“A LIGHT wind blew from the gates of the sun,” the morning she first
walked down the street of the little Iowa town. Not a cloud flecked the
blue; there was a humming of happy insects; a smell of rich and moist
loam perfumed the air, and in the dusk of beeches and of oaks stood the
quiet homes. She paused now and then, looking in the gardens, or at a
group of children, then passed on, smiling in content.
Her accent was so strange, that the agent for real estate, whom she
visited, asked her, twice and once again, what it was she said.
“I want,” she had repeated smilingly, “an upland meadow, where clover
will grow, and mignonette.”
At the tea-tables that night, there was a mighty chattering. The brisk
village made a mystery of this lady with the slow step, the foreign
trick of speech, the long black gown, and the gentle voice. The men,
concealing their curiosity in presence of the women, gratified it
secretly, by sauntering to the tavern in the evening. There the keeper
and his wife stood ready to convey any neighborly intelligence.
“Elizabeth Astrado” was written in the register,--a name conveying
little, unaccompanied by title or by place of residence.
“She eats alone,” the tavern-keeper's wife confided to their eager
ears, “and asks for no service. Oh, she's a curiosity! She's got her
story,--you'll see!”
In a town where every man knew every other man, and whether or not he
paid his taxes on time, and what his standing was in church, and all the
skeletons of his home, a stranger alien to their ways disturbed their
peace of mind.
“An upland meadow where clover and mignonette will grow,” she had said,
and such an one she found, and planted thick with fine white clover
and with mignonette. Then, while the carpenters raised her cabin at the
border of the meadow, near the street, she passed among the villagers,
mingling with them gently, winning their good-will, in spite of
themselves.
The cabin was of unbarked maple logs, with four rooms and a rustic
portico. Then all the villagers stared in very truth. They, living
in their trim and ugly little homes, accounted houses of logs as the
misfortune of their pioneer parents. A shed for wood, a barn for the
Jersey cow, a rustic fence, tall, with a high swinging gate, completed
the domain. In the front room of the cabin was a fireplace of rude
brick. In the bedrooms, cots as bare and hard as a nun's, and in the
kitchen the domestic necessaries; that was all. The poorest house-holder
in the town would not have confessed to such scant furnishing. Yet the
richest man might well have hesitated before he sent to France for hives
and hives of bees, as she did, setting them up along the southern border
of her meadow.
Later there came strong boxes, marked with many marks of foreign
transportation lines, and the neighbor-gossips, seeing them, imagined
wealth of curious furniture; but the man who carted them told his wife,
who told her friend, who told her friend, that every box to the last one
was placed in the dry cemented cellar, and left there in the dark.
“An' a mighty ridic'lous expense a cellar like that is, t' put under a
house of that char'cter,” said the man to his wife--who repeated it to
her friend.
“But that ain't all,” the carpenter's wife had said when she heard about
it all, “Hank says there is one little room, not fit for buttery nor
yet fur closit, with a window high up--well, you ken see yourself-an' a
strong door. Jus' in passin' th' other day, when he was there, hangin'
some shelves, he tried it, an' it was locked!”
“Well!” said the women who listened.
However, they were not unfriendly, these brisk gossips. Two of them,
plucking up tardy courage, did call one afternoon. Their hostess was out
among her bees, crooning to them, as it seemed, while they lighted all
about her, lit on the flower in her dark hair, buzzed vivaciously about
her snow-white linen gown, lighted on her long, dark hands. She came
in brightly when she saw her guests, and placed chairs for them,
courteously, steeped them a cup of pale and fragrant tea, and served
them with little cakes. Though her manner was so quiet and so kind, the
women were shy before her. She, turning to one and then the other, asked
questions in her quaint way.
“You have children, have you not?”
Both of them had.
“Ah,” she cried, clasping those slender hands, “but you are very
fortunate! Your little ones,--what are their ages?”
They told her, she listening smilingly.
“And you nurse your little babes--you nurse them at the breast?”
The modest women blushed. They were not used to speaking with such
freedom. But they confessed they did, not liking artificial means.
“No,” said the lady, looking at them with a soft light in her eyes, “as
you say, there is nothing like the good mother Nature. The little ones
God sends should lie at the breast. 'Tis not the milk alone that
they imbibe; it is the breath of life,-it is the human magnetism, the
power,-how shall I say? Happy the mother who has a little babe to hold!”
They wanted to ask a question, but they dared not--wanted to ask a
hundred questions. But back of the gentleness was a hauteur, and they
were still.
“Tell me,” she said, breaking her reverie, “of what your husbands do.
Are they carpenters? Do they build houses for men, like the blessed
Jesus? Or are they tillers of the soil? Do they bring fruits out of this
bountiful valley?”
They answered, with a reservation of approval. “The blessed Jesus!” It
sounded like popery.
She had gone from these brief personal matters to other things.
“How very strong you people seem,” she had remarked. “Both your men
and your women are large and strong. You should be, being appointed to
subdue a continent. Men think they choose their destinies, but indeed,
good neighbors, I think not so. Men are driven by the winds of God's
will. They are as much bidden to build up this valley, this storehouse
for the nations, as coral insects are bidden to make the reefs with
their own little bodies, dying as they build. Is it not so?”
“We are the creatures of God's will, I suppose,” said one of her
visitors, piously.
She had given them little confidences in return.
“I make my bread,” she said, with childish pride, “pray see if you
do not think it excellent!” And she cut a flaky loaf to display its
whiteness. One guest summoned the bravado to inquire,--
“Then you are not used to doing housework?”
“I?” she said, with a slow smile, “I have never got used to
anything,--not even living.” And so she baffled them all, yet won them.
The weeks went by. Elizabeth Astrado attended to her bees, milked her
cow, fed her fowls, baked, washed, and cleaned, like the simple women
about her, saving that as she did it a look of ineffable content lighted
up her face, and she sang for happiness. Sometimes, amid the ballads
that she hummed, a strain slipped in of some great melody, which
she, singing unaware, as it were, corrected, shaking her finger in
self-reproval, and returning again to the ballads and the hymns. Nor
was she remiss in neighborly offices; but if any were ailing, or had a
festivity, she was at hand to assist, condole, or congratulate, carrying
always some simple gift in her hand, appropriate to the occasion.
She had her wider charities too, for all she kept close to her home.
When, one day, a story came to her of a laborer struck down with heat in
putting in a culvert on the railroad, and gossip said he could not
speak English, she hastened to him, caught dying words from his lips,
whispered a reply, and then what seemed to be a prayer, while he
held fast her hand, and sank to coma with wistful eyes upon her face.
Moreover 'twas she who buried him, raising a cross above his grave, and
she who planted rose-bushes about the mound.
“He spoke like an Italian,” said the physician to her warily.
“And so he was,” she had replied.
“A fellow-countryman of yours, no doubt?”
“Are not all men our countrymen, my friend?” she said, gently. “What are
little lines drawn in the imagination of men, dividing territory, that
they should divide our sympathies? The world is my country--and yours,
I hope. Is it not so?”
Then there had also been a hapless pair of lovers, shamed before their
community, who, desperate, impoverished, and bewildered at the war
between nature and society, had been helped by her into a new part of
the world. There had been a widow with many children, who had found
baskets of cooked food and bundles of well-made clothing on her step.
And as the days passed, with these pleasant offices, the face of the
strange woman glowed with an ever-increasing content, and her dark,
delicate beauty grew.
John Hartington spent his vacation at Des Moines, having a laudable
desire to see something of the world before returning to his native
town, with his college honors fresh upon him. Swiftest of the college
runners was John Hartington, famed for his leaping too, and measuring
widest at the chest and waist of all the hearty fellows at the
university. His blond curls clustered above a brow almost as innocent
as a child's; his frank and brave blue eyes, his free step, his mellow
laugh, bespoke the perfect animal, unharmed by civilization, unperplexed
by the closing century's fallacies and passions. The wholesome oak that
spreads its roots deep in the generous soil, could not be more a part
of nature than he. Conscientious, unimaginative, direct, sincere,
industrious, he was the ideal man of his kind, and his return to town
caused a flutter among the maidens which they did not even attempt to
conceal. They told him all the chat, of course, and, among other things,
mentioned the great sensation of the year,--the coming of the woman
with her mystery, the purchase of the sunny upland, the planting it
with clover and with mignonette, the building of the house of logs,
the keeping of the bees, the barren rooms, the busy, silent life, the
charities, the never-ending wonder of it all. And then the woman--kind,
yet different from the rest, with the foreign trick of tongue, the slow,
proud walk, the delicate, slight hands, the beautiful, beautiful smile,
the air as of a creature from another world.
Hartington, strolling beyond the village streets, up where the sunset
died in daffodil above the upland, saw the little cot of logs, and out
before it, among blood-red poppies, the woman of whom he had heard. Her
gown of white gleamed in that eerie radiance, glorified, her sad great
eyes bent on him in magnetic scrutiny. A peace and plenitude of power
came radiating from her, and reached him where he stood, suddenly, and
for the first time in his careless life, struck dumb and awed. She, too,
seemed suddenly abashed at this great bulk of youthful manhood, innocent
and strong. She gazed on him, and he on her, both chained with
some mysterious enchantment. Yet neither spoke, and he, turning in
bewilderment at last, went back to town, while she placed one hand on
her lips to keep from calling him. And neither slept that night, and in
the morning when she went with milking pail and stool out to the grassy
field, there he stood at the bars, waiting. Again they gazed, like
creatures held in thrall by some magician, till she held out her hand
and said,--
“We must be friends, although we have not met. Perhaps we ARE old
friends. They say there have been worlds before this one. I have not
seen you in these habiliments of flesh and blood, and yet--we may be
friends?”
John Hartington, used to the thin jests of the village girls, and all
their simple talk, rose, nevertheless, enlightened as he was with some
strange sympathy with her, to understand and answer what she said.
“I think perhaps it may be so. May I come in beside you in the field?
Give me the pail. I'll milk the cow for you.”
She threw her head back and laughed like a girl from school, and he
laughed too, and they shook hands. Then she sat near him while he
milked, both keeping silence, save for the p-rring noise he made with
his lips to the patient beast. Being through, she served him with a
cupful of the fragrant milk; but he bade her drink first, then drank
himself, and then they laughed again, as if they both had found
something new and good in life.