Chapter 9

"Say, Letty, wa'n't it about this kind o' weather the day we were married?"

But Letty gave a little cry, and pointed out a frail white butterfly on a mullein leaf. "See there, David! how cold he looks! I'd like to take him along. He'll freeze to-night." David forgot his question, and she was glad. Some inner voice was at her heart, warning her to leave the day unspoiled. Her joy lay in remembering; it seemed a small thing to her that he should forget.

"We've had a real good time," he said, as he gave her the basket at the kitchen door. "Now, as soon as thrashin' 's done, we'll go to Star Pond."

After supper they covered up the squashes, for fear of a frost; and then they stood for a moment in the field, and looked at the harvest moon, risen in a great effrontery of splendor.

"Letty," asked David suddenly, "shouldn't you like to put on your little ring? It's right here in my pocket."

"No! no!" said Letty hastily. "I never want to set eyes on it again."

"I guess I'll get you another one 't you could wear. I looked t'other day when I went to market; but there was so many I didn't das't to make a choice unless you was with me."

Letty clung to him passionately. "Oh, David," she cried, with a break in her voice, "I don't want any rings. I want just you."

David put out one hand and softly touched the little blue kerchief about her head. "Anyway," he said, "we won't have any more secrets from one another, will we?"

Letty gave a little start, and she caught her breath before answering:--

"No, we won't--not unless they're nice ones!"

A LAST ASSEMBLING

This happened in what Dilly Joyce, in deference to a form of speech, was accustomed to call her young days; though really her spirit seemed to renew itself with every step, and her body was to the last a willing instrument. She lived in a happy completeness which allowed her to carry on the joys of youth into the maturity of years. But things did happen to her from twenty to thirty-five which could never happen again. When Dilly was a girl, she fell in love, and was very heartily and honestly loved back again. She had been born into such willing harmony with natural laws, that this in itself seemed to belong to her life. It partook rather of the faithfulness of the seasons than of human tragedy or strenuous overthrow. Even so early she felt great delight in natural things; and when her heart turned to Jethro Moore, she had no doubt whatever of the straightness of its path. She trusted all the primal instincts without knowing she trusted them. She was thirsty; here was water, and she drank. Jethro was a little older than she, the son of a minister in a neighboring town. His father had marked out his plan of life; but Jethro had had enough to do with the church on hot summer Sundays, when "fourthly" and "sixthly" lulled him into a pleasing coma, and when even the shimmer of Mrs. Chase's shot silk failed to awaken his deep eyes to their accustomed delight in fabric and color. To him, the church was a concrete and very dull institution: to his father, it was a city set on a hill, whence a shining path led direct to God's New Jerusalem. Therefore it was easy enough for the boy to say he preferred business, and that he wanted uncle Silas to take him into his upholstery shop; and he never, so long as he lived, understood his father's tragic silence over the choice. He had broken the succession in a line of priests; but it seemed to him that he had simply told what he wanted to do for a living. So he went away to the city, and news came flying back of his wonderful fitness for the trade. He understood colors, fabrics, design; he had been sent abroad for ideas, and finally he was dispatched to the Chicago house, to oversee the business there. Thus it was many years before Dilly met him again; but they remained honestly faithful, each from a lovely simplicity of nature, but a simplicity quite different in kind. Jethro did not grow rich very fast (uncle Silas saw to that), but he did prosper; and he was ready to marry his girl long before she owned herself ready to marry him. She took care of a succession of aged relatives, all afflicted by a strange and interesting diversity of trying diseases; and then, after the last death, she settled down, quite poor, in a little house on the Tiverton Road, and "went out nussin'," the profession for which her previous life had fitted her. With a careless generosity, she made over to her brother the old farmhouse where they were born, because he had a family and needed it. But he died, and was soon followed by his wife and child; and now Dilly was quite alone with the house and the family debts. The time had come, wrote Jethro, for them to marry. She was free, at last, and he had enough. Would she take him, now? Dilly answered quite frankly and from a serenity born of faith in the path before her and a certainty that no feet need slip. She was ready, she wrote. She hoped he was willing she should sell the old place, to pay Tom's debts. That would leave her without a cent; but since he was coming for her, and she needn't go to Chicago alone, she didn't know that there was anything to worry about. He would buy her ticket. There was an ineffable simplicity about Dilly. She had no respect whatever for money, save as a puzzling means to a few necessary ends. And now the place had been sold, and Jethro was coming in a month. Meanwhile Dilly was to pack up the few family effects she could afford to keep, and the rest would go by auction.

Little as she was accustomed to dread experiences which came in the inevitable order of nature, she did think of the last day and night in the old house as something of an ordeal. People felt that the human meant very little to Dilly; but that was not true. It was only true that she held herself remote from personal intimacies; but all the fine, invisible bonds of race and family took hold of her like irresistible factors, and welded her to the universe anew.

As she started out from her little house, this summer morning, and began her three-mile walk to the old homestead, she felt as if some solemn event in her life were about to happen; her heart beat higher, and brought about the suffocating feeling of a hand laid upon the throat. She was a slight creature, with a delicate face and fine black hair. Her slender body seemed all made for action, and the poise of an assured motion dwelt in it and wrapped about its angularity like a gracious charm. She was walking down a lane, her short skirts brushed by the morning dew. She chose to go 'cross lots, not because in this case it was nearer than the road, but because it seemed impossible to go another way. Yet never in her life had she seen less of the outward garment of things than she was seeing this morning. A flouting bobolink flew from stake to stake in front of her, and bubbled out in melody. She heard a scythe swishing in a neighboring field, and the musical call of the mowing-machine afar, and she did not look up. Dumb to the beautiful outer world, she was broad awake to human souls: the souls of the Joyces, alive so long before her and stretching back into an unknown past. They had lived, one after another, in the old house, since colonial times; and now, after this quiet act of a concluding drama, Dilly was going to lower the curtain, and sweep them from the stage.

Her mind was peopled with figures. She thought of Jethro, too. He seemed to be coming ever nearer and nearer. She could hear his tread marching into her life, and could see his face. It was very moving, as she remembered it. A long line of scholarly forbears had dowered him with a refinement and grace quite startling in this unornamented spot, and some old Acadian ancestor had lent him beauty. His eyes were dark, and they held an unfathomable melancholy. The line of his forehead and nose ran haughtily and yet delicate; and even after years of absence, Dilly sometimes caught her breath when she thought of the way his head was set upon his shoulders. She had never in her life seen a man or woman who was entirely beautiful, and he saturated her longing like a prodigal stream.

She was a little dazed when she climbed the low stone wall, crossed the road, and came into the grassy wilderness of the Joyce back yard. Nature had triumphed riotously, as she will when niggardly thrift is away. The grass lay rich and shining, lodged by last night's shower, and gate and cellar-case were choked by it. The cinnamon roses bloomed in a spicy hardiness of pink, and the gnarled apple-trees had shed their broken branches, and were covered with little green buttons of fruit. Dilly stopped to look about her, and her eyes filled. The tears were hot; they hurt her, and so recalled her to the needs of life.

"There!" she said, "I mustn't do so!"--and she walked straight forward through the open shed, and fitted her key in the lock. The door sagged; but she pushed it open and stepped in. The deserted kitchen lay there in desolate order, and the old Willard clock slept upon the wall. Dilly hastily pushed a chair before it (this was the only chair old Daniel Joyce would allow the children to climb in) and wound the clock. It began ticking slowly, with the old, remembered sound. Somehow it seemed beautiful to Dilly that the clock should speak with the voice of all those years agone; it was a kind of loyalty which appealed to the soul like a piercing miracle. Then she ran through to the sitting-room, and started the old eight-day in the corner; and the house breathed and was alive again. She threw open the windows, all save those on the Dilloway side (lest kindly neighbors should discover she was at home), and the soft rose-scented air flooded the rooms like an invisible presence, and bore out the smell of age upon gracious wings. Now, Dilly worked fast and steadily, lest some human thing should come upon her. She tied up bedclothes, and opened long-closed cupboards. She made careful piles of clothing from the attic; and finally, her mind a little tired, she sat down on the floor and began looking over papers and daguerreotypes from her father's desk. Just as she had lost herself in the ancient history of which they were the signs, there came a knock at the back door. So assured had become her idea of a continued housekeeping, that the summons did not seem in the least strange. The house lived again; it had thrown open its arms to human kind.

"Come in!" she called; and a light step sounded in the kitchen and crossed the sill. It was a man, dark-eyed and very handsome. "Oh!" murmured Dilly, catching her breath and holding both hands clasped upon the papers in her lap. "Jethro!"

The stranger was much moved, and his black eyes deepened. He looked at her kindly, perhaps lovingly, too. "Yes," he said, at last. "So you'd know me?"

Dilly got lightly up, and the papers fell about her in a shower; yet she made no motion toward him. "Oh, yes," she said softly, "I should know you. You ain't changed at all."

That was not true. He looked ten years older than his real age; yet time had only dowered him with a finer grace and charm. All the lines in his face were those of gentleness and truth. His mouth had the old delicate curves. One meeting him that day might have said, with a throb of involuntary homage, "How beautiful he must have been when he was young!" But to Dilly he bore even a more subtile distinction than in that far-away time; he had ripened into something harmonizing with her own years. He came forward a little, and held out both hands; but Dilly did not take them, and he dropped the left one. Then she laid her fingers lightly in his, and they greeted each other like old acquaintances. A flush rose in her smooth brown cheek. Her eyes grew bright with that startled questioning which is of the woods. He looked at her the more intently, and his breath quickened. She had none of the blossomy charm of more robust womanhood; but he recognized the old gypsy element which had once bewitched him, and felt he loved her still.

"Well," he said, and his voice shook a little, "are you glad to see me?"

Dilly moved back, and sat down in her mother's little sewing-chair by the desk. "I don't know as I can tell," she answered. "This is a strange day."

Jethro nodded. "I meant to surprise you," he said. "So I never wrote I was coming on so soon. I was real disappointed to find your house shut up; but the neighbors told me where you'd gone, and what you'd gone for. Then I walked over here."

Dilly's face brightened all over with a responsive smile. "Did you come through the woods?" she asked. "What made you?"

"Why, I knew you'd go that way," he answered. "I thought you'd get wool-gathering over some weed or another, and maybe I'd overtake you."

They both laughed, and the ice was broken. Dilly got briskly up and gathered a drawer-full of papers into her apron.

"I can't stop workin'," she said. "I want to fix it so's not to stay here more 'n one night. Now you talk! I know what these are. I can run 'em over an' listen too."

"I think 't was real good of you to turn in the place to Tom's folks," said Jethro, also seating himself, and, as Dilly saw with a start, as if it were an omen, in her father's great chair. "Not that you'll ever need it, Dilly. You won't want for a thing. I've done real well."

Dilly's long fingers assorted papers and laid them at either side, with a neat precision. She looked up at him then, and her eyes had again the quick, inquiring glance of some wild creature in a situation foreign to its habits.

"Well," she said, "well! I guess I don't resk anything. An' if I did--why, I'd resk it!"

Jethro bent forward a little. He was smiling, and Dilly met the glance, half fascinated. She wondered that she could forget his smile; and yet she had forgotten it. Like running water, it was never twice the same.

"Dilly," said he, much moved, "you'll have a good time from this out, if ever a woman did. You'll keep house in a brick block, where the cars run by your door, and you can hire two girls."

"Oh, my!" breathed Dilly. A quick look of trouble darkened her face, as a shadow sweeps across the field.

"What is it?" asked Jethro, in some alarm. "Don't you like what I said?"

Dilly smiled, though her eyes were still apprehensive.

"It ain't that," she answered slowly, striving in her turn to be kind. "Only I guess I never happened to think before just how 't would be. I never spec'lated much on keepin' house."

"But somebody'd have to keep it," said Jethro good-naturedly, smiling on her. "We can get good help. You'll like to have a real home table, and you can invite company every day, if you say so. I never was close, Dilly,--you know that. I sha'n't make you account for things."

Dilly got up, and, still holding her papers in her apron, walked swiftly to the window. There she stood, a moment, looking out into the orchard, where the grass lay tangled under the neglected, happy trees. Her eyes traveled mechanically from one to another. She knew them all. That was the "sopsyvine," its red fruitage fast coming on; there was the Porter she had seen her father graft; and down in the corner grew the August sweet. Life out there looked so still and sane and homely. She knew no city streets,--yet the thought of them sounded like a pursuit. She turned about, and came back to her chair.

"I guess I never dreamt how you lived, Jethro," she said gently. "But it don't make no matter. You're contented with it."

"I ain't a rich man," said Jethro, with some quiet pride; "but I've got enough. Yes, I like my business; and city life suits me. You'll fall in with it, too."

Then silence settled between them; but that never troubled Dilly. She was used to long musings on her walks to and from her patients, and in her watching beside their beds. Conversation seemed to her a very spurious thing when there is nothing to say.

"What you thinking about?" he asked suddenly.

Dilly looked up at him with her bright, truth-telling glance. "I was thinkin'," she answered, with a clarity never ruthless, because it was so sweet,--"I was thinkin' you make me homesick, somehow or another."

Jethro looked at her doubtfully, and then, as she smiled at him, he smiled also.

"I don't believe it's me," he said, confidently. "It's because you're going over things here. It's the old house."

"Maybe," said Dilly, nodding and tying her last bundle of papers. "But I don't know. I never had quite such feelin's before. It's the nearest to bein' afraid of anything I've come acrost. I guess I shall have to run out into the lot an' take my bearin's."

Jethro got up, put his hands in his pockets, and walked about the room. He was very gentle, but he did at heart cherish the masculine theory that the unusual in woman is never to be judged by rules.

"But it is a queer kind of a day," owned Dilly, pushing in the last drawer. "Why, Jethro!" She faced him, and her voice broke in excitement. "You don't know, I ain't begun to tell you, how queer it seems to me. Why, I've dreaded this day for weeks! but when it come nigh, it begun to seem to me like a joyful thing. I felt as if they all knew of it: them that was gone. It seemed as if they stood 'round me, ready to uphold me in what I was doin'. I shouldn't be surprised if they were all here now. I don't feel a mite alone."

Her voice shook with excitement; her eyes were big and black. Jethro came up to her, and laid a kindly hand on her shoulder. It was a fine hand, long and shapely, and Dilly, looking down at it, remembered, with a strange regretfulness, how she had once loved its lines.

"There, poor girl!" he said, "you're tired thinking about it. No wonder you've got fancies. I guess the ghosts won't trouble us. There's nothing here worse than ourselves." And again, in spite of the Joyces, Dilly felt homesick and alone.

There came a soft thudding sound upon the kitchen floor, and she turned, alert, to listen. This was Mrs. Eli Pike in her carpet slippers; she had stood so much over soap-making that week that her feet had taken to swelling. She was no older than Dilly, but she had seemed matronly in her teens. She looked very large, as she padded forward through the doorway, and her pink face and double chin seemed to exude kindliness as she came.

"There, Dilly Joyce! if this ain't jest like you!" she exclaimed. "Creep in here an' not let anybody know! Why, Jethro, that you? Recognize you! Well, I guess I should!"

She included them both in a neighborly glance, and Dilly was very grateful. Yet it seemed to her that now, at last, she might break down and cry. The tone of olden friendliness was hard to bear, when no other voices answered. She could endure the silent house, but not the intercourse of a life so sadly changed.

"There!" continued Mrs. Pike, with a nod, "I guess I know! You're tired to pieces with this pickin' and sortin', an' you're comin' over to dinner, both on ye. Eli's dressed a hin. I had to wring her neck. _He_ wouldn't ha' done it; you know that, Dilly! An' I've been beatin' up eggs. Now don't you say one word. You be there by twelve. Jethro, you got a watch? You see't she starts, now!" And Mrs. Pike marched away victorious, her apron over her head, and waving one hand before her as she went. She had once been stung by bees, on just such a morning as this, and she had a set theory that they infested all strange dooryards.

Dilly felt as if even the Joyces could not save her day in its solemn significance unless, indeed, they should appear in their proper persons. She thought of her bread and butter and boiled eggs, lying in her little bundle, and the simple meal seemed as unattainable as if it were some banquet dreamed of in delirium. It was of one piece with cars going by the house, and two maid-servants to correct. To Dilly, a car meant a shrieking monster propelled by steam: yet not even that drove her to such insanity of revulsion as the two servants. They alone made her coming life seem like one eternal school, with the committee ever on the platform, and no recess. But she worked very meekly and soberly, and Jethro took off his coat and helped her; then, just before twelve, they washed their hands and went across the orchard to Mrs. Pike's.

The rest of the day seemed to Dilly like a confused though not an unfamiliar dream. She knew that the dinner was very good, and that it choked her, so that Mrs. Pike, alert in her first pride of housekeeping, was quite cordially harsh with her for not eating more; and that Jethro talked about Chicago; and Eli Pike, older than his wife and graver, said "Do tell!" now and again, and seemed to picture in his mind the outlines of city living. She escaped from the table as soon as possible, under pretext of the work to be done, and slipped back to the empty house; and there Jethro found her, and began helping her again.

The still afternoon settled down in its grooves of beauty, and its very loveliness gave Dilly a pain at the heart. She remembered that this was the hour when her mother used to yawn over her long seam, or her knitting, and fall asleep by the window, while the bees droned outside in the jessamine, and a humming-bird--there had always been one, year after year, and Dilly could never get over the impression that it was the same bird--hovered on his invisible perch and thrilled his wings divinely. Then the day slipped over an unseen height, and fell into a sheltered calm. The work was not done, and they had to go over to Mrs. Pike's again to supper, and to spend the night. Dilly longed to stretch herself on the old kitchen lounge in her own home; but Mrs. Pike told her plainly that she was crazy, and Jethro, with a kindly authority, bade her yield. And because words were like weapons that returned upon her to hurt her anew, she did yield, and talked patiently to one and another neighbor as they came in to see Jethro, and to inquire when he meant to be married.

"Soon," said Jethro, with assurance. "As soon as Dilly makes up her mind."

All that evening, Eli Pike sat on the steps, where he could hear the talk in the sitting-room without losing the whippoorwill's song from the Joyce orchard, and Dilly longed to slip out and sit quietly beside him. He would know. But she could only be civil and grateful, and when half past eight came, take her lamp and go up to bed. Jethro was given the best chamber, because he had succeeded and came from Chicago; but Dilly had a little room that looked straight out across the treetops down to her own home.