Chapter 15

"I understand it now," she went on rapidly. "I know just what I feel and think, and I thank my God it ain't too late. Don't you see I can't bear to have your clothes hang where his belong? Don't you see 'twould kill me to have you sit in his chair? When I find puss there, it's a comfort. If 'twas you--I don't know but I might do you a mischief!" Her voice sank, in awe of herself and her own capacity for passionate emotion.

Laurie Morse had much swift understanding of the human heart. His own nature partook of the feminine, and he shared its intuitions and its fears.

"I never should lay that up against you, Milly," he said kindly. "But we wouldn't have these things. You'd come to Saltash with me, and we'd furnish all new."

"Not have these things!" called Amelia, with a ringing note of dismay,--"not have these things he set by as he did his life! Why, what do you think I'm made of, after fifteen years? What did I think I was made of, even to guess I could? You don't know what women are like, Laurie Morse,--you don't know!"

She broke down in piteous weeping. Even then it seemed to her that it would be good to find herself comforted with warm human sympathy; but not a thought of its possibility remained in her mind. She saw the boundaries beyond which she must not pass. Though the desert were arid on this side, it was her desert, and there in her tent must she abide. She began speaking again between sobbing breaths:--

"I did have a dull life. I used up all my young days doin' the same things over and over, when I wanted somethin' different. It _was_ dull; but if I could have it all over again, I'd work my fingers to the bone. I don't know how it would have been if you and I'd come together then, and had it all as we planned; but now I'm a different woman. I can't any more go back than you could turn Sudleigh River, and coax it to run uphill. I don't know whether 't was meant my life should make me a different woman; but I _am_ different, and such as I am, I'm his woman. Yes, till I die, till I'm laid in the ground 'longside of him!" Her voice had an assured ring of triumph, as if she were taking again an indissoluble marriage oath.

Laurie had grown very pale. There were forlorn hollows under his eyes; now he looked twice his age.

"I didn't suppose you kept a place for me," he said, with an unconscious dignity. "That wouldn't have been right, and him alive. And I didn't wait for dead men's shoes. But somehow I thought there was something between you and me that couldn't be outlived."

Amelia looked at him with a frank sweetness which transfigured her face into spiritual beauty.

"I thought so, too," she answered, with that simplicity ever attending our approximation to the truth, "I never once said it to myself; but all this year, 'way down in my heart, I knew you'd come back. And I wanted you to come. I guess I'd got it all planned out how we'd make up for what we'd lost, and build up a new life. But so far as I go, I guess I didn't lose by what I've lived through. I guess I gained somethin' I'd sooner give up my life than even lose the memory of."

So absorbed was she in her own spiritual inheritance that she quite forgot his pain. She gazed past him with an unseeing look; and striving to meet and recall it, he faced the vision of their divided lives. To-morrow Amelia would remember his loss and mourn over it with maternal pangs; to-night she was oblivious of all but her own. Great human experiences are costly things; they demand sacrifice, not only of ourselves, but of those who are near us. The room was intolerable to Laurie. He took his hat and coat, and hurried out. Amelia heard the dragging door closed behind him. She realized, with the numbness born of supreme emotion, that he was putting on his coat outside in the cold; and she did not mind. The bells stirred, and went clanging away. Then she drew a long breath, and bowed her head on her hands in an acquiescence that was like prayer.

It seemed a long time to Amelia before she awoke again to temporal things. She rose, smiling, to her feet, and looked about her as if her eyes caressed every corner of the homely room. She picked up puss in a round, comfortable ball, and carried her back to the hearth-side chair; there she stroked her until her touchy ladyship had settled down again to purring content. Then Amelia, still smiling, and with an absent look, as if her mind wandered through lovely possibilities of a sort which can never be undone, drew forth the spinning-wheel, and fitted a roll to the spindle. She began stepping back and forth as if she moved to the measure of an unheard song, and the pleasant hum of her spinning broke delicately upon the ear. It seemed to waken all the room into new vibrations of life. The clock ticked with an assured peace, as if knowing it marked eternal hours. The flames waved softly upward without their former crackle and sheen; and the moving shadows were gentle and rhythmic ones come to keep the soul company. Amelia felt her thread lovingly.

"I guess I'll dye it blue," she said, with a tenderness great enough to compass inanimate things. "He always set by blue, didn't he, puss?"

THE FLAT-IRON LOT

The fields were turning brown, and in the dusty gray of the roadside, closed gentians gloomed, and the aster burned like a purple star. It was the finest autumn for many years. People said, with every clear day, "Now this must be a weather-breeder;" but still the storm delayed. Then they anxiously scanned the heavens, as if, weeks beforehand, the signs of the time might be written there; for this was the fall of all others when wind and sky should be kind to Tiverton. She was going to celebrate her two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and she was big with the importance of it.

On a still afternoon, over three weeks before that happy day, a slender old man walked erectly along the country road. He carried a cane over his shoulder, and, slung upon it, a small black leather bag, bearing the words, painted in careful letters, "Clocks repaired by N. Oldfield." As he went on, he cast a glance, now and then, to either side, from challenging blue eyes, strong yet in the indomitable quality of youth. He knew every varying step of the road, and could have numbered, from memory, the trees and bushes that fringed its length; and now, after a week's absence, he swept the landscape with the air of a manorial lord, to see what changes might have slipped in unawares. At one point, a flat triangular stone had been tilted up on edge, and an unpracticed hand had scrawled on it, in chalk, "4 M to Sudleigh." The old man stopped, took the bag from his shoulder, and laid it tenderly on a stone of the wall. Then, with straining hands, he pulled the rock down into the worn spot where it had lain, and gave a sigh of relief when it settled into its accustomed place, and the tall grass received it tremulously. Now he opened his bag, took from it a cloth, carefully folded, and rubbed the rock until those defiling chalk marks were partially effaced.

"Little varmints!" he said, apostrophizing the absent school children who had wrought the deed. "Can't they let nothin' alone?" He took up his bag, and went on.

Nicholas Oldfield, as he walked the road that day, was a familiar figure to all the county round. He had a smooth, carefully shaven face, with a fine outline of nose and chin, and his straight gray hair shone from faithful brushing. He was almost aggressively clean. Even his blue eyes had the appearance of having just been washed, like a spring day after a shower. It was a frequent remark that he looked as if he had come out of a bandbox; and one critic even went so far as to assert that on Sundays he sandpapered his eyes and gave a little extra polish to his bones. But these were calumnies; though to-day his suit of home-made blue was quite speckless, and the checked gingham neckerchief, which made his ordinary wear, still kept its stiff, starched creases.

"Dirt don't stick to _you_, Mr. Oldfield," once said a seeking widow. "Your washing can't be much. I guess anybody'd be glad to undertake it for you." Mr. Oldfield nodded gravely, as one receiving the tribute which was justly his, and continued to do his washing himself.

As he walked the dusty road, bearing his little bag, so he had walked it for years, sometimes within a few miles of home, and again at the extreme limit of the county edge. The clocks of the region were all his clients, some regarded with compassion ("ramshackle things" that needed perpetual tinkering) and others with a holy awe. "The only thing Nicholas Oldfield bows the knee before is a double-back-action clock a thousand years old," said Brad Freeman, the regardless. "That's how he reads Ancient of Days." The justice of the remark was acknowledged, though, as touching Mr. Oldfield, it was felt to be striking rather too keenly at the root of things. For Nicholas Oldfield was looked upon with a respect not so much inspired by his outward circumstances as by his method of taking them. There are, indeed, ways and ways among us who serve the public. When Tom O'Neil went round peddling essences, children saw him from afar, ran to meet him, and, falling on his pack, besought him for "two-three-drops-o'-c'logne" with such fervor that the mothers had to haul them off by main force, in order themselves to approach his redolence; but when the clock-mender appeared, with his little bag, propriety walked before him, and the naughtiest scion of the flock would come soberly in, to announce:--

"Mother, here's Mr. Oldfield."

It is true that this little old man did exemplify the dignity and restraint of life to such a degree that, had it not been for his one colossal weakness, the town might have condemned him, in good old Athenian fashion. Clock-mending was a legitimate industry; but there were those who felt it to be, in his case, a mere pretext for nosing round and identifying ridiculous old things which nobody prized until Nicholas Oldfield told them it was conformable so to do. Some believed him and some did not; but it was known that a MacDonough's Victory tea-set drove him to an almost outspoken rapture, and that the mere mention of the Bay Psalm Book (a copy of which he sought with the haggard fervor of one who worships but has ceased to hope) was enough to make him "wild as a hawk." Old papers, too, drew him by their very mildew; and when his townsfolk were in danger of respecting him too tediously, they recalled these amiable puerilities, drew a breath of relief, and marked his value down.

Many facts in his life were not in the least understood, because he never saw the possibility of talking about them. For example, when at the marriage of his son, Young Nick, he made over the farm, and kept his own residence in the little gambrel-roofed house where he had been born, and his father and grandfather before him, the act was, for a time, regarded somewhat gloomily by the public at large. There were Young Nick and his Hattie, living in the big new house, with its spacious piazza and cool green blinds; there the two daughters were born and bred, and the elder of them was married. The new house had its hired girl and man; and meantime the other Nicholas (nobody ever dreamed of calling him Old Nick) was cooking his own meals, and even, of a Saturday, scouring his kitchen floor. It was easy to see in him the pathetic symbol of a bygone generation relegated to the past. A little wave of sympathy crept to his very feet, and then, finding itself unnoted, ebbed away again. Only one village censor dared speak, saying slyly to Young Nick's Hattie:--

"Ain't no room for grandpa in the new house, is there?"

Hattie opened her eyes wide at this discovery, though now she realized that echoes of a like benevolence had reached her ears before. She went home very early from the quilting, and that night she said to her husband, as they sat on the doorstone, waiting for the milk to cool:--

"Nicholas, little things I've got hold of, first an' last, make me conclude folks pity father. Do you s'pose they do?"

Young Nick selected a fat plantain spike, and began stripping the seeds.

"Well, I dunno what for," said he, after consideration. "Father seems to be pretty rugged."

Hattie was one of those who find no quicker remedy than that of plentiful speech; and later in the evening, she sped over to the little house, across the dewy orchard. Mr. Oldfield had come home only that afternoon, and now he had drawn up at his kitchen table, which was covered by a hand-woven cloth, beautifully ironed, and set with old-fashioned dishes. He had hot biscuits and apple-pie, and the odor of them rose soothingly to Hattie's nostrils, dissipating, for a moment, her consciousness of tragedy and wrong. A man could not be quite forlorn who cooked such "victuals," and sat before them so serenely.

"See here, father," said she, with the desperation of speaking her mind for the first time to one from whom she had hitherto kept awesomely remote; "when we moved into the new house, I dunno's there was any talk about your comin', too. I guess it never entered into our heads you'd do anything but to stick to the old place. An' now, after it's all past an' gone, the neighbors say"--

Nicholas Oldfield had been smiling his slight, dry smile. At this point, he took up a knife, and cut a careful triangle of pie. He did all these things as if each one were very important.

"Here, Hattie," Said he, "you taste o' this dried apple. I put a mite o' lemon in."

Hattie, somehow abashed by the mental impact of the little man, ate her pie meekly, and thenceforth waived the larger issue. All the same, she knew the neighbors "pitied father," and that they would continue to pity him so long as he lived alone in the little peaceful house, doing his own washing and making his own pie.

To-night was a duplication of many another when Nicholas Oldfield had turned the corner and come in sight of his own home; but often as it had been repeated, the experience was never the same. Some would have named his springing emotion delight; but it neither quickened his pace nor made him draw his breath the faster. Perhaps he even walked a little more slowly, to enjoy the taste, for he was a saving man. There was the little house, white as paint could make it, and snug in bowering foliage. He noted, with an approving eye, that the dahlias in the front yard, set in stiff nodding rows, were holding their own bravely against the dry fall weather, and that the asters were blooming profusely, purple and pink. A rare softness came over his features when he stepped into the yard; and though he examined the roof critically in passing, it was with the eye of love. He fitted the key in the lock; the sound of its turning made music in his ears, and, setting his foot upon the sill, he was a man for whom that little was enough. Nicholas Oldfield was at home.

He laid down his bag, and went, without an instant's pause, straight through to the sitting-room, and stood before the tall eight-day clock. He put his hand on the woodwork, as if it might have been the shoulder of a friend, and looked up understandingly in its face.

"Well, here we be," said he. "You'd ha' hil' out till mornin', though."

For wherever he might travel, he always made it a point to be home in time to wind the clocks; and however early he might hurry away again, under stress of some antiquarian impulse, they were left alive and pulsing behind him. There was one in each room, besides the tall eight-day in the parlor, and they were all soft-voiced and leisurely, reminiscent of another age than ours. Though three of them had been inherited, it almost seemed as if Nicholas must have selected the entire company, so harmonious were they, so serenely fitted to the calm decorum of his own desires.

In half an hour he had accomplished many things, and his fire sent a spiral breath toward heaven. The dark old kitchen lay open, door and window, to the still opulent sun, and from the pantry and a corner cupboard came gleams of color, to delight the eye. Here were riches, indeed: old India china, an unbroken set of Sheltered Peasant, and, on the top shelf, little mugs and cups of a pink lustre, soft and sweet as flowers. Many a collector had wooed Nicholas Oldfield to part with his china (for the fame of it had spread afar,) but his only response to solicitation was to open the doors more widely on his treasures, remarking, without emphasis:--

"I guess they might as well stay where they be."

So passive was he, that many among merchants judged they had impressed him, and returned again and again to the charge; but when they found always the same imperturbable front, the same mild neutrality of demeanor, they melted sadly away, and were seen no more, leaving their places to be taken by others equally hopeful and as sure to be betrayed.

One creature only was capable of rousing Nicholas Oldfield from that calm wherein he went ticking on through life. She it was who, by some natal likeness, understood him wholly; and to-night, just as he was sitting down to his supper of "cream o' tartar" biscuits and smoking tea, her clear voice broke upon his solitude.

"Gran'ther," called Mary Oldfield from the door, "mother says, 'Won't you come over to supper?' She saw your smoke."

Nicholas pushed back his chair a little; he felt himself completed.

"You had yours?" he asked, in his usual even tones.

"No, I waited for you."

"Then you come right in an' git it. Take your mug--here, I'll reach it down for ye--an' there's the Good-Girl plate."

Mary Oldfield was a tall, pleasant looking maid of sixteen, and standing quietly by, while her grandfather got out her own plate and mug, she was an amazingly faithful copy of him. They smiled a little at each other, in sitting down, but there was no closer greeting between them. They were exceedingly well content to be together again, and this was so simple and natural a state that there was nothing to say about it. Only Nicholas looked at her from time to time--her capable brown hands and careful braids of hair,--and nodded briefly, as he had a way of nodding at his clocks.

"You know what I told you, Mary, about the Flat-Iron Lot?" he asked, while Mary buttered her biscuit.

She looked at him in assent.

"Well, I've proved it."

"You don't say!"

Mary had certain antique methods of speech, which the new-fangled school teacher, not liking to pronounce them vulgar, had tactfully dubbed "obsolete." "If we used 'em all the time they wouldn't get obsolete, would they?" asked Mary; and the school teacher, being a logical person, made no answer. So Mary went on plying them with a conscientious calmness like one determined to keep a precious and misprized metal in circulation. She even called Nicholas gran'ther, because he liked it, and because he had called his own grandfather so.

"Ye see," said Nicholas, "the fust rec'ids were missin'. 'Burnt up!' says that town clerk over to Sudleigh. 'Burnt when the old meetin'-house ketched fire, arter the Injun raid.' 'Burnt up!' thinks I. 'The cat's foot! I guess so, when the communion service was carried over fifteen mile an' left in a potato sullar.' So I says to myself, 'What become o' that fust communion set?' Why, before the meetin'-house was repaired, they all rode over to what's now Saltash, to worship in Square Billin's's kitchen. Now, when Square Billin's died of a fever, that same winter, they hove all his books into that old lumber-room over Sudleigh court-house. So, when I was fixin' up the court-house clock, t'other day, I clim' up to that room, an' shet myself in there. An', Mary, I found them rec'ids!" He looked at her with that complete and awe-stricken triumph which nobody else had ever seen upon his face. Her own reflected it.

"Where are they, gran'ther?" asked Mary. But she was the more excited; she could only whisper.

"They're loose sheets o' paper," returned Nicholas, "an' _they 're in my bag_!"

Mary made an involuntary movement toward the bag, which lay, innocently secretive, on a neighboring chair. Even its advertising legend had a knowing look. Nicholas followed her glance.

"No," said he firmly, "not now. We'll read 'em all over this evenin', when I've done the dishes. But, Mary, I'll tell ye this much: it's got the whole story of the settlers comin' into town, an' which way they come, an' all about it, writ down by Simeon Gerry, the fust minister, the one that killed five Injuns, stoppin' to load an' fire, an' then opened on the rest with bilin' fat. An', Mary, the fust settler of all was Nicholas Oldfield, haulin' his wife on a kind of a drag made o' withes; an' the path they took led straight over our Flat-Iron Lot. An', Mary, 't was there they rested, an' offered up prayer to God."

"O my soul, gran'ther!" breathed Mary, clasping her little brown hands. "O my soul!" Her face grew curiously mature. It seemed to mirror his. She leaned forward, in a deadly earnestness. "Gran'ther," said she, "did they settle here first? Or--or was it Sudleigh?"

Now, indeed, was Nicholas Oldfield the herald of news good both to tell and hear.

"The fust settlement," said he, as if he read it from the book of fate, "was made in Tiverton, on the sixteenth day of the month; the second in Sudleigh, on the twenty-fifth."

"So, when you guessed at the date, and told parson to have the celebration then, you got it right?"

"I got it right," replied Nicholas quietly. "But pa'son shall see the rec'ids, an' I'll recommend him to put 'em under lock an' key."

The two sat there and looked at each other, with an outwelling of great content. Then Mary passed her mug, and while Nicholas filled it, he gave her an oft-repeated charge:--

"Don't you open your head now, Mary. All this is between you an' me. I'll just mention it to pa'son, an' make up my mind whether he sees the meanin' on't. But don't you say one word to your father an' mother. To them it don't signify."

Mary nodded wisely. She knew, with the philosophy of a much older experience, that she and gran'ther lived alone in a nest of kindly aliens. As if their mention evoked a foreign presence, her mother's voice sounded that instant from the door:--

"Mary, why under the sun didn't you come back? I sent word for you to run over with her, father, an' have some supper. Well, if you two ain't thick!".

"We're havin' a dish o' discourse," returned Nicholas quietly.

Young Nick's Hattie was forty-five, but she looked much younger. Extreme plumpness had insured her against wrinkles, and her light brown hair was banded smoothly back. Hattie's originality lay in a desire for color, and therein she overstepped the bounds of all decorum. It was customary to see her barred across with enormous plaids, or stripes going the broad way; and so long had she lived under such insignia that no one would have known her without them. She came in with soft, heavy footfalls, and sat down in the little rocking-chair at Mr. Oldfield's right hand. She smiled at him, somewhat nervously.

"Well, father," said she, "you got home!"

Nicholas helped himself to another half cup of tea, after holding the teapot tentatively across to Mary's mug.

"Yes," he answered, in his dry and gentle fashion, "I've got home."

Hattie began rocking, in a rapid staccato, to punctuate her speech.

"Well," she began, "I'll say my say an' done with it. There's goin' to be a town-meetin' to-night, an' Nicholas sent me over to mention it. 'Father'll want to be on hand,' says he."

Mr. Oldfield pushed back his cup, and then his chair. He bent his keen blue eyes upon her.

"Town meetin' this time o' year?" said he. "What for?"

"Oh, it's about the celebration. Old Mr. Eaton"--

"What Eaton?"

"William W."

"He that went away in war time, an' made money in wool? Old War-Wool Eaton?"

Nicholas nodded, at her assent, and his look blackened. He knew what was coming.