Say the philosophers how, to the properly sane mind, there is no
sorrow. But Vesty, only a Basin, fighting Christ's war against the
flesh--Vesty had sorrow.
"It was," she confessed to me alone, I being as a ghost or
confessor--"it was like pulling my heart out, to have Notely go away
so. It was like taking little Gurd away--but it was the only way."
"He has gone back to his wife?"
"Yes." Vesty shivered. I had chanced to meet her in the lane, and the
wind was chill.
"And what are you going to do, Vesty?"
"I am going where they want me to help." She held the thin, frayed
shawl at her neck, the rosy child wrapped as usual on her arm: "there
is always some one wanting me to help, and little Gurd is not so much
care now but I can get along with it."
"You go out as general drudge or charwoman!" I felt my nostrils quiver
and a bitter harshness in my voice.
Vesty looked at me with surprise. "I go to help," she said, "just as
you helped me, with Uncle Benny, when I was sick."
"Oh, I could do"--the child knew not with what a glance I studied her
face--"what it is hard to let you do, Vesty."
A gentle pallor at that, as though I had been strong and seemly in her
sight; the Basin eyes fixed on me as if with a community of experience
and sorrow.
"Shall you go away from the Basin this winter, as you did before?"
"I think so;" for myself, I could not look at her. "You see, I have
my--'show,' that I must attend to a little in the winter: and here,
exposed to the hard climate, if I were taken ill, or should be in want,
there is no one who would care for me, you know."
"You should never want or suffer," cried Vesty of the Basins, "while I
have two hands to work with!"
"Perhaps then," I murmured gravely, with sphinx face, "I might stay. I
have to ask so much, Vesty, you see. All my life seems to be asking,
not giving."
"I don't know who you are!" said she, with puzzled brow, the utter
frankness of Basin speech escaping her unawares. "What I thought
first, when I saw you--I never mind that now. And you are poor and all
alone, and you never make anything of yourself--but somehow I always
think you are pretending; somehow--I think--you are stronger than us
all."
"You are a little arch-flatterer," I said; "and the Basin, out of its
goodness of heart, has made me vain, that is all. It won't do. I need
to sweep some more floors and peel some more potatoes." She would not
smile; she shook her puzzled head at me. "And, Vesty," I said, "where
are you going now?"
"Why, to Uncle Benny's! Didn't you know?" exclaimed the girl eagerly,
with whom the realities of life were always pressing, stern. "He stood
out in the water, _that day_, helping get the men in, and he was around
that evening, singing, without any dry clothes or fire; nobody thought,
then. And you know he 's had a cough ever since, and now--he 's sick."
A thought smote me. "He won't lead the children to school any more,
then?"