Chapter 10

At ten o'clock her work was done, and she established herself by the sitting-room window, her knitting in hand, to watch for him who was to come. A warm excitement flooded through her veins.

"How my heart beats!" she said aloud. It had hurried through the peril of Willard's illness and the disaster of his death. It was hurrying now, as if it meant to gallop with her from the world.

At half-past ten there was the sound of wheels. She dropped her knitting and put her hand up to her throat. A carriage turned the bend in the road and passed the clump of willows. It was the minister's wife, driving at a good pace and leaning out to bow. Hetty rose, trembling, her hand on the window-sill. But the minister's wife gave another smiling nod and flicked the horse. She was not the messenger.

Hetty sank back to her work, and knit with trembling fingers. The forenoon wore on. It was Candlemas, and cloudy, and she remembered that the badger would not go back into his hole. There would be an early spring. Then grief caught her again by the throat, at the thought that spring might come, and summer greaten, but she was a stricken woman whose joy would not return. She rose from her chair and called out passionately,--

"Only one flower, jest one sprig o' suthin', an' I'll be contented!"

That day she had no dinner. She made it ready, with a scrupulous exactitude, but she could not eat. She went back to her post at the window. Nobody went by. Of all the neighbors who might have driven to market, not one appeared. Life itself seemed to be stricken from her world. At four o'clock she caught her shawl from its nail, and ran across the field to Lucy. Both sisters were at home, in the still tranquillity of their pursuits, Lucy knitting and Caroline binding shoes. Hetty came in upon them as if a wind had blown her.

"Law me!" said Caroline, looking up. "Anything happened?"

"No," said Hetty, "nothin' 's happened. I don't know as 't ever will."

She sat down and talked recklessly about nothing. A calla bud, yesterday a roll of white, had opened, and the sun lay in its heart. Hetty set her lips grimly, and refused to look at it. Yet, as her voice rang on, the feverish will within her kept telling her what she might say. She might ask for the well-being of the slip set out yesterday, or she might even venture, "I should think you'd move your calla out o' the sun. Won't it wilt the bloom?" Then Lucy might tell Caroline to snip off the bloom and give it to her. But no one spoke of plants. Her breath quickened chokingly, and her heart swelled and made her sick. Suddenly she rose and threw her shawl about her in wild haste.

"I must go," she trembled; but at the door Lucy stayed her.

"Hetty," she called. Her voice faltered, and her eyes looked soft under wistful brows. "Hetty!"

Hetty was waiting, in a tremor of suspense.

"Well," she answered, her voice beating upon the word. "What is it?"

Still Lucy spoke with diffidence, as she always did when she touched upon her faith.

"I was only thinkin'--I dunno 's I can tell you, Hetty--but what you said yesterday, you know, about not believin' there's any God--I was goin' to ask you who you think made the trees an' flowers."

Hetty did not answer. She stood there, her hands trembling underneath her shawl. She gripped them, one upon the other, to keep from stretching them for alms.

"Well," she answered harshly. "Well!"

"Well," said Lucy gently, "that's all."

Hetty laughed out stridently.

"I'm goin' over to Mis' Flood's," said she, her hand upon the latch.

"They've driv' over to Fairfax to spend the day," volunteered Caroline. "Better by half set here."

"Then I'm goin' over to Ballard's." She fled down the road so fast that Caroline, watching her compassionately, remarked that she "looked, as if she's sent for," and Lucy said, like a charm, a phrase of the Lord's Prayer.

Hetty looked up at the Floods' and groaned, remembering there were plants within. She spoke aloud, satirically:--

"Mebbe I could be the instrument o' the Lord. Mebbe if I climbed into the winder, an' stole a bloom, I could say He give it to me."

But she went on, and hurried up the path to the little one-story house where the Ballards lived. Grandsir was by the fire, pounding walnuts in a little wooden mortar, to make a paste for his toothless jaws, and little 'Melia, a bowl of nuts before her, sat in a high chair at the table, lost in reckless greed. Her doll, forgotten, lay across a corner of the table, in limp abandon, the buttonholed eyes staring nowhere. Grandsir spoke wheezingly:--

"We're keepin' house, 'Melia an' me. We thought we'd crack us a few nuts. Help yourself, Hetty."

'Melia lifted her bowl with two fat hands, and held it out, tiltingly. Her round blue eyes shone in a painstaking hospitality. She was a good little 'Melia.

"No, dear, you set it down. I don't want none," said Hetty tenderly. She steadied the bowl on its way back, and 'Melia, relinquishing the claims of entertainment, picked into her small mouth with a swift avidity.

"Clever little creatur'!" Hetty continued, in a frank aside.

But Grandsir had not heard.

"How old was Willard?" he inquired, pausing to test the mass his mortar held.

The tears came into her eyes.

"Thirty-four," she answered.

"How old?"

After she had repeated it, 'Melia turned suddenly, and made a solemn statement.

"I picked off my gloxinias and gave 'em all to Willard." She lisped on the name, and made it a funny flower.

Hetty was trembling.

"Yes, dear, yes," she responded prayerfully. "They were real handsome blooms. I was obleeged to ye." She wondered if the lisping mouth would say, "There's another one open," and the fat hand pluck it for her. She shut her lips and tried to seal her mind, lest the child should be prompted and the test should fail.

"I dunno 's I remember what year Willard's father died?" Grandsir was inquiring.

"O Lord!" breathed Hetty, "I can't bear no more."

She threw her shawl over her head, and hurried out.

"Come again," the childish voice called after her.

Grandsir had begun to eat his nuts. He scarcely knew she had been there.

Hetty went swiftly homeward through the dusk. The damp air was clogging to the breath, and for a moment her warm kitchen seemed a refuge to her. But only for a moment. It was very still.

"I'll give it up," she said. "There's flowers in the world, an' not one for me. I might 'a' had 'em if He'd took the trouble to send. That proves it. There ain't anybody to send,--nor care."

She walked about in a grim scorn of everything: the world, the way it was made, and herself for trusting it. When she had made a cup of tea and broken bread, the warmth came back to her chilled heart, and suddenly her scorn turned against herself.

"I said I'd wait till twelve o'clock to-night," she owned. "I'm the one that's petered out. This is the last word I speak till arter twelve."

She fortified herself with stronger tea, and sat grimly down to knit. The minutes and the half-hours passed. She rose, from time to time, and fed the fire, and once, at eleven, when a cold rain began, she put her face to the pane.

"Dark as pitch!" she muttered. "If anybody's comin', they couldn't see their way."

Then she lighted another lamp and set it in the window. It was a quarter before twelve when her trembling hands failed her, and she laid down her knitting and walked to the front door. The northeast wind whipped her in the face, and she could hear the surf at Breakers' Edge. The pathway of light from the window lay upon a figure by the gate. A voice came out of the stillness. It was young and frank.

"I'm holdin' up your fence, to rest a spell. I've given my ankle a twist somehow."

Hetty ran out into the storm, and the wind lashed strands of hair into her eyes. She stretched a hand over the fence, and laid it on the man's shoulder.

"Who be you?" she demanded.

He laughed.

"I'll tell you, if you won't bat me for it. I'm your own nephew, near as I can make out."

"Susan's son?"

"Yes. Much as my life's worth, ain't it? Never saw anything like you an' mother when you get fightin',--reg'lar old barnyard fowls."

She gripped his shoulder tightly. Her voice had a sob in it, and a prayer.

"You got anything for me?"

He answered wonderingly.

"Why, no, I don't know 's I have. My ankle's busted, that's all. I guess I can crawl along in a minute."

She remembered how fast the clock was getting on toward midnight, and spoke in dull civility.

"You come in. I'll bandage ye up. Mebbe 'twill save ye a sprain."

Later, when he was by the fire and she had done skillful work with water and cotton cloth, and the pain would let him, he looked at her again.

"You an' mother ain't no more alike than a black an' a maltee," he said. "Hullo! what you cryin' for?"

The tears were splashing her swift hands.

"I dunno," she answered shortly. "Yes, I do, too. You speak some like Willard."

The clock was striking two when she went to bed, and she slept at once. It was necessary, she told herself. There was a man in the west room, and his ankle was hurt, and she must get up early to call the doctor.

The next day and the next went like moments of a familiar dream. The doctor came, and the boy--he was twenty-six, but he seemed only a boy--joked while he winced, and owned he had nothing to do, and could easily lie still a spell, if aunt Het would keep him. She was sorry over the hurt, and, knowing no other compensation for a man's idleness, began to cook delicate things for his eating. He laughed at everything, even at her when she was too solicitous. But he was sorry for her, and when she spoke of Willard his face softened. She thought sometimes of what she had heard about him before he came; and one April day, when they were out in the yard together, he leaning on his cane and she sweeping the grass, she spoke involuntarily:--

"I can't hardly believe it."

"What?" he asked.

"Folks said"--she hesitated--"folks said you was a drinkin' man."

He laughed out.

"I did get overtaken," he owned. "I was awful discouraged, the night I struck here. I didn't care whether school kept or not. But 'twas Lew Parker's whiskey," he added, twinkling at her. "That whiskey'd poison a rat."

She paused, with a handful of chips gathered from the clean grass.

"What was you discouraged about?" she asked kindly.

"Well,"--he hesitated,--"I may as well tell you. I've invented somethin'. It goes onto a reaper. Mother never believed in it, an' she turned me down. So I came East. I couldn't get anybody to look at it, an' I was pretty blue. Then the same day I busted my ankle I heard from another man, an' he'll buy it an' take all the risk, an'--George! I guess mother'll sing small when Johnnie comes marchin' home!"

He looked so strong and full of hope that her own sorrow cried, and her face worked piteously.

"You goin' back?" she faltered.

"Sometime, aunt Het. 'Long towards fall, maybe, to get things into shape. Then I'm comin' back again, to put it through. Who's that?"

It was a neighbor, stopping his slumberous horse to leave a letter.

"That's Susan's hand," said Hetty, as she gave it to him.

He read it and laughed a little. His eyes were moist.

"See here, aunt Het," he said, "mother's had a change of heart because I busted my ankle an' you took care of me an' all,--an' look here! she says she wants you should use the long pastur'."

Hetty dropped her apron and the chips it held. She stood silent for a moment, looking out over the meadow and wishing Willard knew. Then she said practically,--

"Soon 's your ankle'll bear ye, we'll poke down there an' see how things seem."

In a week's time they went slowly down to look over the fences, preparatory to turning in the cow. Hetty glanced at the sky, with its fleece of flying cloud, and then at the grass, so bright that the eyes marveled at it. The old ache was keen within her. The earth bereft of her son would never be the same earth again, but some homely comforting had reached her with the springing of the leaf. She looked at the boy by her side. He was a pretty boy, she thought, and she was glad Susan had him. And suddenly it came to her that he had been lent her for a little while, and she was glad of that, too. His hurt had kept her busy. His ways about the house, even the careless ones, had strengthened the grief in her, but in a human, poignant way that had no bitterness.

They went about, testing the fence-lengths, and then, before they left the pasture, stood, by according impulse, and looked back into its trembling green. The boy had let down the bars, but he was loath to go.

"Stop a minute," he said, pointing to an upland bank where the sun lay warm. "I'm tired."

"Lazy, more like," said Hetty. But he knew she said it fondly.

He lay down at full length, and she sank stiffly on the bank and leaned her elbow there. She looked at the sky and then at the bank. It was blue with violets. There were so many of them that, as they traveled up the sod, they made a purple stain.

"Well, aunt Het," said he, "you've got the pastur'."

She nodded.

"Don't make much difference how long you wait," he continued, "if it comes at last." He was thinking of his patent, and Hetty knew it.

"Mebbe we can't have things when we expect to," she answered comprehendingly. "Still Lucy's great on that. 'Don't do no good to set up your Ebenezer,' says she. 'You got to wait for things to grow.' Lucy's dretful pious." She passed her brown hands over the violet heads, as gently as a breeze, caressing but not bending them. "I dunno 's ever I see so many vi'lets afore."

"Like 'em, aunt Het?" he asked her kindly.

"I guess I do!" but as she spoke, her eyes widened in awe and wonder. "My Lord!" she breathed. "They're flowers."

The boy laughed.

"What'd you think they were?" he asked, with the same indulgent interest. "Herd's grass?"

He turned over and buried his sleepy visage in the new leaves. But Hetty was communing with herself. Her old face had a look of hushed solemnity. Her eyes were lighted from within.

"Sure enough," she murmured reverently. "They're flowers."

GARDENER JIM

"Jim!" called Mrs. Marshall, as the old man, carrying a basket in one hand and a spade in the other, was trudging steadily by. His blue overalls and jumper were threadbare under the soft brown they had achieved through his strenuous kneeling and the general intimacy of weeds and sod. He had a curious neutrality of expression--perhaps an indifference to what his blue eyes fell upon, save when they looked out from under their rugged brows at the growing things he tended. Then the lines about them multiplied and deepened, and his face took on new life.

Mrs. Marshall, the large lady at the gate, splendidly starched in her afternoon calico, regarded him without personal interest. He was merely an old resident likely to clear up a matter that had been blurred during her years of absence in the West. Jim's eyes traveled past her to the garden in the rear of the house, where yellow flower-de-luce was beginning to blow.

"They'd ought to put some muck on them pinies last fall," said he, in a soft voice which his gnarled aspect had not foretold.

"Now you stop thinkin' gardins for a minute an' pay some heed to me," said Mrs. Marshall. "How was I goin' to look out for the pinies, when I only come into the property this spring? Uncle'd ha' seen 'em mowed down for fodder before he'd ha' let you or anybody else poke round over anything 'twas his. But what I want to know is--what was 't the Miller twins had their quarrel about, all them years ago?"

Jim answered without hesitation or interest: "'Twas about a man. They both on 'em set by one man, an' he led 'em on. He made trouble betwixt 'em. 'Twas thirty year ago an' more."

"An' they ain't spoke sence! My! what fools anybody can make of themselves over a man! He's dead now, ain't he?"

"I dunno," said Jim. Abstraction had settled upon him. "Say, Mis' Marshall, what if I should drop in an' 'tend to them pinies?"

"Fush on the pinies!" said Mrs. Marshall heartily. "You can, if 't'll be any comfort to ye. 'Twas they that made me think o' the Miller twins. Husband never got over talkin' about their pinies. I'd ruther have a good head o' lettuce than all the pinies that ever blowed."

Jim dropped his traps, opened the gate, walked past her without a word, and began a professional examination of the garden-beds. When he came to a neglected line of box, he made a sympathetic clucking of the tongue, and before a rosebush, coming out in meagre leafage, he stayed a long time.

"Too bad!" he said, as if the bush appealed to him for comfort. "Too bad!"

Mrs. Marshall had gone contentedly back to her sewing by the window, and a cautious voice challenged her from the bedroom, where her daughter, Lily, was changing her dress.

"Well," said Lily, "I guess you've done it this time. Didn't you know 'twas Jim's wife the man run off with? Well, it was."

Mrs. Marshall paused in her work.

"Well," said she, "I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I believe husband did use to say so. I ain't thought of it for years. How'd you find out so much?"

"I guess I don't have to be in a place long without hearin' all there is to hear," said Lily, coming out in her crisp pink muslin. "Here, you hook me up. Why, mother, he's Wilfred's own uncle! Wilfred told me. He said his uncle never'd been the same man since his wife run away."

Jim was wandering back to the road, deflected now and then by some starveling plant.

"Anything you want to do," called Mrs. Marshall, with a compensatory impulse, "you're welcome to. I may put in a few seeds."

Jim stood there, shaking his head in great dissatisfaction.

"It wouldn't ha' done a mite o' good for me to come here while he was alive," he said, as if he accounted to himself for that grievous lapse. "He'd ha' turned me out, neck an' crop, if I'd laid a finger on it."

"Well, you come when you can," said Mrs. Marshall. She was benevolently willing to fall in with Gardener Jim's peculiarities, because, being love-cracked, he had no particular occupation save this self-chosen one. "What you s'pose I said to the new minister about you, Jim?" she continued kindly.

"Dunno," returned Jim, in his soft voice. "Dunno."

"Well, he says to me, 'I never see such a lot o' nice gardins as there is round here.' 'Don't you know the reason?' says I. 'Why, Gardener Jim goes round an' takes care of 'em without money an' without price.' Wake up, Jim. That's what I said."

The look of response had vanished from his face. He had taken a knife from his pocket and was clipping a dead branch from the prairie queen at the window. When the deed had been done with great nicety, he closed the knife, returned it to his pocket, and took his way silently out of the yard. Mrs. Marshall, glancing up from her sewing, saw him again trudging toward his lonely home.

When Jim went along like that, his head bent and his eyes fixed upon the ground, people often wondered whether he was thinking of anything at all, or whether such intentness did betoken a grave preoccupation. Sometimes they tested him. "What you thinkin' about, Jim?" one would ask him, when they met upon the road; but Jim never replied in any illuminating way. If he answered at all, it was only to query, "How's your gardin?" and then, as soon as the response was given, to nod and hurry on again. If the garden was reported as not doing very well, Jim was there next morning, like the family doctor.

To-day, when he reached the cross-road leading to his little black house, he paused a moment, as if he were working out something and must wait for the answer. Then he continued on the way he had been going, and a quarter of a mile farther on stopped before a great house of a dull and time-worn yellow, where, in the corresponding front window of the upper chambers, two women sat, each in her own solitary state, binding shoes. These were the Miller twins. Sophy saw him as he opened the side gate and went along her path to the back of the house. She rose, tossed her work on the table, and ran into an overlooking chamber to watch him. Sophy had been the pretty one of the family. Now her fair face had broadened, her blond hair showed a wide track at the parting, and her mouth dropped at the corners; but her faded blue eyes still looked wistfully through their glasses. They had a grave simplicity, like that of a child.

As she watched Gardener Jim, a frown came upon her forehead. "What under heavens?" she muttered; and then she saw. Jim was examining her neglected garden, and the wonder was not in that. It was that after all these years, when he had worked for other people, suddenly he had come to her. A moment after, he looked up, to find her at his elbow.

"I should think anybody'd be ashamed," said he, "to let things go to wrack an' ruin this way." The paths were thick with weeds. Faithful sweet-william and phlox had evidently struggled for years and barely held their own against misfortune, and bouncing-bet was thrifty. But others of the loved in old-time gardens had starved and died. "You used to have the handsomest canterbury-bells anywhere round," said Jim. He spoke seriously, as if it pained him to find things at such a pass. "Don't look as if you'd sowed a seed sence nobody knows when. Where's your pinies?"

Sophy turned toward the high board-fence that ran from the exact middle of the house down through the garden.

"Over there," she said.

"Over where?"

"In her part."

"Her part o' the place? What you been an' cut it up this way for?"

If Gardener Jim had ever heard of the feud that separated the two sisters he had apparently forgotten it, and Sophy, knowing his reputed state, felt no surprise.

"She lives in t'other part o' the house," she vouchsafed cautiously.

"Well," he grumbled, "that's no reason, as I see, why you should ha' gone an' sliced up the gardin." He gave one more estimating look at the forlorn waste. "Well, I'll be over in the mornin'."

"You needn't," Sophy called after him. "I don't want any gardenin' done," she cried the louder; but Jim paid no attention.

He was at the other gate now, leading into Eliza's grounds, and there he found Eliza waiting for him. She looked older than her sister. She was thinner, her eyes were sharp, and her chin was square and firm.

"Well," said she, "what is it?"

Jim hardly seemed to see her.

"Where's your pinies?" he asked.

Eliza resolutely refrained from looking at the grassy plot where they sat in their neglected state.

"I dunno 's they're comin' up this year," she returned speciously.

"Yes, they be, too," said Jim, with vigor. He had gone straight over to the spot where the juicy red-brown stalks were pushing up among the grass. "Well, if I don't git round this fall an' feed up them pinies I sha'n't have a wink o' sleep all winter."

Eliza had followed him, and now she stood regarding the peonies absently and with almost a wistful curiosity, as if they recalled something she had long forgotten to enjoy.

"I ain't done much in the gardin for a good many year," she said. "I got kinder stiff, an' then I give it up. It's too late to do anything to 'em now, I s'pose?"

"No, it ain't neither," said Jim. "I'll be round to-morrer an' git the grass out an' put suthin' on to make 'em grow. Trouble is, 'tain't so easy to do it in spring as 'tis in the fall, them stalks are so brittle. Don't you touch 'em, now. I'll see to 'em myself."

Eliza followed him to the gate. She was curious, and yet she hardly knew how to put her question with the indifference she sought. As he was taking up his spade, she found the words:--

"What's started you up to come here arter so many years?"

His eyes dropped. The shaggy brows met over them in a defense.

"I kinder thought I would," said he. Then he went soberly back to his own house.