PART I

By Mary Hartwell Catherwood.

THE LADY OF FORT ST. JOHN. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.

OLD KASKASKIA. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.

THE CHASE OF ST. CASTIN, and Other Tales. 16mo, $1.25.

THE SPIRIT OF AN ILLINOIS TOWN, and THE LITTLE RENAULT. Illustrated.

16mo, $1.25.

THE QUEEN OF THE SWAMP, and Other Plain Americans. 16mo, $1.25.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

THE QUEEN OF THE

SWAMP

And Other Plain Americans

BY

MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD

[Illustration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1900

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

NOTE

Some of these stories were written more than a dozen years ago. They

have been gathered in from the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazar,

Outing, the Independent, the Delineator, the Chicago Tribune, the late

Chicago Graphic, and Lippincott’s Magazine, by courteous permission of

the editors; and revised year after year. Many of them embody phases

of American life which have entirely passed away, or are yet to be

found in secluded spots like eddies along the margin of the nation’s

progress. Their honest preservation of middle western experience

makes them, at least in the author’s eyes, seem worthy themselves of

preservation.

The Puritan and the Church of England took possession of the Atlantic

seaboard, north and south; and Jesuit and Recollet missionaries carried

the cross through Canada and down the Mississippi. But the pioneer

evangelist of the Middle West was the Methodist itinerant.

CONTENTS

OHIO.

THE QUEEN OF THE SWAMP 1

THE STIRRING-OFF 29

SWEETNESS 55

SERENA 77

ROSE DAY 106

KENTUCKY.

A KENTUCKY PRINCESS 129

INDIANA.

THE FAIRFIELD POET 155

T’FÉRGORE 175

ILLINOIS.

BEETRUS 235

THE BRIDE OF ARNE SANDSTROM 253

THE BABE JEROME 270

THE CALHOUN FIDDLER 301

A MAN FROM THE SPANISH WAR 320

_The Babe Jerome_, _Rose Day_, _The Bride of Arne Sandstrom_, _The

Fairfield Poet_, and _Beetrus_ are reprinted from “Harper’s Bazar,”

and _The Queen of the Swamp_ from Harper’s “Christmas,” by permission

of the publishers, Messrs Harper & Brothers.

OHIO

THE QUEEN OF THE SWAMP

TIME, 1846

On Christmas Day a large congregation poured from George’s Chapel into

the early dusk. Quarterly meeting, which for a week had drawn together,

not only the neighborhood, but people from Millersport, Basil, and

even Kirkersville, closed that afternoon. The presiding elder and his

assistants were wrapping up their throats and joking with each other,

for the occasion had been blessed with converts and a fairly liberal

collection.

These men must ride on around the circuit, risking health, and

accepting whatever fell to their lot, yet nothing checked their flow of

spirits. The only solemn person near the group was Mr. Warner, a local

preacher and exhorter, who habitually prayed with a war-whoop, and kept

the young people tittering at his pompous phrases. His father, an aged

apparition, tottering on a stick, was circulating genially to shake

every hand, known or unknown, and inquire, toothlessly, “Hi-ya! hi-ya!

how’s your consarn?” which being interpreted meant, “How are you, how

are you, how’s your concern?” (in religion).

Women clustered together near the red-hot stove, exclaiming to each

other, as their work-worn palms met, “Hoddy-do, Mis’ Waddell, does your

family keep well?” and “Law! Mis’ Davis, it’s good for sore eyes to see

you out to meetin’ once more!” “Yes, I been kept close all fall, but

I told him it wouldn’t do, we must come to big meetin’.” “It’s been a

good time. One o’ my boys,” the speaker pressing her neighbor’s hand,

“was gathered in, and I have my suspicions the other’s touched.” “Yes,

there’s more under conviction than’ll own to it.”

They made excuses to each other for neglecting neighborly duties in the

past, but promised, now such good sleighin’ had set in, to go more.

One had had whooping-cough in her family, another a teething baby, and

not a few had been very busy getting the butchering done and making

sausage. The men-folks were also constantly hauling with the teams.

Warm Christian feeling pervaded the whole separating assembly, even the

young girls greeting each other with unusual affection. The young men

drove their conveyances up to the door, exchanging merry remarks; there

were many fine horses, and some of the sleighs were painted, but the

general vehicle was a wagon-bed, stuffed with straw and comforters, and

running on two short sleds called “bobs.”

Theophilus Gill’s sleigh was of this pattern, and he intended to drive

the young folks to Macauley’s. His spirited team pranced so that he

stood up to control it, though at full height Theophilus Gill was but a

little fellow. He had, however, a strong black beard.

“How many goin’ in our load, Theoph?” inquired Philip Welchammer,

resting one foot on the forward runner.

“’Bout ten couple. Mart, he’s got to take his mother home, so he won’t

be along.”

“You feel like as if you could spare him?”

“I always ken. Now, don’t you go to cut me out if I try to engage her

company for Sunday night.”

“Oh, you and Mart fer it,” said Philip. “I ain’t fer cuttin’ neither of

ye out. But Persilla Thompson’s a pretty girl.”

“She’s the Queen of the Swamp,” said little Gill, with emphasis.

Priscilla at this moment stepped down from the chapel threshold into

the snow, to wait for her party. Philip brought her to the sled and

Gill insisted on placing her in a warm and sheltered place just behind

the driver’s bench, which he had specially prepared for her.

“Macauley’s is makin’ a big house-warmin’ this Chris’mas,” remarked

Priscilla’s little suitor to her. “They’s four tables full of old folks

to their turkey-roast, and the young folks all invited in the evenin’.

I reckon the old lady’s doin’ it for Mart. She’s bound for him to marry

that Miller girl, some says.”

Priscilla replied, with pleasant nonchalance, she reckoned so. She did

not look at Mart Macauley at all, but she saw him watching her while

he untied his bay filly, and held its head until his mother finished

talking with her dinner guests.

He had loved Priscilla Thompson when she was a little girl with black

plaits of hair hanging down her linsey back. In those days he gave her

a bead purse, and whipped all her tormentors. When she began to be a

big girl he shyly courted her, stopping his plough by the fence if he

saw her coming, and dropping in of a Sunday night to see her brother,

whom he despised, and who had since married and left him without

excuse for his visits. When she got a certificate and went into the

Kemmerer neighborhood to teach school, with her clothes neatly packed

in a large wicker basket, he had no peace of mind all summer. He had

himself been to Worthington to college, but in all his experience saw

no one to compare with her. Wherever he saw her, so modest and lovely

in manner, he cherished the ground her shoes rested on. The cold air

gave her a bright color, which the depth and length of her bonnet

could not conceal. She wore a wadded alpaca cloak and cloak cape, and

Martin’s memory showed him how trimly under these her delaine dress was

coat-sleeved to her arm and pointed at her waist.

Mrs. Macauley, climbing into her own sleigh, could take no exceptions

to Priscilla Thompson’s manner or appearance, though she would have

done so gladly for the benefit of her favorite son. Mrs. Macauley

disliked the Thompsons. Her husband before his death objected to them.

She thought little Theophilus Gill the best match in the neighborhood

for Priscilla Thompson. Her own large light-haired son was too dutiful

to marry without her consent. She was educating him to be a doctor;

the younger boys could work the farm under her direction. She expected

Martin to do his family credit by looking higher than the Thompsons.

Priscilla, on her part, held Mrs. Macauley in secret aversion. She

felt sorry for Martin’s younger brothers and sisters, who were all

obliged to stand in a row and take pills or tincture before breakfast.

Mrs. Macauley was too high-handed and all-prevailing. Priscilla’s

disposition was cheerful, but that Ohio region known as the Swamp could

not escape the tinge of the period, and at that date the extremely

feminine woman with a bias toward melancholy was the standard. Mrs.

Macauley was so mannish that Priscilla thought her fully entitled to

the tufts of beard in her moles.

The young people crowded merrily into Theophilus Gill’s sled. They

all knew how matters stood between the Macauleys and Thompsons.

The Thompsons, excepting Priscilla, who was a reticent girl, talked

about the Macauleys, and the Macauleys held their heads rather high,

excepting Mart; but he thought the world of his mother. The girls

suspected Priscilla was going to-night because her staying away would

make talk. Some of them believed Theophilus Gill would get her, and

others thought things might take a turn so that she would marry Mart

Macauley after all.

There was a day when she would have given half her life to go to

Macauley’s, but stayed away. That was when Martin broke his collar-bone

racing his bay filly. Nobody knew that she hid in her father’s field

corn-crib all that day. Yet it was not an occasion for extravagant

fears. Mrs. Macauley was the best nurse in Fairfield County, and soon

had her son mended to perfection.

A few flakes of snow fell on Gill’s load, and made it all the merrier.

No joke could fail to strike fire at once on the steel-clear air, and

many a time-honored one was repeated by the young men as their fathers

before them had repeated it, and enjoyed by the girls as their mothers

had enjoyed it.

Philip Welchammer was pitied for having his arm out of place, and Nora

Waddell, discovering it at that instant around her, told him tartly

there _is_ folks that their room’s better than their comp’ny. Upon this

he genially retorted that she never made no such fuss when they were

out sleigh-ridin’ alone; and Nora glowed in her red merino hood while

the laugh turned upon her.

Then a girl’s voice, to cover her confusion, started a thrilling old

revival hymn, and the load poured its bass and treble through the

lines. Darkness approached as near as the white world would allow.

The triumphant strain echoed among treetops and stirred emotion in

Priscilla.

“There, there on eagles’ wings I soar,

And sense and sin are felt no more.

There heaven comes down our souls to greet,

And glory crowns the Mercy Seat--

And glo-ry crowns the Mer-cy Seat.”

The road was bounded by that distinctively American fence, the rail,

or stake-and-ridered, showing drifts of snow in its angles, and white

lines like illuminations along the top of every lichened rail. The sled

flew over corduroy spaces now deeply bedded. On each side the trees

rose out of frozen pools, from which they seemed to conduct a glazed

coating upward, for every twig glinted icily through the dusk. In

spring-time, when the Feeder and creek rose out of banks, acres of this

swamp lay under water, with moss scum and rotting leaves at the top and

bottom.

Priscilla found always in these woods a solemn beauty. Her wildest

dream was of living deep in their summer shade with an unnamed person,

and sitting on the doorstep at nightfall, her hand locked in his. The

amber lights, the cry of tree-frog and locust, the mysterious snap of

twigs, the reverberating bark of a dog, the ceaseless motion of water

under a foot-log, all gave her delight. One spring she worked in her

father’s sugar-camp. A bark shelter that they passed reminded her of

it, of collecting the sugar-water, watching the bubbling kettles, and

dropping the wax on snow, of stirring-off, which was such a festival,

and at the same time such a miracle, for you could feel the hardening

wax grain to sugar on your tongue.

Theophilus Gill turned his horses from the road, and drove through a

gap into the woods.

“What are you doin’ that for?” exclaimed John Davis, who loved a horse,

like every good Ohio man, but was always ready to sacrifice it to his

comfort or speed.

Theophilus explained there was a bad bit of road ahead, and the circuit

through the woods might be better.

If he dreaded cutting his team’s ankles, the danger was not lessened

by this choice of routes. For after some easy progress and much

winding among saplings and jarring against stumps, they descended to

a seldom-used bridge across the Feeder, standing like an island in a

frozen lake. Theophilus Gill drew up his horses. There was not room

in which to turn back, and the occupants of the sled rose with some

apprehension.

Nora Waddell said she would never go over that bridge. Theophilus

observed doubtfully he’d risk gettin’ the team across, but mebby some

of the boys had better walk over and lighten the load.

Everybody alighted except the driver, who cautiously, and reassuring

his snorting horses, moved across the ice and up the bridge. It shook

under their tread to such a degree that nearly all the party resolved

to trust the ice in preference, and pushed their tracks carefully upon

the snow-covered Feeder. Besides Nora Waddell, Philip Welchammer took

under his charge Mary Thompson, Priscilla’s flighty young sister, who

was barely fifteen and in short dresses, but so headstrong that she

would go into company whenever Priscilla did. Starts and exclamations

were finally blended into a general outcry, for the ice gave way,

and several figures disappeared to their very necks. Then the young

men who had landed were prompt in action, while some of the girls

showed courage and pioneer swiftness of resource. Philip and his two

companions were pulled out, and huddled, dripping, into the sled, all

available covering being piled upon them. Everybody scrambled in, and

Theophilus, restraining his horses, asked, in an excited shout, if they

were all in. Mary Thompson, through her chattering teeth, retorted, “Of

course all of us were in, and if he did not mean to kill us entirely,

he’d better whip up and get to some fireplace.”

Thus reproached, and by the Swamp Queen’s sister, the young man drove

with such zeal that his horses ran away, and were restrained from

tearing the vehicle to bits against logs and fences only by his utmost

strength and horsemanship.

Thus the party came like a whirlwind up the open lane to Macauley’s,

and were hurried into the three-story house, while Macauley’s boys led

the horses away to a barn of similar magnitude, where long rows of

stalls and shining flanks were discernible by lantern-light.

No less than three fireplaces had blazing logs piled to the very

chimney throats. Sarah Macauley conducted the girls upstairs to the

best room, from which opened a bedchamber where they laid off their

wraps. The young men found a similar haven on the other side of the

staircase. And it was pleasant to hear the logs snap while frost lay

so thick on the two upper porches which were let into the sides of the

house.

Macauleys were very well off indeed. The estate consisted of fifteen

thousand dollars cash, besides a couple of farms, and the largest

homestead in the township. Mr. Macauley had accumulated all this,

after breaking up twice during his career, paying security debts.

Nearly all the floors were carpeted in home-made stripe or hit-or-miss,

and the best beds reared backs as lofty and imposing as the backs of

elephants.

Numbers of young women, arrived before this party, were basking in the

best room, their hair and collars smoothed, and their eyes taking keen

neighborly notes while the hum of conversation went on. Miss Miller

from Millersport was there, and appeared a worthy rival for Priscilla

Thompson. She had pink cheeks, and pretty brown hair on a low, delicate

forehead, these charms being distractingly set in an all-wool blue

merino dress and ribbon headdress to match. Miss Miller possessed

two thousand dollars in her own right, and would come in for all her

father’s property when he died. Besides, she had attended select school

in Lancaster, and some said she was so fine she would cut a bean in two

rather than lift the whole of it on the point of her knife to her very

pretty mouth.

Mrs. Macauley lost not an instant in dosing her drenched guests with

hot whiskey and ginger stew. Other raiment was provided for them. When

all the young people had arrived and warmed themselves, they were to

descend to the dining-room, one of the largest apartments ever seen in

those days, supported by a row of posts across the centre, and floored

by oak as smooth as glass. The name of kitchen would have fitted it

as well, for here the family cooked. One of those new-fashioned iron

machines called stoves stood beside the fireplace, having a pipe to

carry its smoke into the chimney. But Mrs. Macauley often said it was

not half as much use to her as the Dutch ovens she always baked in,

over the coals.

A line of chairs waited around the sides of the dining-room. The

pantry, opening at one end, half revealed stacks of Christmas

provisions on shelves.

But there was to be no such godless amusement as dancing. The young

people would frolic and play plays with kissing penalties, which could

by no means corrupt them as much as joining hands and jumping to the

tune of a fiddle.

Groups were already descending to the dining-room, and Mary Thompson

struggled hard to hook one of Sarah Macauley’s dresses over her stouter

waist.

“Your sister didn’t come?” remarked Sarah politely, in the modulated

voice that her mother trained.

“Yes, she did,” exclaimed Mary. “She was along with the load. Why,

where is Persill?”

This inquiry at once became general. Priscilla was nowhere in the

house. The panic-stricken company could not remember seeing her since

crossing the Feeder. They all thought she returned to the sled with

them. John Davis was sure he helped her in.

Theophilus Gill, turning livid around the edges of his beard, said the

horses might have gone to Jericho for all of him, and he’d ’tended to

Persilla Thompson himself if he had known the rest of the boys wasn’t

goin’ to. Priscilla’s sister began to cry aloud, and such young ladies

as did not accompany her gazed at each other in pale apprehension.

But Mrs. Macauley came sternly to the front. She would not allow Mary

Thompson to proclaim that Priscilla was drowned, and Theoph Gill had

done it, and she forbade the party falling into a panic.

Her son Martin had his filly and sleigh ready, and while she snatched

blankets and brandy, she marshaled forth such young men to form a

separate search party as seemed suitable in her eyes. Mrs. Macauley

would not have Priscilla Thompson drowned in the Feeder, and left

strict orders on her own offspring against any such impression--which

the whole company obeyed. Then she got into the sleigh, and Mart

galloped his filly.

He made but one remark to his mother during this ride.

“If she’d come along with us as _I_ wanted her to, this wouldn’t have

happened, mother!”

His face showed ghastly through the dark, and his husky voice jarred

the breast of the woman who bore him.

The sleigh and the sled containing the young men both stopped at that

unused bridge standing in the midst of the Feeder. They all called

Priscilla’s name, the winter night’s stillness magnifying the sound.

And for reply they had a void of silence.

Mart was for dropping into the hole and searching under the ice, but

his mother sternly restrained him. She sent the young men down stream,

and she walked across the bridge with her son, separating from him

afterward that they might search the woods in different directions.

Down the Feeder, men’s voices raised melancholy echoes--“Persilla!

Hoo-o-o, Persil-la! Persilla Thompson!”

The solemn winter woods could not daunt Mrs. Macauley. She gave no

nervous start at twigs snapping under the snow-crust, but searched

large spaces with vigor. It did hurt her to hear Mart calling the

girl in such a tone, and to remember what he had said to his mother.

In those days people weighed their words, and every sentence meant

something. Martin’s slight reproach to Mrs. Macauley was the first he

had ever uttered.

Treading among naked saplings, with now and then a ghostly pawpaw leaf

rustling against her face, she came to the bark sugar-house, and met

Mart at its open side, carrying Priscilla in his arms. Priscilla was

too terrified and exhausted to speak aloud, having crept out of the

Feeder as far as this shelter. Icicles hung to her clothing, and she

had lost her bonnet and cloak cape. She clung around Mrs. Macauley’s

neck, crying like a baby, and very unlike the dignified young woman

that her small circle had always considered her. Perhaps this softness

had its effect on a nature bent on commanding and protecting.

In half an hour the young folks at Macauley’s knew that Mart’s mother

brought Priscilla home on her lap, wrapped in blankets, and dosed with

brandy every few rods. The searchers in the sled, arriving but little

later, said Priscilla must have been clear under the ice by the looks

of it where she crept out. But the Feeder was so shallow right there

that she could walk on the bottom.

All festivity remained suspended while the hostess, like some

mysterious medicine-woman, worked over her patient. A few groups in the

dining-room played “fist’ock,” and other very mild sitting diversions

which could be suspended in an instant, the players looking up with

concern to receive the latest bulletin from Priscilla.

But she recovered so rapidly that every spirit rose, as did the general

opinion of Mrs. Macauley’s skill. John Davis remarked staidly to Darius

Macauley that he believed Darius’s mother knew more about doctorin’

horses, even, than most of the horse doctors in the country, but

Darius replied with some grimness, she wasn’t settin’ up for that.

Finally Priscilla was able to come downstairs, holding to Mart’s arm,

and helped on the other side by his mother, and everybody said they

entered the dining-room like a bridal couple about to stand up, for she

was pale and handsome enough to be a bride, and he looked scared and

anxious enough to be a groom. Priscilla made the effort to come down,

not only because Mrs. Macauley considered her sufficiently restored to

do so, but also because she did not want to check the merriment of the

party.

They put her in a large chair against one of the central posts, and

Sarah Macauley, as soon as she could catch breath for surprise,

exclaimed, loud enough to be heard by all around her, though

fortunately not by the head of the family:--

“Why, mother! you’ve put that flowered silk dress on her that father

brought you from Philadelphia when he went over the mountains with a

drove of horses! You said you was goin’ to save that for the oldest

son’s wife.”

The guests near Sarah looked significantly at each other, and Miss

Miller, being among them, tossed her head and tittered.

“Anybody who was _anxious_ to marry into your family,” she remarked to

Sarah, “ought to fall sick and send for your mother, and give her all

the trouble in the world. That’s the surest way to get her consent.”

Miss Miller pursed her lips. She wanted to correct any impression

that she had favored Mart Macauley, and at the same time utter a few

strictures.

“Yes, mother’s a good nurse,” said Sarah innocently.

“She’ll nurse _you_,” whispered Darius, with a warning nudge, “when she

hears what you said about that flowered silk.”

“Don’t tell her,” begged his sister. “I’ll do your share of the milkin’

all the rest of the week, if you won’t.”

“Well,” assented Darius provisionally, “mebby I won’t.”

The flowered silk had been constructed for Mrs. Macauley when she was

much less matronly in shape than on this Christmas night, and by reason

of being put away so long had got into fashion again. It was so rich

and thick that it was famed through the neighborhood as being able to

stand by itself, but, having retired to lavender and camphor, was not

expected forth any more until the occasion of Mart Macauley’s infair

dinner.

Priscilla never looked so pretty as she did on this Christmas night.

She took no part in the plays, but they sold pawns over her head, and

the penalties she inflicted were considered brilliant.

“Heavy, heavy, what hangs over your head!” said John Davis, the seller,

holding Miss Miller’s real gold ring. Her father had tried that ring

with aquafortis before he allowed her to buy it of the peddler.

“Is it fine or superfine?” inquired Priscilla.

“Superfine,” said John, pulling his neckerchief with an air. “What must

be done to redeem it?”

“Let the owner make a charade.”

This sent Miss Miller, with assistants, giggling into the pantry. And

a grand charade they exhibited, for Miss Miller had picked up such

things among the Lancaster young people, and was not sorry to show her

knowledge. First the actors came in supporting each other and weeping

aloud. In their second act there were several dumb weddings, and in

their third the weddings were repeated with a change of partners. After

long guessing, everybody was struck with admiration to discover that

the word was Bal-ti-more.

Then John sold Martin’s big handkerchief over Priscilla’s head,

informing her it was fine only. And the possessor was bid to bow to the

wittiest, kneel to the prettiest, and kiss the one he loved best, which

Martin did, perambulating about the room in a long search, but coming

back to Priscilla in every instance, covering her with confusion, and

exciting the company to hilarity.

Mrs. Macauley having discreetly retired, they played “London Bridge is

swept away,” furnishing the music with their own voices. The figures

and changes made it very similar to the “Virginia Reel,” and Mrs.

Macauley would have thought it sounded like a dance had she not known

“London Bridge,” to be an innocent marching play.

Supper was served at ten o’clock, with plates and white-handled knives

and forks held upon the knee, this variety of refreshment being called

a lap supper. The Macauley genius for cookery shone resplendent. Such

cold meats and pickles and spiced breads, such coffee (made at a

neighboring house in a wash-boiler, by Mrs. Macauley, just before she

retired), such varieties of cake and pie, such metheglin and root beer,

flowed upon the guests as only Macauleys knew how to make and brew.

“You don’t seem to be havin’ as good a time as the rest,” observed

Philip Welchammer to Theophilus Gill, when the plates were being

collected, and his plate retained a pile of scarcely touched dainties.

“Oh, I’m gittin’ along, I’m gittin’ along,” said Theophilus.

“You ’pear kind o’ sober.”

“Well, ’twas a scare,” apologized Theophilus.

“But that’s all over now.”

“Yes, it’s all over,” assented the black-bearded lover, with a sigh.

And plucking up animation, he added, “Mart has kind o’ took the bit in

his teeth, hain’t he?”

“He has that. It’s a match now, if Persilla’s a mind to have him. The

old lady, she’s turned round and set herself that way too. I shouldn’t

be surprised if the’s an infair to this house by next Chris’mas.”

“No, neither would I,” said Theophilus, shaking his head, and making

a grimace as if the action hurt him. He had a stirring, money-making

disposition, while Mart Macauley’s tastes were those of a student, and

he thought himself as good a match. But there was no accounting for

the tricks of fate.

Philip laughed in a heartening and sympathetic fashion.

“I reckon the’ won’t be no chance for you next Sunday night, nor any

other Sunday night this year, now,” he said.

“Mebby not,” said Theophilus. “But if Mart Macauley gits her, he gits

the Queen of the Swamp, sure as you’re born. She’ll always be that,

come what will.”

THE STIRRING-OFF

TIME, 1850

Davis’s boys said to all the young men at singing-school, “Come over

to’r sugar-camp Saturday night; we’re goin’ to stir off.”

The young men, sitting on the fence to which horses were tied in dusky

rows, playfully imitated the preacher when he gave out appointments,

and replied they would be there, no preventing Providence, at early

candle-lighting.

Jane Davis, attended by her cousin, also circulated among the girls in

the school-house during that interval in singing-school called recess,

and invited them to the stirring-off.

The Davises, though by no means the richest, were the most hospitable

family in the Swamp. They came from Virginia. Their stable swarmed

with fine horses, each son and daughter owning a colt; and the steeds

of visiting neighbors often crowded the stalls until these looked like

a horse-fair.

The Davises entertained every day in the year. Their house was

unpretending even for those times, being of unpainted wood, with a

bedroom at each side of the porch, a sitting-room where guns and

powder-horns hung over the fireplace, a kitchen, and a loft. Yet

here sojourned relations from other counties, and even from over

the mountains. Here on Christmas and New Year’s days were made

great turkey-roasts. Out of it issued Jane Davis to the dances and

parties where she was a belle, and her brothers, ruddy, huge-limbed,

black-eyed, and dignified as any young men in Fairfield County.

They kept bees, and raised what were called noble turnips. Their

farm appeared to produce solely for the use of guests. In watermelon

season they kept what might be termed open field. Their cookery was

celebrated, and their cordiality as free as sunshine. No unwelcome

guest could alight at Davis’s. The head of the family, Uncle Davis was

a “general,” and this title carried as much social weight as that of

judge. About their premises hung an atmosphere of unending good times.

On Sunday afternoons late in November all the raw young men of the

neighborhood drew in a circle to Davis’s fireplace, scraping turnips

or apples. Now the steel knives moved in concert, and now they jarred;

the hollow wall of a turnip protested against the scrape, and Aunt

Davis passed the heaping pan again. Or cracked walnuts and hickory

nuts were the offerings. Then every youth sat with an overflowing

handkerchief on his lap, and the small blade of his knife busy with

the kernels,--backlog and forestick being bombarded with shells which

burned in blue and crimson.

So when the Davises were ready to stir off in their sugar-camp, it was

the most natural thing in the world for them to invite their neighbors

to come and eat the sugar, and for their neighbors to come and do so.

The camp threw its shine far among leafless trees. Three or four iron

kettles steamed on a pole over the fire. In a bark lodge near by, Aunt

Davis had put a lunch of pies and cakes before she went home, to be

handed around at the stirring-off. It was a clear starry night, the

withered sod crisp underfoot with the stiffness of ice. Any group

approaching silently could hear the tapped maples dripping a liquid

nocturne into trough or pan.

But scarcely any groups approached silently. They were heard chatting

in the open places, and their calls raised echoes.

John and Eck Davis had collected logs and chunks and spread robes and

blankets until the seating capacity of the camp was nearly equal to

that of George’s Chapel. Some of the girls took off their wraps and

hung them in the bark house. One couple carried away a bucket for more

sugar-water to cool a kettle, and other couples sauntered after them.

There were races on the spongy dead leaves, and sudden squalls of

remonstrance.

Jane Davis stood in the midst of her company, moving a long wooden

stirrer in the kettle about to sugar-off. Though her beauty was neither

brown nor white, nor, in fact, positive beauty of any kind, it cajoled

everybody. Her hair was folded close to her cheeks. There was innocent

audacity in the curving line of every motion she made. The young men

were so taken by the spell of her grace that she was accused of being

unrighteously engaged to three at once, and about to add her cousin Tom

Randall to the list.

Tom Randall was a Virginian, spending the winter in Ohio. He was

handsome, merry as Mercutio, and so easy in his manners that the Swamp

youths watched him with varying emotions. He brought his songs over the

mountains: one celebrated the swiftness of the electric telegraph in

flashing news from Baltimore to Wheeling; another was about a Quaker

courtship, and set all the Swamp girls to rattling the lady’s brisk

response,--

“What care I for your rings or money,--

Faddle-a-ding, a-ding, a-day;

I want a man that will call me honey,--

Faddle-a-ding, a-ding, a-day!”

Tom Randall sat close to the fire, hanging his delicate hands, which

had never done a day’s chopping, over his knees. He looked much of a

gentleman, Nora Waddell remarked aside to Philip Welchammer. To all

the girls he was a central figure, as Jane was a central figure to the

young men.

But Philip claimed that Virginians were no nearer perfection than

out-and-out Swamp fellows.

“I didn’t say he was a perfect gentleman,” said Nora, with cautious

moderation, “for I wouldn’t say so of any man.”

“He ain’t proud,” admitted Philip. “He’s free to talk with everybody.”

“Humph!” remarked Mary Thompson, sitting at the other side of Philip;

“he ought to be. Folks in Georger Chapel neighborhood is just as good

as anybody.”

“Well, anyhow, I know he ain’t a prettier dancer than Jane,” sighed

Nora, whose folks would not allow her to indulge in the godless motion

which the music of a fiddle inspires. While Jane stirred and chatted,

she was swaying and taking dance-steps, as if unable to refrain from

spinning away through the trees. In this great woods drawing-room,

where so many were gathered, it was impossible for her to hear any

comment that went on.

“Jane makes a good appearance on the floor,” responded Philip, who,

being male, could withstand the general denunciations of the preacher

and his mother’s praying at him in meeting. “I like to lead her out to

dance.”

“Uncle and Aunt Davis are just as easy with Jane as if they wasn’t

perfessors of religion,” sighed Nora Waddell.

“And their boys thinks so much of her,” added Mary Thompson. “John

can’t go anywhere unless she ties his neck-han’ketcher for him. I’ve

knowed him, when Jane was sick, to come and lean over her to get it

fixed.”

“If she’s to leave them,” said Philip, “I wonder how they’d do without

her?”

“She’s goin’ to marry Cousin Jimmy Thompson, that I know,” said Mary.

“She’s engaged to Dr. Miller in Lancaster,” insisted Nora. “I’ve saw

voluntines he’s sent her.”

“Dick Hanks thinks he’s goin’ to get her,” laughed Philip. “He told me

she’s as good as promised him. And Dick’s a good feller, if he wasn’t

such a coward.”

“I don’t believe Jane wants anybody,” said Nora Waddell. “She’s

light-minded, and likes to enjoy herself.”

Dick Hanks stood by Jane and insisted on helping her to move the

stirrer. His hair inclosed his head in the shape of a thatch, leaving

but narrow eaves of forehead above his eyebrows, though his expression

was open and amiable. He looked like one of Bewick’s cuts of an English

carter. The Hankses, however, were a rich family, and, in spite of

their eccentricities, a power in the county. Old Jimmy Hanks so dreaded

the grave that he had a marble vault hewed, watching its progress for

years, and getting himself ready to occupy it a few weeks after its

completion. Lest he should be buried alive, his will decreed that

the vault should be unlocked and the coffin examined at intervals.

The sight of a face floating in alcohol and spotted with drops from

the metal casket not proving grateful to his heirs, the key was soon

conveniently lost.

His son Dick, hearty in love and friendship and noble in brawn, so

feared the dark that he would not go into an unlighted room. When left

by himself at the parting of roads after a night’s frolic, he galloped

his horse through brush and mire, and it was told that he had more than

once reached home without a whole stitch to his back.

But in spite of the powers of darkness, Dick was anxious to take Jane

Davis under his protection. The fire and the noisy company kept him

from lifting his eyes to the treetops swaying slowly overhead, and the

lonesome stars. All through the woods winter-night sounds and sudden

twig cracklings could be heard. Dick, however, meant to take Jane Davis

home, whether he could persuade one of the Davis boys to go home with

him afterward or not.

In those days neighborhoods were intensely local. The people knew what

historians have not yet learned about the value of isolated bits of

human life. These young folks in the sugar-camp knew nothing of the

events and complications of the great world, but they all felt more or

less interested in the politics of Jane Davis’s entanglements.

Her brother kept dipping a long spoon into the kettle she stirred, and

dropping the liquid into a tin cup of cold sugar-water. As long as the

hot stuff twined about in ropy arms, it was syrup; but as soon as it

settled to the bottom in a clear mass, it was wax, and the change from

wax to the grain of sugar is a sudden one.

When Eck Davis announced, “It’s waxed,” the kettle was slung off in

haste, and everybody left the tree which had propped his back, or the

robe on which he had leaned, and the graining sugar was served in

saucers and handed around. It could be eaten with spoons or “worked”

into crackling ropes. Davis’s boys took off the syrup kettles and

covered them up in the bark lodge. They would be emptied into stone

jars when the more important business of entertaining company was

over. The fire now shone redder. Jane was cutting up pies and cakes in

the bark house, all this warm light focused on her lowered eyelids,

when more of her suitors arrived.

“I knowed the entire posse would be out,” said Philip Welchammer in

a laughing undertone to the girls sitting beside him. “Davises never

misses invitin’ anybody.”

“You’re too late, Jimmy Thompson,” called Jane’s elder brother before

he noticed the preacher was in the party. “Your sheer’s e’t.” When,

however, Dr. Miller from Lancaster also came forward, John stood up

stiffly and put on his company grandeur. He held the town-man in some

awe, and was bound to be constrained by the preacher.

Jimmy Thompson, having met Jane with awkward heartiness, said he would

make the young folks acquainted with Brother Gurley. They all knew

Brother Gurley; but Jimmy was a wild young man, and his audacity in

“brother”-ing the preacher was more delicious than home-made sugar.

He afterward explained that the preacher had been turned onto the

old folks for Sunday, and he asked him along to the frolic without

suspicionin’ he’d come, but the preacher, he took a-holt as if that was

the understandin’.

Jane met Brother Gurley and Dr. Miller with equal ease. A hush fell

upon the company, and they ate and watched her serve the newcomers and

appear to balance such formidable individuals in her hands. Affectation

was in that region the deadliest sin a girl could commit against her

own popularity, and Jane’s manner was always beautifully simple.

The preacher had a clean-shaven, large face, huge blue eyes, and

laughing white teeth, and a sprinkling of fine, indefinitely tinted

hair. His figure was vigorous, and well made to bear the hardships of a

Methodist circuit-rider. His presence had the grasp of good-fellowship

and power, and rather dwarfed Dr. Miller, whom all the girls thought

a very pretty man. Dr. Miller wore side-whiskers, and a Lancaster suit

of clothes finished by a fine round cloak hooked under his chin. When

he took off his hat to bow, two curls fell over his forehead. The woman

who would not take Dr. Miller if he wanted her must expect to have the

pick of creation, and maybe she would miss it after all. He talked to

Jane and ate maple sugar with the greatest of Lancaster ease, telling

her he had put up with his cousin in Millersport and borrowed a horse

to ride to camp. John Davis at once said the folks at home expected him

to put up with them over Sunday, and the other young men resented the

doctor’s prompt acceptance of Davis’s hospitality.

The preacher, holding his saucer of sugar in his left hand, was going

around and giving the right hand of fellowship to every young person

in camp. This was the proper and customary thing for him to do. A

preacher who went into company anywhere on the circuit without shaking

hands and pushing and strengthening his acquaintance would be a worse

stumbling-block than a backslider given up to superfluous clothing and

all kinds of sinful levity, or a new convert with artificials in her

bonnet. But there was a tingling quality in Brother Gurley’s grasp

which stirred the blood; and his heavy voice was as prevailing in its

ordinary tones as in the thunders of the pulpit.

“Did you bring your wife with you, Brother Gurley?” simpered Tabitha

Gill, a dwarfish, dark old maid, devout in church and esteemed for her

ability to make a good prayer.

Mary Thompson whispered behind her back, “Tabitha Gill’s always for

findin’ out whether a preacher’s married or not before anybody else

does.”

“Not this time,” replied Brother Gurley, warming Sister Gill’s heart

with a broad, class-meeting smile. “But I expect to bring her with me

when I come around again.”

“Do,” said Tabitha; “and stop at our house.”

“I’m obliged to you, Sister Gill,” replied the preacher. “You have a

fine community of young people here.”

“But they ain’t none of ’em converted. There’s a good deal of levity in

Georger Chapel neighborhood. Now, Jane, now,--Jane Davis,--she’s a girl

nobody can help likin’, but many’s the night that she’s danced away

in sinful amusement. I wish you’d do somethin’ for her soul, Brother

Gurley.”

“I’ll try,” responded the preacher heartily. He looked with a tender

and indulgent eye at Jane, who was dividing her company into two parts,

to play one innocent play before the camp broke up.

“Come away from here,” whispered Philip Welchammer to the girl beside

him, seceding from the preacher’s group and adding himself to Jane’s.

“Tabitha Gill will be haulin’ us all up to the mourners’ bench pretty

soon.”

They played “clap-out,” the girls sitting in their wraps all ready to

depart, and the young men turning up their collars and tying on their

comforters while waiting a summons. Jane was leader, and with much

tittering and secrecy each young lady imparted to Jane the name of the

youth she wished to have sit beside her. Dick Hanks was called first,

and he stood looking at the array from which he could take but one

choice, his lips dropping apart and his expression like that he used

to display under the dunce-cap at Gum College. During this interval of

silence the drip of sugar-water into troughs played a musical phrase or

two, and the stirring and whinnying of the horses could be heard where

they were tied to saplings. No rural Ohioan ever walked a quarter of a

mile if he had any kind of beast or conveyance to carry him.

Then Dick of course sat down by the wrong girl, and was clapped out,

and Dr. Miller was called. Dr. Miller made a pleasing impression by

hesitating all along the line, and when he sat down by Mary Thompson

her murmur of assent was a tribute to his sagacity. Cousin Tom Randall

was summoned, and sung two or three lines of the “Quaker’s Courtship”

before throwing himself on the mercy of Nora Waddell. He was clapped

out, and said he always expected it. West of the Alleghanies was no

place for him; they were even goin’ to clap him out up at uncle’s. Then

the preacher came smiling joyfully, and placed himself by Tabitha Gill,

where he was tittered over and allowed to remain; and one by one the

seats were filled, the less fortunate men making a second trial with

more success when their range was narrowed.

Everybody rose up to go home. But a great many “good-nights,” and

reproaches for social neglect, and promises of future devotion to each

other, had first to be exchanged. Then Jimmy Thompson, who had driven

in his buggy expressly to take Jane Davis home, and was wondering what

he should do with the preacher, saw with astonishment that Brother

Gurley had Jane upon his own arm and was tucking her shawl close to her

chin. Her black eyes sparkled within a scarlet hood. She turned about

with Brother Gurley, facing all the young associates of her life, and

said, “We want you all to come to our house after preachin’ to-morrow.

The presidin’ elder will be there.”

“I don’t care nothin’ about the presidin’ elder,” muttered Jimmy

Thompson.

“Goin’ to be a weddin’, you know,” explained John Davis, turning from

assisting his brother Eck to empty the syrup kettles, and beaming

warmly over such a general occasion. “The folks at meeting will all

be invited, but Jane said she wanted to ask the young people separate

to-night.”

“And next time I come around the circuit,” said Brother Gurley,

gathering Jane’s hand in his before the company, “I’ll bring my wife

with me.”

They walked away from the campfire, Jane turning her head once or twice

to call “Good-night, all,” as if she still clung to every companionable

hand. The party watched her an instant in silence. Perhaps some were

fanciful enough to see her walking away from the high estate of a

doctor’s wife in Lancaster, from the Hanks money, and Jimmy Thompson’s

thrift, into the constant change and unfailing hardships of Methodist

itinerancy. The dancing motion would disappear from her gait, and

she who had tittered irreverently at her good mother’s labors with

backsliders at the mourners’ bench would come to feel an interest in

such sinners herself.

“Dog’d if I thought Jane Davis would ever marry a preacher!” burst out

Jimmy Thompson, in sudden and hot disapproval.

“Don’t it beat all!” murmured Tabitha Gill. “And her an unconverted

woman in the error of her ways! Jane’s too young for a preacher’s wife.”

“Jane’s fooled us all,” owned Philip Welchammer heartily. To keep

intended nuptials a family secret until a day or a few hours before

the appointed time was as much a custom of the country as was prying

into and spying out such affairs. Surprising her friends by her wedding

was, therefore, adding to Jane’s social successes; but only Dr. Miller

could perceive her true reason for assembling her suitors at the last

moment. While discarding them all, her hospitable nature clung to

their friendship; she wished to tell them in a group the change she

contemplated, so that no one could accuse her of superior kindness to

another. Her very cruelties were intended mercies.

“That’s the way the pretty girls go,” sighed Cousin Tom Randall,

seizing hold of Jane’s younger brother: “the preachers get ’em. Come

on, Eck; I have to be helped home.”

“I don’t see when he courted her,” breathed Dick Hanks, closing his

lips after many efforts.

“Preachers is chain-lightnin’,” laughed Jimmy Thompson. “He’s been

around often enough, and always stoppin’ there.”

“To-morrow after preachin’,” said John impressively, as he came forward

after hastily covering the jars. “We’re goin’ to have a turkey-dinner,

and we want you all to be sure to come. And next time Brother Gurley

and Jane makes the circuit, we’ll have the infair at our house, too.”

“That’s just like Davises,” exclaimed one of the dispersing group in

the midst of their eager promises; “they wouldn’t be satisfied unless

they give the weddin’ and the infair both, and invited all quarterly

meetin’ to set down to the table. I thought there was doin’s over at

their house; but then they’re always bakin’ and fussin’.”

They could all picture a turkey-roast at Davis’s: the crisp, brown

turkeys rising from their own dripping, squares of pone as yellow as

buttercups, and biscuits calculated to melt whitely with honey from

glass dishes of sweet-smelling combs. There would be every kind of

vegetable grown in the Swamp, and game from the banks of the Feeder

and Reservoir, pies and cakes and coffee, and at least eight kinds of

preserves. Jane Davis and the preacher would stand up in front of the

fireplace, and after the ceremony there would be a constant rattle of

jokes from the presiding elder and his assistants. And over the whole

house would hang that happy atmosphere which makes one think of corn

ripening on a sunny hillside in still September weather. A dozen times

the long tables would be replenished and supplied with plates, all the

usual features of a turkey-roast at Davis’s being exaggerated by the

importance of the occasion; and Aunt Davis would now and then forget to

urge a guest, while she hurriedly wiped her eyes and replied to some

expression of neighborly sympathy, that they had to lose Jane sometime,

and it was a good thing for a girl to get a religious man. Then about

dusk the preachers and their congregation would start again to chapel,

and Jane, in Millersport clothes, would shine on the front seats as a

bride, certain of an ovation when the after-meeting handshaking came.

It would be a spite if she sat where tallow candles could drip on her

from one of the wooden chandeliers, but she would enjoy hearing her

bridegroom exhort, and he would feel like exhorting with all his might.

“Well, Doc,” said John Davis, turning from the deserted camp and

sinking fire to place himself by the bridle of the young man from

Lancaster.

“No,” answered Dr. Miller, “I’m obliged to you, John; but I’ll ride

back to Millersport to-night.”

“You don’t feel put out?” urged John, conscious of a pang because all

the good fellows who courted Jane could not become his brothers-in-law.

“No; oh, no,” protested Dr. Miller with chagrin. “She’d a right to suit

herself. I’ll be around some other day.”

“We’d take it hard if you didn’t,” said John.

“But just now,” concluded the doctor, “I feel what a body might

call--stirred-off.”

Dick Hanks was riding up close to Jimmy Thompson, while Jimmy

unblanketed his mare and prepared for a deliberate departure.

“John, now,” remarked Jimmy,--“he brothered the preacher right up,

didn’t he? They’ll be makin’ a class-leader o’ John yet, if they can

git him to quit racin’ horses.”

“Which way you goin’ home, Jimmy?” inquired Dick Hanks anxiously.

“The long way, round by Georger Chapel, where I can look at the

tombstones for company. Want to go along? We can talk over the

weddin’, and you’re only two mile from home at our woods’ gate.”

“I guess I’ll take the short cut through the brush,” said Dick.

Jimmy drove through the clearing and fence-gap, where John Davis was

waiting to lay up the rails again.

“What’s that?” said John, and they both paused to listen.

It was a sound of crashing and scampering, of smothered exclamation and

the rasping and tearing of garments. Dick Hanks was whipping his steed

through the woods, against trees, logs, and branches, as if George’s

Chapel graveyard, containing the ghastly vault of his father, and

George’s Chapel preacher, waving Jane Davis in one victorious hand,

were both in merciless pursuit of him.

SWEETNESS

TIME, 1855

Amber light in the dense Ohio woods receded slowly from the path which

a woman ascended. The earth was frozen, and glazed puddles stood in cow

tracks. But this woman loved to climb from the valley farms and her

day’s sewing, of chill December evenings, and feel that she approached

her heaven and left the world behind. The year had just passed its

shortest day. Neighborhood custom allowed her to leave her tasks early

in the evening, because she came to them with a lantern in the morning.

She hastened as you may have noticed a large-eyed anxious cow cantering

toward its nursling; but stopped to breathe, half ashamed of herself,

in sight of a log-house known through the Rocky Fork settlement as

Coon’s.

All the Coons had been queer little people, but this last daughter of

them exceeded her forefathers in squatty squareness of stature and

Japanese cast of feature. As she was quite thirty-five her friends

called her an old maid, according to the custom of that remote period.

Yet there was not a girl on all the windings of the Rocky Fork who had

more laughter in her eyes, or smoother cheeks, or darker polished hair.

“Sure’s my name is Wilda Coon,” said the small woman beneath her

breath, “yonder comes Lanson Bundle.”

The man she saw was yet far off, plodding across the valley toward

her hillside; and as he had taken that walk nearly every evening for

a dozen years, it should have ceased to surprise her. Yet as shadows

thickened among rock and naked trees, it was always a satisfaction to

turn and look back from that particular point and exclaim, “Yonder

comes Lanson Bundle!”

Wilda’s log-house had a clearing and some acres of trees around it,

standing like a German principality or an oasis in the midst of Alanson

Bundle’s great farm. The Bundles had vainly tried in times past to buy

out the Coons. But Alanson had other views. He had courted Wilda twelve

years, and he calculated in time to wear her out. She could not go on

forever raising patches of truck in the summer, and quilting and sewing

in the winter.

Alanson was not uncomfortable while he waited. His aunt kept house

for him at his homestead, where he had several barns, a milk-house,

a smoke-house and all modern conveniences around him. He felt his

value with everybody but Wilda. The youngest girls showed him no

discouragement. There was a sonorous pomp about his singing in meeting

which affected every rural nature, while his Adam’s apple, like a

sensitive lump of mercury, trembled up and down its inclosure. Some

folks thought Alanson Bundle ought to have been a preacher. He would

look so nice standing in a pulpit, with his hair sleeked up in a

straight roach, saying, “Hence we discover, my brethren.” But Wilda

Coon never had made any fuss over him. And for that reason he followed

her with abject service.

In that early year of the fifties a great many people about the Rocky

Fork had locks on their doors. But a tow latch-string hung out for

Wilda Coon, and with it she lifted the wooden latch of her dwelling.

At night, for security, she would draw the string inside, and slip a

wooden bar into staples across the thick board portal.

The tight-chinked cabin had the strangest interior on the Rocky Fork.

There was only one room, and the hollow of the roof rose up in a

cavernous arch without joists. Two wooden bars were, indeed, set high

across one corner, but they served as roosts for chickens who had

already taken to them for the night, and who stirred quavering as Wilda

shut the door and emptied a gourd.

Before the fire, yet not too near it, was a trundle-bed which could be

pushed anywhere on wheels.

She dropped her hood and shawl upon a chair and slipped toward the

trundle-bed, motioning back a great mastiff who kept guard at the

hearth. He sat down again and licked his lips; the glory of burning

logs in the fireplace was enough to content any dog, for that cabin

seemed to have the sunset imprisoned within it. Calico curtains on the

four-paned windows hid darkening woods outside.

“O Sweetness!” whispered Wilda, bending over the trundle-bed and

scarcely daring to touch the patchwork quilt. Her eyes were full of

kisses and fondling for her only baby, the helpless being who reversed

for her the maternal relations. It was a little old woman, whose apple

face had shriveled into puckers only around the corners of the eyes and

mouth. A dimity nightcap tied it in, almost covering white silk threads

of hair. This helpless mother, lying in the dead alive state we now

call paralysis, and the Rocky Forkers then called palsy, was the secret

delight of Wilda’s heart, and Alanson Bundle’s only rival. But she

concealed her fondness like a crime. The name of Sweetness was sacred

to that hollow cabin. Bounce could make no remark about it, and he was

the only safe auditor in an age when excess of loving was considered

weakness.

Wilda hung her supper kettles on the hooks of the crane, and made

biscuits, and raked out coals to bake them in a Dutch oven. Alanson

Bundle would not appear until the evening meal was over. He pottered

around in his woods or went across the ridge to look after cattle.

The log-house was exquisite with cleanness, even in that corner where

the fowls roosted. No cobwebs or dust marred the rich brown of its

upper depth. The floor and stone hearth were scoured white. Wilda’s

spinning-wheel stood beside one wall. Her own apartment was an oblong

space curtained with homespun which had been dyed a dull red. Some red

and gilt chairs, a pine table and a red and gilt cushioned settee on

rockers, furnished the house. The log wall between hearth and door held

gay trappings of tinware and pewter, all shining in the mighty blaze.

The table was spread and a perfume of coffee filled the place. Wilda

had turned the fried eggs and lifted them carefully to a platter before

she heard the usual sounds her mother made to call her.

Sweetness was wide awake and smiling like a baby. The Rocky Fork people

said she had her faculties but couldn’t make no use of them. Unabated

intelligence looked through her eyes and her face never distorted

itself, although she could not talk.

“Have you been lonesome to-day, Sweetness? No? Have you slept much?

Yes? That’s good. Did Speckle and Banty sit on Bounce’s back and

keep you company? They’ve gone to roost now. They’re going to wake

up about midnight and crow for Christmas, and wake you up--the bad

chickens.--Now supper’s ready. Folks round here thinks I starve you

because you never eat in the middle of the day. ’Tain’t no use for me

to say anything. But if you don’t want me to be clean disgraced, you

must eat hearty when you do eat.”

She fed the helpless being with long and patient use of a spoon. The

fire roared. Bounce rose up and yawned, stretching his limbs, to hint

that his own plate had been empty since morning. But Wilda never

hurried this important part of her day’s business. The food which she

must eat became overdone. She sat on the trundle-bed, giving her mother

with the spoon meat all the life and doings of that small world on the

Rocky Fork.

“Gutteridges were going to have a turkey-roast to-morrow. The presiding

elder was at their house. Yes, their sewing was done; she finished

Mandy’s black quilted petticoat to-day. Mandy and ’Lizabeth both had

new shawls that their father had paid six dollars apiece for, at the

woolen factory in Newark; stripes and crossbars. Ridenour’s little

boy was so he could sit up; the doctor thought the fever was broke.

The Bankses were all going to take dinner at granny’s. And some folks

said one of Harris’s girls was to be married to-morrow, but it might

be all talk. There wasn’t much chance of snow, but it was a cold night

outside. Didn’t Sweetness hear the wind across the roof? It was a good

thing our clapboards were on so tight.”

So this one-sided conversation went on until the little old woman was

quite filled. Then Wilda made her snug, as if attending an infant, and

fed Bounce, and sat down alone at the table.

Scarcely were the clean pewter and crockery in place again, and the

wheel set out where the table had been, and Wilda bundled ready to go

out, when a knock sounded on the door.

She opened it, and exclaimed as she always did,--

“Well, I declare! here’s Lanson. Come in, Lanson, and take a chair.”

“Gimme your milk bucket,” responded Alanson.

“I was just starting to milk, Lanson. Don’t you bother yourself with it

to-night.”

But he took her pail. And Wilda, smiling, laid off her wraps and made

the hearth very clean, and plumped up the settee cushions.

When Alanson handed the frothing pail into the door, without putting

foot over the threshold, he glanced at the fireplace.

“Want another log brought in to-night?”

“Law, Lanson! that one ain’t half burnt.”

“But it’ll settle down before another twenty-four hours. I ’low I’d

better fetch a few sticks.”

So he came in laden with sections of trees, and built them handily

upon the structure of the fire.

“Do you want ary bucket of water?” was his next inquiry.

“No, I’m obleeged to you, Lanson,” replied Wilda. “I fetched a big

gourdful from the spring as I come uphill. It saves steps.”

Alanson now unbelted and took off his butternut-colored wamus, and

Wilda hung it with his hat on a peg. He had a fine black blanket shawl

for meeting, but he was not so reckless as to scratch it through hill

underbrush every evening.

Feeling himself now ready for society, Alanson walked over to the

trundle-bed and greeted the invalid.

“Good even’, Mis’ Coon; it’s right wintry outdoors.”

She gave him an approving smile. He sat down in the settee and rocked

himself, while Wilda pulled a long thread from her spindle, stepped

back and gave the wheel a whirl. The trundle-bed, as usual, stood

between her and her besieger. A hum, rising and rising like some sweet

tune through the pines, filled the room. The great wheel blurred all

its spokes, and found them again, and slackened to a slow revolution,

as Wilda came back to the spindle.

“How’s your aunt to-day?” she inquired.

“Middling,” replied Alanson. Again the music of the spinning arose.

Alanson warmed his feet and hands, and felt comforted after his tramp

through the vast chill woods.

When the silent companionship which he enjoyed with Wilda had quite

filled its measure, he took from his pocket and unfolded a large

newspaper.

“I’ll light a candle,” said Wilda, with that eagerness for romance

which the simplest lives manifest.

“’Tisn’t needed,” said Alanson. What was a candle’s star to that

blazing sun in the fireplace? He turned his shoulder so the light fell

upon the “Saturday Evening Post,” and read a harrowing installment

about some Bride of the Wilderness. There was domestic bliss in this

snug cabin, the wind-song of the wheel, and the winter night with

its breath of Christmas. Alanson droned on in a high key, the mother

watching him as long as she was able to resist so many monotones. She

went to sleep before Wilda’s stint of spinning was done, and before

Alanson read with impressive voice, “To be con-tin-u-ed.”

That wary inspection of each other which people of that time called

courting had varied its routine so little for twelve years betwixt this

pair, that Alanson felt bound to make his usual remark as Wilda sat

down to knit.

“Well, folks is still talking about us getting married, Wilda.”

“Let them talk,” said Wilda, putting her hair behind her ear, and

smiling while she looked at Sweetness.

“I come here pretty regular. Don’t you think it’s about time we set the

day?”

Wilda answered, without moving her eyes from the trundle-bed, “Don’t

you think we better let well enough alone, Lanson?”

“Well, now, ’tisn’t well enough,” argued Alanson, and to the sylvan

mind there is accumulated force in an oft-used argument. “You’ve got

these woods lots and the house and a cow”--

“Yes, I’m well fixed,” murmured Wilda.

--“but you have to leave your mother and go out among the neighbors to

airn a living. How do you know sometime the house won’t burn down?”

“I am jub’ous about it often,” owned Wilda, biting the end of a

knitting-needle. But catching the yarn over her little finger she drove

it ahead with her work.

“Then eventually she might die.”

“I’ve thought of that,” sighed Wilda. “And I’ve thought what’d become

of her if I’s to be taken and her left. Then who’d let her pet rooster

and hen--that she’s just as tickled with as a child--roost in the

house, and clean after them without fretting her?”

Alanson glanced at Speckle and Banty sticking like balls to their

perch, and he volunteered some discreet possibilities.

“When folks begins to get used to such things before they’re too old

and sot in their ways, seems to me like chickens in the house would be

natteral enough--though not brought up to it.”

Whenever Alanson made this great concession, Wilda always fell back

upon her observations of marriage.

“But there’s Mary Jane Willey. She had fifteen hundred dollars in her

own right, and was well fixed with bedding and goods--six chairs and a

bread-trough and a cupboard. And all that didn’t satisfy her, but she

must have a man to speckalate with her money and lose it; and now he’s

took to drinking, her and her children are like to go on the county.”

Alanson interlaced his fingers across his chest and set his thumbs to

whirling.

“She ought to got a man like me,” he observed humorously.

Then the topic was usually diverted into the lives of other Rocky

Forkers until Alanson felt it was time to go home.

But to-night, after drawing out his silver watch by its steel

log-chain, he lingered uneasily instead of rising from the settee and

saying, “Well, I better be moseying towards home.”

The flashing of Wilda’s needles went on. She had a leather stall pinned

to her waist, in which she braced and steadied the most rampant needle

as he led the gallop around the stocking. Sweetness slept as a spirit

may sleep who has escaped the bounds of care, her sunken little mouth

and wrinkled eye-corners steadily smiling.

“Going to have any Christmas up here to-morrow?” inquired Alanson, with

a sheepish look at Wilda.

“I got a Christmas gift for her,” replied Wilda fondly. Alanson

understood the pronouns which always stood for mother.

“Well, now, it’s funny,” said he. “But I got something for her, too.”

“Why, Lanson! What ever put you up to do such a thing?” Wilda paused

with her needle held back in mid plunge.

“’Tisn’t much,” apologized Alanson, and he brought his wamus from the

peg to the hearth. Wilda had noticed it was laden when she hung it up,

but she always discreetly overlooked the apples he brought until he

made his offering.

There were no apples in the wamus pockets this time. Alanson took out

two packets, and opened one which he laid on Wilda’s knee. It was a

pound of red hearts.

“The other’s for her,” he said “and it’s all white ones.”

“Why, Lanson Bundle!” exclaimed Wilda.

But he had yet another paper, and it disclosed the yellow coats of

tropical fruit.

“What’s them?” breathed Wilda, bending over in admiration. “Why, Lanson

Bundle! If them ain’t lemons and oranges! Where in this world did you

get them?”

“I sent clean to Fredericktown for them,” confessed the suitor with an

apologetic grin. “I thought her being bedfast so steady all the time,

she’d like something out of the common.”

“You are _real_ clever,” spoke Wilda with trembling voice. “She’ll be

so tickled! I been making her two fine caps with hem-stitching around

the border;--but this does beat all!”

“I done something else,” Alanson ventured on, “that you’ll think is

simple;--I’ve never seen such a thing, but I’ve read about it. Coming

along through the pines I took my jack-knife out and cut a little one

off close to the ground; and it’s laying outside the door.”

“What for, Lanson?”

“A Christmas-tree.”

“What’s that?”

“Why, in a foreign place they call Germany, I’ve read they take an

evergreen and make it stand like it growed in the house, and hang gifts

on it, and if I don’t disremember, they fix candles into it and light

them.”

“I should think that would be pretty,” said Wilda in some excitement.

“Law, Lanson! If we could fix it at the foot of her trundle-bed!”

Alanson thought they could fix it, and he set vigorously about the

task. He ran out to the ash-hopper and brought in the keg which in

summer time caught the lye. The evergreen tree, beautifully straight,

and tasseled at the top, he fastened in the keg ingeniously, without

clamor of nails and pounding.

Then maid and bachelor trimmed the Christmas-tree for their old

sleeping child. A dexterous use of string hung all the hearts to the

boughs, as well as oranges and lemons. One cap was put on the top

tassel, and the other dropped from a branch by its ties. Wilda brought

out her candle box and recklessly cut the moulded tallow into short

tapers. This part of the decoration greatly taxed both Alanson and her.

But they finally pinned all the tapers in place, and concluded to light

the wicks for a trial.

Alanson carried a brand from point to point. Wilda was frightened at

the beauty of the thing and their unusual occupation. Her eyes and

cheeks were vivid. She had never been so wildly excited in her life

before. Thought and resolution, which had battled for years, bounded

forward with the bounding of her blood.

“Lanson Bundle!” she laughed, “what do you suppose folks would say if

they peeked in and seen us at this!”

“I ’low they’d want to have a Christmas-tree themselves,” responded the

bachelor. “You and me will have one next year at our own house, won’t

we, Wilda?”

“Well, I don’t know but we will. I don’t know as I can hold out much

longer. You’re a real good man, Lanson, and if I’ve got to get married,

there ain’t nobody I’d have as quick as you.”

At that admission Alanson laid the brand on the fire, wiped his lips

carefully with a red cotton handkerchief, and came expectantly round

the Christmas-tree. But with the recoil of a middle-aged girl from

dropping man a word of encouragement, Wilda flew behind the trundle-bed

and kept her lover warned by an uplifted palm.

“I haven’t made up my mind to no kissing yet, Lanson Bundle! I ain’t

used to kissing anybody but her.”

Alanson looked at the little mother in the trundle-bed, and she opened

her eyes, disturbed by such scampering. The pet chickens were roused

also, and Speckle crowed on his perch with a vigor which belongs only

to the midnight of Christmas eve.

“Look there, Sweetness,” Wilda whispered kneeling. “Do you see what

Lanson’s fixed for you? That’s a Christmas-tree.”

The mother’s eyes caught the Christmas-tree, and snapped with

astonishment and delight. The tapers were dripping tallow, but

firelight shone through the boughs, and all the wonderful hearts and

yellow fruit hung like a fairy picture. Her grateful look finally

sought Alanson, and he also knelt down, at the opposite side of the

trundle-bed, and with reverence which brought a rush of tears to

Wilda’s eyes, kissed Sweetness on the forehead.

Wilda furtively gathered her tears on her finger-tips, and hid them in

her linsey dress, but she said impressively to Alanson,--

“Now, that kiss will make you a better man all your life.”

SERENA

TIME, 1860

Serena Hedding drove through the gateway of her father’s farm, while

her little son held the creaking gate open. Her vehicle was a low

buggy, with room at the back for a sack of nubbins, which the scrawny

white horse would appreciate on his return trip. The driver was obliged

to cluck encouragement to him as he paused, with his head down, in the

gateway; and before he had taken ten steps forward, before Milton could

stick the pin back in the post-hole and scamper to his seat at her left

side, she lived her girlhood over. She saw her father holding that gate

open for camp-meeting or protracted-meeting folks to drive in to dinner

with him. She saw Milton Hedding ride through to court her, and the

scowl her father gave him; and the buggy which waited for her in the

woods one afternoon, herself getting into it, and Milton whipping up

his horse to carry her away forever.

The road wound, folding on itself, through dense woods. Nothing had

changed about the road. She noticed that the old log among the haw

saplings remained untouched. That log was a link binding her childhood

to her girlhood. She sat on it to baste up the hem of her ridiculously

long dress before going to school, her dinner-basket waiting near; and,

coming home in the evening, she there ripped the basting out, lest Aunt

Lindy should notice that her skirt did not flop against her heels, as

proper skirts had done in Aunt Lindy’s childhood. Seated on that log,

she and Milton had talked of the impossibility of their marriage, and

decided to run away.

It was so near sunset that the woods were in mellow twilight. She heard

the cows lowing away off, and a loaded wagon rumbling over the Feeder

bridge. The loamy incense of this ancestral land was so sweet that it

pained her. Soon the house would come in sight, and seem to strike her

on the face. If they had altered it any, she did not know it. Was her

father’s sick-bed downstairs, or did Aunt Lindy keep him above the

narrow staircase? The slippery-elm tree she used to wound for its juicy

strips started out at the roadside to give her a scarry welcome. Her

fingers brushed her cheeks, and drew the black sunbonnet farther over

them.

“What’s the matter, mother?” inquired her light-haired boy. “Are you

feared grandfather’s worse?”

“I hope he ain’t,” replied Serena. Then the house, on its rising

ground, appeared, crossed by trees. It had a yard in which lilac bushes

and tall hollyhocks bordered the path. The gate opened into an orchard,

and the orchard was guarded from the lane by bars, which Serena’s

little boy let down, and they drove in.

Her father’s barn was one of those immense structures which early Ohio

farmers built to indicate their wealth. It had always seemed bursting

with hay and grain, and the stamp of horses resounded from its basement

stables.

Serena looked piteously at the house. Vehicles of various kinds were

fastened all along the fence. Still, no solemn voice or sound of

singing reached her ear. It had long been the Jeffries custom to hold

services over their dead at the house. No feather-bed hung across

the garden palings; neither was the hideous cooling-board standing

up anywhere, like a wooden tombstone. But the whole neighborhood was

there. He must be very low indeed.

The youthful widow and her boy alighted, and tied their horse in a

humble corner near the woodpile. Nobody came out to receive them. That

was another bad sign. She was cramped by her long ride. If her suspense

had not been so great she must have felt a pang of shame at the shabby

appearance of her son and herself, on this first return from exile.

The house dog barked, waking suddenly from his meditations to learn who

they were and what they wanted. But he recollected that a great many

strangers had been coming and going recently, and considering his duty

done, trotted back, and stretched himself to snap flies.

Serena felt obliged to go around to the front of the house, though the

back doorstep showed the wear of her childish feet. But as she passed

the first rosebush, Milty trotting in the white path behind her, a

woman came from the back porch, holding a handkerchief over her cap,

the ribbons of which flew back on each side of her neck. The light

glared on her spectacles. She was as trim and quick as a young girl.

Her dress, cape, and apron were of the same material, and her waist was

fastened in front with a spiky row of pins.

“Serene Heddin’!” she exclaimed, with the spring in her voice which

Serena remembered comparing to the clip of a mouse-trap, “you’re not

goin’ into the front door to scare your father to death in his last

moments.”

“Oh, Aunt Lindy,” said the shabby widow, lifting her hands, “is he as

bad as that?”

“He’s been struck with death all the afternoon. You come in this way.”

“Can’t I see him?” asked Mrs. Hedding, climbing over the back doorstone

like a suddenly exhausted pilgrim, her face quivering under streams of

tears.

Through open doors she recognized in the parlor and sitting-room

groups of old neighbors, waiting in that hush with which they always

accompanied one another to the brink of death. A woman came from among

them, whispering,--

“Who’s this, Lindy?” and immediately informing herself: “Why, Sereny

Jeffr’s! Have you got here? Come right in to your pap. He’s pretty

nigh gone.”

“It won’t do no good, Sister McGafferty,” said Aunt Lindy. “He won’t

know her, and ’twill disturb him. She was postin’ in at the front door

when I caught her,” declared Aunt Lindy, as if speaking of a thief.

Sister McGafferty, a comfortable, large woman in blue spectacles,

the presiding elder’s wife, and therefore a person of authority,

still beckoned Serena in, and she passed Aunt Lindy, followed by her

barefooted boy. The round-posted bedstead was drawn out from the wall,

and under its sheet and many colored quilt lay the old farmer, his

mouth open, his eyes glazed, his narrow brows and knotty features

wearing a ghastly pallor. But behind the solemn terror of that face was

her father.

Aunt Lindy followed, and twitched her elbow, thereby creating a

faction in Serena Hedding’s favor among the spectators. They were all

well-to-do people, who noticed her dejected attitude toward the world,

and had always disapproved of her thriftless match. But they said

within themselves that Lindy Miller was going too far when she tried to

pull a daughter away from her dying father.

“Ain’t you ’shamed to disturb his last peaceful minutes!” Aunt Lindy

hissed with force.

But the returned culprit fastened such desperate interest on the

unseeing eyes of her father that Aunt Lindy’s interruption was as

remote to her as the gambols of loose horses in the pasture.

If there had now been time and opportunity, Serena could not argue

her case with him. He never had allowed that. She could not tell how

true and happy her marriage was, in spite of his disapproval and its

accompanying poverty. She had suffered, but her heart had ripened

so that she could discern and love the good in human nature across

its narrow bounds. Words or expressions did not occur to her; but a

thousand living thoughts swarmed in her mind. If he would look at her

again with reconciliation in his eyes, she could be satisfied, and bear

all her future trials like benedictions. Never a loving father, he was,

until her disobedience, a fairly kind one. He was a very religious man

of the old sort, believing seriousness to be the primary principle of

godliness, and levity a fermentation of the inward Satan. He always

paid his quarterage and contributed to foreign missions, while every

successive preacher on the circuit used his house as home. The deep

grooves making a triangle of his upper lip showed how constant and sad

his meditations had been. Yet this old farmer was in some matters timid

and self-distrustful, and so fond of peace and quiet as to yield his

rights for them.

“Father,” pleaded Serena Hedding, bending closer to him. “Father!”

Unconsciously she repeated the name like a cry. The hum of the

bee-hives against the garden palings could be heard. Did a ray dart

across his leaden brain from the afternoon his only child, in short

coats, poked a stick in the bee-hives, and, feeling the results of

her folly, wailed thus to him? Did he imagine himself again dropping

the rake and leaping the fence to run with her from her tormentors?

A flicker grew through the glazing of his eyes, and became a steady

light, a look, a tender gaze, a blessing. She clasped her hands, and

rocked before him in ecstasy. He knew her, and revealed, midway over

the silent chasm of death, how unalterably close and dear she was to

him. In that small eternity of time they were knitted together as

never before. His eyes began to glaze again, and she remembered Milty.

Pushing the child forward, she cried again, “My boy, father! See my

boy!”

The old man saw him. That rigid face was too set to smile, but with the

image of his child’s child on his eyes, the hope of future generations

of his blood, he passed away.

A little time was allowed for the wailing that rises around every

death-bed. The overtaxed young widow rocked her son against her,

while he gazed about him in awe. Aunt Lindy stood by the bedpost,

burying her face in her apron. Her son, Hod Miller, a huge creature,

very black-eyed, bright-complexioned, and having the appearance of

possessing no immortal soul, sat near the foot of the bed, with his

legs crossed and his shoulders hung forward, looking respectfully

concerned. There were no other near relatives except Jesse Jeffries and

his wife, who covered their faces while this elder brother lay in the

first dignity of death.

Then a quiet bustle began. Sister McGafferty took Serena Hedding out

of the parlor, and made her lie down on the sitting-room straw-tick

lounge, and smell camphor. Milty wandered out-of-doors, and was

grateful to a neighbor’s boy, forbidden the house and enjoined to

watch the horses, who told him, after an exchange of scrutiny, that

he dursn’t take a dare which ’ud reach the medder fence first. The men

took charge of the body. They closed the parlor doors, and, with basins

of water, clean linen, and the new store suit Aunt Lindy’s forethought

had ready in the house, performed those solemn rites to which all our

flesh must humbly come. One mounted a horse and rode to Millersport

for the undertaker. Little Jimmy Holmes, who was a middle-aged man,

but had a father known as Old or Big Jimmy, was informed by his wife

that he could go home now, and look after the milkin’ and feedin’; she

would stay here and tend to things. Into her capable hands Aunt Lindy

appeared to resign the house, while Little Jimmy and their son, Little

Jimmy’s Jimmy, drove into the pleasant dusk.

After inquiring about the date of the funeral, and detailing watchers

for the intervening nights, the other neighbors slowly dispersed in

squads. Lights appeared about the house, and the kitchen and cellar

yielded up their prepared good things.

Before they reached home the neighbors began to speculate about the

disposition of the property. They said Moses Jeffr’s had been a hard

worker, and his sister Lindy had been a hard worker, and she had kept

his house for more than twenty year: ’twouldn’t be no more than right

for him to leave her well off. She had been savin’ with what her man

left her, and Hod Miller had done a son’s part by the old man. Money

goes to them that lays up. Some said Mr. Jeffr’s had cut off Sereny

with a cent in his will. Sereny ought to knowed better than to done as

she did. It was a pity, specially as she was left a widow-woman, with

a little boy to raise. But when a person makes their bed, they got to

lie in it. How tickled Mr. Jeffr’s was when Sereny was a little girl

experiencin’ religion! He never thought then she would go and run off.

She had a good home, and he would have done well by her.

On the other hand, there was folks-talk among the Serena faction, whose

hearts melted toward the girl when she rocked before her father. They

said there never would have been any trouble between Moses Jeffr’s

and his daughter if Lindy Miller hadn’t managed things. Milt Heddin’

was a good feller, only he hadn’t the knack of gettin’ along. But he

could have worked the farm as well as Hod Miller. They wanted Sereny to

have her rights. It was a scandal and a shame if that big, able-bodied

feller, with land of his own, could turn her off the home place.

Serena wandered about the house, which strangers seemed to possess,

crying over familiar objects. She had large violet eyes, and was

once considered as pretty a girl as came to meeting, though her lips

were too prominent and full. She looked shabby and piteous. Sister

McGafferty combed her hair for her, while her trembling, work-worn

hands lay in her lap.

“They’ve borried a black bonnet and dress for you, Sister Sereny,” said

the elder’s wife, who had been around the circuit when this sorrowful

creature was a shy child.

“I might have worn a better dress and bonnet. But when word came, I

felt so bad I didn’t think of anything. They didn’t let me know until

he was near gone.”

Milty spent his time out-of-doors. He approved of the barn, and did not

approve of Aunt Lindy. His mother had said, “Aunt Lindy, this is my

boy.”

And Aunt Lindy had said, “He looks spindlin’, like the Heddin’s. I hope

you’re raisin’ him to obedience. Children set on their own way gives

their parents plenty of sorrow to sup.”

This spry great-aunt’s glasses detected him if he touched a

daguerreotype among the glaring, upright array on the sitting-room

table, or ventured too near the fine men and women pasted on the

fire-screen.

She took him to see his grandfather after the laying-out, turned back

the ghastly sheet, which was stretched between two chairs, removed

cloths from the dead man’s face, and warned the boy to prepare for

death. He never afterwards inhaled the pungent odor of camphor without

turning faint.

At table he and his mother huddled together, feeling scarcely welcome

to the abundant food. Little Jimmy Holmes’s wife, with a number of

helpers, kept the table burdened with every country luxury, but Aunt

Lindy saw that the best was reserved until the great final dinner on

the day of the funeral.

That day was considered a credit to Moses Jeffries. It was one of the

largest funerals ever known in those parts. The weather was pleasant,

and summer work so well advanced that everybody could feel the

pressure of neighborly duty. Carriages and fine horses nearly filled

the orchard space in front of the house; the yard was darkened with

standing men in their best black clothes. Not half the people could get

into the house, to say nothing of getting into the parlor. There Elder

McGafferty lifted his hands, praying and preaching over the old farmer,

who looked so unused to his collar and neck-cloth and brand-new suit

when they took off his coffin-lid.

A number of men wandered down by the barn; the hymn-singing came to

them faint and plaintive, in gusts of couplets, just as the preacher

lined the words.

One of them remarked that old Mr. Jeffr’s left things in pretty good

shape, and he s’posed Hod Miller wouldn’t alter them much. Another

thought that Serene Heddin’ would come in for a sheer, if not all. A

man may be put out with his children, but he’ll favor them when it

comes to such serious business as makin’ a will. Hod Miller had bought

and sold and made money on that farm, enough to pay for his work. He

oughtn’t to stand in Sereny’s light.

“What’s she been doin’ since her man died?” inquired the first speaker,

shaving off long whittlings from a piece of pine.

“Workin’ out, ’pears like I heard. She got a place near Lancaster,

where they’d let her keep her boy with her. It’s my opinion,” said the

second speaker, suddenly spitting a flood, and letting his spiky chin

work up and down with slow rumination, “that old Lindy kept her away

from her pap as long as she could, for fear there’d be a makin’ up.”

“Oh, sho! The old man was very set in his ways. He didn’t need

bully-raggin’ to make up his mind and keep it made up. Hod Miller might

marry the widder now, and that’d settle all claims.”

“I don’t believe she’d have him,” said the chewer, smiling slowly.

“Jesse Jeffr’s, he thinks Sereny’s all right. He claims he seen the

will.”

The whittler scoffed at such claims. Jesse Jeffries was held in light

esteem by his old neighbors. He sold his farm, and had such a hankering

for town life as to settle in Millersport, the Deep Cut of the Ohio

canal, and lose every cent of it in grocery-keeping. What Jesse

Jeffries said or did thereafter was of small importance. His record

slew him.

There was bustle at the front of the house. Both men squinted in the

sun, and watched a long black object with shining dots upon it coming

through the door, borne by stout young farmers. The men in the yard

raised their hats. After the coffin came Serena, on her Uncle Jesse’s

arm. He shuffled along uncomfortably, as if not used to showing such

attention to the women-folks. After them came Hod Miller and his

mother, and Jesse Jeffries’ wife with Serena’s boy. Sister McGafferty

considered this the proper order of procession, and had so managed

it. Streams of people gushed from all the outlets of the house; the

carriages filled and were arrayed in line; the long black serpent

trailed down through the woods; and the women remaining to prepare

dinner stood and counted, until they declared it beat everything. It

was a pleasant sensation to be at such a populous funeral.

When Jesse Jeffries foretold the contents of the will he did not speak

without authority, for it had been left in his hands. After a hearty

dinner, at which many tablefuls of neighbors assisted, he importantly

called the possible heirs together, and their factions sat by to listen.

Aunt Lindy was neither nervous nor bowed with grief. She had done her

duty, and knew what her deserts were. Her son Hod tipped back in his

chair, and twitched his shirt-collar. He wanted to have the thing over,

and was not without doubts of his succeeding to the estate. If it came

to him he meant to hold to it. His hands were as strong as a vise, and

typified his grip on property. Serena might try to break the will, but

if she lawed until Judgment Day he would not give her a cent he was not

obliged to give her. Women-folks were a sort of cattle he had no fancy

for.

Curious eyes watched Serena, and speculated on her emotions. She was

pale and quiet. Her son stood beside her.

The testator’s brother broke the seal, and began to read.

The testator, after stating his sanity and general ability to

execute such a document, giving the numbers of his various lands and

enumerating his parcels of property in the tedious and high-sounding

repetition prescribed by law, bequeathed it all to his beloved daughter

Serena Jeffries, and her heirs, the said Serena being enjoined to pay a

stated annuity to her aunt, the testator’s beloved sister, and to make

over to her certain chattels particularly named; also a legacy of five

hundred dollars to her cousin, Howard Miller.

Sister McGafferty poked the camphor bottle toward Serena, but it was

declined.

Still the poor girl could not believe this. Disinheritance had been so

long accepted as part of the penalty of her marriage that she scarcely

thought of it as injustice. But to have the homestead for her own was a

rise which made her dizzy.

After gazing on her with satisfaction through his glasses, Uncle

Jesse turned the paper over, and rapidly read a small codicil, which

nevertheless choked him. He knew nothing about this part of the will.

It destroyed Serena Hedding’s claims, on account of her disobedience,

and made Howard Miller unconditional heir.

So that settled the matter. Serena turned whiter. It was a shock, after

realizing one instant the possession of competence.

“I ’low Mozy must have put that on the day he took it away to have more

added, he said,” remarked Uncle Jesse huskily. His good wife, who was

all cap-rim and beak, with a thin neck and general air of scrawniness,

sat with her claws crossed in silent sympathy. Jesse and his wife did

not find Lindy a congenial sister.

“Well,” remarked Aunt Lindy, turning her head so the light fell in a

sheet of glare upon her spectacles, “I’m satisfied. That is, I will be

when I’ve said what I’m goin’ to say. I’m a plain speaker, and tell my

mind. Things has turned out right. Sereny Heddin’ left her pap, and we

stayed by him. She’s got her reward, and we’ve got our’n. I hope you

don’t take no exceptions to his will, Sereny?”

Sereny replied in a low voice that she did not take any.

“To show that I’m fair-minded and want to do right by you,” said Aunt

Lindy, raising her voice to the tone she used in speaking-meeting when

exhorting sinners, “I’ll give you your mother’s spinnin’-wheel that

stands in the smoke-house. You ought to have something to remember her

by.”

Little Jimmy Holmes’s wife nudged the woman next to her, and whispered,

with a curving mouth, “Just the idy! And all Sereny’s mother’s spoons,

and her quilts and coverlids she had wove! And the girl never having

any settin’-out in the first place!”

Serena climbed the staircase, to take off her borrowed mourning, and

put on her own shabby weeds for her ride back into the world. She

passed presses stacked with household linen. The precious things

of her childhood, seen and handled in this trying visit, seemed so

heart-breakingly precious because Hod Miller’s future wife would throw

them about as common. She would like to have the yellow, leather-bound

copy of “Alonzo and Melissa,” the novel of the house, always considered

unwholesome by the elders, and as surely read with sly zest by the

children. The coverlet with her mother’s name woven into it had

never been intended for anybody but the daughter of the house. It was

unendurable to go away from home this second time, and into perpetual

exile.

“Now I wisht they’d find a later will,” said Little Jimmy Holmes’s

wife, tying on her bonnet in the best bedroom. The persons who had

lingered to support the family through the ordeal of will-reading were

driving off, one after another. “Oh, but Aunt Lindy’ll carry things

before her! Is she anywhere near? I don’t want her to hear me.”

“Things don’t turn out that way except in novel-stories,” observed

another woman, with her mouth full of pins. “They don’t find wills hid

around in stockin’s or Bibles. I declare, I’m real sorry for Sereny. I

don’t see how old Mr. Jeffr’s can lay easy in his grave, turnin’ his

own child out to give place to a big, hearty feller, with money in his

own right.”

“I always thought so much of Serene,” said Little Jimmy Holmes’s wife.

“We was taken into full church membership on the same day; and we used

to run together and swap dinners at the Gum College. Aunt Lindy was so

hard on her. I’ve asked Serene to go home with me and stay as long as

she wanted to. But she has to take that horse and buggy back. And I

don’t think she could stand it, so near the old home.”

“Now what do you think?” said Jesse Jeffries’ wife, coming in, with her

black-mitted hands pressed together. “Things is willed to Sereny, after

all.”

The bedroom resounded with ejaculations.

“How do you make that out?” inquired Little Jimmy Holmes’s wife. “I’d

give all my yearlin’ calves to have it so.”

“There was another piece wrote on to the paper, that Jesse missed.

’Pears like Mozy cut her off, and then repented, and went right to

another lawyer and had it fixed, for it’s in two different handwrites.

Things stands just as they did in the first.”

“I’m sorry Lindy gets her yearly portion,” said Mrs. Holmes, in an

irreverent aside. “Let me get out of this crowd: I’m goin’ to hug

Serene.”

“I _thought_ ’twas a great pity,” exclaimed the woman with pins in her

mouth, bestowing them rapidly about her bonnet ribbons, “if Sereny

couldn’t have the homestead to bring up her boy in!”

“You said folks never found new wills!” observed a neighbor

triumphantly.

“Well,” retorted the woman, turning her face from side to side to get

her chin set properly in the bonnet ribbons, “they _didn’t_ find any.

Jesse Jeffr’s only fooled around and didn’t read all of the first one.

They might ’a’ knowed _Jesse Jeffr’s_ ’ud make a mess of it. _He_ don’t

know how to do a thing right.”

This opinion was shielded from the ear of Mrs. Jesse. She was busy

nodding her leghorn bonnet and exchanging parting civilities with

several old neighbors.

But Little Jimmy Holmes’s wife had flown upstairs, and interfered with

Jesse Jeffries and Sister McGafferty and a number of others. Serena lay

upon a bed, and the air reeked with camphor.

“She’s overcome like,” explained Uncle Jesse.

“Let me get to her,” said Mrs. Holmes. Having got to her, Mrs. Holmes

raised Serena’s head on her arm, and began to laugh.

“She’s comin’ out of it now,” observed Sister McGafferty. “All of you’d

better go downstairs except Sister Holmes and me. Let her be without

disturbin’ a while. We’ll have plenty of other chances to enjoy Sister

Heddin’s company.”

The neighbors and Jesse went submissively downstairs, but Little Jimmy

Holmes’s wife kept on laughing with some effort, as if she felt afraid

of ending in a sob.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’ll be in the neighborhood again, Serene!” she

said. “Things wouldn’t never been right in this world if they’d turned

out the other way. Don’t look at me like you’s thinkin’ of the dead.

But rouse up and feel better. There’s your Aunt Lindy and Hod standin’

at the gate: I can see ’em through the winder. They’re talkin’ mighty

serious, and she don’t look so well satisfied as she did. But you must

do well by her, Sereny. Give her the old spinnin’-wheel that stands in

the smoke-house!”

ROSE DAY

TIME, 1875

“I do believe this is rose day,” said Infant, standing on the top step

of the veranda in delight.

“I _know_ it’s soap-boiling day,” asserted her twin sister, who had

been baptized Marilla Victoria when she was baptized Infanta Isabella,

quite forty years before. These twins entered the world at a period

when flowery, daring names were the extreme of fashion, and previous to

a rebound to plain and strong Ann, Elizabeth, Mary, Hannah, Jane, and

their various combinations. Infant came very near being labeled Lovey

Lucilla, and she felt thankful for her escape, and even attached to her

diminutive.

Belle would never have suited her (she was not belle), while Infant

did not shame her (she was more or less an infant at any age). She was

slender, blue-eyed, and smooth-skinned, so smooth that wrinkles could

scarcely make their indentation. And it never ceased to be appropriate

for her to wear her hair in a braid down her back, tied with ribbons

the color of the dress she wore. Infant herself could not separate the

gray hair from the blond, nor did she care whether it was all blond or

all gray. She scampered over a fence and swung in the cherry-trees.

Her long tranced girlhood never ended; and the slow life of the farm,

simple as grass and wholesome as new milk, kept up the illusion that

time was eternity. In their neighborhood these twins had been the

Baldwin girls when they first toddled into meeting, when they went off

to be educated at an expensive school, when they came back to paint and

to play on a grand piano, when their parents died and they took charge

of the farm; and the Baldwin girls would probably be their title when

they should become contemporary with all living grandmothers.

Occasionally Infant received a shock from the growth of young children.

It was so astonishing to see a creature who was a baby but a short

time ago, shooting aloft, long-armed and long-legged, and announcing

itself in the teens. Such phenomena did not astonish Rilla, however.

She resented them. Though she had the same fair complexion and comely

make as her sister, a deadly drop of acid had been added to her nature.

Her shoulders were bent. She loved to hear people talked about, and

to lift the corners of her nose with scorn. She felt abused by much

that had happened to her on this planet, and yet too insignificant in

her own personality to take it out of the human race as she desired to

do. The freedom, ease, and scope of mature unmarried womanhood were in

no wise appreciated by her. These traits made Rilla an uncomfortable

house-mate, especially in winter, when the twins were snowed in with

their books and trim housekeeping. Still, Infant loved Rilla’s sourness

along with Rilla. There was strong diversion in being scolded, and she

always felt such a delicious warmth around her heart when she made it

up with Rilla and gave her a handsome present, or took double turns at

the cooking.

Rilla was very parsimonious, and felt bound to distort herself with

aged gowns and long-hoarded hats. But Infant felt unhappy in any color

except that tint of gray which has the thought of wine in it. On this

very rose day, though it was early in the morning, she wore a clinging

gray challie dress. And a good background it would be for all the roses

Infant could hang upon it.

Nothing made Rilla lift the corners of her nose higher than Infant’s

flower days. But as Rilla would be lifting her nose anyhow, and could

really scent no harm in these silent festivals, Infant continued to

observe them year after year, and to afford her sister that triumphant

sense of superiority which we all have upon beholding others’

absurdities.

There was crocus day, when the first flowers broke the sod and made

heavenly beauty in the dark spring. Infant decked herself with them,

and put them on the dinner-table. More abundantly satisfactory,

however, was lilac day. It took a critical eye to discern the exact

date. If the lilacs browned about the edges, then, alas! lilac day had

slipped past. They were not to be gathered too soon, either, if their

full soul of fragrance was to be enjoyed. On lilac day Infant walked

under burdens of lavender bloom. The walls, the pictures, breathed

lilacs. And at night she went to sleep crushing her face into a nest

of bunches, so that she had lilac dreams, and drew the sweetness into

herself, like an Eastern woman absorbing roses.

But the best day of all was rose day. Before it arrived she had

always ready a posy of poems from Keats, Wordsworth, Jean Ingelow, and

Whittier, and read them in the morning while the dew was on the world.

The Baldwin girls cultivated a great many roses. Rilla could hardly

miss from her rose-water and home-made attar and rose preserves the

heaps which Infant cut for her nonsense.

There was not a nicer day in the year than rose day, if Rilla would

only abstain from boiling soap on that date. The sisters had inherited

seventy-five thousand dollars apiece, but they made their own soap

every spring of refuse fats and the lye of wood-ashes. It could have

been made cold in the cellar, if that way had not been too easy for

Rilla. She held it a movable festival, like rose day, and no one

will ever gauge the degree of satisfaction she felt in haling her

flower-wreathed sister up to the vile-smelling caldron to keep the

stirrer going while she set about other duties. Rilla honored pioneer

custom and her grandmother’s memory by performing her soap incantations

in the oldest, mouldiest, most completely shattered garment she

possessed. This was a red wool delaine, so abased from its ruby tone

that the drippings of the lye gourd could find little remaining space

to burn or spot.

They boiled soap in a huge iron kettle in the chip yard. The blue wood

smoke would envelop Rilla and her tarnished tatters as she ladled and

tested, until she looked witch-like to passers along the road. Her

unhappy victim, the slim woman in gray, with a rope of roses wound

spirally around her from head to foot, a burden of roses on her bosom,

and roses studded thickly along the band of her hat, sat on the corded

wood as far as Rilla would allow from the soap, alternately inhaling

their odor and rejecting the alkali steam. If Infant had to stir the

soap, she would have a long-handled stirrer. The hot sun, beating on

the chip yard and her huge hat, smote also the roses, and amidst their

dying fragrance she had sad thoughts on the disappointments of life. So

there was nothing but the morning of rose day which Rilla did not spoil.

But this anniversary Infant felt a sudden uplifting of courage within

herself when her twin announced the soap orgy.

“_My_ soap-boiling will not come any more on rose day,” she put forth

strongly. “And I think I will pay Enos Robb’s wife to make up my share

of the fat and lye after this, Rilla.”

“I would,” said Rilla sarcastically, “particularly as Enos Robb and his

wife and children don’t batten on us already. Give them the piano and

the best parlor chairs and the solid coffee service while you are about

it.”

“Why, Rilla, I didn’t propose to give her my share of the soap. But

it would be cheaply got rid of that way. Yes,” exclaimed Infant, with

sudden recklessness, “I would rather _buy_ soap, and pay out money to

have this dirty stuff carted off, than ever smell it again while I

live. Let us make a new rule, and give our fat and ashes to the Robbs.

They have farmed for us ever since father died,” Infant pleaded, “and

whatever you say, Rilla, I know you have the greatest confidence in

them.”

“The poorhouse wagon is never going to call for me,” said Rilla

decidedly. “You can go and build a fire under the kettle, while I carry

some more water to pour on the ash-hopper. That lye is strong enough to

bear up a setting of eggs, but we may need some more a little weaker.”

“Rilla, I am as firm as the ash-hopper itself. You can’t shake me any

more than you could our brick smoke-house. I won’t help make any more

soap--especially on rose day,” added Infant to herself. “I don’t see

any sense in it.”

“But you can see sense in spoiling dozens of good roses to load

yourself up with like a mad Ophelia. You feel above all the

associations of wash day, though the Princess Nausicaa didn’t.”

“Oh, Rilla, I don’t feel above anything. I merely feel under that soap

kettle, and as if it would crush my soul out, as the shields crushed

Tarpeia, if I didn’t throw it off.”

“Well, I am going to make soap,” said Rilla, whitening with intense

disapproval of the liberty her twin proposed to grasp. “You are not a

minor, and if you were, I’m not your guardian. But if you propose to go

to yourself and leave me to myself, we both know what belongs to us,

and it is easily done.”

This time-worn hint, which in her girlhood used to startle and distress

Infant so much, made but the slightest impression on her hearing now,

as she leaned over the veranda railing to look at the roses. There

were such abundant stacks of them: she might cut and pile them into a

pyramid almost as tall as herself. Such smooth, sweet tea-roses, such

crimson velvet-petaled Jacqueminots, blush and white so fragrant you

would be willing to drown yourself in a sea of their scent; yellow

roses piercingly delightful, Prairie Queens creeping all over the front

of the house, old hundred-leaved varieties, having always in their

depths a reminder of grandmother’s chests and long, long past days.

There were eighteen distinct families of roses, each family a mighty

tribe, marshaled before Infant on lawn and dewy stretch of garden. It

was rose day. She would not let herself think of anything else.

Rilla would not come to the embowered dinner-table which Infant

prepared so carefully, and to which she called her sister exactly as

the clock struck twelve.

Rose day never interfered with Infant’s duties. Her conscience

acquitted her of shirking. Often in dead winter-time, when the snow

piled up, and Enos Robb’s family settled down to the enjoyment of colds

and rheumatism, she fed all the stock herself.

Rilla turned her back on Infant’s several approaches, and dipped lye

with a savagely noisy gourd to quench Infant’s voice. Slugs and ants

in the roses, and even mildew, were no drawback at all to rose day

compared to Rilla. Habits of endurance become proof armor to one’s

sensibilities in the course of life, however; so Infant wandered off

and absorbed the beauty of that day almost as completely as if she did

so with Rilla’s approval. There was tremulous heat over the meadows.

The huge and strictly tended garden was a world by itself. Beyond that

stretched their orchard, having a run of clear water winding through

it, all thickly tufted along the margins with mint.

Infant stepped upon the spongy lichens of the fence and rested her

arms on the top rail, while she looked along the narrow country

thoroughfare. The sweet green world was dear enough to be pressed in

her arms. Mingled mint and rose scents were satisfying. The noble

strength of their Norman colts pasturing in the stock meadow was

beautiful to the eye. Infant loved to hear the pounding of those tufted

feet, and to note the brilliant blackness or gray dappling of the young

creatures’ coats glistening in the sun. She did not expect anything

more unusual to happen on this rose day than her rebellion against

Rilla and the splendor of the weather.

But who should come suddenly riding along the road, as if he had an

appointment with Infant, and meant to keep it the moment she set her

foot on the rail, but the Honorable Truman Condit, who many years

before rode as instantaneously out of her sight! She knew him in

a flash, although his hair showed gray around the ears, and much

experience had added unspeakably to his personality. He was on a Condit

horse, evidently riding around to look at his old neighborhood. There

was a great tribe of the Condits, all well-to-do, high-headed people.

The Honorable Truman had been the local bright young man of his

generation. He went west, where, Infant heard, he became a Senator and

did tremendous things.

She was suddenly conscious that her rose-studded braid was not wound

up in a decent lump as she wore it before her class of young ladies in

Sunday-school. She felt contemptible and out of her place in the human

procession, although the Honorable Truman turned his horse straight

into the fence corner to shake hands with her.

“Pretty nearly the same Infant Baldwin,” he remarked. “But I do see

some lines on your face.”

“I suppose I’ve vegetated instead of lived all the time you have been

doing so much,” said Infant.

“Oh, I haven’t been doing so much.”

“We heard you had.”

“We means Rilla and you. And you didn’t marry?”

“No,” said Infant, feeling it a stinging indignity that he should

mention it, after that courtship so long ago buried. _He_ had married,

and raised a family out west. Rilla was probably right when she said

one woman was the same as another to a man.

“And how is Rilla? Is she as hard on you as she used to be?”

“Oh, Rilla was never hard on _me_. She is quite well, thank you. You’re

coming up to the house to make us a call and take tea, aren’t you?”

“I thought I would.”

Infant looked anxiously at the westering sun. She hoped Rilla would

have the cold soap cut into cakes and boxed, and herself bathed,

clothed, and in her right mind, before the Honorable Truman Condit rode

up to their door.

“I want to have a talk with you first, though,” he added. “And my way

is to go right to the point. Why did you never marry?”

“Come to that,” retorted Infant, a sparkle breaking through her face,

“why did _you marry_?”

“In the first place, because you wouldn’t have me, and in the second

place, because I found a very good wife where I went. I’ve been a

widower now several years, and the boys are settled. I’m loose from

business for almost the first time in my life, and back here to look

at the old neighborhood before spending some years abroad. Your never

marrying has revived certain things. Maybe you’ve forgotten.”

Among her other thoughts, Infant was conscious of recollecting how

often she had wished to go abroad if only some happy friend could go

along as a cushion betwixt Rilla and her. She unfastened with a furtive

hand the rose rope wound about her, but, unwilling to let so many

precious roses go, gathered it into loops on her arm.

“Did you ever know,” pursued the Honorable Truman, “that Rilla told me

you were going to marry one of the Pierson boys?”

“No!” Infant cried out so suddenly that the horse started.

“She did,” said the Honorable Truman.

“Why,” stammered Infant, “how could you believe it?”

“I was a hot-headed boy with more pride than sense. I wouldn’t say

anything to you about it.”

“I remember your quarreling with the Piersons.”

“Weren’t you engaged to one of them?”

“No; which one?”

“Abner.”

“I never was engaged to anybody except you,” she retorted, burning

hotly in the face, “and I did not admire that experience when you

dropped me and went off. And I don’t yet, though you do lay the blame

on poor Rilla.”

Plenty of time had Rilla for all the domestic countermarching she

wished to perform before that conference by the fence ended. Unusually

stirring were her tactics too, for all the Robbs were haled up from

the tenant-house--Mrs. Robb to cook a supper, and the young Robbs not

actually farming to run on errands.

It was six o’clock when Enos came riding his plough-horses to the great

barn. He had turned off early on purpose to intercept Miss Infant and

find out what changes were to be made. Infant hastened up the orchard,

while the Honorable Truman hastened to the same destination by the

road. She saw him leading his horse up the avenue, and felt impatient

at Enos Robb’s interruption.

“Sudden doin’s up to the house,” said Enos, wiping his forehead with

the back of his hand. “’Pears like Miss Rill’s made up her mind about

Brother Sanderson at last.”

“Is Brother Sanderson at the house?” inquired Infant.

“He is, for a fact, and the license and the preacher with him. Now

what I want to know, and what I ought to been consulted, Miss Infant,

seeing how long I been here, is this--what’s you and me going to do

afterward? Is it an interference?”

“Enos,” said Infant, with a gasp, “this is _almost_ as sudden to me as

it is to you. But considering Rilla’s firm character, do you think she

would let any new person interfere with her established plans?”

“No, I don’t,” replied Enos, grinning.

Rilla was standing before the dresser in her room arrayed in her

stiffest silk. She looked with composure upon her twin, who shut the

bedroom door, and hurried up to embrace her.

“It was the best boiling of soap I ever had,” said Rilla, warding the

fading roses away from her silk.

“Rilla dear, you might have told me what you meant to do this evening.

But I am so glad! I couldn’t bear the thoughts of leaving you before,

but now I can.”

“I saw Truman Condit come into the yard with you,” said Rilla. “He’s

grown fat. It must have agreed with him to go west.”

“This has been a great rose day,” said her twin, undoing all traces of

the day’s festival, and piling them carefully in a waste-basket where

they could make no litter. “Won’t you let me kiss you, Rilla?”

The acquiescent nip which Rilla gave Infant took up a world of

forgiveness which Rilla never felt.

“And do you think, dear,” Infant ventured, “we’ll ever wish we hadn’t?

We’ve lived so long with each other. Truman Condit and Brother

Sanderson are really strangers to our ways.”

“I think,” replied Rilla, with decision, “that Brother Sanderson will

never have a rose day while he lives on _my_ farm; and when I say it is

soap-boiling day it will _be_ soap-boiling day, and Brother Sanderson

will stir the soap.”

KENTUCKY

A KENTUCKY PRINCESS

TIME, 1857

The perfection of summer noon, when acres of corn tassels seemed in

a trance and the blueness of far-off hills suggested incense rising,

was not without its effect on Miss Sally Vandewater as she rode toward

General Poynton’s plantation. The turnpike, stretching its ash-colored

ribbon across the greenness of the country, rang like a causeway of

rock to the beat of horseshoes.

From this plantation or from that, as hill or sweep of woodland

revealed them, shone marble stones in family burial lots.

Occasionally Miss Sally met girls or young men on dashing horses, and

these merry people saluted her cordially in passing. But in all that

blue-grass region, where each member of every comfortable family had

his own gaited saddle-horse, there was not a finer animal than Miss

Sally’s Pacer. Cæsar and his fortune were aboard when she mounted.

Pacer was her entire capital in life, carrying her on visits among

good families whereby she subsisted, and furnishing colts for her

pin-money. The camel is not more to the Bedouin. Had Pacer failed Miss

Sally in any point, she must have fallen into the straits of a reduced

gentlewoman, instead of carrying a high head through all the best

houses of the county.

She rode at a steady hand gallop through the sultry day, though a young

colt whinnied behind her; increasing her speed past one pillared brick

house set far up an avenue. The woods about it were close trimmed and

free from underbrush, like all Kentucky woodland. Some evergreens made

gloom about its eaves, but not such gloom as the reputation of the

house itself. There lived a man who was said to have a chain stretched

across his cellar. He bought up slaves and handcuffed them in pairs

along this chain until he was ready to drive them to market, when a

band of musicians was employed to lead their march, cheerfully playing

“Yankee Doodle.” The house was worse than haunted. Both whites and

blacks hurried past its handsome gate with abhorrence--spot of mystery

and abomination on those pleasant corn lands.

Miss Sally was anxious to get out of her riding-skirt at Poynton’s, and

bully the black boy who would come to take her bridle. The wealthiest

slave-owner in Kentucky could not exact more deference. Everybody

humored her. In a country where hospitality was a social religion, her

little visits of a month or two were welcomed even when they crowded

dearer guests. And in spite of fine traits concealed under the haughty

airs of a nomad, well did she know how to crowd people distasteful to

her.

When she turned into Poynton’s avenue, the white pillared mansion

seemed to doze. The quarters stretched in a long row fieldward. Miss

Sally could not see the kitchen, standing by itself behind the great

house. No drowsiness had settled there. A stir of preparation was going

on, not only for the two o’clock dinner, but for the wedding yet a week

distant. Miss Sally had omitted one place in her rounds, and shortened

her visit at another, that she might be at Poynton’s in time to gather

every detail of the wedding.

A yellow boy skipped out to help her at the mounting-block. He would

have lounged to meet his master. Approvingly she saw him pull his hat

to her.

“Miss Sally, you sho’ly bake you’se’f to-day!”

“Yes, it’s hot, Peach. And if you’re concerned for me I hope you’ll

feel more concern about Pacer.” Miss Vandewater’s anxiety about her

property grew in the ratio of its approach to a crib.

“Sam’ll rub her down,” promised Peachy. “I’ll tell Sam to give her a

good feed.”

“You attend to it yourself,” commanded Miss Sally.

“I isn’t a stable-boy,” remonstrated Peachy. “I’se a house-boy.”

“House-boy or stable-boy, you mind what I tell you. In my father’s

time--and he owned fifty--our boys did whatever they were told to do.”

“Ya-as, m’m.”

“And the poor little colt,” said Miss Sally, making that infant’s

discomfort her own,--“I don’t want my colt kicked to death among a lot

of wild shod heels.”

“He go with his mammy. No ha’um evah happen to you’ colts on this

place, Miss Sally.”

“You see to it that none happens to it this time! All the family at

home?” she stopped to inquire, with her riding-skirt gathered in her

hand.

“Ya-as, m’m.”

“Has my trunk been carried up? I sent it this morning.”

“Ya-as, m’m.”

“Who’s here?” demanded Miss Vandewater, stiffening her figure.

Peachy followed her eye to the stable-yard, where stood a vehicle she

never beheld with calmness. It was the handsome and shining carriage of

Judge Poynton, from the county seat.

Peachy grinned. “Miss Judge come out this mawnin’ to spend the day.”

So sore does one’s pride become when chafed by poverty, that Miss Sally

hated that plump and opulent woman for naught but being plump and

opulent; though she would have given as her reason the airs of a woman

married above her wildest expectations.

“You can fetch my riding-skirt to my room, Nancy,” said Miss Sally to

the colored girl who admitted her, casting it across the stair-rail as

she ascended. “I reckon I go to the same room I always have.”

“Miss Ma’ky’s things is all spread out in that bedroom,” apologized

Nancy.

“You can soon move them out of the way.”

“But Miss Maria ’bleeged to have you’ trunk set in the back bedroom fo’

this week, Miss Sally.”

A solicitous hostess, trailing a muslin wrapper--for even Kentucky

hospitality may be overpowered by the languors of summer midday--met

the guest with outstretched hands. Miss Sally permitted her cheek to be

brushed, and at once put the lady into the apologetic attitude of an

overcrowded landlord.

“You ought to have sent me word if it was inconvenient to have me now,

Mrs. Poynton, and I wouldn’t have skipped the Moores as I did.”

“Miss Sally, it is not inconvenient to have you now!” the delinquent

pleaded. “It is never inconvenient. Only America’s things are so spread

out, and we are obliged to keep dressing-rooms for the wedding, and the

bridesmaids! I thought you would be less annoyed in that back room

than anywhere else. I am so glad you have come!”

“The judge’s wife is here?”

“But it is only for the day,” unconsciously conciliated Mrs. Poynton.

“She is not staying. Sue Bet Moore has been here, helping America to

try on. Her dresses are all done. But Sue Bet has gone.”

“I knew Sue Bet was to be one of the bridesmaids,” said Miss Sally. It

was not necessary to mention bridesmaids to a woman of her thorough

information.

“We have all been lying down; the day is so sultry. We shall not have

America’s things filling up the chambers much longer. I feel like

giving her all the rooms in the house--yes, the plantation itself! If

you can only make yourself comfortable a few days, we can change your

room after the wedding.”

“The back bedroom makes not the slightest difference in the world to

me, Mrs. Poynton”--

“O Miss Sally, I am so glad it makes no difference!”

--“but I am sorry I came at such an inconvenient time!”

Thus the duet went on, until Mrs. Poynton accepted as positive

beneficence Miss Sally Vandewater’s willingness to descend from the

back chamber, dine with the family, and sit down in the parlor.

Miss Sally had kept her sprightliness and her youthful shape. Her

muslin dress was cut low, and her shoulders were concealed by a bertha

of lace. Fine embroidered undersleeves made delicate frills about her

folded hands. The curling-iron had created two large spirals at each

temple, but the rest of her hair was pinned in a knot at the back of

her head.

America Poynton came into the parlor in her tight-fitting habit of

black velvet, and sat down with the guests, holding her riding-whip,

her gauntlets, and tall hat.

“Are you going to ride in this heat?” inquired her aunt, the judge’s

wife.

“We always ride Thursday afternoons, about four o’clock, if the weather

is fine,” America replied.

She looked no less cool and white in the heavy fabric than in a gold

dotted vaporous tissue which she had worn at dinner. Her black eyes

moved with languid interest from speaker to speaker as the visiting

chat ran on. America Poynton was called the proudest girl who ever

appeared in the county seat from surrounding plantations. The manners

of this tall beauty were considered too quiet by romping young people

who danced, drove, and flirted to the limit of their privileges; yet

she was sovereign among them, and ruled by a look while others expended

noisy effort. It was told of her that she often sat veiled in her room

to save her complexion from sun glare and wind, so matchless was it.

She had a robe of black curls in which she could wrap herself when

her maid let it down to brush. America was General Poynton’s only

child. She had inherited from her grandmother a plantation adjoining

her father’s, with more than a hundred slaves. When she went to

boarding-school in the county town, one of her servants led to her

every pleasant Friday evening a milk-white mule, saddled and bridled

with silk, fine leather, and silver.

Though above such pastime as flirtation, America had more offers than

any other girl in her set. Her low, slow voice never recounted these

conquests, but the victims published themselves, wondering whom America

Poynton would marry, since she was so hard to suit. When she accepted

Ross Carr, therefore, the astonishment was general. He was good enough

for some girls, but hardly good enough for America Poynton. He had also

been a wild youth, but people said he was settling down. The Carrs

ranked somewhat below the Poyntons, and Ross had no plantation of his

own. Yet when the community thought it over, they were willing to

accept him as America’s husband if he proved a credit to her.

“Miss Maria,” said Nancy, coming to the door with a face full of

meaning, “Miss Becky Inchbald’s done lighted down by the quarters, and

tied her horse.”

“What does she want?” inquired Mrs. Poynton, disturbed.

“Dunno, Miss Maria.”

“Why doesn’t she come to the house?”

“She hardly ever came to the house in her best days,” murmured the

judge’s wife.

“Perhaps she’s sick,” continued Mrs. Poynton. “Some of you run and see.”

“Peachy done been down to her, and she say she just waitin’ there in

the shade. Miss Becky got her baby ’long with her.”

The general’s wife heard this with rising dignity.

“Don’t annoy her,” she commanded. “Let the poor girl alone.”

“Law, Miss Maria, nobody won’t say nothin’ to Miss Becky. But all the

little niggehs has come out to look at her.”

“Go yourself and see if she needs anything.”

“I have heard,” remarked Miss Vandewater, through the silence which

followed, “that Becky Inchbald, for all she was so close-mouthed at

first, threatens now to carry her child to its father.”

Mrs. Poynton, with an instant’s pause on the subject, hoped he could

be found and made to do his duty. The judge’s wife heard with a mere

lifting of the eyebrows. She thought it scarcely a fit topic to mention

before America. But America’s plane was so much above Becky Inchbald

that she had never even disapproved of the girl.

Becky Inchbald’s people were not poor whites, for they owned land and

slaves; but their raw unfitness for encountering the old stock held

them on the verge of society. That Becky was uneducated was her own

fault. She had become the mother of a hapless baby and the scandal of

the neighborhood before America Poynton’s engagement was announced.

“She’s spiteful about that baby,” pursued Miss Sally. “There’ll be

trouble somewhere before sundown, if she’s started out with it.”

“I do not see that Inchbald’s affairs need disturb us,” suggested the

judge’s wife, making dimples at the finger roots of one hand as she

smoothed her polished hair.

“Some women are never disturbed about any of the sin in the world,”

said Miss Vandewater incisively, “until it comes into their houses and

takes their children by the throat.”

“That can never be said of you, Miss Sally,” the judge’s indolent wife

responded, smiling. Though she generally bore Miss Sally’s attacks as

a lady should, and felt indulgent sympathy for the migratory spinster,

she sometimes allowed herself to retort.

“Aunt and Miss Sally, kiss and make up,” said America, with the

deliberate accent that gave weight to all her words. But without

response one of the combatants sat glowering, while the other, waving

a lazy fan, indicated through the window Ross Carr cantering to

his appointment, man and steed moving like one, so perfect was his

horsemanship.

America’s mother, impatiently anxious to go on recounting to Miss Sally

the silver and linen bought for America’s new home, resigned herself

for a few moments. Ross Carr threw his bridle to the groom, who was

walking Miss Poynton’s saddled thoroughbred.

He entered the room. America gave him her hand with a light word, and

he stood holding his hat, talking to her elders.

It was the culminating moment of her betrothal, a dot of time

separating ease and care-free thoughts from what followed.

The young man chatted idly with four women, when another screamed out

behind him:--

“Here it is, Ross Carr! So you’ve got to take it, and no words betwixt

us--for I won’t take care of it any longer!”

“Why, Miss Becky!--why, Miss Becky!” Mrs. Poynton herself ran gasping

forward to interpose between such scandalous outcry and America’s

lover. “Come away with me, Miss Becky, and let me help you with your

baby--and don’t speak that way before the gentlemen!”

A shaker bonnet fell back from the girl’s hot and furious face. She

had narrow sunken temples like a hen’s. Her entire profile was chicken

beaked, yet a fluff of golden down made her comely. The wrathful rings

in her eyes sent out their fires toward Ross Carr.

“He thinks he’s a great gentleman, and he thinks he’s going to get a

great lady”--

“Becky Inchbald, sit down in that chair!” commanded America, standing

at the other side of the room. Her hat and gloves and whip lay on the

floor. The other women, even her mother, waited, sitting blanched.

Carr remained with his hand on the back of the chair, like a frozen

figure, while Becky Inchbald placed herself in it and stretched the

baby across her lap. Her first courage leaving her, she began to cry.

The men of the west do not cower when found out in their sins. Ross

Carr stood six feet and one inch high; a handsome, light-haired

Kentuckian, the man most abundant in vitality, and the best horseman

in Bourbon County. A culprit waiting to be shot, he looked his death

in the face, erect, but blighted through every outline. He had carried

this guilt a long time, trying to shape it for disclosure; while day

after day continued to separate him farther from the Ross Carr of the

past, and to make more incomprehensible the deeds which he inherited

from that miserable wretch.

When you or I stand, on our day of judgment, to be looked at through

the dark medium of our basest moments, may some eye among our

contemners discern the angel shape struggling in remorse and anguish

behind the bar.

“Is this your child?” America demanded of her lover, pointing to it for

his identification.

The baby, oppressed by the jaunt, under arm, or on lap, according to

its mother’s convenience in riding, was covered all over its visible

surface by that prickly rash which nurses call “heat.” It was gowned in

pink calico, and diffused a sour odor.

Ross Carr looked down at it with the slighting masculine eye, which

since Saturn has seen little to admire in extremely young offspring. He

controlled the muscles of his lips to reply.

“I reckon it is.”

“Answer me on your word as a man--is this your child?”

“Yes. It is.”

“He knows it’s his, and he’s got to take care of it and support

it--it’s his place to take care of it, not mine,” sobbed Becky, her

head wagging.

America directed her face to Becky. “Do you intend to turn it off

entirely?”

“Yes. I do! It’s his, and he ought to keep it!”

“But you are its mother!”

“I won’t be its mother!” exploded Becky, flinging the ill-kept and

wretched infant about on her knees with a vicious grip. “I’ll leave it

on a doorstep first!”

The child put up a piteous lip and uttered those cries by which bruised

infancy protests against tormentors whom it feels but does not know.

America stared at the girl; her alabaster face was suddenly drained of

horror at the wrong done a woman, and filled with passionate contempt.

“Then I’ll be its mother! Give it to me.”

She gathered it off Becky’s lap and laid its heat-blotched face

against her shoulder. The tiny creature discharged a mouthful of its

wretchedness there. America stanched the spot, and made a softer rest

for its cheek with her rose-scented handkerchief. Her unconscious

sweep of figure in taking the child and standing up publicly with it,

thrilled beholders like piercing music or the sight of great works

of art. The mother-spirit, which has brooded for centuries over this

world--the passion to foster and protect and train--shone white and

large in her face. She was that fair impersonation men call the Goddess

of Liberty, holding the outcast to her breast. She was Mother Mary,

with a reminder of the Heavenly Infant in her arms.

No one remonstrated or spoke a word to her as she moved from the room.

Becky Inchbald, pulling her shaker over her face, went out and mounted

her horse.

America was at the top of the stairs when she heard Ross Carr speak

hoarsely at the foot. She stood looking at him over the balustrade. The

baby was quiet.

“One word, America!--It’s all over--between us?”

He could hear his watch ticking; and outdoor sounds buzzed in his ears.

“No,” answered America. “It is not all over between us.”

Ross Carr dropped his groping hand on the stair newel, his next

sentence also coming in fragments.

“There won’t be any use--Shall I come here--for the ceremony--next

Thursday?”

“Thursday,” spoke the low, slow voice above him, “at two o’clock, was

the time we set.”

The culprit lifted his eyes to her and exclaimed:--

“America, tell me what you want me to do!”

“I want you,” she said, “to be a father to your child!” Her mouth

struggled. She flung out the rest in a wail--“and never speak to me of

this again!”

Not fit to prostrate himself before her virgin motherhood, the

tarnished man hid his face on his arm against the stair-rail. She

carried his child out of sight.

There was scarcely a negro on the plantation who did not know what

had happened when Ross Carr staggered out of the house and passed his

chafing horse and the groom as if he had forgotten his own property.

Baseless mountains which had been piling lucent peak over peak, now

seemed to sink in smoke to the effacement of the sun. Stretches of

forest and road, plantation and dimpled hill, from horizon to horizon,

ceased smiling; for the day’s heat was about to pass off in drenching

rain.

This cloudy interval before the thunder-burst was just the time for

stealing corn to roast at the quarters in the evening. So Peachy crept

on all fours down narrow avenues to avoid agitating the corntops,

such telltales are the tassel fingers. His sack already bulged; but

unexpectedly he came against a man stretched out in the dirt face

downward--Miss Ma’ky’s Mist’ Ross Carr!

Peachy backed away from the spectacle, the grinding of teeth and the

swelling of veins on a man’s neck! Not until many cornstalks screened

him had Peachy the courage to burst recklessly down a slim alley,

spilling his stolen ears, while corn leaves slashed his face with their

edged sabres. The superstitious African instinctively fled from anguish

so dumb and dreadful.

While the county was shocked by America Poynton’s adoption of Ross

Carr’s child, her beauty as a bride softened all critics. She went to

live with her husband on her plantation, and there the baby grew into

robust and happy boyhood. Reticence on the subject of Becky Inchbald

was diffused through her small world. At that date a small world held

all the acts of many lives.

Even Miss Sally Vandewater, swelling her visiting list with another

hospitable home, grew into complete harmony with the judge’s wife on

this delicate subject.

Becky Inchbald went on a long visit to Tennessee. News came back that

she had married there; and in the course of years that she had died.

So far as human knowledge goes, Ross Carr’s wife took no shrewish

revenge, though a woman of her nature must have suffered from the blot.

She always spoke of his son as “our eldest boy,” and he grew up among

brothers and sisters without noting that he was part alien, until some

neighbor dropped the fact in his ear. Personally he was much like his

father, whose sin matured its bitterest fruit when that child threw

himself on the ground to sob in secret agony because the beautiful and

tender woman he loved with such devotion was really not his mother.

INDIANA

THE FAIRFIELD POET

TIME, 1881

Tragedy, which is never far from the most prosperous lives, continually

trod upon the tenderest-hearted woman in Fairfield. She hated Fairfield

as a background to her existence, but there had fate nailed her for

life. It was the forlornest of Indiana railroad stations, looking

like a scar on the face of a beautifully wooded country, peopled

by the descendants of poor white Carolinians and Tennesseeans. The

male portion of the community sat on the railroad platform in yellow

jeans, sprawling their naked toes to the sun, whittling, and jetting

with the regularity of fountains upon the meerschaum-colored boards.

The women might have lived lives of primitive simplicity, dignified

by child-bearing and neighborly sympathy with one another; but they

stained their human kindness with trivial disagreements.

This one among them all felt the progress of the age tearing her

heartstrings out while her circumstances kept her at a standstill. I

do not say her life would have been more symmetrical or her experience

richer if she had lived in the whirl. She was a plain, ground-loving

woman who enjoyed the companionship of her fruit-trees and flowers,

and worked with her hands. Indeed, crowds annoyed her, and she was

undecided what toilets ought to be made for a large public. The striped

silk dresses of her prosperous days, the fringed crape shawls and

gimp-edged mantillas, agreed ill with bonnets of the passing season,

and she had more respect for what was rich and old than for new

inventions. But she was fiercely ambitious for her children, especially

her eldest son, and for him in spite of his misfortune. The younger boy

and girl were still leaping like colts upon their few remaining acres,

sound in limb and wind, with the hopes of a future sheathed in their

healthy present, when Willie was tall as a man, and far up in his teens.

His mother had a picture of him taken when he was going to school in

Cincinnati, under his uncle’s care. At that time his auburn curls were

unshorn, and he was beautiful.

A few days before cottons took their terrific rise during the civil

war, Mr. Harbison had stocked in thousands of yards. Those were

Fairfield’s best days, and he kept a general store, making money so

rapidly that the lazy people around him felt helplessly injured.

He began his fine brick house, building on a generous and artistic

plan, at the edge of Fairfield, where he could surround himself with

fruit-trees, and have fields for his cattle. Whether it is a more

distinct misery to build the temple of your home and see someone else

inhabit it, or to shelter yourself for years in a house you have not

the power of finishing, the latter fate was reserved for the Harbisons.

With a crash they came down from what had been Fairfield’s opulence

nearly to a level with Fairfield’s poverty. They kept the house and

grounds and a meadow, but under such weight of mortgages that it was

comparatively no grief at all to see the ornamental cornices lying

around the partly plastered parlors, balustrades and newel-post

standing on end beside the skeleton stairway, and to find the bathroom

useless except as a rubbish closet. The man who had employed half

of Fairfield was now obliged to become himself an employee, and the

general verdict of the world against those who fail was emphasized by

communistic envy.

But the habit of being a woman of consideration is not easily

forgotten. Mrs. Harbison still made the village respect her. She had

something to give to the poorest. She was the wife of a man who had

made a fortune before he lost it, and sat in the state Senate. More

than all, she had her children, the eldest of them a continual surprise

to her. He seemed born to stir her pride and tenderness to their

depths. He was tall, fair, and Roman-featured, shy as a girl toward

every one but his mother, and so ravenous in mind that he was partly

through college when his father’s reverses brought him home.

Then he was seized with a spotted fever, and approached the next world

so close that he left part of his faculties there, and was never the

same Willie he had been before. He could hear nothing, and seldom spoke

an audible word--Mrs. Harbison’s boy, who was made to take the world by

storm--and what had been the shyness of a country-bred youth became the

set-apart seclusion of a hoofed and goat-eared faun. Willie Harbison

was to be seen whirring as noiseless as a bat upon his bicycle across

the open ground at dusk. He was met coming from the woods, silent as

an Indian, and his eyes were on everything in earth or sky except the

human beings just before him.

Whatever were the faults of Fairfield, it loved and respected Willie

Harbison, and humored his self-withdrawal. And he loved Fairfield with

a partiality which saw mere picturesqueness in the row of whittling

men, and various forms of motherhood or sisterhood in the women. He

would dismount from his wheel to let the boys tilt with it at the old

warehouse. He loved the woods; he loved Wild-cat and Kitten creeks,

which ploughed rock-bedded channels through the woods; and what joy

in life he fished out of those waters only Willie himself knew. He

loved to watch from the mill, on a clear morning, that plume of steam

the south-bound train sent around the curve, to watch another plume

roll over the first, and finally to see the train stand suddenly on

the summit of the grade, sharp-cut against the sky. All common life

was pleasant to him. Who but his mother could be witness that a double

nature dwelt under his floury mill clothes?

Willie worked in the mill with his father, where the roar of grinding

and bolting and the whir of belts made silent liveliness around him.

This had been bitterness to his mother--her Willie should work with

his head alone; but she accepted it as the result of his physical

misfortune.

The parlors were Willie’s workshop, in which he sawed, hammered, and

glued, or put noiseless inventions together. A carpenter’s bench was

set before two uncased windows, and his father’s old store desk had

fallen to his unmercantile use. Its lock was never opened unless Willie

had something which he could force himself to show to his mother. That

ripe instant arriving, he sought her in her kitchen, her garden, or at

her spinning-wheel upstairs, and seized her by the hand. She went with

him to the parlors, they fastened the doors, Willie undid his desk, and

placed his paper in her fingers. The paper itself was sometimes brown,

sometimes the blue cap left from the store, sometimes gilt-edged note

having penciled landscapes along the margins, or the flowers he rhymed

of done in water-colors; for his hand was as skillful as his eye was

discerning. The poems were usually short, and sensitive in rhyme and

rhythm. Willie’s themes were the common sights and the common pathos or

humor of the situations in which he found the people around him: his

interpretation of the flicker’s feelings; his delight in certain thick

fleeces of grass; the panorama of sky and field as it marched across

his eye; the grotesque though heartily human family party made by old

man Persons and his wife, where half of their descendants, unable to

get into the small house, sat on the fence while the rest ate dinner.

Willie was deaf, but he had inward music. Every smooth and liquid

stanza was like wine to his mother. She compared his poems to Burns’s,

and could not find the “Mountain Daisy” a whit better than her poet’s

song about the woods in frost.

Even Mr. Harbison thought well of Willie’s performances. They were

smuggled to him by the mother, and carefully returned to their place

when the poet was out of the house. Mr. Harbison knew all that was

going on in the world. A dozen times a year he left the grinding of the

mill to meet his old chums at the capital, or to quicken the action of

his blood in Chicago. A couple of stimulating days tinctured and made

endurable his month of mill work. A man of luxurious tastes cannot lose

his tastes with his means. He was a judge of poets, and said Willie

might as well take to poetry as to anything, for business did not pay a

man of sound faculties in these days.

The hum of bees could be heard all around this unfinished brick house

growing mossy at the gables, and its shadow was long on the afternoon

sunshine. It was that alert and happy time of year when the earth’s sap

starts new from winter distillation.

You could hear the voices of children calling in play as they loitered

home from school; the days were so long that the cows would not come up

the pasture until nearly seven o’clock.

Willie trudged across lots to supper. Mrs. Harbison met him at the

north side of the house, having her garden knife and rake in her

hands. She put them on the stepless front-door sill, which had never

been and never would be pressed by the foot of an arriving guest. This

stone sill was high enough for a seat, and she sat down, tilting her

sunbonnet back, and smiling at Willie. He was floured from head to

foot. Little of his boyish beauty except its clear innocence remained

to him. His nose was large for his head, and on his head the auburn

curls were shorn to a thin crisping layer.

His young sister was putting supper on the table in the dining-room,

his brother was fisting with another boy on the railroad, and up

the cow lane came his father with the slow step and somewhat of the

ponderous white presence of the walking statue in “Don Giovanni.” But

closest knit of all this family, mother and son talked together in

silence, some birds in the mulberry-tree over their heads making the

only calling and replying that could be heard. Before Willie reached

her, he held up his hands and signed in the deaf-mute language:--

“The preacher has come back.”

Mrs. Harbison raised her hands and darted her fingers into various

shapes, saying thereby, “Did you see him?”

“No,” Willie replied as swiftly; “I only saw his coffin in the wagon,

and Nancy Ellen sitting beside it. She had to bring him the whole

twenty miles from where he died, in a wagon.”

“Because it wasn’t on a railroad?”

Willie nodded.

His mother wove on: “Poor Nancy Ellen! Her father wouldn’t let her have

the preacher for so long, and turned her off when she did marry him.

Now she’s a widow in her honeymoon, and old man Morton saying he told

her a preacher as old as himself wasn’t any match for her. Did you see

her father? How did he act?”

“He got into the wagon by the driver,” said Willie’s fingers.

“Well, that was something for him.”

“And they drove to his place.”

“I suppose he’ll let her come back and live at home now.”

“I wish you had seen Nancy Ellen.”

“I’m going to see her after the milking is done.”

“Seen her by the preacher,” insisted Willie’s passes. “She looked like

a captive coming in chains to Rome.”

“Yes, I’ll be bound she did. Every jolt of that twenty miles is stamped

in _her_ mind.”

“I wish,” flashed Willie, “I knew what the preacher sung to himself all

along the road.”

“What a notion! You’ll have to fix it up in poetry now, won’t you?”

Willie shook his head many times and reddened.

“You said the preacher used to sing home from meeting in the dark.”

“Yes, he did,” affirmed Mrs. Harbison. “And Nancy Ellen used to listen

for him to go by their place.”

Their talk paused, and Willie looked up at the birds in the mulberry.

Having afterward caught his mother’s eye, he wove out slowly:--

“When in the tree above his head

The sap goes tingling through the bark,

She will remember it was dead,

And hear him singing in the dark.”

“Oh, Willie, is that the first verse or the last? Have you written it

down?”

Willie smiled shyly, putting his head down toward one shoulder, without

making any reply. His mother urged, with eager fingers:--

“Print it in some place when you get it done. Nancy Ellen would be

pleased.”

“I’m not an obituary poet,” wove Willie.

“But that’s so good.” Mrs. Harbison moved her lips, repeating it to

herself. “And ain’t you ever going to publish anything you write? I’ve

heard of people getting money for it.”

Willie uttered a gentle sneer. He laughed at his mother in a way that

always made her laugh with him.

“But if you would let your father fix up your writings,” she continued,

repeating an old plea, “and send them to some publishing house, I know

they would put them in a book for you.”

The gate, weighted by a stone, slammed to behind his father coming to

the evening meal. But before his mother rose, Willie found time to make

dance before her eyes the characters indicating this promise:--

“Some day I’ll get on my bicycle and ride and ride until I come to a

publisher. If you miss me, you’ll know where I’ve gone. You can just

say to yourself, ‘He’s off having his poems published.’ Wait till then,

mother; that will be soon enough.”

“You’ll never do it,” said his mother, having no idea how near the time

was.

She gave her family their supper and helped to milk the cows. She

thought of Willie’s stanza when the milk first sang in the pail, and

kept repeating it until the rising froth drowned all sounds of the

lashing streams quite at her pail’s brim.

When the house was tidy and full of twilight stillness, Mrs. Harbison

put on a clean apron and took her sunbonnet to make her call of

condolence. It was likely they would want watchers at Morton’s, and she

was ready to do anything. She had helped bear the burden of life and

death so long in Fairfield that illness, a new baby, or the mysterious

breathless presence in any house was a peremptory invitation to her.

The boys were playing hide-and-seek around the warehouse, and as she

crossed the open lot she saw the usual line of wise men sitting on the

edge of the platform with their legs across the rail, as if they had

all agreed to make an offering of their feet to the Juggernaut of the

next passing train.

Willie darted like a bat or a night bird on his bicycle far up and far

down the smooth wagon road. Now he took a turn, and came spinning among

the boys, scattering them before him, and escaping as often as they

chased him. In one of these excursions he crossed his mother’s way.

The last red streaks and high sunset lights were not gone out of the

sky. She lifted up her hands and spelled, “Are you starting out to hunt

a publisher now?”

And Willie laughed and nodded and made her a sign of good-by.

The pleasant stillness of the evening fell around her like a blessing

as she went on. Fireflies were filling one field, as if a conflagration

under that particular ground sent up endless streams of sparks. She

smelled the budding elders, and was reminded of tile-like bits in her

past, fitted oddly together.

Morton lived but a few steps beyond the village. She had been talking

a mere moment with Nancy Ellen, and had not yet entered the room

where the preacher lay when another neighbor came in with excitement,

and said aloud, over the whispered talk of the mourning house, that

something was wrong down at the station.

“That express has run into something again,” proclaimed the neighbor,

“and looks, by the way folks run, as if it wasn’t a cow this time.

Enough cows and pigs has been killed by that railroad.”

“I haven’t seen the express,” said Mrs. Harbison, feeling her head full

of wheels. “It was all quiet when I was there a minute ago.”

“The express has stopped. Good reason! There’s something on the track,

I tell ye,” insisted the neighbor.

Willie’s mother was sure it could not be Willie. He was conscious of

his infirmity, and so cautious that she had long ceased to be anxious

about him. He knew the times of all the trains with nice exactness,

also. Yet she started from the house without speaking another word, and

ran until she reached the crowd.

The engine stood hissing; it confronted her with the glare of its eye,

a horrid and remorseless fate, ready to go its way with bell-clanging

and all cheerful noise, no matter who had been ground under its wheels.

The conductor was just stepping on board, for time and orders wait for

nothing. The engineer had already climbed back to his cab; he saw a

running woman kneel down on the platform and draw the boy up from the

boards to rest in her arms. Having seen that much, the engineer turned

away his head and wept out loud; and the train moved on, bearing pale

faces that looked backward as long as they could discern anything.

Mrs. Harbison had stumbled over Willie’s bent wheel first. When

she found him indeed laid in the midst of the crowd, she did not

believe it. He was not mangled. His bones were sound--she felt them

with a fiercely quick hand. There was no mark about him excepting a

dirty-looking spot on one temple.

“Willie,” she cried, shaking him. “Willie! Willie!”

“We’ll have to carry him home,” said her husband at her side, his voice

sounding far off as if it came strained through some dense medium.

She looked up, and could not understand it.

“He’s knocked senseless,” she claimed. “Why doesn’t somebody bring

water?”

“He never knowed what hurt him,” cautiously said one villager to

another. “The train was goin’ so fast, and he come up from among the

houses onto it so fast, that it was done in a flash.”

“And I don’t never want to see no better boy than Willie Harbison was,”

responded the other.

But only his mother--when she had him at home lying in that pomp of

death with which we all shall impress beholders--could have pronounced

the true oration over him. Through her dumb tragedy she wanted to make

deaf-mute signs to some intelligence that here lay one of Nature’s

poets, with a gift virgin and untarnished.

He had never hunted a public. His public was the woods and sky, and

his critic one fond woman. Not a line of unsatisfied ambition marked

his placid face. He had lived an humble, happy life, and sung for the

sake of expression, not for the sake of praise. He had, after all, only

gone to find the best publisher, and his mother could always hear him

“singing in the dark.”

T’FÉRGORE

A PASTORAL IN THREE PARTS

TIME, 1883

PART I

HE THREATENS TO ARRIVE

“We will not endeavor to modify the motions of the elements, or

fix the destiny of kingdoms. It is our business to consider what

beings like us may perform: each laboring for his own happiness

by promoting within his circle, however narrow, the happiness of

others.”--_Rasselas._

“Come into the painting-room,” said Julian, “and let’s talk it over.”

“How excited you are!” I said.

“Well, after balancing one way and another for years, my mind’s made

up. We’re going.”

“To Europe?”

“Yes, to Europe.”

“Oh, what a beautiful prospect,” I said. And then leaning against his

elbow I heaved a great sigh.

“It must be a beautiful prospect if you groan like that over it.”

“The groan’s because I can’t go.”

Julian sat down and took me indulgently on his knee. Some women in

marriage have their pride gratified by a good match, by all the pomps

of life, or by unlimited allowances of spending money. But my portion

is to be loved and cherished and fondled like an infant. I like it

very much. Some part of me lingers in eternal babyhood. In the glass

I frequently see a juvenile face with dimples around the mouth, that

disowns its thirty years.

“You think,” said Julian, after kissing me in a way which would

scandalize some of the girls who made the best matches, “that we can’t

raise the money.”

Such a thought would have been justified by the fact that we seldom

could raise the money.

“But we can. And what’s the use of waiting around till we are old? I’m

in my thirties. And if I ever do anything now’s the time to do it. A

man can’t make a success of painting here in the west.”

I looked all around Julian’s studio. He had done many portraits, and

hated them. They made our living. But he believed he was wasting time.

I always loved to be in the studio, and sometimes sat there a whole

afternoon, with bits of sewing, behind a screen. A great many people

took the elevator to explore Julian’s work place. He had reputation

in his native city. And when they stumbled around the screen on me,

they might have taken me for a model. But most of the explorers were

country people, piloted by their town friends to see the sights. I only

looked odd to them. I know I looked odd, because Julian had me dress

in loose gowns and broad hats. Cheese cloth is only four cents a yard

and very wide, and with borders of velvet or lace it made sumptuous

cool toilets. I was slim; and a dull blue gown, belted just under my

arms and puffed at the shoulders, with an aureole of dull blue hat over

it, made me look nice in Julian’s eyes or I never should have had the

courage to face the street. When a person is slim and lithe, however,

her daring clothes have not the aggressive grossness of a fat woman’s

daring clothes.

Looking around the painting-room, I could not think Julian a failure.

He had made it so pretty with tiles and pottery and draping stuff, and

flowers painted in dull red or bronze vases, or in masses wasting their

petals, and landscapes, some blurred so you had to squint your eyes to

get the outlines. Looking at himself I always considered him a great

success. His mouth and chin were so refined. He was muscular and alert

in his carriage for a man of his profession, and his ideas were far

grander than mine.

“So I’m going to sell the little farm,” said Julian.

“Oh!” I exclaimed, “that’s all the property we’ve got.”

“Why, I thought you were perfectly willing. What does it amount to,

anyhow? Fifteen acres and a scrubby house and barn.”

“What will old Lena do?”

“Oh, she’ll continue her gardening. I’ve had an offer of two thousand

dollars for it. One thousand down, five hundred in one year, and the

balance in eighteen months. We can live a long time abroad on that. And

I shall get hold of something then. We’ll never come back here.”

I did not mind that at all. The prospect was dazzling. But I saw I

should have to tell him at once.

“You didn’t know your poor painter would take you to Europe, did you?

Think of Rome, think of Paris, think of being domesticated in some

ancient German city while I paint!”

“Oh, I think of it, Julian; but could you go without me?”

“Could I go without you?” said Julian, setting me off on the tip of his

knees. “Did I ever go to any place without you? Didn’t I manage that

jaunt up to Canada with you? Did I scour out to Colorado and leave you

at home? Do you _want_ me to go without you?”

“Oh, no!”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

“You certainly don’t know,” said Julian severely, “if you think I

would go off to Europe for even a limited time, to say nothing of an

indefinite time, without _you_. Why, you great baby, you’d cry your

eyes out! And if you got sick who would do you up in packs and give you

your medicine? You can’t get along away from me.”

“I know it, Julian.”

“And where would you stay!” continued Julian with increasing

indignation. “You wouldn’t want to keep up a house, and you wouldn’t

want to board. And what business would you have over here by yourself,

anyhow! You provoke me!”

“I believe I’m going to cry,” I said.

“I should think you would, for proposing such a thing. But don’t do it.”

“I _am_ going to cry,” I affirmed, and put my hands up to my face,

while I quivered all over. These mute fits of sobbing, relics of my

babyhood which I try so hard to outgrow, seize me unreasonably. They

take away every scrap of dignity. I never could get the best end of

a quarrel on account of this weakness; for who could sweep out of a

room with a stinging retort, when at the door she was sure to break

down, lay her cheek against the frame, and sob until every fibre in her

seemed melting!

The only good effect of my crying, besides the delicious languor it

left over me, was that it melted Julian also. I have known it to be a

very convenient solvent when he hardened himself into a male tyrant.

His face was sure to relax and his motherly arms to gather me in. Some

men will run from tears, and very disagreeable men they are. Julian

seems to like the soaking. It is tribute to him as a man, and certifies

to his grip on my individuality. He is convinced I am very fond of him,

and dependent on his gracious favor, when I creep to his knees to cry.

Julian wiped my tears and comforted me upon his shoulder, his face

assuming its usual superior expression.

When I got my breath and knew that I could talk becomingly between

little hiccoughs, I told him the message I had from T’férgore, and he

saw at once how it would prevent the European trip.

He whistled a minute, and we studied each other’s eyes.

“Well,” said Julian, “I suppose we owe everything to the old fellow,

and if he is really coming we’ll have to prepare for him.”

“Perhaps we better go out to the little farm,” I suggested.

“Yes, I think we better. We’ll have to economize, to gratify all his

fastidious tastes.”

“I wish he’d sent word to you, instead of to me,” I burst out. “It’s

your relation this time.”

“Yes, I wish he had,” said Julian, smiling.

“Are you glad or sorry, Julian?”

“Glad, of course. But why didn’t you tell me before?”

“How could I tell you what I didn’t know myself?”

“Oh, it’s his fault, evidently,” said Julian.

I began to wonder if Julian would not be a little jealous of T’férgore.

As I had never seen T’férgore myself, I did not know what his aptitude

might be at putting himself forward and eclipsing the master of the

house. But I was glad it was Julian’s relation this time.

We had had several of my kin living upon our hearthstone at various

times, and though Julian was always kind, I think he undervalued the

stock from which I sprung. He said I must have been changed in the

cradle, for refinement was my natural atmosphere. I did myself feel

a creeping of the flesh at brother Jack’s ways; but the dear boy had

been brought up away from me, and his manners were not his fault. He

had an affectionate and honorable nature, and soon quit spitting upon

our Brussels rugs and hard finished floors; his English, however, was

beyond all help. I loved Jack so dearly that it was a grief to me to

see him falling to pieces in his clothes, and slipping up and down

in shoes that were never buttoned. He frequently put his trousers on

wrong side foremost, and came to me to help him hunt the pockets.

With my own pin-money I bought him hats that must adorn his rosy face,

but after he slouched out in them once they looked disreputable. His

coat-sleeves hung over his dirty fists like a hackman’s. Whenever

he passed through his room he left it as if it had been struck by a

tornado. The earth adhered to Jack. Stray burrs and dumpings of gravel

appeared by the chair where he sat to put on his slippers. He had no

cattish horror of mud, and left the print of his foot on his napkin

under the table. When Jack was partially dressed, he shouted for me, to

the remotest corners, to come and button his sleeves and hand him his

tie.

The more fastidious our company, the louder would Jack bite his nails,

while he sprawled like a spread eagle on the sofa, until every pause

in conversation became vocal with that horrible cracking. He lost

everything portable which was not tied or buttoned about his person,

but he was always so good-natured about the losses it seemed stingy to

regret the money it cost to replace things.

As he had no inclination toward Art, and walked flat-footed over

canvases whenever he came into the studio, Julian got him employment.

Jack’s apprenticeship to buying and selling was to me a long period

of alternate hopes and despairs. He would begin well, and in fancy I

saw him a merchant prince; but eventually he fell out with everybody

and thought himself abused when his employer objected to his dribbling

small change along the streets, and losing keys. I did not know what to

do for Jack when the despair seasons came upon me. But in the end he

did very well for himself. He got tired of the city, and no cajoling of

mine could keep him from thrusting some shirts into a valise, grasping

a pair of heavy boots in his hand, and starting for the country, sowing

handkerchiefs and unmated socks in his wake. He went to work for a

middle-aged widow with considerable property, and she got the dear

boy’s consent to marry him: so there he is, a landed proprietor, with

a thrifty wife to button his sleeves and join knives with him in the

butter. Our bric-à-brac ways trouble him no more, and what he loses

in the furrow at planting time he may find again during harvest. And

when he comes to see us, his loving heart is as mellow as the apples he

brings.

Then there was Aunt Lizy. I suppose she was christened Eliza, but her

name was always pronounced Lizy with a plaintive lingering on the _i_.

We had her with us two years. She was a stepsister of my stepmother’s.

She looked like an Indian, and had seen more trouble than any other

woman with whom she ever measured experiences. Her breathing was all

done in sighs, and she tweaked her nose so much it was twisted at the

end, and all of a dark red color. She and I never could understand why

fortune hit her so hard, and we talked about it so much that I was kept

quite bilious.

Aunt Lizy felt too low to sit in the parlor unless dragged there by

entreaties, and spent a great deal of her time on the back stairs with

a sunbonnet drawn over her eyes. She did not want to go anywhere, and

the sound of the door-bell exorcised her as if she were a ghost. She

compared her lot to mine until I was ashamed of myself, wondering if I

had not stood in her sun.

I think Julian secretly regarded her as a trying disease that we had in

the house, and that must be doctored and endured. She was so much in

awe of him that I suffered anguish with her whenever he tried to show a

man’s bluff kindness to her.

Aunt Lizy finally died, and her face looked young and cheerful in

the coffin. We scraped some money together and bought a lot in the

cemetery, and her misused body rests there under roses, myrtle, and

verbenas. I take pains to keep her shade pleasant and her sod well

trimmed; and when the flowers look particularly thrifty, I feel as if

Aunt Lizy were learning how to laugh, at last.

Her daughter, who had been deserted by a husband as soon as she gave

him a child to support, came to the funeral, and remained to make an

unlimited visit and pick up such wearing apparel and other comforts as

we had given Aunt Lizy.

She took entire possession of the house, being as loud-voiced and

self-assertive as her mother was crushed and sensitive. But she owned

me before everybody as her cousin, and took notice of Julian, though

she preferred Irish society in the kitchen, and installed me as her

nurse, while she enjoyed it. The baby’s usual expression was that of

a young bird when it hears the parent return to the nest with a full

beak. I used to sit studying the interior of the poor child’s throat,

while its voice pierced my marrow. Julian made a sketch of the pimply

little face, but finished it up with a black cat’s body and a high

fence. It cried steadily during its stay, and had the croup and the

doctor and our sleep, until Julian said he must follow the excusable

example of its father and abandon it. He paid the fare of Aunt Lizy’s

daughter to relations in the far west, and loaded her with whatever she

fancied her mother’s. Yet she probably thought we shirked kinsmen’s

duty toward her, for we have since heard the whisper that we got all

that Aunt Lizy ought to have left her.

So I was glad that T’férgore and not one of my own stock now dictated a

postponement of the foreign trip.

Next day we drove out to the little farm and saw old Lena. Julian

declared she was worth driving the five miles to see, if it was only to

say “Good-day, Lena,” and watch her shriveled smiles. She always wore

a blue calico or blue woolen dress, low shoes, and scarlet stockings.

Her gait was a cheerful trot, but her tongue was lamest at the English

language of any tongue I have ever heard. She had a grandson named

Fritz, tallow-colored and blue-eyed, and covered with contagious

smiles. He never had forgotten the feeling of wooden shoes on his

feet, and clumped conscientiously in leather. Lena and Fritz rented

the little farm, and Fritz pushed the vegetables, fruit, and butter to

market in a hand-cart. Summer or winter, the road, a turnpike, was as

smooth and hard as a floor. Every inch of the fifteen acres was under

cultivation. Such weeds as were allowed to grow had some medicinal

property, or were good for feeding Lena’s birds. She had her cages hung

along the porch, the two canaries, the red-bird, and the mockingbird

trying to out-sing and out-chatter the wild things in the cherry-trees.

It was the last of May, and I snuffed delightful odors from the little

farm. Nasturtium vines were already running up strings at the window.

They produced little pods of which Lena made my favorite pickles. She

had one blazing bed of tulips in the garden, and her early vegetables

were showing green. Everything Lena tended grew like magic. Fritz had

raked every stick and bit of trash into the meadow, and the heap was

burning with a pale flicker in the sunlight, and raising smoke like

incense from the sod. Whenever I smell that smoke I think I must tell

my sensations to somebody who can put them in a poem: a homely poem

about last year’s pea-vines and strawberry and currant leaves, exhaling

the dew as they turned into blue vapor, and suggesting, though I cannot

tell why, the old home garden life when Adam and Eve were content to

lean down to the sweet ground and feel the loam with their fingers, or

take delight in the breath of fresh-cut grass.

The walk up to the porch was of uneven stones, each outlined by moss.

Lena arose between two gaping cellar doors at the side of the house,

and ambled down the walk to meet us.

“Wie befinden, Lena?” said Julian. “Suppose we put off that sale and

you take us to live on your prospective estate?”

“Was Lena going to buy it?” I exclaimed.

“Of course. She’s grown so wealthy off my land that she was going to

turn me away entirely.”

Lena laughed and shook her head and made gestures of good-will.

We went into the house, and Julian bargained with Lena to take us

home unto our estate. There was plenty of room for our furniture.

Lena had nothing but a spinning-wheel in one long slant-sided room

over the wing. Julian said he should leave the spinning-wheel alone,

hang his draperies and pictures there, set up his easels, and make it

a painting-room. The house had all sorts of tags and after-thoughts

built to the main part. Some boards in the floors arched downwards

like inverted rainbows. You mounted two steps to one room and descended

three to another. There were tall mantles and unexpected closets. The

staircase twisted in a way I fancied T’férgore would not like. I sat

down on the porch bench while Julian was giving Lena directions, and

tried to picture T’férgore coming up the walk toward the house. Was he

white or brown? Would he be churlish or full of the spirit of laughter?

Was he bringing trouble or gladness to Julian and me?