The Old Men’s Home, Indian Village, Long Island.
June 10, 19—
To the Matron of the Old Ladies’ Home, Shoreville, Long Island.
Dear Miss: The writer of this letter has had a windfall and
he wants one of your woman-folks to have a share in it. He
has lived in an old folks’ home himself for ten years, hand
running, and he has a feeling for them others. My cousin
Obadiah Hawkins died up to Lakeland last week. He never would
so much as lend me a penny whilst he was living, but now he’s
dead, he’s left me ten thousand dollars in ready money and a
house and a home. There’s a pump in the kitchen. He never was
no hand for investments and the money was all in an old silver
water pitcher. It’s all good and the matron here has counted
it over. I always wanted a home of my own and never was able
to afford one. I always wanted a wife of my own and never
could get up gumption enough to ask any woman to share my bad
luck. Now the luck has turned. I got the home. All I need is
the wife. I be going to drive over this afternoon and see if
you got anybody that’s willing. I put it that way ’cause I
ain’t much account if I have come into a tidy little fortune.
I wear a wig and have spells of lumbago. It’s the lumbago what
brought me here. There ain’t a lazy bone in my body. As for the
requirements of the lady. She must be under seventy years old;
she mustn’t wear a wig or dye her hair. I want one respectable
suit of hair between us. She mustn’t squint or take snuff,
and if she is sot on keeping chickens—some women be—she must
keep them in the coop. I’ll build the coop. And she must love
flowers and garden sass.
Expecting them to be on deck this afternoon at three o’clock, I
am,
Yours most respectfully,
Samuel Jessup.
A moment’s intense silence followed the matron’s public reading of this
letter in the large hall which served as the community room of the Old
Ladies’ Home. The matron, her young gray eyes twinkling and shining,
looked from one old face to the other. Some were broadly grinning under
their crowns of gray hair, some were hurt and scornful, some were only
puzzled and amazed—these belonging to the old ladies who had held their
shriveled, shaking hands as trumpets before their ears during the reading
of the letter. And some faces were marred by a shrewd, keen, calculating
look as if to exclaim: “I wonder if—!” The matron looked at them all, her
smile slowly growing broader, then quickly she looked down at her desk
and said with business-like briskness:
“That is a very honest letter. I wish you could all give it your serious
attention. There is no fraud in it, for I have telephoned to the Old
Men’s Home, and Mr. Jessup is a noble, straightforward character. Now,
are any of you willing to see him this afternoon? I suggest that all
those who can not or who will not give Mr. Jessup a chance for their
hands this afternoon, leave the hall.”
There was a curious reluctance on the part of the old ladies to move.
There was much wagging of heads, much nudging of elbows, whispers and
winks and murmurs from every quarter, but no one stirred. Those who
really had no personal interest or legitimate right to an interest in Mr.
Jessup’s quest for a wife stayed to see what the others might do. The
matron repeated her request. Then old Mrs. Smith, bent and humpbacked,
took up her cane and hobbled slowly toward the stairway.
“Ef he wanted me,” she declared with mock asperity, “he should oughter
come twenty year ago. Ye notice,” she added, looking over her shoulder
with her sharp, shrewd peaked face, “he didn’t tell how old _he_ was.”
“He’s sixty-nine,” laughed the matron. “Most men of his age would have
insisted on a wife of eighteen.”
There was a scurrying sound among the group of old ladies and suddenly
there darted across the hall a younger, slimmer, straighter figure than
Mrs. Smith’s.
“Miss Ellie!” protestingly called the matron, “where are you going?”
Miss Ellie paused, her face flushed with shame to think she had not fled
from the hall before. She paused and looked at the matron. However old
she was, Miss Ellie did not look more than fifty years. Her hair was
luxuriant, half silver, half gold, faded, yet giving a curious effect of
a halo of moonlight. The flush mounted higher up the spinster’s cheeks
until it crept over her forehead to the edge of her hair. For a moment
she stood thus, looking at the youthful matron. Then, with a world of
reproach in her tones, she said simply: “Miss Jessica!” Then she went up
the stairs with quick and trembling limbs, but with an air of dignity
that acted as a rebuke upon those lingering the hall.
“Proud Miss Ellie!” murmured Jessica, herself feeling ashamed.
“I do think,” began Mrs. Honan in a loud, strident key, “I do think
myself that the man didn’t show very fine feeling. The idea of him
a-spectin’ a woman ter jump at his head. Ef he wanted a wife, why didn’t
he come a-lookin’ around modest an’ quiet-like in the good, old fashioned
way?”
With that she swept out of the hall. She was down on the register as
having passed her seventy-third birthday, and anyway, she mused, she
had always preferred a yard full of chickens to a yard full of flowers,
because chickens are more lively. They keep you better company, she
said. Then, with or without verbal excuse, one woman after another left
the hall. There were two with the deplorable squint, several far on the
shaded side of seventy, some who wore honest wigs, and some too honest
to proclaim either that they did not dye their hair or that they had
never sniffed at the contents of a snuffbox. Then there were the dear
old ladies loyal to their dead husbands, the old ladies who did not care
to give up the serene, uneventful security of the Old Ladies’ Home for
a house shared only with a man afflicted with lumbago and very decided
notions. However, ten remained, openly ashamed, yet not sufficiently
ashamed to reject Samuel Jessup’s hand before they had seen him.
“It don’t mean that none of us promise to take him, oh no!” said Mrs.
Young, a woman living in the memories of her long reign as a belle. “It
only means that we’d like to get a good look at him. We’ve had plenty of
chances all our lives. We ain’t none of us here because no man wanted
us—neither us widders nor us maidens. We’re here from ch’ice, Miss
Jessica, from _ch’ice_! But still if there’s another ch’ice open to
us with a real, kind honest man—his letter shows he’s that, bless his
heart!—we’d each of us ten like to have one tenth of a show at him.”
Then, greatly flustered at having spoken with such unmaidenly freedom
on such a subject, Mrs. Young moved away from the desk across the hall
and out of doors, where she could take a good long breath. After she had
gone, one of the nine remaining candidates wondered aloud how Mrs. Young
would look without her false front, for of course no one would deceive
Samuel Jessup as to her quantity of hair.
“But the rest of it?” whispered another. “You can’t wash all that dye off
in one day, can you?”
“Waal!” retorted a third, coming hotly to Mrs. Young’s rescue, “a man who
wears a wig hasn’t no right ter be so particular.”
Said the first one firmly: “She shouldn’t deceive him.”
Answered a third: “Deceive him all she wants ter as long as it’s in
somethin’ no man would have wit enough ter find out.”
At three o’clock to the minute, Samuel Jessup appeared, emerging from a
closed coach together with a plump middle-aged woman who carried with
extraordinary care a large market basket covered with a red tablecloth.
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Mrs. Young, peeking with half the household
from the upper hall windows. “He’s been an’ picked up a wife on the road
an’ come to offer his apologies.”
She laughed merrily at the possible joke against them all. And yet what a
pity that would be, too, for Samuel was a pleasant, self-reliant looking
little man with his head hanging sideways as if he had never lifted it
from a one-sided attack of the mumps. Somehow this attitude made him
appear younger. But the wig! That was too much in evidence and they all
decided that it must be clipped at once. Samuel did not scan the house
with lover-like eagerness as he came up the steps. Instead, he watched
the basket with intense interest—so intense that he stumbled on the way.
“I bet he’s got a dog in it!” cried one of the candidates. “I will not
stand no leetle measly pet dog around the house, a-sheddin’ hair all over
the parlor sofy. I ain’t agoin’ downstairs!”
But she went with the others and met Mr. Jessup. The woman with the
basket was nowhere in sight, having been relegated to the dining-room. No
attempt whatever was made to explain her to the old ladies. Samuel Jessup
was immediately enthroned by the matron in her private office; and one
by one in alphabetical order of their names, Jessica sent the candidates
to him, thinking that this would be more delicate than to have them all
face him at once. Delicacy in this affair did not seem so difficult after
coming face to face with little Mr. Jessup. Very modestly, and with his
head more on one side than ever, he told the matron that she must convey
to the ladies his doubts as to any one of them accepting him. He thought
it was very kind of them to receive him anyway, and—this with a quick
keen look into Jessica’s wise and bonny face—he hoped that they would not
laugh at him.
The first five filed out of the room after only a few moments’
conversation, each briefly explaining in her turn why Mr. Jessup “hadn’t
took” with her. One did not like the way he held his head. One never
could stand that wig. She knew that it got askew every time he took a
nap. One thought him too much like her dead husband. One thought him too
unlike her departed John to make a happy union possible. One said she
never could bear a pump dribbling water in the kitchen; and he was too
stubborn and “sot” in his ways to take it out. Then went in the sixth—she
who had not rebuked the deceit of Mrs. Young’s dyed hair and she who
hated pet dogs. After a longer period, she came out and with customary
candor bluntly declared that she would have had Samuel Jessup in a
minute, but she saw that she did not take with him.
“The woman that gits him will be lucky,” she declared, “basket and all.”
Nothing more would she tell. Then into the private room went the seventh
old lady. She immediately demanded of Samuel an explanation of the woman
and the basket; whereupon Samuel said that he refused to be questioned by
any woman and he knew that they could not get along well together. She
came out sniffing contemptuously, and vowed that in her opinion there
was something very mysterious about this man. Number Eight went in even
more eagerly, on tip-toe. She had read romances all her life. She loved
mysteries and she was so sensitive about living in an Old Ladies’ Home
partly on charity that she would have married any man that asked her.
Almost any man—but not quite. She and Samuel Jessup talked together for a
long time.
“I am sure we would git along,” said Samuel at last, his heart stirred
to sympathy for one who hated a Home of this sort with the same proud
hatred that he had borne. “But,” he went on, “before I let you decide, I
be agoin’ to take you into the dining-room and show you the basket. What
belongs in the basket belongs with me an’s agoin’ with me. I ain’t much
ter git, but come an’ see the basket!”
Her romantic old heart beating high with excitement, Miss Ruby tip-toed
ahead of him, across a tiny, dark back hall into the dining-room. On the
very threshold she paused, her eyes popping out of her head as she looked
within; then she uttered a faint scream and went scuttling into a corner
among the shadows of the dim passage.
“Good-bye, Mr. Jessup!” she called tragically. “Good-bye!” and there
ended Samuel Jessup’s affair with Miss Ruby.
A humorous light twinkled in the old man’s eye as he went back into
Jessica’s office and waited for the ninth candidate. She was a woman
famous in the Home for always managing to find some one to wait upon her,
and she wanted a house of her own with several servants, an unobtrusive
husband, and stained glass windows in the parlor.
“I kinder fancied stained glass winders myself,” said Samuel. “But you
can’t be keepin’ a hull passel o’ servants. One servant gal—that’s all I
agree to, ma’am.”
She thought that one servant might do if they put out the washing. Samuel
looked dubious for a moment, seeing himself a henpecked husband, and then
that twinkle came again into his wholesome eye.
“Before we decide, m’am, I want ter show you what I got in that there
basket. Me an’ the basket be inseparable.”
She preceded him into the dining-room, her shoulders high and her nose
uplifted. She stood for some moments staring at the contents of the
basket, the basket’s owner, and the basket’s guardian staring at her.
Slowly her face grew rigid. She shook her head once. She strove to speak,
swallowed hard and then gasped;
“How dast you presume, Samuel Jessup!”
Samuel winked at the guardian of the basket and chuckled soft and low.
But then he realized that he really wanted a wife, a companion in his
old age, a mistress for the snug little home, and now there was but one
candidate left. To be sure he might find some one outside the Home,
but he had wanted in truth to share all that he had—the basket not
excepted—with one who had tasted as he had the well buttered bread of
charity in an old folks’ home. Soberly he went back to the private room,
and Mrs. Young came drifting leisurely in to him. She congratulated
herself on being the last. She wanted never to be twitted with having
failed to give the others every possible chance, and she knew that had
she entered the private room first the result would have been the same.
She would be the wife selected by Mr. Jessup if she wanted him. A woman
with real charm for old men, a woman who could have graced many a home in
her lazy, yet pleasingly frivolous ways, she felt that Samuel could not
resist her if she chose to throw her charm around him.
“This is a very ridiculous position,” she began, with a quavering little
trill of laughter. “I never went a-seekin’ a man before. They always
sought me.”
This was more than Samuel’s natural gallantry could withstand. He took
her small lean fingers in his and drew her down beside him on the couch.
Her fingers twined around his hand. She wore jewels—relics of bygone
splendors—which seemed pitifully out of keeping with her present state.
To Samuel they told a long, familiar story, and sent a feeling of pity
out from him to her.
“Mis’ Young,” he said gently. “I am jest as much obliged to all of you
folks fer seein’ me as I kin be.”
“To us _all_?” she asked and lifted her eyes.
They had been very fine blue eyes once and now they were bright in spite
of their puffy lids. And her thin hair, parted simply in the middle, was
more becoming than the false front had been. He wondered that she had no
gray hairs, but was too straightforward himself to suspect the deception.
What a very pretty woman she still was, and, with that not displeasing
girlish attempt at flirtation, how exceedingly feminine!
“Obliged to us _all_?” she repeated, her eyes still uplifted, her hand
still clinging to his. She remembered how eloquently hands can speak and
so did Samuel, but of a sudden he felt that his horny old hand had become
tongue-tied. He knew that she wanted him to say: “I be obliged to _you_
in perticular, Mis’ Young.”
And he did stumble through some such gallant speech, but all the while he
was thinking: “So I have got to take this! This frivolous old lady with
a spot of red paint on either cheek and a pair of penciled eye-brows.”
Why had he not mentioned rouge in his letter? Mrs. Young still looked at
him, still held his hand, remembering of old the value of long looks and
of silence. Of a truth many and many a man had she captivated in this
way in the days of long ago and once again in her mind’s eye she could
see suitor after suitor at her feet. She had refused them all, after the
first one had given her his name and then gone into the unknown world.
Even after coming into the Old Ladies’ Home, she had refused offers of
marriage, and yet, now of a sudden, she wished to share the good fortune
and the ill fortune of Samuel Jessup. She laid her free hand on his
shoulder and murmured a line from her favorite Browning—Browning who was
a mere name and scarcely that to Samuel:
“Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be.”
Samuel was embarrassed. He pushed his wig back from his brow and, going
opposite to the natural, sidewise slant of his head, it gave him a rakish
expression, delightful to Mrs. Young’s eye. Then all of a kindle with the
light of an eager hope went Samuel’s own brown orbs.
“Yes, yes,” he said glibly, “but the best ain’t _ter be_. It’s here,
right now, in the dinin’-room. Come along with me.”
He was so mixed as to his own desires and emotions that he half hoped,
half feared that she would stand the test, but when she saw the basket
and its contents, first horror crossed her face, then the shadow of
a deep disappointment fell among the wrinkles and the rouge and the
penciled eye-brows. Sadly she faced Samuel Jessup as if certain of his
answer before her questioning:
“And you insist on a-keeping it?”
“It’s mine. It belongs ter me. I had it jest half a day, but now all the
women in the country couldn’t make me give it up. I don’t want ter be
imperlite,” added Samuel in a milder tone, “but them’s the facts. Me an’
the basket, or ‘Good-bye, Samuel.’”
She interpreted him literally. Holding out her fragile, jeweled hand, she
clasped his warmly, yet with honest sadness and compassion:
“Good-bye, Samuel. If it hadn’t been for the basket—.” She paused, slowly
withdrawing her hand, and then went on again: “You’re makin’ an awful
mistake. Who’d a thought it of a man o’ your age! I shall never forget
you. Good-bye, Samuel.”
With one swift, half hungering, half frightened glance at the basket,
she slipped out of the room. Samuel did not laugh and his eyes did not
twinkle as he went up to the matron’s desk.
“Miss Jessica, they’ve all practically refused me. What shall I do?” He
had a vision of an endless quest of an eligible, willing old lady from an
old folks’ home.
Miss Jessica thought a long while, biting the end of her pencil, and at
last she said slowly, half reluctantly:
“There is one more—who—answers your requirements, but she was too proud
to enter the lists.”
Samuel’s face lit up. Proud women can be very tender and only a tender
soul could accept the basket. Moreover, a woman with sufficient spirit to
resent his action today was a woman after his own heart. He lifted his
head from its sidewise slant and, throwing back his shoulders, looked
Jessica square in the eyes:
“What’s the woman’s name?”
“Miss Ellie Smith.”
“Waal, I be goin’ ter change it!” vowed Mr. Jessup. “Whar be she?”
The matron hesitated, wondering whether she could play the part of the
traitor to dignified, self-reliant Miss Ellie, but Jessica was very
young. She looked down the long years that these two had traveled, and
seeing how dusty and stony and hard the road had been, wondered why they
should not come into a restful, fragrant garden at last. Ellie, she knew,
even yet, with the help of the right man, could make the garden. And now
as she looked keenly into Samuel Jessup’s eyes—eyes shaded by iron-gray
brows, but deep, dark brown eyes, limpid, sparkling, full of tenderness
and an appealing hunger for tenderness—she felt that Samuel could play an
all-sufficient Adam to Ellie’s Eve, in the garden.
“Miss Ellie’s all alone in the kitchen, hulling strawberries for supper,”
she said very low. Then bending far over her desk, as if completely
absorbed in her books, she went on: “It’s the south dining-room door. Go
right in, take the basket with you—no, no, not that woman, too—and ask
Miss Ellie if she won’t take charge of your basket for an hour or so.”
Samuel grinned. He wagged his head back and forth until his wig shook
in sympathetic anticipation. Years and years seemed to fall from him,
until with his small, thick-set figure and his sparkling, youthful eyes
he looked like a boy getting ready to steal apples. With short, firm,
quicksteps he entered the dining-room. No one would have thought him a
victim of lumbago from his gait now. Then of a sudden, Miss Jessica, no
longer able to contain herself, went into her private room, where he had
consulted with the ten, and danced around with glee.
“Miss Ellie, you darling!” she whispered to herself. “I know you’ll do
it!”
Miss Ellie, in a prim, dainty blue gingham dress, with a great bib apron
enveloping her slender figure, sat at the south kitchen window hulling
berries, the basket of red fruit on the table beside her, a yellow
earthen bowl in her lap. Her silver-gold hair caught sunbeam lights from
the window until each single thread danced and twinkled. Little curls
of silver gold nestled against the nape of her slender neck. Her face
was that of an April lady’s—first the clouds chased across it, clouds of
contempt, of anger and of regret; and then it took on a soft blaze of
tenderness and of passionate longing.
She did not want Mr. Samuel Jessup or any other man. She scorned the
woman who might take him today for his home and that little sum of money;
but why—why had she with all her power of loving and of attracting love,
all the unspent passion of motherhood that had been her ruling passion
since the doll-baby age—why had she come to see sixty-one without finding
Mr. Right? Lovers in moderate numbers she had had in the days of long
ago, and old people do not forget the loves of the springtime, but all
the while—all through the spring and the summer and this swiftly passing
autumn—or was it really winter-time?—there had never come to her one
whom she would rejoice to call her mate! Him she did not regret so much
nowadays, or she regretted him with a vague, indistinct feeling. He
might have liked strong drink and smoked a strong pipe indoors. But the
children! Ah, the children that had never come!
She had outlived all her people. There were no nieces, no nephews, no one
in all the world whom she could call her own, and there had never been
and never could be a little grandchild to pull at her skirts.
“Dran-ma! I love oo, dran-ma!” Only yesterday she had heard a little
child lisp this into the ears of Mrs. Young.
“Dran-ma, I love oo, dran-ma!” whispered Ellie, bending far over the
berries with the hot gushing of tears coming into her eyes.
Both the ache of motherhood and the ache of grandmotherhood were upon
her. Never to have felt the touch of her own babe at her breast! And,
now that old age had withered the breast, never to hear the prattle of
grandchildren in her ears! And her ears were still so finely attuned,
unlike the average grandmother! Miss Ellie looked up from her berries at
the window. Her eyes were too dim to see, and wiping the tears away she
looked out of the window again, down the garden. So, young girls stare
wistfully as if they would look to the very end of the world and discover
what, in the very end, may come to them.
The dining-room door opened. Miss Ellie turned back to her task. She
scorned to look up and ask her fellow inmate of the Home who had won
Samuel Jessup. It was probably Mrs. Homan coming to help with the supper.
Steps came across the kitchen. Ellie bent far over the yellow bowl and
went on with her berry hulling. It needed a great many berries to supply
that supper table. The sunbeam darted down from the top of Ellie’s head
to seek out with its twinkling, gold-shod feet the silver-gold curls in
Ellie’s neck. The steps paused close beside Ellie. Suddenly the spinster
realized that they were not Mrs. Homan’s steps and she looked up. Scorn,
indignation, amazement, and then something more subtle, something which
one sees in faces everywhere all over the world, and something which
makes the world more beautiful, crossed her face. There stood Samuel
Jessup with the huge market basket in one hand. He held out the basket to
Miss Ellie. He looked at her eagerly, almost with piteous appeal, as if
to say:
“They would have none of it, but—_you_! _You?_”
The red table cover had been thrown off the basket. There lay the
contents before Miss Ellie’s eyes. A big white pillow and resting upon
it, a baby—a real, live, pink-and-white, wide-awake baby. More than this,
a baby who at first sight of Miss Ellie holding poised in her hand a
huge, red strawberry, struggled up into a sitting position, held out his
two pudgy, dimpled little hands and cried with the softest, most ecstatic
little cry imaginable: “Dranny!”
The baby’s grandmother had died last week, but neither Miss Ellie nor the
baby knew that, and Samuel Jessup kept a wise silence.
Trembling, agitated, scarcely able to see or hear for the moment
following the baby’s cry, Miss Ellie put down the red berry, placed
the bowl on the table, and then turned to take the baby. She asked no
questions. She simply took him. She knew that he was hers. Even now
again—would her heart burst with joy and her ears lose their power of
hearing!—even now again he was murmuring and mumbling: “Dranny! Dranny!”
Now she knew that she would hear the prattle of one she called grandchild
in her ears and guide with her shriveled old hands the unsteady movements
of these little feet. Samuel Jessup counted not at all just then; but if
he had attempted to take away that baby, she would have fought him like a
mother-tigress.
Samuel had meant to say much. He said nothing, but simply put his hand
against his throat and looked at her. He saw her devour with eyes and
lips the tender little form—saw her seek out the baby wrinkles in the fat
little dimpled neck—saw her munch hungrily at the baby’s yellow curls—saw
her feel every bone of the little body through the stiff starchy white
dress as if she loved each one more than the other. And then at length he
watched her unfasten the shoes, pull off the tiny white socks and then
adore with the pent-up passion of the lonely years the adorable little
rosy heel of his baby.
Samuel cleared his throat with a loud noise and walked across the room.
He noticed a red calico curtain at the cupboard door and wondered
whether Miss Ellie had made it. In his mind’s eye, he saw another
kitchen, smaller than this, cosier, but still with red calico curtains
at the cupboard door and crisp white swiss ones—as crisp as the baby’s
dress—at the windows. He knew that Miss Ellie would not want to get
those curtains stained up with tobacco smoke—she looked so dainty—so
he would volunteer to do his smoking on the back porch. If she left the
window open, he could look through and talk to her and the little one.
He came beside Miss Ellie’s chair and stood looking down at her lovely
head and the baby’s cheek pressed against her own. The baby, quieted with
happiness against that breast, was profoundly still.
Through the open door came a wonderful fragrance—as the fragrance of
youthful love—blown in from the syringa bush beside the kitchen door.
They must plant a syringa beside the kitchen door-step in the new home,
thought Samuel. Out of the stillness, he spoke, his voice very husky.
“You be a woman arter my own heart—I knowed it when I see you a-settin’
here a-hullin’ berries. It’s more than I ’spected. I never dreamed it
could be: I was that old. But, Miss Ellie, you be—you be—” He lost his
voice entirely for a space and fearfully, reverently, he lifted in his
trembling fingers one of the silver-gold curls that lay on her neck,
lifted it and immediately let it fall in place again. “You be,” he
whispered, “a woman arter my own heart. I never found sech a one when I
was young. I know it now, fer ef I had, I wouldn’t ’a’ been afeared of no
bad luck fer neither her ner me. I’d a took her an’—” another pause and
then with brave, masculine assurance, “she’d ’a’ took me.”
Miss Ellie did not move, she did not speak. She felt that his voice was
very far away, away off back in her youth where she had dreamed of the
mate who was yet to come. Closer she pressed her cheek to the baby’s and
so assured herself that baby and the man who had brought her the baby
were real and belonged to today.
Samuel was speaking again, his hand now on the back of her chair, so that
it brushed against the ruffle that ran across the shoulders of her apron.
“I allers wanted children, an’ when I got too old to have the hope o’
ever a-marryin’, I used ter say ter myself: ‘Oh, ef they was only leetle
grand-younguns now!’ Then the fortune come. Says I fust thing: ‘I’ll
have a baby. I’ll be a granddaddy yit.’ Thar wa’n’t much mean about me.
I be sixty-nine, but I wanted my own home, an’ my own wife, an’ my own
baby. But I wanted the baby most of all. So the fust thing I done when
the money come was ter go to that thar Margaret Jane Orphan Asylum an git
this here baby. He hadn’t been there but a week. Jest lost his grandma
an’ his grandpa—didn’t yer, yer pore leetle cuss, yer? He’s legally
adopted. His name is Samuel Biggs Jessup, Jr. Ain’t he a wallopin’ fine
feller!”
Samuel exploded at the last. His bashfulness, his self-depreciation,
his afraidness, were all gone. He bent over, his hands on his knees,
and looked into the baby’s face. The baby’s face was very close to
Ellie’s. The baby’s face was dimpled and smiling, while over Ellie’s
face there was a flush of joyous young motherhood together with the
proud, all-wondering delight of grandmotherhood, and blending with both,
a sweet shame and shrinking such as no one but a virgin can wear. Oh,
exquisite, young-old Miss Ellie! Your eyes swimming in unshed tears were
so beautiful then with the inner light that Samuel blinked to see them.
“Miss Ellie,” he whispered. Very still was the kitchen. The syringa
outside the door shook out its perfume just for these two. The wind
murmured through the fragrant flowers—it murmured:
“Again and again and again! Even for the old, this same old story!”
“Ellie,” whispered Samuel. “I want you even more than I want the baby.
Will you marry me?”
Again the silence fell, and after a long while, the voice of Ellie’s
dream-swept, ideal-keeping youth came from within the curves of the
baby’s cheek where her lips were hiding:
“Samuel, you been a long time comin’.” Her voice faltered and then
gathering a girlish tremor went on, “But, even ef you hadn’t brought the
baby, I should say you was wuth all the waitin’.”
_Control or Ownership?_