Archibald wakened, sniffed incredulously, sat up in his hammock bed, and
sniffed again.
Yes, it certainly was coffee—good coffee, and there was a subdued
rustle and stir beyond the door leading into the kitchen.
Why, of course! He was being “seen to.” Pegeen had come back.
He had not really expected her, but he might have known she was not one
to put her hand to the plow and look back.
Incidentally it might be well for him to arise and shine. The Young
Person who had adopted him had intimated that, if the weather cleared
over night, he would be expected to paint out of doors and let her clean
his quarters. When she got ready to clean she would probably clean, and
he must breakfast and make his escape.
Queer how mad women, even very small women, were about cleaning things.
No man could stand against them when the sacred rage possessed them. He
would not think of attempting it. No more comfortable and unashamed
grubbiness. He was going to be kept clean, whether he would or no. He
had seen it in the gleam of Peggy’s eye. When she saw to people, she saw
to them.
There was a whimsical smile on the face the man turned toward the
kitchen, but his eyes were very kind. On the whole, he was rather glad
he had been taken in hand. He liked the Very Small Person and there was
something pleasant about awakening to an aroma of coffee and a smell of
toast.
He made a hasty toilet and looked into the kitchen.
“You ready?” said Pegeen, briskly. “I forgot to ask you last night when
you wanted breakfast, so I just decided to have it at eight. I’d have
called you, only I heard you moving around. How d’ you like your boiled
eggs?”
“I have a theory that I like them cooked two minutes,” said Archibald,
humbly, “but I’ve never been able to get them that way.”
“Well, you’ll get them now. She likes hers coddled.”
“Oh, does she?”
“Yessir. I’d love to coddle you some.”
“I’ve an idea you’ll coddle me a great deal.”
Pegeen laughed.
“That’s just the way she twists things. I didn’t know anybody else did.
It makes talking lots more fun, don’t it? Most people talk right
straight ahead about sensible things and you’d as leave they’d stop any
time. I like it when sometimes you say what you don’t mean or don’t say
what you mean—not lies, you know, but all twisty, like a guessing
game—’n’ then I like the things that don’t mean things—just sound as
if they did,—snarks and goober snatches and such, you know.
“She read me lots of those when I had measles. Measles was the best time
I’ve ever had. I went and had them right at her house when I was staying
there over Sunday once.”
She flew into the other room, set the table, and came back for the
coffee and toast.
“Now you sit down ’n’ I’ll cook that two-minute egg. We’ll have to fix a
bed for you in the little room where you’ve got your trunk, so I can
come in here and have the table all ready soon as I get here mornings.
It’s kind of messy anyway, sleeping in your dining-room. It’d be nice if
you could afford another hammock for your bedroom. This one helps to
furnish here.”
“I’ll send for another,” said the man who was being seen to.
He got his two-minute egg, and the coffee was delicious, and the toast
was crisp and browned and hot as the toast one sees in hungry dreams.
While he ate, Pegeen went out and came back with her hands full of
maidenhair fern.
“You might send for some vases when you’re ordering the hammock,” she
said happily, as she put the ferns in a glass of water and set them on
the table. “She says it’s wicked to let a room starve for flowers and
green things when you can’t walk a step outdoors without finding
something that would put heart into the very lonesomest, saddest room. I
always did like flowers, but I never realized about ferns and green
things till she showed me, ’n’ now I like them most better ’n flowers.
They’re so cool, ’n’ fresh, ’n’ kind of resting. There’s always flowers
or ferns or pine branches or bayberry or something in her rooms. I guess
that’s why, even when she isn’t in them, they all seem kind of as if she
must have just gone through them, smiling in her eyes, the way she does.
Is that egg all right?”
“Perfect. She must be rather a wonderful Smiling Lady. Where does she
live?”
“Right down the other side of Pine Knob. You can go over or around, but
it’s prettiest over. There’s a spring up on top with pine trees around
it and a place where you can look way out ’n’ out ’n’ out. She goes up
there sometimes to watch the sunset. My, but she does love things.”
“And people?” questioned Archibald, idly.
“Well, I should say! She’s the lovingest thing. Sometimes I think the
Loving Lady’d be a better name than the Smiling Lady, but I guess it’s
all the same thing. Loving makes smiling, don’t it?”
“Not always,” said the man. His voice rang hard, and Pegeen shot a
swift, surprised look at him.
“Well, it ought to,” she said soberly. “That’s what it’s really
for—except when people you love get sick or die—or are bad. ’N’ if
they’re bad that’s because they aren’t loving. She says if you love hard
enough you just naturally make the world smiley—only you have to be
sure it’s the real, right love, the kind of love God has. She’s the
funniest thing. She talks about God right out, as if He were folks, ’n’
as if He and she had beautiful times together—like my measles. ’N’ she
don’t go to church so awfully much either, ’n’ once I saw her sew on
Sunday. That was when they were trying to get some clothes ready for the
Johnston twins that came unexpected. I asked her how she was going to
fix _that_ with God—my mother was a Presbyterian—’n’ she laughed ’n’
said she didn’t have to fix it, ’cause sewing in His name was just as
good as praying in His name, ’n’ loving was a bigger commandment ’n that
one about not doing any work, ’n’ those twins surely would need loving,
with their mother having no back bone ’n’ their father having delirious
tremors.
“It’s nice out of doors now, ’n’ as soon as I wash dishes I’m going to
begin cleaning.”
“I’m off,” laughed Archibald.
“It’ll be over before dinner ’n’ I’ll only do it thorough once a week,”
she called after him encouragingly, as he went away down the sunlit
slope where the daisies made way for him.
Mrs. Neal, his nearest neighbor, who was working in her garden as he
skirted her side yard, dropped her trowel and strolled over to the fence
when she saw him coming.
She was a sociable woman. He had discovered that before and resented it.
Above all things in the world he had wanted to escape from people, to be
left alone with his bruised soul; but, oddly enough, he was not
conscious of bruises this morning, was not even conscious of a soul,
which is quite as things should be on a June morning.
And so, to the waiting woman’s surprise, he took his pipe from his
mouth, bade her a blithe good morning, rested his elbows comfortably on
the top rail of the fence beside her own, and smiled into her broad,
astonished, and kindly face.
“My land,” said the woman. “Was it as bad as all that?”
“It was,” admitted the man.
“And here I was thinking it was a bad disposition. Just goes to show
that you never can tell.”
Mrs. Neal’s tone was self-reproachful. Her face had taken on creases
still more kindly.
“I told Peggy she’d got her work cut out for her; but she said if you
was grouchy you needed seein’ to all the more, and that bein’ grouchy
was, like as not, just not bein’ used to bein’ pleasant; but I didn’t
suppose she’d get you used to bein’ pleasant as quick as this.”
Archibald’s grin held no hurt vanity. He had evidently made an
uncommonly bad first impression, but his neighbor was plainly ready and
willing to reverse her judgment.
“And here all the time you was only lonesome,” Mrs. Neal went on, in her
fat, friendly voice. “Well, Pegeen surely is quite a kid. Now, ain’t
she?”
“She is,” agreed the man emphatically. “Tell me about her.”
The woman draped her bulk more comfortably over the fence, as one who
settles herself for a long social session. She always had time to visit,
and next to the sound of her own voice, she loved best the sound of
another person’s voice, yet she managed to accomplish an astonishing
amount of work between talks.
“Well,” she began, her eyes looking past the listening man and down the
winding road, “Peggy wasn’t born here. She came along one day on a
broken-down cart behind a broken-down horse. A baby thing she was, only
five years old, but she was taking care of folks already. I saw ’em as
they went by here and the youngster was pulling a shawl up tight around
her mother’s throat and shoulders. Broken down worse’n the cart and
horse, the woman was. I never saw anybody more peaked and sad. Why, say,
that woman’s eyes made you _ache_—except when they looked at Peggy. I
don’t know but what they made you ache worse than ever then. The little
smile that came into them looked so sort of pitiful in that face of
hers. You know the kind of face—the kind that’s been pretty once and
fine, but has had the youth and prettiness and fineness all killed out
of it. A face that’s sort of a tombstone telling where everything worth
while in a life has been buried. She’d been clear outside her husband’s
class. It was easy to tell that. Land knows how she ever came to marry
him. Common, drunken brute he was. Might have been handsome in a beefy
sort of a way once, but drink had knocked that out of him, along with
any other decency he might have had. Honest to God, if I’d ’a’ been a
man I’d ’a’ started every day by going down the road and licking that
man O’Neill, just for luck; but his wife wouldn’t have thanked me for
it—nor Peg either. The woman didn’t love him, but she had some queer
idea of duty or pluck or something hidden away in her, and she never
complained and never let any one say hard things about him to her.—Just
hid what she could, and endured what she couldn’t hide.
“I figured it that she’d run away and married a handsome, blarneying,
good-for-nothing Irishman against her family’s wishes and in the face of
all sorts of prophecies about the evil that’d come of it, and seeing as
she’d made her bed she was going to lie on it without whining. I’ll bet
her folks never knew how things went with her.
“She tried to teach Peggy what she could and the youngster was a good
deal like her in some ways—tidy, little mite with pretty ideas about
things and lots of pluck. She ain’t a whiner, no more ’n her mother, but
it ain’t all plain pluck with Peg. She’s got just the one good thing
that her father had to give her, ’n’ that’s cheerfulness. She’s got a
disposition like one of them toy balloons, Peg has, and it’s a good
thing. If it hadn’t been for that she’d ’a’ been dead, with all the
responsibility and want and abuse she’s had to stand.
“She’s too old for her years, of course, and she’s got serious ways and
some awfully grown-up thoughts, but she’ll never die of broken heart and
broken spirit like her mother did. No, sir. You can’t down Peg. That’s
the Irish in her. She’d see something cheerful and encouraging in a
smallpox epidemic—’n’ she’d be out nursing the sick ones too. Well,
there’s no telling what the man was himself before the drink got him. He
was something a fine-souled, big-hearted woman fell in love with, and
maybe a better father might have given Peggy something that wasn’t as
handy to have around as her cheerfulness.”
“What became of the mother?” Archibald asked. There was a very friendly
light in his eyes as he looked into the face beside him. He was going to
like this neighbor.
“Oh, she dragged around, getting weaker and weaker and thinner and
thinner and whiter and whiter. I’ll say one thing for O’Neill. He never
beat her—not even when he was drunk. He didn’t make a living for her
and he didn’t raise a hand to help her, the lazy whelp. Chopped her own
wood, she did, when Peggy didn’t pick it up in the woods. The neighbors
would have helped but they couldn’t do much—didn’t dare. She was so
proud she’d rather starve than take charity. You couldn’t even offer
it—just had to do what you could in a round-about, happen-so way.
“By and by she took to her bed and then Peggy had to do everything that
got done. She surely was a wonder too—waited on her mother hand and
foot, and kept things clean and cooked whenever there was anything to
cook, and got wood to keep them all warm, and looked after O’Neill as if
he was a bad child that she loved even if he was bad.
“Then her mother died about a year ago. That did for O’Neill. He’d been
a brute to the woman, but then he’d been a brute to himself. The drink
did it, and some place back in his rotten old soul I guess there was a
clean spot that loved her. He was too drunk to see her buried and he
kept that way most of the time for two or three months. Lord knows where
he got the money for his whisky. Peggy used to help around at the
neighbors, taking care of babies mostly. She’s a wonderful hand with
babies. Some of the folks offered to take her on and look out for her,
but she wouldn’t leave her father, and what little she made she’d use to
feed him—washed for him, too, and tried to keep his clothes mended. Her
mother had taught her to read and write and spell, and she went to
school sometimes when she could. O’Neill’d be off for two or three days
at a time and then she’d slip down to the schoolhouse. Miss Keyes, the
teacher, says Peg’s the smartest scholar she ever had.”
“Couldn’t some one interfere legally and take her away from her father?”
asked Archibald.
Mrs. Neal smiled indulgently.
“You don’t really know Peg yet,” she said. “We all worried a great deal
and did what we could to help the child, but as for taking her away from
what she thought was her duty—from somebody that was dependent on
her—well, you wait till you know Pegeen O’Neill.
“O’Neill, he settled the business himself by going off on one of his
sprees and not coming back at all. The Lord knows what became of him. I
hope he’s dead and I guess he is, but his mind had sort of been going
for a while before he left and Peggy, she has an idea that he just lost
his memory and didn’t know where he belonged, or else he’d have come
home to her.
“Grieved for him—that youngster did. Not exactly about her being
without him, but about his being without her. She was afraid he was
somewhere crazy and wasn’t being seen to properly.
“Several of us offered to take her in, after that, but what’d she do but
go over to Mrs. Potter’s. She was sick—Mrs. Potter I mean—and had a
little baby, and her husband’s work took him away most of the time.
Poison poor, they were too. Peg she said they sort of needed her and
she’d got the habit of taking care of somebody; so she took on that job
until Mrs. Potter died. Then she took care of the baby until its
mother’s folks came and got it last month. Peg felt real bad about the
baby, but Mrs. Benderby’s husband had died in the winter and she was all
alone and walking down to the village, three miles, early every morning
to get day’s work and walking home, dog tired, at night; so Peg she said
she’d just move over and see to Mrs. Benderby.—Gets up and has fire and
breakfast at half-past six for the woman and tidies up the house and
mends and has a supper waiting for the poor soul when she comes in at
night. That didn’t keep the child busy though; so she took you on.”
“Good heavens!” protested the man. “It’s too much for her.”
“No, it ain’t,”—Mrs. Neal’s smile was reassuring. “It’s just a lark for
her at your place and she’ll have good food up there and make a little
money, and she can fix Mrs. Benderby up, night and morning, all the
same. Peg’s got to take care of something with all her might and it may
as well be you and Mrs. Benderby.”
“Well, perhaps it may,” agreed Mrs. Benderby’s fellow beneficiary,
humbly.
After that there was a little talk of June peas and lettuce and the
vicious propensities of cut worms; and then Mrs. Neal went back to her
gardening, while Archibald swung himself over a stone wall into the
road, over another wall into a clover field, and made his leisurely way
toward the most sketchable of willow-fringed brooks.
For a while he made pretense of working, but even the brook laughed at
the faint-heartedness of his efforts and the drooping willow boughs
quivered with mirth and the sunlight stealing through the green leaves
danced over his canvas and mocked at its futility.
“Work? In June?” sang a bird in the willows and, at the idea, all the
summer world laughed with the brook.
“Smell!” whispered the clover sea, billowing away from the tree shadows
where he sat.
“Feel!” crooned the breeze, touching his cheek with cool, caressing
fingers.
“Look!” shouted the sun, driving shadow-throwing clouds across the low
meadowland and up the far blue hills.
“Listen!” lilted the bird in the branches.
Archibald gave up the struggle. Why dabble with paints? Loafing was more
glorious business.
“You’re quite right about it,” he said cheerfully to the derisive brook.
“I’m a punk painter, but the Lord knew his business when he sketched in
June. Come along and show me more of the canvas.”
He set off across the meadow, the brook chuckling its sunlit way beside
him and together they wandered down the Valley. A companionable brook it
was, full of surprises and whimsies as a woman, running quietly through
brown, sun-warmed shallows, working itself into a fury against solid,
unyielding stones, dreaming under overhanging elders, glooming among
thick clustering pine trees, dashing noisily, recklessly, down steep
slopes.
Winding and wandering, it led its comrade around the base of Pine Knob,
into a bird-enchanted woodland and whirling suddenly around a sharp
corner, swooped out into an open, birch-fringed glade where a host of
Quaker ladies powdered the grass and butter-cups made love to them
brazenly.
“There!” shouted the brook, leaping a mossy stone for sheer love of
splashing, and making rainbows in the sunlight. “What do you think of
June now?” With a gurgle of glee it romped away through the birches, but
Archibald stayed in the glade.
A girl was sitting among the Quaker ladies. Her hair was full of golden
lights. Her eyes were full of laughter. Her lap was full of flowers and
puppies and kittens. A big collie dog stood sentinel at her shoulder. At
her feet on the grass, two fat babies rolled about in a riotous tussle
with a puppy, strayed from the lapful.
A twig cracked under the man’s foot. The dog growled warningly and the
girl, glancing round, saw the intruder standing among the birches.
Apparently she was not startled, and she was as little embarrassed.
“Don’t pay any attention to him. It’s principle with him, not passion,”
she said, laying a quieting hand on the dog’s head.
Archibald and she might have been meeting every day for months. Not a
hint of self-consciousness ruffled her gay serenity. She made no effort
to rise—merely sat there in the sunshine with young life rioting over
her and round her and smiled up at the stranger out of clear, fearless,
brown eyes that were used to greeting friends. There was no room for
doubt. This was Pegeen’s Smiling Lady.
Archibald’s cap was in his hand. Apology was on his lips, but looking
down at the group, he laughed instead of apologizing. Babies, puppies,
kittens—all were staring at him solemnly, uncertainly. The collie was
staring, too, with more dignity and with deeper suspicion.
Only the Smiling Lady accepted him without reserve, had no doubts about
him.
“We came after flowers,” she said. “At least we intended to get flowers,
but there were so many of us, and some of us had such short legs, and
all of us except Sandy had such vagabond, inconsequent souls, that we
just sat down and rolled around in flowers instead of picking them.”
“I’ve been sketching. At least I intended to sketch,” Archibald
paraphrased.
She laughed. The laugh was as satisfactory in its way as the smile.
“Yes, it’s that kind of a day,” she admitted lazily.
She moved a wandering puppy and a kitten or two, to make room for the
man on the grassy bank beside her, but there was no coquetry in the
invitation—merely a matter-of-fact acceptance of another companion less
reliable than the collie perhaps, less amusing than the puppies and
kittens and babies, but doubtless well meaning. There was June joy
enough for all comers, and she was no monopolist. And when Archibald had
stretched himself out on his back beside her, she evidently considered
her responsibility ended, took his well being and content for granted,
and went back to playing with her young things. The young things, after
their first surprise, accepted him in much the same tranquil way. Only
Sandy, the collie, maintained a haughty aloofness, stood manifestly on
guard.
One of the kittens made a tentative excursion along the man’s recumbent
form and curled up in a soft ball on his chest. A puppy of inquiring and
friendly turn of mind chewed two or three of the newcomer’s fingers in
turn, then gamboled awkwardly up to his head and licked his cheek with a
warm, wet tongue. A chubby, laughing baby in sadly faded and much
patched blue rompers filled her hot little hands with Quaker ladies and
scattered them painstakingly over the front of the artist’s flannel
shirt.
“Thank you, Ophelia,” murmured Archibald. “Or perhaps I should say
Hamlet,” he added doubtfully.
The Smiling Lady rescued a kitten from the strangle hold of the other
diminutive being in blue rompers, and cleared up the situation.
“There’s simply no telling in rompers,” she said. “But that’s Rosamond
strewing flowers over you and this is Jeremiah. They’re the Johnston
twins, four years old and very active, thank you. Father Johnston is
religious and Mother Johnston is romantic and each one named a baby, but
I do think Mr. Johnston might have picked out one of the cheerful
prophets. Jerry isn’t a bit of a wailer. Jerry and Rosy aren’t such bad
little names for them, though, are they?”
“Very good little names,” protested Archibald. “But how do you know
which child belongs to which name?”
“You have to go by manners, not by looks,” the Smiling Lady explained.
“Now if Jerry’s attention had been concentrated upon you, he wouldn’t
have strewn flowers over you. He’d probably have bitten your thumb or
poked a finger in your eye. You see, Jerry’s on the way to being a man.”
“A thumb-biting, eye-poking class, I gather?”
“Forceful, let us put it—and yet so helpless, poor things! How is
Pegeen?”
“The connection is obvious,” Archibald confessed. “I am wax in her
hands. Within a week there won’t be a paint brush in the shack that I
can call my own. She’s going to keep me tidy if she has to drive me from
home in order to do it. In fact, she did drive me from home this
morning. She’s cleaning.”
“She’ll take very good care of you,” said the Smiling Lady, “and _how
she will_ love doing it! She’ll mother you as if you were Jerry’s age.
Peggy was born for mothering.”
She had risen as she spoke.
“Sandy and I must take all these babies home before they begin clamoring
for food,” she said lightly, “and I haven’t a doubt but that Peggy is
watching the meadow path for you. Give her my love.”
She took it for granted that he knew her as she knew him. Pegeen was
sure to have talked of her and so why bother with formalities? Yet, in
spite of her frank acceptance of him, Archibald did not offer to walk
home with her.
There was a definite finality about her leave-taking, a door quietly
shut. Evidently this unconventional Young Woman made her own laws and
limitations, and Archibald, being no dullard in feminine psychology,
realized that the man who presumed upon her casual friendliness would be
likely to find the door permanently closed. So he stood quietly and
watched her going away across the sunshiny glade.
She walked as she spoke, as she looked, as she smiled, with a fine
freedom, a blithe assurance; and though the figure that swayed so
lightly as it went away between the birches was girlishly slender, there
was a subtle hint of strength and vigor in its flowing lines.
As Archibald looked, she stooped to one of the babies, and the man drew
a sharp breath of appreciation, noting with an artist’s eye, the
gracious curves of her breast under the clinging muslin blouse, the
rhythmic length of limb, the modeling of the bare forearms, the well-set
head.
When she gathered the child into her arms, tossed it high before
cuddling it close against her shoulder, and went on her way as swiftly
and lightly as though unburdened, the watcher sighed with satisfaction.
He was still thinking of her as he leaped the wall into his own meadow
and swung his cap over his head, in answer to the greeting waved to him
by a little figure in the doorway of the shack.
“Not so much beautiful,” he summed up, “as made up of beauties. She’d
never drive a man mad, but, holy smoke, what a delight she might be to
him in his sane moments.”