The long table in the great kitchen soon gathered its company of waifs
and strays,—creatures of improvidence and misfortune, and the
irreparable victims of old age. The dinner was satisfactory, and there
was not much delay for conversation. Peggy Bond and Mrs. Dow and Betsey
Lane always sat together at one end, with an air of putting the rest of
the company below the salt. Betsey was still flushed with excitement; in
fact, she could not eat as much as usual, and she looked up from time to
time expectantly, as if she were likely to be asked to speak of her
guest; but everybody was hungry, and even Mrs. Dow broke in upon some
attempted confidences by asking inopportunely for a second potato. There
were nearly twenty at the table, counting the keeper and his wife and
two children, noisy little persons who had come from school with the
small flock belonging to the poor widow, who sat just opposite our
friends. She finished her dinner before any one else, and pushed her
chair back; she always helped with the housework,—a thin, sorry,
bad-tempered-looking poor soul, whom grief had sharpened instead of
softening. “I expect you feel too fine to set with common folks,” she
said enviously to Betsey.
“Here I be a-settin’,” responded Betsey calmly. “I don’ know’s I behave
more unbecomin’ than usual.” Betsey prided herself upon her good and
proper manners; but the rest of the company, who would have liked to
hear the bit of morning news, were now defrauded of that pleasure. The
wrong note had been struck; there was a silence after the clatter of
knives and plates, and one by one the cheerful town charges disappeared.
The bean-picking had been finished, and there was a call for any of the
women who felt like planting corn; so Peggy Bond, who could follow the
line of hills pretty fairly, and Betsey herself, who was still equal to
anybody at that work, and Mrs. Dow, all went out to the field together.
Aunt Lavina labored slowly up the yard, carrying a light splint-bottomed
kitchen chair and her knitting-work, and sat near the stone wall on a
gentle rise, where she could see the pond and the green country, and
exchange a word with her friends as they came and went up and down the
rows. Betsey vouchsafed a word now and then about Mrs. Strafford, but
you would have thought that she had been suddenly elevated to Mrs.
Strafford’s own cares and the responsibilities attending them, and had
little in common with her old associates. Mrs. Dow and Peggy knew well
that these high-feeling times never lasted long, and so they waited with
as much patience as they could muster. They were by no means without
that true tact which is only another word for unselfish sympathy.
The strip of corn land ran along the side of a great field; at the upper
end of it was a field-corner thicket of young maples and walnut
saplings, the children of a great nut-tree that marked the boundary.
Once, when Betsey Lane found herself alone near this shelter at the end
of her row, the other planters having lagged behind beyond the rising
ground, she looked stealthily about, and then put her hand inside her
gown, and for the first time took out the money that Mrs. Strafford had
given her. She turned it over and over with an astonished look: there
were new bank-bills for a hundred dollars. Betsey gave a funny little
shrug of her shoulders, came out of the bushes, and took a step or two
on the narrow edge of turf, as if she were going to dance; then she
hastily tucked away her treasure, and stepped discreetly down into the
soft harrowed and hoed land, and began to drop corn again, five kernels
to a hill. She had seen the top of Peggy Bond’s head over the knoll, and
now Peggy herself came entirely into view, gazing upward to the skies,
and stumbling more or less, but counting the corn by touch and twisting
her head about anxiously to gain advantage over her uncertain vision.
Betsey made a friendly, inarticulate little sound as they passed; she
was thinking that somebody said once that Peggy’s eyesight might be
remedied if she could go to Boston to the hospital; but that was so
remote and impossible an undertaking that no one had ever taken the
first step. Betsey Lane’s brown old face suddenly worked with
excitement, but in a moment more she regained her usual firm expression,
and spoke carelessly to Peggy as she turned and came alongside.
The high spring wind of the morning had quite fallen; it was a lovely
May afternoon. The woods about the field to the northward were full of
birds, and the young leaves scarcely hid the solemn shapes of a company
of crows that patiently attended the corn-planting, Two of the men had
finished their hoeing, and were busy with the construction of a
scarecrow; they knelt in the furrows, chuckling, and looking over some
forlorn, discarded garments. It was a time-honored custom to make the
scarecrow resemble one of the poor-house family; and this year they
intended to have Mrs. Lavina Dow protect the field in effigy; last year
it was the counterfeit of Betsey Lane who stood on guard, with an easily
recognized quilted hood and the remains of a valued shawl that one of
the calves had found airing on a fence and chewed to pieces. Behind the
men was the foundation for this rustic attempt at statuary,—an upright
stake and bar in the form of a cross. This stood on the highest part of
the field; and as the men knelt near it, and the quaint figures of the
corn-planters went and came, the scene gave a curious suggestion of
foreign life. It was not like New England; the presence of the rude
cross appealed strangely to the imagination.