a plank.
"What do you think you'd do, Caddie?" he demanded. "That's what I want
to know."
"I can't tell, Myron," she returned solemnly. "True as I'm a livin'
woman, I can't tell you. Mebbe I'd go over to the Turnbull house and set
it a-fire, so 't I shouldn't ever live in it. Mebbe I'd take my
bank-book, and go up to the Street, and draw out that money aunt Susan
left me, and give it to Hermie, so 's he could run away, and take Annie
with him. If that other one come up in me, I dunno what I'd do."
Myron gazed at her, aghast.
"Why, Caddie," said he, "you can't go round settin' houses a-fire.
That's arson."
"Is it?" she inquired. "Well, I dunno what it's called, but if that
other one gets the better o' me, mebbe that's what I shall do."
Myron held her hand now with an involuntary fervor of his own, not so
much because she bade him, but with the purpose of restraining her. An
hour passed, and her blue eyes were fixed upon him with the same
imploring force. He fidgeted, and at last longed childishly to see them
wink.
"Don't you want to see the doctor?" he ventured.
"No," said Caddie, in the same tone of wild asseveration. "Doctors won't
do me a mite o' good. Besides, doctors know all about it, and they'd see
what was to pay, and they'd send me off to some kind of a hospital, and
there'd be a pretty bill o' costs."
"I don't believe a word of it," Myron ventured, with a grasp at mental
liberty. He essayed, at the same time, to draw away his hand, but Caddie
seemed to fix him with a sharper eye-gleam, and he forbore.
"There's Hermie," she said. "I hear him in the shed, rattlin' round
amongst the tools. You call him in here, and when he's here, you tell
him he's goin' to have the Turnbull place, and have it now. Myron, you
tell him."
Myron made a slight involuntary movement in his chair, as if he were
about to rise and carry out her mandate; but he settled back again, and
Herman, having selected the tool he wanted, went off through the shed
and, as they both knew, down the garden-path.
The forenoon went on in a strange silence, save for the sound of the
birds, and an occasional voice of neighbors calling to Herman as they
passed. Myron had still that sickening sense of illness in the house.
The breakfast dishes were, he knew, untouched upon the table. The cat
came in, looked incidentally at the sofa as if she were accustomed to
occupy it at that particular hour, and walked out again. Myron drew
forth his watch, and looked at it with a stealthiness he could not
explain.
"Why," said he, with a simulated wonder, "it's nigh half after eleven.
Hadn't you better see about gettin' dinner?"
"I ain't a-goin' to get any dinner," his wife responded. "I don't know
as I shall ever get dinners any more. Myron, it's comin' up in me. I
feel it." She dropped his hand and rose to a sitting posture, and for a
moment, yielding to the physical relief of the broken clasp, he leaned
back in his chair and drew a hearty breath.
"Myron," said his wife. There was something mandatory in her voice, and
he came upright again. "Now I'm goin' to do it. I don't know what 'tis,
but it's got the better o' me and I'm goin' to do what it says. But
'fore I give way to it, I'm goin' to tell you this. You've got as good a
home and as good a son and as good a wife, if I do say it, as any man in
the State o' New Hampshire. And you can keep 'em, Myron, jest as they
be, jest as good as they always have been, if you'll only hear to reason
and give other folks a chance. You've got to give me a chance, and
you've got to give Herman a chance. I guess mebbe I'd sell all my
chances for the sake of turnin' 'em in with Hermie's. But you've got to
do it, and you've got to do it now. And if you don't, somethin' 's goin'
to happen. I don't know what it is. I don't know no more'n the dead, for
this is the first time I ever really knew I had that terrible creatur'
inside of me that's goin' to beat. But I do know it, and you've got to
stand from under."
She turned about and walked to the side window, looking on the garden.
She was a slight woman, but Myron, watching her in the fascination of
his dread, had momentary remembrance of her father, who had been a man
of majestic presence and unflinching will.
"Herman," his wife was calling from the window. "Herman, you come here."
That new mysterious note in her voice evidently affected the young man
also. He came, hurrying, and when he had entered stayed upon the
threshold, warm-hued with work and bringing with him the odor of the
soil. His brown eyes went from one of them to the other, and questioned
them.
"What is it?" he inquired. "What's happened?"
Myron got upon his feet. He had a dazed feeling that the two were
against him, and he could face them better so. He hated the situation,
the abasement that came from a secret self within him which was almost
terribly moved by some of the things his wife had spoken out of her long
silence. He was a proud man, and it seemed to him dreadful that he
should in any way have won such harsh appeal.
"Herman," his wife was beginning, "your father's got somethin' to say to
you."
Herman waited, but his father could not speak. Myron was really seeing,
as in a homely vision, the peace of the garden where he might at this
moment have been expecting the call to dinner if he had not been
summoned to the bar of judgment.
"I guess he's goin' to let me say it," his wife continued. "Father's
goin' to give you a deed o' the Turnbull place. It's goin' to be yours,
same as if you'd bought it, and you and Annie are goin' to live there
all your days, same 's we're goin' to live here."
Herman turned impetuously upon his father. There was a great rush of
life to his face, and his father saw it and understood, in the amazement
of it, things he had never stopped to consider about the boy who had
miraculously grown to be a man. But Herman was finding something in his
father's jaded mien. It stopped him on the tide of happiness, and he
spoke impetuously.
"She's dragged it out o' you! Mother's been tellin' you! I don't want it
that way, father, not unless it's your own free will. I won't have it no
other way."
It was a man's word to a man. Myron straightened himself to his former
bearing. In a flash of memory he remembered the day when his father, an
old-fashioned man, had given him his freedom suit and shaken hands with
him and wished him well. Involuntarily he put out his hand.
"It's my own will, Hermie," he said, in a tone they had not heard from
him since the day, eighteen years behind them, when the boy Hermie was
rescued from the "old swimmin'-hole." "We'll have the deeds drawed up
to-morrer."
They stood an instant, hands gripped, regarding each other in the
allegiance not of blood alone. The clasp broke, and they remembered the
woman and turned to her. There she stood, trembling a little, but
apparently removed from all affairs too large for her. She had taken a
cover from the stove, and was obviously reflecting on the next step in
her domestic progress.
"I guess you better bring me in a handful o' that fine kindlin',
Hermie," she remarked, in her wonted tone of brisk suggestion, "so 's 't
I can brash up the fire. I sha'n't have dinner on the stroke--not 'fore
half-past one."