Hillsboro People Part 34

With the thought came her old dogged defiance to despair. She shut her hands on her crutches, pulled herself heavily up to her feet, and toiled forward through some brush. She would not allow herself to think if thoughts were like that. Soon she came out into a little clearing beside the Winthrop Branch, swirling and fumbling in its headlong descent. The remains of a stone wall and a blackened beam or two showed her that she had hit upon the ruins of the old sawmill her great-grandfather had owned.

This forgotten and abandoned decay, a symbol of the future of the whole region, struck a last blow at the remnants of her courage. She sank down on the wall and set herself to a losing struggle with the blackness that was closing in about her. All her effort had been in vain. The fight was over. She had not a weapon left.

A last spark of valor flickered into flame within her. She stood up, lifting her head high, and summoning with a loudly beating heart every scattered energy. She was alive; her fight could not be over while she still breathed.

For an instant she stood, self-hypnotized by the intensity of her resolution. Then there burst upon her ear, as though she had not heard it before, the roar of the water rushing past her. It sounded like a loud voice calling to her. She shivered and turned a little giddy as though pa.s.sing into a trance, and then, with one bound, the gigantic forces of subconscious self, wrought by her long struggle to a white heat of concentration on one aim, arose and mastered her. For a time--hours perhaps--she never knew how long, old Miss Abigail was a genius, with the brain of an engineer and the prophetic vision of a seer.

IV

The next months were the hardest of her life. The long dreary battle against insurmountable obstacles she had been able to bear with a stoical front, but the sickening alternations of emotions which now filled her days wore upon her until she was fairly suffocated. About mail time each day she became of an unendurable irritability, so that poor Miss Molly was quite afraid to go near her. For the first time in her life there was no living thing growing in her house.

"Don't you mean to have any service this Christmas?" asked Miss Molly one day.

Miss Abigail shouted at her so fiercely that she retreated in a panic.

"Why not? Why shouldn't we? What makes you think such a thing?"

"Why, I didn't know of anybody to go but just you and me, and I noticed that you hadn't any flowers started for decorations the way you always do."

Miss Abigail flamed and fulminated as though her timid little friend had offered her an insult. "I've been to service in that church every Christmas since I was born and I shall till I die. And as for my not growing any flowers, that's _my_ business, ain't it!" Her voice cracked under the outraged emphasis she put on it.

Her companion fled away without a word, and Miss Abigail sank into a chair trembling. It came over her with a shock that her preoccupation had been so great that she had _forgotten_ about her winter flowers.

The fortnight before Christmas was interminable to her. Every morning she broke a hobbling path through the snow to the post-office, where she waited with a haggard face for the postmaster's verdict of "nothing." The rest of the day she wandered desolately about her house, from one window to another, always staring, staring up at Hemlock Mountain.

She disposed of the problem of the Christmas service with the absent competence of a person engrossed in greater matters. Miss Molly had declared it impossible--there was no money for a minister, there was no congregation, there was no fuel for the furnace. Miss Abigail wrote so urgently to the Theological Seminary of the next State that they promised one of their seniors for the service; and she loaded a hand sled with wood from her own woodshed and, harnessing herself and Miss Molly to it, drew it with painful difficulty through the empty village street. There was not enough of this fuel to fill even once the great furnace in the cellar, so she decreed that the service should be in the vestibule where a stove stood. The last few days before Christmas she spent in sending out desperate appeals to remote families to come. But when the morning arrived, she and Miss Molly were the only ones there.

The young theologian appeared a little before the appointed time, brought in the motor car of a wealthy friend of his own age. They were trying to make a record winter trip, and were impatient at the delay occasioned by the service. When they saw that two shabby old women const.i.tuted the congregation, they laughed as they stood warming their hands by the stove and waiting for the hour. They ignored the two women, chatting lightly of their own affairs. It seemed that they were on their way to a winter house party to which the young clergyman-to-be was invited on account of his fine voice--an operetta by amateurs being one of the gayeties to which they looked forward.

Miss Abigail and Miss Molly were silent in their rusty black, Miss Molly's soft eyes red with restrained tears, Miss Abigail's face like a flint.

"A pretty place, this village is," said the motorist to the minister. "I have visited the Ellerys here. Really charming in summer time--so utterly deserted and peaceful." He looked out of the window speculatively. "Rather odd we should be pa.s.sing through it to-day. There's been a lot of talk about it in our family lately."

"How so?" asked the minister, beginning cautiously to unwind the wrapping from around his throat.

"Why, my brother-in-law--Peg's husband--don't you remember, the one who sang so fearfully flat in----" He was off on a reminiscence over which both men laughed loudly.

Finally, "But what did you start to tell me about him?" asked the minister.

"I forget, I'm sure. What was it? Oh, yes; he owns those print mills in Johnsonville--hideous place for Peg to live, that town!--and of late he's been awfully put out by the failure of his water-power. There's not much fall there at the best, and when the river's low--and it's low most all the time nowadays--he doesn't get power enough, so he says, to run a churn! He's been wondering what he could do about it, when doesn't he get a tip from some old Rube up here that, above this village, there's a whopping water-power--the Winthrop Branch. I know it--fished it lots of times. He didn't take any stock in it of course at first, but, just on the chance, he sent his engineer up here to look it over, and, by Jove, it's true. It'll furnish twice the power he's had in Johnsonville lately."

"Seems queer," said the minister a little skeptically, "that n.o.body's ever thought of it before."

"Well, _I_ said that, but Pete says that his engineer tells him that there are lots of such unknown water-powers in the East. n.o.body but farmers live near 'em, you see."

The minister was but mildly interested. "I thought the cost of transmitting power was so great it didn't pay for any water-force but Niagara."

"He isn't going to carry the power to Johnsonville. He's going to bring his mill here. A lot of his operators come from around here and most of 'em have kept their old homes, so there won't be any trouble about keeping his help. Besides, it seems the old hayseed who wrote him about it owned the land, and offered him land, water-power, right of way--anything!--free, just to 'help the town' by getting the mill up here. That bespeaks the materialistic Yankee, doesn't it?--to want to spoil a quiet little Paradise like this village with a lot of greasy mill-hands."

The minister looked at his watch. "I think I'll begin the service now.

There's no use waiting for a congregation to turn up." He felt in one pocket after the other with increasing irritation. "Pshaw! I've left my eyegla.s.ses out in the car." The two disappeared, leaving the vestibule echoing and empty.

For a moment the two women did not speak. Then Miss Molly cast herself upon her old friend's bosom. "They're coming back!" she cried. "Annie and her children!"

Miss Abigail stared over her head. "They are _all_ coming back," she said, "and--we are ready for them. The library's ready--the school is ready--"

she got up and opened the door into the great, cold, lofty church, "and--"

They looked in silence at the empty pews.

"Next Christmas!" said Miss Molly. "Next Christmas--"

The young minister bustled in, announcing as he came, "We will open the service by singing hymn number forty-nine."

He sat down before the little old organ and struck a resonant chord.

"Oh, come, all ye faithful!"

his full rich voice proclaimed, and then he stopped short, startled by a great cry from Miss Abigail. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the tears were streaming down her face. He smiled to himself at the sentimentality of old women and turned again to the organ, relieved that his performance of a favorite hymn was not to be marred by cracked trebles. He sang with much taste and expression.

"Oh, come, all ye faithful!"

he chanted l.u.s.tily,

"Joyful and triumphant!"