The Idyl of Twin Fires Part 11

"Fine," said I. "You can tackle the firewood in the orchard soon!"

We got up two more arches, working close together, intent upon our task.

As each arch, with its piers, took up eight feet, and the central arch would take up twelve, we should need exactly a dozen arches to complete the trellis. Here were four of them done!

"Hooray!" cried the girl, as the fourth was finished. "How we are getting on!"

"I could never have done it alone," said I. "You have really been a great help."

"Oh, I hope so!" she exclaimed. "I haven't had so much fun in years."

We looked into the vegetable garden, and saw that Mike had gone, and Joe, too. My watch and the lengthening shadows warned me it was approaching six. Hot and pleasantly tired, we packed up the tools on the barrow, and wheeled them to the shed.

"Now shall we go and hear the hermit?" I asked.

She nodded, and we went down through the orchard, past the pool where the iris buds were already showing a spike of greenish white, through the maples, and into the pines. There we stood, side by side, in the quiet hush of coming sunset, and waited for the fairy horn. A song sparrow was singing out by the road, and the thin, sweet flutings of a Peabody came from the pasture. But the thrush was silent.

"Please sing, Mr. Thrush!" she pleaded, looking at me after she spoke, with a wistful little smile of apology for her foolishness. "I want so to hear him again," she said. "We don't hear thrushes in New York, nor smell pine trees, nor feel this sweet, cool silence. Oh, the good pines!"

"He will sing to-morrow," said I. "There is no opera on Thursdays."

Her eyes twinkled once more. "Perhaps he has that terrible disease, 'sudden indisposition'," she laughed. "Come, we must go home to supper. It will take me hours to get clean."

Out in the open, she looked at her hands. "See, I've begun to get callouses, too!" she exclaimed, holding out her palms proudly.

"You've got blisters," said I. "No work for you to-morrow! Let me see."

I touched her hand, as we paused beneath a blossoming apple tree, with the fragrance shedding about us. Our eyes met, too, as I did so. She drew her hand back gently, as the colour came to her cheeks. We walked on in silence, as far as the pump. Mike had finished milking, and had gone home. The stable was closed. Inside, we could hear the animals stamp. Suddenly I put my head under the pump spout, and asked her to work the handle. Laughing, she did so, and as I raised my dripping head, I saw her standing with the low western sun full upon her, her eyes laughing into mine, her nose and lips provocative, her plain blouse waist open at the throat so that I could see the gurgle of laughter rise.

"Why did you do that?" she asked, arrested, perhaps, by something in my gaze.

"Because," I answered, "there's a ghost lives in this well, and maybe with your aid I shall pump it out."

"Don't you like the ghost?" she said.

"Very much," said I, as we climbed the slope to Bert's.

That evening Mrs. Bert sent her off to bed, and I toiled cheerfully at my ma.n.u.scripts till the unholy hour of eleven.

Chapter VIII

I PICK PAINT AND A QUARREL

The next morning at breakfast a burned nose confronted me across the table, and the possessor ruefully regarded her sore palms.

"No work for you to-day," said I. "You will just have to pick out colours for me. The painters are coming."

I spoke as if we were old friends. I spoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a young woman to accompany a young man to his house and pick out paint for him. I spoke, also, as if I had never cursed the prospect of petticoats that advise. So soon can one pair of eyes undo our prejudices, and so easily are the conventions forgotten, in the natural life of the country--at least by such persons as never were much bothered by them, anyhow!

Evidently they had never greatly troubled Miss Goodwin, or she was not disposed to let them trouble her now, for ten minutes later we went down the road together, and found the painters already unloading their wagon. The reliable Hard Cider, true to his word, had procured them for me, which, as I afterward have discovered, was something of a feat in Bentford, where promises are more common than fulfilment.

"It seems a pity to paint the outside of the house," said Miss Goodwin; "it's such a lovely weathered gray now. What colour is it going to be?"

"No colour," said I. "White, with green blinds, of course. But the inside will be done first."

We entered, with the boss painter, and went into the south room, which had already become the natural centre of the house.

"Now," said I, "I'm not going to paper any rooms if I can help it. I want the walls calcimined. They look pretty sound to me, barring some places where you'll have to patch the plaster. Can it be done?"

The painter walked about the room carefully, then examined the hall, the north room, and the dining-room, while the girl and I followed him.

"Sure," he said.

"All right; then I want this room done first, as I'm anxious to get my books unpacked and my desk set up. Now, what colour shall it be?" I turned toward Miss Goodwin as I spoke.

She shook her head. "I'm not going to say a word," she answered.

"This is your room."

"I suppose you want the woodwork white?" the painter suggested. "Those old mantels, for instance."

"Cream white, not dead white," said I. "Wait a minute." I ran to the shed and brought back two more of my pictures, an etching by Cameron which our professor of fine arts had once given me, and an oil painting acquired in a moment of rash expenditure several years before--the long line of Beacon Street houses across the Charles with the church spires rising here and there, and to the left Beacon Hill piling up to the golden dome of the State House.

"Now," said I, "the walls have got to set off both these pictures, and books besides. They've got to be neutral. I want a greenish, brownish, yellowish olive, with the old beam in the centre of the ceiling in the same key, only a bit darker."

The girl and the painter both laughed.

"You are so definite," said she.

"But I want an indefinite tint," I replied.

Again she laughed, though the painter looked puzzled.

"I'll get my colours," he said.

He mixed what he considered an olive tint, and laid a streak of it on the plaster.

"Too green," said I.

He added something and tried again.

"Too gray," said Miss Goodwin, forgetful, and then quickly supplemented, "isn't it?"

He added something else.

"Too brown," said I.