The summer boarders had gone, and Marshmead was settling down to a peace
enhanced by affluence. Though the exodus had come earlier than usual
this year, because the Hiltons were sailing for Germany and the Dennys
due at the Catskills, not one among their country entertainers had
complained. Marshmead approved, from a careless dignity, when people
brought money into the town, but it always relapsed into its own customs
with a contented sigh after the jolt of inexplicable requirements and
imported ways. This year had been an especially fruitful one. The
boarders had given a fancy dress party with amateur vaudeville combined,
for the benefit of the old church, and Martha Waterman now, as she
toiled up the hill to a meeting of the Circle, held the resultant check
in one of her plump freckled hands. Martha was chief mover in all
capable deeds, a warm, silent woman who called children "lamb," plied
them with pears, and knew the inner secrets of rich cookery. She was
portly, and her thin skin gave confirmation to her own frequent
complaint of feeling the heat; but though the day had been more sultry
than it was, she would not have foregone the pleasure of endowing the
Circle with its new accession toward the meeting-house fund.
The Circle had been founded in war time when women scraped lint and
sewed with a passionate zeal. Martha was a little girl then, wondering
what the excitement was really about, though, since it had lasted
through her own brief period, she took it that war was a permanent
condition, like bread or weather. Now she often mused over those old
days and thought how marvelous it was that she could ever have been
young enough to see no significance in that time of blood and pain. In
these middle years of hers the Circle was a different affair, but it
kept its loyal being. To-day it met in the basement of the church, and
there, when Martha went plodding in, nearly all the other members were
assembled. Sometimes they sewed for sufferers from varying disasters,
but to-day their hands were idle, and a buzz of talk saluted her. They
looked up as one woman when she entered.
"There she is," called two or three, and Lydia Vesey, the little
dressmaker, as sharp and unexpected as the slash of her own
too-impulsive scissors, came forward with a run.
"You got it?" she inquired.
Mrs. Waterman laughed richly, and set her umbrella in the corner. Then,
still holding one hand closed upon the check, she untied her hat and
fanned herself with it during the relief of sinking into a seat.
"Do let me get my breath," she besought, yet as if she prolonged the
moment for the sake of the dramatic weight the tale demanded. "Seems if
I never experienced such a day as this. It's hotter'n any fall I ever
see."
"You look very warm, Martha," said Ellen Bayliss, in her gentle way. She
was sitting by the window, bending over an embroidered square, the sun
on her soft curls and delicate cheek unveiling the look of middle life,
yet doing something kindly, too; for though he showed the withered
texture of her skin, he brought out the last fleck of gold in her hair,
and balanced sadness with some bloom. Ellen had been accounted a beauty,
and her niece Nellie was a beauty now, of a more radiant type. She was
the rose of life, but aunt Ellen had the fragrance of roses in a jar.
"You sewin', Ellen?" Martha inquired, as if she were willing to shift
the topic from what would exact continued speech from her, and at least
defer her colleagues' satisfaction. "You're the only one that's brought
their thimble, I'll be bound."
"It's only this same centrepiece," Ellen answered, holding it up. "Mrs.
Hilton told me if I'd send it after her, she'd give me three dollars for
it. I thought I could turn the money into the fund."
"You got it?" Lydia Vesey cried again, as if she could not possibly
crowd her interest under, and this time she had reenforcements from
without. Mrs. Daniel Pray, who was almost a giantess and bent
laboriously over to accommodate her height to her husband's, took off
her glasses and laid them on her declivitous lap, the better to fix
Martha with her dull, small eyes.
"I'll be whipped if I believe you've got it, after all," she offered
discontentedly. "Mebbe they're goin' to send by mail."
Martha looked at her a moment, apparently in polite consideration, but
really wondering, as she often did, if anything would thicken the hair
at Mrs. Pray's parting. She frequently, out of the strength of her
address and capability, had these moments of musing over what could be
done.
"Speak up, Marthy, can't ye?" ended Mrs. Pray irritably, now putting on
her glasses again as if, having tried one way, she would essay another.
"Didn't you see Mis' Hilton at the last, or didn't they give it to you?"
Martha unclosed her hand and extended it to them impartially, the
check, face uppermost, held between thumb and finger. They bent forward
to peer. Some rose and looked over the shoulders of the nearer ones, and
glasses were sought and hastily mounted upon noses.
"Well, there," said Mrs. Hanscom, the wife of the grain-dealer who
always stipulated for cash payment before he would deliver a bag at the
barn door, "it ain't bills, as I see."
"It's just as good." Ellen Bayliss looked up from her sewing to throw
this in, with her air of deprecating courtesy. "A check's the same as
money any day. I have two, twice a year, from my stock. All you have to
do is to write your name on the back and turn 'em into the bank."
"Well, all I want to know is, what's it come to?" Lydia Vesey said.
"Course it's just the same as money. I've had checks myself, days past.
Once I done over Miss Tenny's black mohair an' sent it after her, an'
she mailed me back a check,--same day, I guess it was. How much's it
come to, Marthy?"
"See for yourself," said Martha. She laid it, still face upward, on the
table. "It's as much yours as 'tis mine, I guess, if I be treasurer.
Forty-three dollars an' twenty-seven cents."
There was a chorused sigh.
"Well, I call that a good haul," said Ann Bartlett, whose father had
been sexton for thirty-eight years, and who, in consequence, looked upon
herself as holding some subtly intimate relation with the church, so
that when the old carpet was "auctioned off" she insisted on darning the
breadths before they were put up for sale. "What money can do! Just one
evenin', an' them few folks dressed up to kill an' payin' that in for
their ice-cream an' tickets at the door."
"We made the ice-cream," said Martha, as one stating a fact to be justly
remembered.
"We paid ourselves in, too," said Lydia sharply. "I guess our money's
good as anybody's, an' I guess it'll count up as quick an' go as fur."
"Course it will," said Martha, in a mollifying tone. "But 'tis an easy
way of makin' a dollar, just as Ann says. There they got up a
fancy-dress party an' enjoyed themselves, an' it's brought in all this.
'Twa'n't hard work for 'em. 'Twas a kind o' play."
"Well, I guess they did enjoy it," said Mrs. Pray gloomily. She had
settled her glasses on her nose again, and now, with her finger, went
following the bows round under her hair, to be sure they "canted right."
"I guess they wouldn't ha' done it if they hadn't."
"There's one thing Mis' Hilton says to me when she passed me the check,"
Martha brought out, in sudden recollection. "'Now here's this money we
made for you,' she says. 'Use it anyways you want, so 's you use it for
the church. But,' she says, 'why don't you make up your minds now you'll
give some kind of an entertainment after we're gone, a harvest
festival,' she says, 'or the like o' that? Then you could do your
paintin',' she says, 'an' get you a new melodeon for the Sunday School,
or whatever 'tis you want. We've showed you the way,' she says. 'Now you
go ahead an' see what you can do.'"
Lydia Vesey looked as if she might, in another instant, cap the
suggestion by a satirical climax, and Ellen Bayliss rested her sewing
hand on her knee and glanced thoughtfully about as if to ask, in her
still, earnest way, what her own part could be in such an enterprise.
But a step came hurrying down the stairs, the step of a heavy body
lightly carried, and Caddie Musgrave came in at a flying pace. It was
Caddie who, with the help of her silent husband, kept the big
boarding-house on the hill. No need to talk to her about summer
boarders, she was wont to say. She knew 'em, egg an' bird. Take 'em as
folks an' nobody was better, but 'twas boarders she meant. They might
seem different, fust sight, but shake 'em up in a peck measure, an' you
couldn't tell t'other from which.
"I guess you're tired," said Ellen Bayliss, in her gentle fashion,
taking a stolen glance from the embroidery and returning again at once
to her careful stitches.
"Tired!" said Caddie. She dropped into a chair and leaned her head back
with ostentatious weariness. "I guess I be. An' yet I told Charlie 'fore
they went I never'd say I was tired again in all my born days, only let
me get rid of 'em this time."
"How'd you manage with 'em this season?" asked Mrs. Pray, as if her
question concerned the importation of some alien plant.
Caddie opened her eyes and came to a posture more adapted to sustaining
her end of the conversational burden.
"Why, they're all right," she owned, "good as gold, take 'em on their
own ground. I found out they were good as gold that winter I went up an'
passed Sunday with Mis' Denny. But take 'em together, boardin', an' what
one don't think of t'other will. This summer 'twas growin' fleshy, an'
if they didn't harp on that one string--well, suz!"
Mrs. Pray nodded her head solemnly.
"I said that," she returned. "I said that to Jonathan when I come home
from the Circle the day they was here talkin' over the fund an' settlin'
what they'd do. I come home an' says to Jonathan wipin' his hands on
the roller-towel there by the back door, I says, 'What's everybody got
ag'inst growin' old, an' growin' hefty, too, for that matter?' I says.
'Seems if folks don't talk about nothin' else.'"
Martha put in her assuaging word.
"Well, I guess human natur' ain't changed much. I guess nobody ever
hankered after gettin' stiff j'ints an' losin' their eyesight an' so.
'Twould be a queer kind of a shay that was lookin' for'ard to goin' to
pieces while 'twas travelin' along. Mis' Denny's niece that reads in
public read me that piece once. I thought 'twas about the cutest that
ever was."
Ellen Bayliss had laid her sewing on her knee, and now she looked up in
an impulsive haste, the color in her cheeks and a quick moving note in
her voice.
"It isn't growing old that's the trouble. It's talking about it. Why,
the night after that meeting of the Circle--" She stopped here, and her
eyes, widening and growing darker in a way they had, gave her face
almost a look of terror.
"What is it, Ellen?" asked Martha Waterman kindly. "You tell it right
out."
"Why," said Ellen, "this is all 'twas. That night at supper, my Nellie
kept staring at me across the table. 'What is 't, Nellie?' I says, at
last. Then she colored up and says, not as if she wanted to, but as if
she couldn't help it, 'I hope I shall look like you sometime, aunt
Ellen.' You see how 'twas. She meant, when she was old. She never in her
life had thought anything about me being old, and they'd put it into her
head."
A pained look settled upon her face, and before she took up her sewing
again she glanced from one to another as if to ask them if they really
understood. There was a little warm murmur of assent. Ellen was beloved,
and there was, besides, a concurrent strain of sympathy through the
assembly who had known all her past. They remembered how Colonel Hadley
had "gone with her" awhile when she was teaching school at District
Number Four, and how Ellen had faded out, the summer he was married to
Kate Leighton, of the Leightons on the hill. Now his nephew, Clyde, was
going with Ellen's niece in a way that vividly mirrored the old time,
and they had heard that the colonel, when he came for one of his brief
visits in the summer, had somehow put a check to love's beginning. At
least, Clyde had seen Nellie only once after his uncle went away, and
had speedily closed the old house and followed him.
"There, Ellen," said Lydia Vesey, from a rare softness. "I guess
nobody'd ever say 't you was growin' old. They'd only think you was
sort o' palin' out, that's all, same 's a white dress is different from
a pink one."
"Well, now, I'll say my say, an' done with it," remarked Caddie
Musgrave, with her accustomed violence. "I'm ready to grow old when my
time comes, an' if I get there by the road some have took before me, I
guess I sha'n't be put under the sod by any vote o' town-meetin'. As I
look back, seems to me 'most all them that's gone before us has had
their uses to the last. Think o' gramma Jakes! Why, she hadn't chick nor
child of her own left to bless her, an' see how she was looked up to,
an' how every little tot in town thought he's made if he could be sent
to gramma Jakes's to do an arrant, an' she give him a pep'mint or a
cooky. 'Twa'n't the pep'mint though. 'Twas because she was a real sweet
nice old lady, that's what 'twas."
"Yes, I remember gramma Jakes," said Anna Dutton, from the corner. She
was a round, pink, near-sighted little person, who had tried to cure
herself of stammering by speaking very slowly, and now scarcely talked
at all because she had found how unwilling her more robust and
loquacious neighbors were to give her the right of way in her hindering
course. "Seems if I could see her now standin' there on her front porch,
her little handkercher round her neck--"
Caddie broke in upon this reminiscence, according to a custom so
established that Anna Dutton only kept her mouth open for an instant, as
if the opportunity for speech might return to her, and then quite calmly
settled back with an air of pleased attention.
"They're afraid o' gettin' old an' they're afraid o' gettin' fleshy,"
Caddie announced. "Well, there's no crime in gettin' old, now is there?
An' if there is, you can't put a stop to 't in any court o' law. An' as
for bein' fleshy, if you be you be, an' you might as well turn to an'
have your clo'es made bigger an' say no more."
Mrs. Pray presented her mite with her accustomed severity of gloom, as
if she had selected the words most carefully and wished to have it
understood that they were the choicest she had to offer.
"I was fryin' doughnuts, a week ago Saturday, an' Mis' Denny come along
with that lady friend o' hers that's down here over Sunday. I offered
'em each a warm doughnut, an' they was possessed to take it. They'd been
walkin' quite a spell, an' they'd called for a drink o' water. They said
'twas the time in the forenoon when they drinked. But they looked at the
doughnuts good an' hard, an' they says: 'No. It's fattenin',' says they.
'It's fattenin'.'"
"Yes," said Caddie, with a scornful cadence, "I'll warrant they did.
That's what they said about two things out o' three, soon 's the hands
moved round to meal-time. 'It's fattenin'!' Oh, I'm sick an' tired to
death of it! I ain't goin' to be dead till I be dead, thinkin' about it
all the time, not if I can keep my thoughts inside o' me an' my tongue
in my head. So there!"
"Well, now," said Martha Waterman, with the mildness calculated to
smooth a troubled situation, "hadn't we better be gettin' round to
thinkin' what we'll do to earn us a mite more money for the fund? Seems
if, now they've done so well by us, we'd ought to up an' show what we
can do--a harvest festival, mebbe, or a sociable for all, an' charge for
tickets."
One woman had not spoken. She was a thin, dark-eyed creature, with a
gypsy face and a quantity of gray hair wound about on the top of her
head. This was Isabel Martin, who was allowed her erratic way because
she took it, and because, it had always been said, "You never could tell
what Isabel would do next, only she never meant the least o' harm." She
had come softly in while the others were talking, and drawn Ellen's work
out of her hand, with a swift, pretty smile at her. "Rest your eyes,"
she had whispered her, and sat by, taking quick, deft stitches, while
Ellen, unconscious until then of being tired, had dropped her lids and
leaned her head against the casing, with a faint smile of pleasant
restfulness. Now Isabel put the work back into Ellen's hand with an
accurate haste, and looked up at the group about her.
"I'll tell you what to do," she said. Her voice thrilled with urging and
suggestive mischief. It was a compelling voice, and they turned at once.
"If there ain't Isabel," said Martha Waterman. "I didn't see you come
in."
"Le' 's give a fancy dress party of our own," said Isabel.
"Dress ourselves up to the nines, an' put on paint an' powder, an' send
off to the stores to hire clo'es an' wigs?" inquired Caddie. "No, sir,
none o' that for me. I've seen what it comes to, money an' labor, too.
I've just been through it, lookin' on, an' I wouldn't do it not if the
church never see a brush o' paint nor a shingle, an' we had to play on a
jew's-harp 'stead of a melodeon. No!"
Ann Bartlett gave a little murmur here.
"I never heard of anybody's bringin' a jew's-harp into the
meetin'-house," she said, as a kind of official protest. "I guess we
could get us some kind of a melodeon, 'fore we done such a thing as
that."
Isabel was going on in that persuasive voice; it seemed to call the town
to her to do her bidding.
"No, we ain't goin' to do it their way. We're goin' to do it our way.
They've set out to see how young they can be. Le' 's see 'f we can't
beat 'em seein' how old we can be. Le' 's dress up like the oldest that
ever was, an' act as if we liked it."
The electrifying meaning ran over them like a wave. They caught the
splendid significance of it. They were to offer, in the guise of
jesting, their big protest against the folly of sickening over youth by
showing how fearlessly they were dancing on toward age. It was more than
bravado, more than repudiation of the cowards who hesitated at the
onward step. It was loyal and passionate upholding of the state of those
who were already old, and of those who had continued their beneficent
lives into the time when there is no pleasure in the years, and yet had
given honor and blessing through them all. They fell to laughing
together, and two or three cried a little on the heels of merriment.
"I dunno what mother'd say," whispered Hannah Call, whose mother, old
and yet regnant as the best housekeeper in town and a repository of all
the most valuable recipes, had died that year. "I guess she'd say we was
possessed."
"We be," said Isabel recklessly. "That's the only fun there is, bein'
possessed. If you ain't one way, you'd better be another. It's the
way's the only thing to see to."
"I said I was sick o' paint an' powder," said Caddie. "Well, so I be,
but I'll put flour in my hair so 't's as white as the drifted snow. I've
got aunt Hope's gre't horn spe'tacles."
"I guess I could borrer one o' gramma Ellsworth's gounds," said Mrs.
Pray. A light rarely seen there had come into her dull eyes. Isabel,
with that prescience she had about the minds of people, knew what it
meant. Mrs. Pray, though she was contemplating the garb of eld, was
unconsciously going back to youth and the joy of playing. "She ain't
quite my figger, but I guess 'twill do."
Lydia Vesey gave her a kindly look, yet scathing in its certainty of
professional strictures.
"There ain't nobody that ever I see that's anywhere near your figger,"
she said, in the neighborly ruthlessness that was perfectly understood
among them. "But you hand the gound over to me, an' I can fix it."
"Everybody flour their hair," cried Isabel, with the mien of inciting
them deliriously.
"Everybody that's got plates, take 'em out," added Martha, the
administrative, catching the infection and going a step beyond.
"Why, we can borrer every stitch we want," said Lydia Vesey. "Borrer of
the dead an' borrer of the livin'. I know every rag o' clo'es that's
been made in this town, last thirty years. There's enough laid away in
camphire, of them that's gone, to fit out three-four old ladies' homes."
"It'll be like the resurrection," said Ellen Bayliss, with that little
breathless catch in her voice.
"What you mean by that, Ellen?" asked Martha gently.
"I know what she means," said Isabel, while Ellen, the blood running
into her cheeks, looked helplessly as if she wished she had not spoken.
"She means we're goin' to dress ourselves up in the things of them
that's gone, a good many of 'em, an' we can't help takin' on the ways of
folks that wore 'em. We can't anyways help glancin' back an' kinder
formin' ourselves on old folks we've looked up to. Seems if the dead
would walk."
Sometimes people shuddered at Isabel's queer sayings, but at this every
one felt moved in a solemn way. It seemed beautiful to have the dead
walk, so it was in the remembrance of the living.
"Shall we let the men in?" asked Caddie anxiously. "I dunno what they'll
say 'f we don't." Her silent husband was the close partner of her life.
To Marshmead it seemed as if he might as well have been born dumb, but
Caddie never omitted tribute to his great qualities.
"Mercy, yes," said Isabel, "if they'll dress up. Not else. They've got
to be gran'ther Graybeards every one of 'em, or they don't come. You
tell 'em so."
"You going home, aunt Ellen?" came a fresh voice from the doorway. "I've
been staying after school, and I thought maybe you'd be tired and like
me to call for you."
It was Nellie Lake, a vision of youth and sweet unconsciousness. She
stood there in the doorway, hat and parasol in hand, crowned by her
yellow hair, and in the prettiest pose of deprecating grace. Aunt Ellen
smiled at her with loving pride, and yet wistfully, too. Nellie had
called for her many times, just to walk home together, but never because
aunt Ellen might be tired. The infection of age was in the air, and
Nellie Lake had caught it.
"Come in, Nellie," she said. "No, I don't feel specially tired, but
maybe I'll go along in a minute."
"Want to come to an old folks' party?" called Isabel, who was reading
all these thoughts as swiftly as if they were signals to herself alone.
"Want to dress up, an' flour your hair, an' put on spe'tacles, an' come
an' play with us old folks?"
The girl's face creased up delightfully.
"A fancy dress!" she said. "What can I be?"
"You'll be an old lady," said Isabel, "or you won't come."
"Is it for the fund?" asked Nellie.
"Well, yes, I suppose it's for the fund, some," Isabel conceded. "But
take it by an' large, it's for fun."
* * * * *
The night of the masquerade was soft and still, lighted by the harvest
moon. Everywhere the fragrance of grapes enriched the air, and the dusty
bitterness of things ripening. The little town hall was gay with lights,
a curious blending of the west and east; for the boarders had left
Japanese lanterns behind them, and their grotesque prettiness contrasted
strangely with bowery goldenrod and asters and the red of maple leaves.
Colonel Hadley, standing a moment at the doorway in his evening walk,
this first night of his stay, when he had come with his nephew to look
out some precious old books in the attic, and perhaps the more actually
to draw Clyde away again after the errand was done, thought he had never
seen such abandonment to a wild pleasure, even in his early days at
Marshmead. For it was pleasure, though it seemed to be the festival of
the old. Men and women bent with years and yet straightening themselves
when their muscles ached, were promenading the hall, not sedately,
according to the wont of Marshmead social gatherings, to fulfill a
terrifying rite, but gayly, as if only by premeditation did they
withstand the beckoning of the dance.
At the end of the hall, in a bower of light and greenery, sat a row of
others who were apparently set apart for some honor or special service.
From time to time the ranks broke, and one group after another stayed to
talk with them, and always with the air of giving pleasure by their
deference and heartening. Suddenly the colonel's eyes smarted with the
sudden tears of a recognition which seemed to touch not only life as it
innocently rioted here to-night, but all life, his own in the midst of
it. At once he knew. These were the very old, and those who had lived
through their fostering were paying them beautiful tribute.
At that moment his nephew, boyishly changed, but not disguised, in old
Judge Hadley's coat and knee-breeches, stepped out of the moving line, a
lady with him, and came to him. Clyde, too, was flushed with the
strangeness of it all, and the joyous certainty that now for an evening,
if only that, Nellie Lake was with him. The colonel looked at her and
looked again, and she dropped her eyes in a pretty, serious modesty.
"Ellen!" he said involuntarily.
Then she laughed.
"That's my aunt," she told him. "I'm Elinor. I'm Nell. I tried to look
like auntie. I guess I do."
"No," said the colonel sharply, "you don't look like Ellen Bayliss.
You've made up too old."
Yet she had not, and he knew it. She had only put a little powder on her
hair and drawn its curling richness into a seemly knot. She had whitened
the bloom of her cheeks, and taken on that little pathetic droop of the
shoulders he remembered in Ellen Bayliss the day he saw her in his last
hurried trip to Marshmead. He had not spoken to her then. She had passed
the station as he was driving away, and he had felt a pang he deadened
with some anodyne of grim endurance, to see how youth could wilt into a
dowerless middle age.
"I guess you haven't seen aunt Ellen," said Nellie innocently. "I'm just
as she is every day, but she's made up to-night to be like grandma, or
the picture of aunt Sue that died."
There she was. She had left the moving line for a moment, and the
minister, in robe and bands of an ancient time, devised by Ann Bartlett
and made by Lydia Vesey, had bowed and left her for some of his
multifarious social claims. A chair was beside her, but she only rested
one hand on the back of it and leaned her head against the wall. She was
in a faded brocade unearthed from some dark corner Lydia Vesey knew the
secret of, and she was age itself, beautiful, delicate, acquiescent age,
all sadness and a wistful grace. The colonel looked at her, savagely
almost, with the pain of it, and then back again at the girl who seemed
to be picturing the first sad stage of undefended maidenhood. At that
moment he knew he had put something wonderful away from him, those years
ago, when he ceased to court the look in Ellen's eyes and turned to a
robuster fortune. At the time, he had told himself, in his way of
escaping the difficult issue, that the pang of leaving her was his
alone. She, in her innocence of love, could hardly feel the death of
what lived so briefly. Now, as it sometimes happened when his anodyne
ceased to work, he knew he had snipped the blossom of her life and she
had borne no fruit of ecstasy; and in the instant of sharp regret it
came upon him that no other woman, through him, should tread the way of
love denied. He stooped to Nellie, standing there before him, and kissed
her on the cheek. Whether in this blended love and pain he was kissing
Ellen or the girl, he did not know, but he saw how Clyde started and
grew luminous, and what it meant to both of them.
"How did you know it?" Clyde was asking. "We are engaged. I wrote to her
to-day. I was going to tell you, but I couldn't. You knew it, didn't
you? You're a brick."
The girl flushed through her powder, and her eyes sent him a starry
gratitude. But now the colonel hardly cared whether they had acted
without his knowledge or whether they were grateful for his sanction. He
and they and Ellen Bayliss seemed to be in a world alone, bound together
by ties that might last--would last, he knew; but the mist cleared away
from his eyes, and the vision of life to come faded, and he saw things
as they were before, and chiefly Ellen standing there unconscious of
him. He walked over to her.
"Ellen," he said bluffly, holding out his hand, "I've got only a minute,
but I want to speak to you if I don't to anybody else."
She straightened and gazed at him, startled out of her part into a life
half joy, half terror. He had taken her hand and held it warmly.
"Ellen," he said, "they're engaged, that boy and girl. Did you know it?"
"No," she answered faintly, but with candor. "No. I've discouraged it.
I thought of you." She paused, too kind to him for more.
"I didn't know," he said. "I hadn't seen her. How should I know she was
like you? How should I know if he lost her he mightn't be making a
mistake? Yes, they're engaged. I sha'n't be at the wedding. I'm going
abroad, but I shall send my blessing. To you, too, Ellen. Good-by. God
bless you."
Then he had walked out of the hall, as alien, with his middle-aged
robustness, as the mortal in fairy revelry; and Ellen, knowing her
towns-people were looking at her in kindly interest, stood with dignity
and yet a curious new consciousness of treasured happiness, as if she
had a secret to think over, and a solving of perplexities.
Isabel Martin dropped out of her place, where she had been talking with
Andrew Hall, and, forgetting in her haste the consistency of her part,
ran over to her. Isabel, out of her abiding mischief, had dressed
herself for a dullard's part. She had thought at first of being an old
witch-woman and telling fortunes, but instead she had put on pious black
alpaca and a portentous cap, and dropped her darting glances. To Andrew
Hall, who was a portly Quaker in the dress of uncle Ephraim long since
dead, she seemed as sweet as girlhood and as restful as his own mother.
Andrew had been her servitor for almost as many years as they had lived;
but she had so flouted him, so called upon him for impossible
chivalries, out of the wantonness of her fancy, that he had sometimes
confided to himself, in the darkest of nights when he woke to think of
her, that Isabel Martin was enough to make you hang yourself, and he
wished he never had set eyes on her. Yet she was the major part of his
life, and Andrew knew it. Now he followed her more slowly, and was by at
the instant of her saying,--
"O Ellen, you couldn't go over across the orchard, could you, an' see if
Maggie L.'s got the water boilin' for the coffee? I'm 'most afraid to go
alone."
Ellen, waking from her dream, looked at her and smiled. She knew
Isabel's tender purposes. This was meant to take her away from curious
though tolerant eyes and give her a moment to wipe out the world of
dreaming for the world of men.
"No," she said softly. "You don't need to."
"You let me go," said Andrew gallantly. "I can see if it's bilin' an'
come back an' tell ye."
"You!" said Isabel, abjuring her disguise, to rally him. "You'd be
afraid. Come, Ellen."
She linked an arm in Ellen's, and falling at once into her part of sober
age, paced with her from the hall. Andrew, constrained in a way he
hardly understood himself, was following them, but in their woman's
community of silent understanding they took no notice of him. Outside,
the night was soft and welcoming, unreal after the light and color, an
enchanted wilderness of moonlight splendor. They had crossed the road to
the bench under the old poplar, and there Ellen sat down and drew a
breath of excitement and gladness to be free to think. The moonlight
seemed still brighter, sifting down the sky-spaces, and the two women
together looked up at it through the poplar branches and were exalted by
that inexplicable sense of the certainty that things come true.
Dreams--that was what their minds were seeking passionately--and dreams
come true.
"Ain't it wonderful?" Isabel asked softly.
"Yes," said Ellen, in the same hushed tone, "it's wonderful."
"I'll leave you here by yourself an' run acrost the orchard," said
Isabel, in her other careless voice. "When I come back, I'll stop here
an' we'll go in together. Why, Andrew, you here?"
"You said you was afraid," he answered. "I'll go acrost with you."
"All right," said Isabel, with her kindest laugh, not the teasing one
that made him hate her while he thought how bright and dear she was.
"Come take gran'ma acrost the orchard. Don't let anything happen to
her."
They stepped over the wall and made their way along the little path by
the grape arbor. The fragrance of fruit was sweet, and the world seemed
filled with it.
"It's a pretty time o' year," said Andrew tremblingly.
"Yes."
"A kind of a time same 's this is to-night makes it seem as if life was
pretty short. Be past before you know it."
"Yes."
She, too, spoke tremulously, and his heart went out to her.
"O Isabel," he said, "when you're like this, same as you are to-night,
there ain't a livin' creatur' that's as nice as you be."
Isabel laughed. It was an echo of her flouting laugh, yet there was a
little catch in the middle of it.
"There!" he said, with discontentment. "Now you're just as you be half
the time, an' I could shake you for it. Sometimes seems to me I could
kill you."
"Why don't you?" Isabel asked him, softly yet teasingly too, in a way
that suddenly made her dearer. "If you don't see no use o' my livin',
why don't you kill me?"
"What you cryin' for?" Andrew besought her, in an agony of trouble. "O
Isabel, what you cryin' for?"
"I ain't cryin'," she said, "but if I am I guess it's for Ellen Bayliss,
an' things--" She had never heard of "the tears of mortal things," and
so she could not tell him.
"Ellen Bayliss? What's the matter of Ellen Bayliss?"
"Oh, she gets tired so quick, that's all."
"Don't you get tired," said Andrew. "Don't you let anything happen to
you. O Isabel!"
The moonlight and the fragrance and old love constrained them, and they
had kissed each other, and each knew they were to live together now, and
sharpness would be put away perhaps; or, if it were not quite, Andrew
would understand, knowing other things, too, and smile at it.
When they went back to the bench Ellen was gone, but in the hall they
found her dancing with Clyde, and almost, it seemed, clad in the flying
mantle of her youth.
"It's Virginny reel," cried Andrew, the infection of the night upon him.
"There's another set here. Come."
"Wait a minute," said Isabel, her hand upon his arm. "Look at the
platform. Where's the old folks gone?"
The platform was deserted. The old folks, too, were dancing. Martha
Waterman caught the recognition of it in Isabel's eyes, pointed at the
empty seats of eld, and nodded gayly. She sped out of her place and,
losing no step, danced up to Isabel and Andrew.
"I dunno which's the youngest, old or young," she cried, "nor they don't
either. We're goin' to have some country dancin' an' then serve the
coffee an' sing 'Auld Lang Syne,' an' it's my opinion we sha'n't be home
'fore two o'clock. Ain't it just grand!"