Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches Part 16

"No wonder I dremp' ol' Mis' Meredy was twins!" he screamed. "Why, h-h-honey," he was nearly splitting his old sides--"why, honey, I ain't seen a thing but these two swingin' pitchers all night. They've been dancin' before me--them an' what seemed like a pair o' ol' Mis' Meredys, an' between 'em all I ain't slep' a wink."

"N-n-either have I. An' I dremp' about ol' Mis' M-m-m-eredy, too. I dremp' she had come to live with us--an' thet y-y-you an' me had moved into the back o' the house. That's why I got up. I couldn't sleep easy, an' I thought I might ez well git up an' see wh-wh-what you'd brought me. But I didn't no mor'n glance at it. But you can't say you didn't sleep, for you was a-s-s-snorin' when I come out here--"

"An' so was you, honey, when I 'ranged them things on the mantel. Lemme go an' git the other set an' compare 'em. That one I picked out is mighty purty."

"I'll tell you befo' you fetch 'em thet they're exactly alike"--she began to cry again--"even to the p-p-polar bear. I saw that at a glance, an' it makes it s-s-so much more ridic'--"

"Hush, honey. I'm reely ashamed of you--I reely am. Seems to me ef they're jest alike, so much the better. What's the matter with havin' a pair of 'em? We might use one for b.u.t.termilk."

"Th-that would be perfectly ridiculous. A polar bear'd look like a fool on a b.u.t.termilk pitcher. N-n-no, the place for pitchers like them is in halls, on tables, where anybody comin' in can see 'em an' stop an' git a drink. They couldn't be nothin' tackier'n pourin' b.u.t.termilk out of a'

ice-pitcher."

"Of co'se, if you say so, we won't--I jest thought maybe--or, I tell you what we might do. I could easy take out a panel o' banisters out of the side po'ch, an' put in a pair o' stairsteps, so ez to make a sort o'

side entrance to the house, an' we could set one of 'em in _it_. It would make the pitcher come a little high, of co'se, but it would set off that side o' the house lovely, an' ef you say so--

"Lemme go git 'em all out here together."

As he trudged in presently loaded up with the duplicate set he said, "I wonder ef you know what time it is, wife?"

She glanced over her shoulder at the clock on the wall.

"Don't look at that. It's six o'clock last night by that. I forgot to wind her up. No. It's half-past three o'clock--that's all it is." By this time he had placed his water-set beside hers upon the table. "Why, honey," he exclaimed, "where on earth? I don't see a sign of a'

inscription on this--an' what is this paper in the spout? Here, you read it, wife, I ain't got my specs."

"'Too busy to mark to-day--send back after Christmas--sorry.

ROWTON.'"

"Why, it--an' here's another paper. What can this be, I wonder?"

"'To my darling wife, from her affectionate husband.'"

The little wife colored as she read it.

"Oh, that ain't nothin' but the motter he was to print on it. But ain't it lucky thet he didn't do it? I'll change it--that's what I'll do--for anything you say. There, now. Don't that fix it?"

She was very still for a moment--very thoughtful. "An' affectionate is a mighty expensive word, too," she said, slowly, glancing over the intended inscription, in her husband's handwriting. "Yes. Your pitcher don't stand for a thing but generosity--an' mine don't mean a thing but selfishness. Yes, take it back, cert'nly, that is ef you'll get me anything I want for it. Will you?"

"Sh.o.r.e. They's a cow-topped b.u.t.ter-dish an' no end o' purty little things out there you might like. An' ef it's goin' back, it better be a-goin'. I can ride out to town an' back befo' breakfast. Come, kiss me, wife."

She threw both arms around her old husband's neck, and kissed him on one cheek and then on the other. Then she kissed his lips. And then, as she went for pen and paper, she said: "Hurry, now, an' hitch up, an' I'll be writin' down what I want in exchange--an' you can put it in yo' pocket."

In a surprisingly short time the old man was on his way--a heaped basket beside him, a tiny bit of writing in his pocket. When he had turned into the road he drew rein for a moment, lit a match, and this is what he read:

"MY DEAR HUSBAND,--I want one silver-mounted brier-wood pipe and a smoking set--a nice lava one--and I want a set of them fine overhauls like them that Mis Pope give Mr. Pope that time I said she was too extravagant, and if they's any money left over I want some nice tobacco, the best. I want all the price of the ice-set took up even to them affectionate words they never put on.

"Your affectionate and loving wife,

"KITTY."

When Ephraim put the little note back in his pocket, he took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

Her good neighbors and friends, even as far as Simpkinsville and Washington, had their little jokes over Mis' Trimble's giving her splendor-despising husband a swinging ice-pitcher, but they never knew of the two early trips of the twin pitcher, nor of the midnight comedy in the Trimble home.

But the old man often recalls it, and as he sits in his front hall smoking his silver-mounted pipe, and shaking its ashes into the lava bowl that stands beside the ice-pitcher at his elbow, he sometimes chuckles to himself.

Noticing his shaking shoulders as he sat thus one day his wife turned from the window, where she stood watering her geraniums, and said:

"What on earth are you a-laughin' at, honey?" (She often calls him "honey" now.)

"How did you know I was a-laughin'?" He looked over his shoulder at her as he spoke.

"Why, I seen yo' shoulders a-shakin'--that's how." And then she added, with a laugh, "An' now I see yo' reflection in the side o' the ice-pitcher, with a zig-zag grin on you a mile long--yo' smile just happened to strike a iceberg."

He chuckled again.

"Is that so? Well, the truth is, I'm just sort o' tickled over things in general, an' I'm a-settin' here gigglin', jest from pure contentment."

A MINOR CHORD

I am an old bachelor, and I live alone in my corner upper room of an ancient house of _Chambres garnies_, down on the lower edge of the French quarter of New Orleans.

When I made my nest here, forty years ago, I felt myself an old man, and the building was even then a dilapidated old rookery, and since then we--the house and I--have lapsed physically with the decline of the neighborhood about us, until now our only claims to gentility are perhaps our memories and our reserves.

The habit of introspection formed by so isolated an existence tends to develop morbid views of life, and throws one out of sympathetic relations with the world of progress, we are told; but is there not some compensation for this in the acquisition of finer and more subtle perception of things hidden from the social, laughing, hurrying world?

So it seems to me, and even though the nicer discernment bring pain, as it often does--as all refinement must--who would yield it for a grosser content resulting from a duller vision?

To contemplate the procession that pa.s.ses daily beneath my window, with its ever-shifting pictures of sorrow, of decrepitude ill-matched with want, new motherhood, and mendicancy, with uplifted eye and palm--to look down upon all this with only a pa.s.sing sigh, as my worthy but material fat landlady does, would imply a spiritual blindness infinitely worse than the pang which the keener perception induces.

There are in this neighborhood of moribund pretensions a few special objects which strike a note of such sadness in my heart that the most exquisite pain ensues--a pain which seems almost bodily, such as those for which we take physic; yet I could never confuse it with the neuralgic dart which it so nearly resembles, so closely does it follow the sight or sound which I know induces it.

There is a young lawyer who pa.s.ses twice a day beneath my window.... I say he is young, for all the moving world is young to me, at eighty--and yet he seems old at five-and-forty, for his temples are white.

I know this man's history. The only son of a proud house, handsome, gifted--even somewhat of a poet in his youth--he married a soulless woman, who began the ruin which the wine-cup finished. It is an old story. In a mad hour he forged another man's name--then, a wanderer on the face of the earth, he drifted about with never a local habitation or a name, until his aged father had made good the price of his honor, when he came home--"tramped home," the world says--and, now, after years of variable steadiness, he has built upon the wreck of his early life a sort of questionable confidence which brings him half-averted recognition; and every day, with the gray always glistening on his temples and the clear profile of the past outlining itself--though the high-bred face is low between the shoulders now--he pa.s.ses beneath my window with halting step to and from the old courthouse, where, by virtue of his father's position, he holds a minor office.

Almost within a stone's throw of my chamber this man and his aged father--the latter now a hopeless paralytic--live together in the ruins of their old home.

Year by year the river, by constant cavings, has swallowed nearly all its extensive grounds, yet beyond the low-browed Spanish cottage that clings close within the new levee, "the ghost of a garden" fronts the river. Here, amid broken marbles--lyreless Apollos, Pegasus bereft of wings, and prostrate Muses--the hardier roses, golden-rod, and honeysuckle run riot within the old levee, between the comings of the waters that at intervals steal in and threaten to swallow all at a gulp.

The naked old house, grotesquely guarded by the stately skeleton of a moss-grown oak, is thus bereft, by the river in front and the public road at its back, of all but the bare fact of survival.

No visitor ever enters here; but in the summer evenings two old men may be seen creeping with difficult steps from its low portal up to the brow of the bank, where they sit in silence and watch the boats go by.

The picture is not devoid of pathos, and even the common people whisper together as they look upon the figures of father and son sitting in the moonlight; and no one likes to pa.s.s the door at night, for there are grewsome tales of ghosts afloat, in which decapitated statues are said to stalk about the old garden at nightfall.