"A treasure of the memory, a joy unutterable."
"Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried.
She could not look at the sweet heaven
Either at morn or eventide."
Myron Holder's father was Jed Holder, the broom-maker. His death
occurred when Myron was eighteen years old. He had clung to his quaint
occupation to the last, after factory-made brooms stood even at the
store doors in Jamestown.
His fortunes had fallen off sadly in the last few years of his life,
but he worked away as steadily at his trade as in the old days, when,
looking from his door, his eyes were met by the mast-like masses of a
Kentish hop orchard. He had planted hopvines all about the fence of
his little house in Jamestown. They clambered up the sides of the
house, twined insinuatingly about the disdainful sunflowers, and
throwing their tendrils abroad from the roots wound round and round the
tall stalks of grass, weighing them down with the burden of their
unsought embrace.
Little Myron was often impressed with the truth that a single leaf
broken from a growing hopvine kills the whole spray. She learned to
"pick up her feet," as her father expressed it, and step daintily
between the wandering vines, so that no slurring footstep might injure
them.
Jed Holder had carried on the broom-making for many years very
systematically. Year by year he rented from Sol Disney a bit of the
virgin soil of the woodland, and the tall brown tassel of the broom
corn overtopped the stamps in the clearing. Year by year the little
patch of corn crept nearer and nearer the limit of Disney's diminishing
woodland--seeming, as Jed Holder said, "to sweep the trees off before
it," but being in its turn swept aside by waves of golden grain.
It was a sore day to Jed Holder when he sent off his first order for
Western broom corn, forced to do so by the impossibility of renting
ground rich enough to perfect and mature his crop.
In the short winter days Jed used to work in Disney's brush helping to
"clear" it. In return for his services he received all the young
maples they encountered: out of these in the long winter evenings he
fashioned his broom handles.
Jed never could remember how the knowledge was conveyed to him that
broom handles were being made by the thousands by a machine out of the
refuse in the wake of logging camps.
If the recognition of this iconoclastic fact was not an intuition, it
must have been something very like one--some transmission of a half
contemptuous thought from the brain of the smart groceryman in the city
when he ridiculed the price Jed asked for his hand-made brooms. Jed
pondered over the matter much, but never could recall the source of his
information. But when he lay in his last illness, watching the shadow
of the hopvine on the blinds, all these tormenting thoughts vanished.
The murmurs that fell from his lips were all of other days, of hop
picking, of England, of Kentish lanes and birds, of one whom he named
lovingly as "Myron lass" and yet did not seem to identify with the girl
who waited upon him so untiringly, under the direction of her
grandmother, an old, old woman, bent with rheumatism, and hard of face
and heart, whose lips set cruelly and eyes grew stony when her
gray-haired son babbled of "Myron lass." When he lay in his coffin she
could not grieve, for raging that he was not to lie with all his kin in
Kent.
She made Myron suffer vicariously for her long dead mother, whose death
coming soon after Myron's birth had driven Jed Holder to seek strange
scenes, away from where he had known the fullest happiness of which he
was capable.
But Myron bore her grandmother's bad temper with patience and without
bitterness. Her father often said to her, "The yeast is bitter, but it
is the yeast that makes bread sweet."
Jed Holder died one day in autumn, when the aromatic green cones had
been picked from the hops and lay browning upon paper-covered boards in
the sun. The last breath Jed Holder drew savored of their fragrance,
and the aroma of the hops dispelled the faint odor of mortality in the
death chamber.
The winter succeeding his death was a long and bitter one. Fuel was
high; and however sparingly bought, still the plainest provisions cost
money. Albeit Myron and her grandmother lived frugally, yet they
exhausted Jed's poor hoardings very soon. Spring found them penniless.
But in summer, life is more easily sustained, and Myron found various
occupations which sufficed to keep her grandmother in tolerable
comfort. Hoeing and weeding, cleaning house and berrying, doing extra
washings, cooking for threshers and harvesters, all had their part in
Myron's busy life. Her grandmother was never satisfied either with her
ability or her willingness to work; but for all that she worked, and
worked well too.
There was soon proof positive of this given her grandmother, for after
Myron had helped in the half yearly saturnalia of work Mrs. Deans
called "house cleaning," the latter arranged to have Myron come to the
farm daily to help the bound girl.
For that summer Mrs. Deans had boarders--boarders who read, and walked,
and brought in great bunches of golden rod, and masses of wild aster,
and long trails of virgin bower clematis.
There were Mrs. and Miss Rexton, Miss Carpenter and Dr. Henry Willis, a
young medico. They had all driven to the lake one day from the Mineral
Spring Hotel, where they were stopping. The lake curved in a shining
semi-circle round Jamestown, and swept off in ever-widening curves far
away, until sky and water blended in a band of blinding silver
radiance. The party of four had been caught in a thunderstorm, and
sought refuge on Mrs. Deans' veranda.
Then and there they had decided that they must come there for the rest
of the summer, and with one accord set about persuading Mrs. Deans to
give her consent. Of a truth their persuasion would have had little
effect upon that worthy woman, had not the remuneration suggested
seemed to her quite extravagantly sufficient; therefore she was pleased
at length to accede to their request, and a few days later found the
quartette comfortably settled at Mrs. Deans'.
Miss Carpenter was Dr. Willis' maiden aunt. Miss Rexton believed
herself to be his affinity and hoped that he agreed with her. Mrs.
Rexton was a chattel of her daughter's.
Myron Holder's duties were now made more manifold than ever, but she
was well content that it should be so; only the long mile she walked
night and morning from and to the village tired her greatly, taking the
edge off her vitality in the morning and utterly exhausting her at
night. So Mrs. Deans proposed that she should stay all night at the
farm; not actuated by any kindly thought for Myron, but because, like
the good financier that she was, she wanted to get her money's worth
out of her.
As for old Mrs. Holder, she had no timid qualms about staying alone:
she missed the little scraps of news, however, that Myron always had to
tell, and--unconsciously--suffered from lack of some one to berate.
The summer passed slowly--autumn came. Mrs. Deans' boarders departed.
Myron Holder once more walked the mile night and morning; she had had a
hard summer's work. Her hands and wrists were reddened and coarsened;
her face was very pale, and _bistre_ shades lingered about her eyes.
But she and her grandmother had to live, and after December snows were
blowing she still trudged the mile back and forth.
It was only by great chance that Mrs. Deans retained Myron's services;
but her son, a loutish young man of twenty-two, had fallen from a
hickory-nut tree and dislocated his hip.
The increasing attention he demanded, and the care of her poultry, and
her accumulated sewing kept Mrs. Deans fully occupied. So Myron Holder
continued her daily attendance at the Deans farm. January and February
passed. March was blowing its wildest, when one day Myron Holder did
not come to Mrs. Deans'.
The latter waited fuming, resolved, as she expressed it, to "give Myron
Holder a fine hearing when she did come."
Mrs. Deans was always promising somebody or other a "hearing," which,
by the bye, was an exceedingly misleading term, for in the conversation
thus referred to the other party did the listening whilst Mrs. Deans
talked.
The wild wind of the morning had intensified into a bitter sleet, which
darted its blasts into the face like sharp-pointed lashes, when Mrs.
Deans heard a knock at the side door. She opened it herself to find
old Mrs. Holder, bent, wet, furious, standing in the slush. Mrs. Deans
bade her come in, with a meaning look at the corn husk mat before the
door.
Mrs. Holder paid no heed to the look, but with muddy feet stepped into
the room fair upon Mrs. Deans' new rag carpet, and standing there, a
quaint old figure, clad in the forgotten fashion of thirty years back,
proceeded to give Mrs. Deans what that lady herself would have called
"a hearing."
Mrs. Deans had a ready tongue, an inventive imagination, a fund of
vituperative imagery, and a pleasant habit of drowning the voice of any
one who chose to contradict her; but in one's own house, to be
confronted in this way, abused for some unknown crime, covered with
contumely, and showered with contemptuous epithets, and all from an old
woman whose granddaughter was honored in doing one's kitchen work, was
not conducive to dignity and presence of mind.
Mrs. Deans was too old a scold, however, to be routed without an effort
to vindicate herself. Finding it vain to wait an opportunity for
speech (Mrs. Holder never seemed to pause for breath), she simply began
to talk also--Myron's non-appearance, Mrs. Holder's impertinence, and
her own mystification giving ample subject-matter for her eloquence to
do justice to.
But Mrs. Holder talked on, apparently unconscious of Mrs. Deans'
remarks--finally she hurled one direct question at the latter: "Did you
know--that's what I want to find out--did ye? And if ye did, what d'ye
think of yourself? You----"
She was about to branch off into a personal description of Mrs.
Deans--somewhat unflattering--when the latter seized her cue.
"Did I know what?" she demanded.
Mrs. Holder came to a dead stop and looked at her.
"Did I know what?" reiterated Mrs. Deans majestically.
"Did you know--Myron--" she stopped, this thing was difficult to frame
in words.
"Well?" said Mrs. Deans.
"Did you know Myron was--would be--had--" again the voluble Mrs. Holder
faltered. Mrs. Deans looked at Mrs. Holder--and something whispered to
her what Mrs. Holder could not say. "Do you mean to tell me--" she
paused--filling up the hiatus with an eloquent look.
Then she loosened the tides of her indignation, and sweeping aside all
memories of Myron's honesty, and faithful service, and patience,
launched against her the full flood of her invective.
Presently Mrs. Holder chimed in: there was something absurd yet
tragically repulsive in these two women, but a moment before reviling
each other, now absorbed only in the desire to outvie each other in the
epithets they hurled against the girl--the granddaughter of the one,
the uncomplaining servant of the other.
Their attitude, however, was prophetically typical of the treatment
Myron Holder was to receive. The whole village forgot its private
quarrels to point the finger at its common victim. Beset with all the
frightful anticipations of motherhood, bowed beneath the burden of a
shame she appreciated and accepted, hounded nearly to madness by her
grandmother's jibes and reproaches, Myron Holder's heart was wellnigh
desperate.
The spring winds brought her dreadful suggestions of despair. The
first hepaticas shone up at her as balefully as the lighted fagots to a
martyr's eye. The springing hopvines seemed to twine their tendrils
tight and tighter about her heart. All the scents and sounds of spring
were ever after to her an exquisite torture. But her soul was of
strong fibre.
Before all the scorn of the village, all the rebukes of Mrs. Deans, all
the wrath of her grandmother, all the bitterness and misery and
hopelessness of her own heart, Myron Holder was mute.
No murmur escaped her lips against the man who had forsaken her. The
village knew her shame, but it could not fathom her secret. Myron
Holder was deaf to all commands, entreaties, persuasions, sneers. Her
face, holy with the divine shadow of coming maternity, turned to her
questioners an indecipherable page--writ large with characters of shame
and sorrow, but telling naught else.
* * * * * *
There came a night when Myron Holder descended into that hell of
suffering called child-birth--struggled with prolonged agony--helpless
and alone--and cried aloud--to that dead father--to that unknown
mother--to God--for Death.
Myron Holder was a woman and had come to years of knowledge, and her
fall was doubtless a sin and a shame to her--black and unforgivable;
but far as Myron Holder had fallen, deep as was her humiliation, black
as was her shame, inexcusable her error, she still shines in effulgent
whiteness when compared with those women who refused her aid that long
night through, demanding as recompense for their ministering the
betrayal of her betrayer. Myron Holder would not pay their price.
The dim gray dawn lighted the pain-scarred face of a sleeping mother,
by whose side reposed a fair-haired child; a child the secret of whose
parentage was still locked within its mother's heart.
* * * * * *
"Them kind always lives," Mrs. Warner said to her husband, when, on a
June morning, she saw Myron Holder totter past her door. Mrs. Warner
should have thanked the God she worshipped, fasting, that it was so:
had Myron Holder died, no woman in all Jamestown would have been free
from blood-guiltiness. They had beheld a woman in such extremity as
moved the hearts of Inquisitors, stayed the torch of persecution,
shackled the relentless rack, deferred the vengeance of the law, and
had withheld their hands from helping.
Those same hands which wrought garments for the heathen and shamed not
to offer their alms to God!