Meadow Grass: Tales of New England Life Part 14

All that afternoon, the stranger chopped wood, pausing, from time to time, to look from the shed door down the country road; and Mrs.

Wadleigh, singing "Fly like a Youthful," "But O! their end, their dreadful end," and like melodies which had prevailed when she "set in the seats," flew round, indeed, and set the kitchen in immaculate order. Evidently her guest had seldom left that room. He had slept there on the lounge. He had eaten his potatoes there, and smoked his pipe.

When the early dusk set in, and Mrs. Wadleigh had cleared away their supper of baked potatoes and salt fish, again with libations of quince, she drew up before the shining stove, and put her feet on the hearth.

"Here!" she called to the man, who was sitting uncomfortably on one corner of the woodbox, and eying her with the same embarra.s.sed watchfulness. "You draw up, too! It's the best time o' the day now, 'tween sunset an' dark."

"I guess I'd better be goin'," he returned, doggedly.

"Goin'? Where?"

"I don't know. But I'm goin'."

"Now look here," said Mrs. Wadleigh, with rigor. "You take that chair, an' draw up to the fire. You do as I tell you!"

He did it.

"Now, I can't hender your goin', but if you do go, I've got a word to say to you."

"You needn't say it! I don't want n.o.body's advice."

"Well, you've got to have it jest the same! When you bile potaters, don't you let 'em run over onto the stove. Now you remember! I've had to let the fire go down here, an' scrub till I could ha' cried. Don't you never do such a thing ag'in, wherever you be!"

He could only look at her. This sort of woman was entirely new to his experience.

"But I've got somethin' else to say," she continued, adjusting her feet more comfortably. "I ain't goin' to turn anybody out into the snow, such a night as this. You're welcome to stay, but I want to know what brought ye here. I ain't one o' them that meddles an' makes, an' if you 'ain't done nothin' out o' the way, an' I ain't called on for a witness, you needn't be afraid o' my tellin'."

"You will be called on!" he broke in, speaking from a desperation outside his own control. "It's murder! I've killed a man!" He turned upon her with a savage challenge in the motion; but her face was set, placidly forward, and the growing dusk had veiled its meaning.

"Well!" she remarked, at length, "ain't you ashamed to set there talkin' about it! You must have bra.s.s enough to line a kittle! Why 'ain't you been, like a man, an' gi'n yourself up, instid o' livin'

here, turnin' my kitchen upside down? Now you tell me all about it!

It'll do ye good."

"I'm goin'," said the man, breathing hard as he spoke, "I'm goin' away from here tonight. They never'll take me alive. It was this way. There was a man over where I lived that's most drunk himself under ground, but he ain't too fur gone to do mischief. He told a lie about me, an'

lost me my place in the shoe shop. Then one night, I met him goin'

home, an' we had words. I struck him. He fell like an ox. I killed him.

I didn't go home no more. I didn't even see my wife. I couldn't tell her. I couldn't be took _there_. So I run away. An' when I got starved out, an' my feet were most froze walkin', I see this house, all shet up, an' I come here."

He paused; and the silence was broken only by the slow, cosey ticking of the liberated clock.

"Well!" said Mrs. Wadleigh, at last, in a ruminating tone. "Well! well!

Be you a drinkin' man?"

"I never was till I lost my job," he answered, sullenly. "I had a little then. I had a little the night he sa.s.sed me."

"Well! well!" said Mrs. Wadleigh, again. And then she continued, musingly: "So I s'pose you're Joe Mellen, an' the man you struck was Solomon Ray?"

He came to his feet with a spring.

"How'd you know?" he shouted.

"Law! I've been visitin' over Hillside way!" said Mrs. Wadleigh, comfortably. "You couldn't ha' been very smart not to thought o' that when I mentioned my darter Lucy, an' where the childern went to school.

No smarter'n you was to depend on that old wooden b.u.t.ton! I know all about that drunken sc.r.a.pe. But the queerest part on't was--Solomon Ray didn't die!"

"Didn't die!" the words halted, and he dragged them forth. "Didn't die?"

"Law, no! you can't kill a Ray! They brought him to, an' fixed him up in good shape. I guess you mellered him some, but he's more scairt than hurt. He won't prosecute. You needn't be afraid. He said he dared you to it. There, there now! I wouldn't. My sake alive! le' me git a light!"

For the stranger sat with his head bowed on the table, and he trembled like a child.

Next morning at eight o'clock, Mrs. Wadleigh was standing at the door, in the sparkling light, giving her last motherly injunction to the departing guest.

"You know where the depot is? An' it's the nine o'clock train you've got to take. An' you remember what I said about hayin' time. If you don't have no work by the middle o' May, you drop me a line, an'

perhaps I can take you an' your wife, too; Lucy's childern al'ays make a sight o' work. You keep that bill safe, an'--Here, wait a minute! You might stop at Cyrus Pendleton's--it's the fust house arter you pa.s.s; the corner--an' ask 'em to put a sparerib an' a pat o' b.u.t.ter into the sleigh, an' ride over here to dinner. You tell 'em I'm as much obleeged to 'em for sendin' over last night to see if I was alive, as if I hadn't been so dead with sleep I couldn't say so. Good-bye! Now, you mind you keep tight hold o' that bill, an', spend it prudent!"

"Is Kelup Rivers comin' over here to-night?" suddenly asked Aunt Melissa Adams, peering over her gold-bowed gla.s.ses, and fixing her small shrewd eyes sharply upon her niece.

Amanda did not look up from her fine hemming, but her thin hand trembled almost imperceptibly, and she gave a little start, as if such attacks were not altogether unexpected.

"I don't know," she answered, in a low tone.

"Dunno! why don't ye know?" said her aunt, beginning to sway back and forth in the old-fashioned rocking-chair, but not once dropping her eyes from Amanda's face. "Don't he come every Sat.u.r.day night?"

Amanda took another length, of thread, and this time her hand really shook.

"I guess so," she answered.

"You guess so? Don't ye know? An' if he's come every Sat.u.r.day night for fifteen year, ain't he comin' to-night? I dunno what makes you act as if you wa'n't sure whether your soul's your own, 'Mandy Green. My dander al'ays rises when I ask you a civil question an' you put on that look."

Amanda bent more closely over her sewing. She was a woman of thirty-five, with a pathetically slender figure, thin blond hair painstakingly crimped, and anxious blue eyes. Something deprecating lay in her expression; her days had been uncomplainingly sacrificed to the comfort of those she loved, and the desire of peace and good-will had crept into her face and stayed there. Her mother, who looked even slighter than she, and whose cheeks were puckered by wrinkles, sat by the window watching the two with a smile of empty content. Old Lady Green had lost her mind, said the neighbors; but she was sufficiently like her former self to be a source of unspeakable joy and comfort to Amanda, who nursed and petted her as if their positions were reversed, and protected her from the blunt criticism of the literal-tongued neighborhood with a reverential awe belonging to the old days when the fifth commandment was written and obeyed.

"Gold-bowed," said Mrs. Green, with a look of unalloyed delight, pointing to her sister-in-law's spectacles; and Aunt Melissa repeated indulgently,--

"Yes, yes, gold-bowed. I'll let you take 'em a spell, arter I've set my heel. It'll please her, poor creatur'!" she added, in an audible aside to Amanda. Since the time when Mrs. Green's wits had ceased to work normally, she had treated her sympathetically, but from a lofty eminence. Aunt Melissa was perhaps too prosperous. She sat there, swaying back and forth, in her thin black silk trimmed with narrow rows of velvet, her heavy chin sunk upon a broad collar, worked in her youth, and she seemed to Mrs. Green a vision of majesty and delight, but to Amanda a virtuous censor, necessarily to be obeyed, yet whose presence made the summer day intolerable. Even her purple cap-ribbons bespoke terror to the evil-doer, and her heavy face was set, as a judgment, toward the doom of the man who knew not how to account for his actions. She began speaking again, and Amanda involuntarily gave a little start, as at a lightning flash.

"I says to myself when I drove off, this mornin': 'I'll have a little talk with 'Mandy. I don' go there to spend a day more'n four times a year, an' like as not she'll be glad to have somebody to speak to, seen' 's her mother's how she is.'"

Amanda gave a quick look at Mrs. Green; but the old lady was busily pleating the hem of her ap.r.o.n and then smoothing it out again. Aunt Melissa rocked, and went on:--

"I says to myself: 'Here they let Kelup carry on the farm at the halves, an' go racin' an' trottin' from the other place over here day in an' day out. An' when his Uncle Nat died, two year ago, then was the time for him to come over here an' marry 'Mandy an' carry on the farm.

But no, he'd rather hang round the old place, an' sleep in the ell-chamber, an' do their ch.o.r.es for his board, an' keep on a-runnin'

over here.' An' when young Nat married, I says to myself, 'That'll make him speak.' But it didn't--an' you 're a laughin'-stock, 'Mandy Green, if ever there was one. Every time the neighbors see him steppin' by Sat.u.r.day nights, all fixed up, with that brown coat on he's had sence the year one, they have suthin' to say, 'Goin' over to 'Mandy's,'

that's what they say. An' on'y last Sat.u.r.day one on 'em hollered out to me, when I was pickin' a mess o' pease for Sunday, 'Wonder what 'Mandy'll answer when he gits round to askin' of her?' I hadn't a word to say. 'You better go to _him_,' says I, at last."

Amanda had put down her sewing in her lap, and was looking steadfastly out of the window, with eyes brimmed by two angry tears. Once she wiped them with a furtive movement of the white garment in her lap; her cheeks were crimson. Aunt Melissa had lashed herself into a c.u.mulative pa.s.sion of words.

"An' I says to myself, 'If there ain't n.o.body else to speak to 'Mandy, I will,' I says, when I was combin' my hair this mornin'. 'She 'ain't got no mother,' I says, 'nor as good as none, an' if she 'ain't s.p.u.n.k enough to look out for herself, somebody's got to look out for her.'

An' then it all come over me--I'd speak to Kelup himself, an' bein'

Sat.u.r.day night, I knew I should ketch him here."