Green Valley Part 22

He helped her to laugh when she felt like crying. And best of all he steadied her when Cynthia's son was by, when her heart was beating horribly and her head was dizzy with happiness and fright.

She was a new girl to the boy from India. He was no longer afraid of her. She no longer said bright, sharp things that puzzled and hurt him. She was quiet and kind and frequently now exceedingly ill at ease.

One day while they were walking along the road he stopped suddenly and looked at her.

"Are you tired?" he asked abruptly.

"No--I'm not tired," Nanny said a little surprised at the question.

"Are you ill?" he next wanted to know.

"Ill? Why--no. Not that I know of."

He searched her eyes for the truth. Nanny, not daring to trust herself, turned away her head with an unsteady little laugh.

"Why?"

"Because," the puzzled boy explained, "you have been so quiet and so nice and kind to me."

The laughable innocence of him was all that saved Nanny that time.

She thought of going away. But she lacked the courage. The thought of going made the pain worse and there was no place in all the world to which she cared to go.

Then a brilliant idea came to her. It might after all, she told herself, be purely imaginary,--this strange torture that she thought was love. It might after all be only a foolish fancy born of her quiet isolated life in the dreamy old town. She would fill the house with people, with men and women and music.

So for a time the Ainslees were very gay. House party followed house party and there were always guests. Secure with the security of numbers Nanny invited Cynthia's son. Then she stood back and watched him draw both men and women about him. He was utterly at ease with the men but quiet and reserved with the girls. Instinctively he sorted out the comfortable, less brilliant ones and chatted with them, all unconscious of the light in the eyes of the others. Nanny watched him and as she watched there was born in her heart a new fear and torture.

She realized that some day love would come to Cynthia's son and feared that she would have to stand by unseen and forgotten.

So then she began to distrust those of her feminine guests who smiled at him and chatted with him. And as soon as she decently could she sent all her company packing. When they were gone she knew beyond any possibility of doubt that she loved him and would always love him and that the vengeance that her father had predicted had overtaken her.

The very next time Cynthia's son came he found the house quiet and Nanny alone.

"Are they all gone?" he asked.

"Yes," she told him.

"When is your next crowd coming?" he wondered.

"There aren't going to be any more crowds," Nanny informed him.

"That's nice. It's pleasanter this way."

Nanny's poor heart longed to ask why but it dared not.

So then she drifted and didn't care. Though she prayed a little miserably at times for peace and a home sh.o.r.e. They seemed to meet by accident on the sunny summer roads and whenever they did they strolled on aimlessly but contented. Because she was now so quiet and kind he told her things that he had never told to any one else. She marvelled at the simple heart of him, its freedom from self-consciousness. She had not dreamed that there was anywhere in the world a grown-up man like that.

Had he been different she could never have lived, it seemed to her, through the fearful hour of humiliation on the Glen Road. She stooped for a spray of scarlet sumach one early autumn afternoon. They had been looking through the hedges for the first hazel nuts and he was standing beside her when, in some way, the little picture worked its way out of her soft silk blouse and fell at his feet, face up.

Fright as terrible and as cold as death laid its hand on Nanny's heart.

It seemed to her that she never again could raise her eyes to his.

Fortunately her body went through its mechanical duties. She bent, her hand picked up the picture, and her voice of its own accord was explaining:

"This belongs to you. I took it the day I was looking over the pictures at Grandma Wentworth's. I should, of course, have returned it long ago but I kept neglecting to do it. It's one of the dearest child pictures I have ever seen."

She raised her eyes then, eyes as careless as she could make them.

Fright kept the flame of bitter shame from her cheeks and the tremor out of her voice. She held the little picture out to him, forcing her eyes to meet his.

And those eyes of his looked down at her, first with wonder and then with a pleased smile, and she knew that he didn't know, didn't understand, saw nothing strange in the incident. He took her calm explanation for the whole truth. The man had absolutely no vanity.

"Why, I don't want that," he told her wonderingly. "Are you making a collection of children's pictures?" he asked with such innocent curiosity that Nanny's self-control gave way and she laughed until she cried. He stood by, helpless and puzzled. When Nanny, having gotten to the tears, searched in vain for her handkerchief he gravely offered his.

Nanny took it and used it and then looked up at him with eyes as full of laughing despair as his were full of bewilderment.

"John Roger Churchill Knight--you will some day be the very death of me."

CHAPTER XV

INDIAN SUMMER

"Well, I guess this is about the last spell of pretty weather we're going to have," sighed f.a.n.n.y Foster as she sat herself down on Grandma Wentworth's back steps and went right to work helping Grandma sort the herbs and bulbs and the seeds she had been gathering for a whole week.

"I'm hoping not," said Grandma, "though when the air is like warm gold dust, and the sun's heat just mellows you through and through, and the last bobolink calls from the hill, why, a body just knows such perfect days can't last. Still, I'm hoping it'll stay a bit longer, though I can't say I'm not ready for cold weather."

"Oh, I guess everybody is," agreed f.a.n.n.y with that joyous, bubbling, luxurious note that Grandma knew so well. "I saw Mary Hagley polishing her very knuckles off on that second-hand stove Mert bought from that watery-eyed man from Spring Road who drives through here with the lame buckskin horse and pieced-out harness. Lutie Barlow's got her fall tinting and painting all done. She's painted the inside of her chicken coops a bright yellow, so's to fool her hens into thinking the sun's forever shining, and the inside of her stormshed a red, so's to make it seem warmer when she goes out there on a cold day to the coal and wood box. There ain't anybody can beat Lutie on color ideas.

"Minnie Eton's dyed her heavy lace curtains in coffee and has a new set made for the dining room, besides having a picture of the third boy enlarged for the parlor. She started crocheting the lace for a new bedspread for her company bedroom yesterday. And--oh, my lands, I forgot to tell you the rest of that second-hand stove business. You see Mary was feeling pretty bad about having to put up with another old stove and envying Cissie Harvey hers. Cissie's new parlor stove is a monster, made seemingly of nothing but pure nickel and isingla.s.s. Mary went over to look at it and when she come home and took another look at her old thing she just sat down and cried. She cried till she was too tired to care and then went to Jessup's for some stove polish. On the way she met Judy Parks who told her that d.i.c.k had a new kind of polish that gave a beautiful shine without hardly any work. So Mary got that and it proved to be all Judy said it was and in no time at all Mary turned that old stove of hers into a shining glory. And just as she was standing back admiring her work in comes Cissie, wringing her hands. The baby had poked out every last one of those isingla.s.s windows while Cissie was in the kitchen warming up his milk. And there you are. And there's people that say there is no G.o.d and no justice in this world.

"Josephine Rand's starting in on her rugs and begging rags from friends and enemies. She's going a little easy though since last week. She cut up what Ted says was a perfectly good pair of his pants. He had them hanging up in the bas.e.m.e.nt and was hoping Josephine would wash and press them some day. He kept them down in the bas.e.m.e.nt because he knew that if he left them in his closet she'd give them away to a hobo on account of her always feeling so sorry for tramps and believing everything they tell her. Ted says he always liked these particular pants on account of them making him look slim and being made of the same kind of cloth as his first long pair of pants that he got as a boy. So he was cherishing them and Josephine goes and cuts them into tatters. He's so mad, she says she don't dare leave a rag rug in his sight.

"Mat Wilson and his wife ain't on the very best conjugal terms either.

It seems Mat has a felon right under his thumb nail, about the worst place you can have one, he thinks. It's kept him awake nights and made him miserable, so naturally he felt ent.i.tled to a good deal of sympathy. And he got it. Everybody has sympathized so much that Clara just got mad and said that that there felon of Mat's isn't half as bad as the one that she had at the end of her thumb two years ago. She says she got hollow-eyed and consumptive looking with hers but that Mat looks about the same as usual, maybe brighter. Anyhow, they've argued and sc.r.a.pped about their felons so that Clara's aunt's gone off for a visit to Ioway, and Mat says that there sure is a recompense for everything in this world, even felons and domestic misery, and Clara wants to know if he's meaning to insinuate that her aunt is a nuisance, because if he is she ain't going to send his aunt the Christmas present that she's got half done for her. But Mat won't say, just keeps showing his thumb to everybody and talking about silver linings to every cloud. There's no use talking, some men are aggravating.

"Mandy Jutlins don't know whether to have the telephone put in or not.

She says the Lord knows she has enough children to run all her errands and take all messages and that the two dollars a month comes in handy for a new pair of shoes. And if it's in she says more than likely she'll be wasting her time listening to a lot of silly gossip. Of course that was a foolish remark for Mandy to make, seeing all her friends have telephones. Two or three's took it personal and aren't speaking a word to Mandy but plenty about her. One of them is supposed to have said that it's a fact that Mandy doesn't need a telephone, that she talks enough without it, and that in her opinion the worst kind of a gossip is the kind that stays at home the whole enduring time, never taking pains to see how things really happen and always knowing everything.

"Emmy Smith doesn't know what to do with her oldest girl, Eleanor.

Eleanor just won't wash the knives and forks and spoons. She'll sc.r.a.pe and scald and polish the pots and pans and does the china beautiful, but she will leave the knives and forks and even hides them away dirty.

Did you ever hear of such a thing? Emmy can't explain it unless it's due to the shiftless streak in all the Smiths.

"Agnes Hooper's crab-apple jell is about all gone and here it's hardly cool yet. Those boys of hers just want to live on crab-apple jell and Aggie says she's got to the end of her strength and patience, that Charlie'd better pull up and move out among the Mormons where he could have a couple of more wives to help keep those boys filled up.

"Jennie Burton's sauerkraut isn't going to keep and hasn't turned out well, she thinks. Fremy Stockton says it's because she forgot to put in a little mite of sugar and altogether too much salt.

"Grace Cook's husband bought a whole pig from some farmer Bloomingdale way, thinking it was going to be good and cold by this time. And Grace has got up at four o'clock every morning for a week and stayed up till midnight, trying to get that pig out of sight. She's rendered lard and made sausage and salted and smoked meat till every crock is full.

Yesterday she was making head cheese, sick to her stomach and crying because there were still the four feet to cook up, and she said she didn't know how to cook them and that each one looked to her about as big as the kitchen stove.