The Idyl of Twin Fires Part 13

I returned to the dial and went to work again. She had suggested a ring of low flowers, and some taller ones, irregularly set. I measured off a six-foot circle about the pedestal, as the inner ring of the beds, and left four breaks in it, to the four cardinal points of the compa.s.s, where the turf or paths could come in to the dial. Then I extended the sides of these four beds on the straight axes of the paths for three feet, and made the rear sides not on the regular arc of the inner edges, but full of irregularities, almost of bulges, where I would set clumps of tall flowers. "She'll like that, I guess," I reflected, and then caught myself at it, and grinned rather sheepishly.

I rose and went to the barn for a load of manure. The great pile which had been there when I bought the place was already used up, but I secured enough litter with a rake to cover the beds and brought it back. By then the hour was nearly twelve, and consequently too late to spade it under, so I went into the house to see if the painters were getting the colour right. They were, or as nearly right as it seems to be humanly possible for house painters to do, and I plodded up the road to dinner. As I pa.s.sed my potato field, I saw rows of green shoots above the ground, and out under my lone pine I saw a figure, sitting in the shadow on the stone wall.

I climbed through the brambles over the wall, and walked down the aisles of potatoes toward her.

"It is time for dinner," I said meekly.

She looked up. "Is it? I have been listening to the old pine talk."

"What was he saying?" I asked.

"Things you wouldn't understand," said she.

"About words in 'hy'?"

She shook her head. "Not at all; nothing quite so stupid--but nearly as saddening." She rose to her feet, and her eyes looked into mine, enigmatically wistful.

"I missed you after you went away from Twin Fires," said I suddenly.

"I don't know whether I got the sundial beds right or not. Won't you please come back to tell me? Or am I stupid again, and mustn't you advise me about that?"

Her eyes twinkled a little. "You are still very stupid," she said, "but perhaps I will consent to give my invaluable advice on this important subject."

"Good!" I cried. "And we'll build some more trellis if your hands are better."

"My hands are all right," she said, with the faintest emphasis on the noun, which made a variety of perplexing interpretations possible and kept me silent as I helped her over the wall into Bert's great cauliflower field, and we tramped through the soft soil toward the house.

Chapter IX

WE SEAT Th.o.r.eAU IN THE CHIMNEY NOOK, AND I WRITE A SONNET

After dinner she approved the sundial beds with a mock-judicial gravity, and then she went at the trellis, working with a kind of impersonal nervous intensity that troubled me, I didn't quite know why. She said, with a brief laugh, it was because she had suggested the structure, and she could never rest till any job she had undertaken was completed.

"You live too hard," said I. "That's the trouble with most of us nowadays. We are over-civilized. We don't know how to take things easy, because we have the vague idea of so many other things to be done always crowding across the threshold of our consciousness."

"Perhaps," she answered. "The 'J' words, for instance, if they get 'I' done before my return. Thank heaven, 'J' hasn't contributed so many words to science as 'Hy'!"

"Forget the dictionary!" I cried. "You are going to stay here a long time--till these roses bloom, or at any rate till the sundial beds have come to flower. Besides, there'll be a lot of things about my house where your advice cannot be spared."

She darted a quick look at me, and turned back to the trellis, where she was nailing on strips. She did not speak, and when I came over to face her, with a post for the next arch, I saw that her eyes were moist.

She turned her face half away, blinking her eyelids hard, bit her lip, then picked up the level and set it with a smack against the post. I put my hand over hers--both our hands were dirty!--and said, "What is the matter? Are you tired?"

"Please, please--level this post," she replied.

"Are you tired?"

"No, I'm not tired. I'm a fool. Come, we must finish the arch!"

"I guess we won't do any more arches to-day," I replied, "or you won't, at any rate. You'll go home and rest."

She looked at me an instant with just the hint of her twinkle coming back. "I'm so unused to taking orders," she said, "that I've lost the art of obedience. Move the post a little to the right, please."

I did so, and we worked on in silence. We had built the wide central arch by the time the sun began to drop down into our faces. There were only five arches more to build.

"I shall write to-night and have the roses hurried along," said I.

We walked back toward the house and looked over the lawn, past the sundial, and saw the farm through the trellis, and beyond the farm the trees at the edge of my clearing, and then a distant roof or two, and the far hills. The apple blossoms were fragrant in the orchard. The persistent song sparrows were singing. The shadow of the dial post stretched far out toward the east.

"It is pointing toward the brook," said I. "Shall we go and ask the thrush to sing?"

She shook her head. "Not to-night," she said briefly, and I walked, grieved and puzzling, up the road by her side.

The next day she pleaded a headache, and I went to the farm alone. The south room was shining with its first coat of paint. Hard was, as he put it "seein' daylight" in his work, and I realized that soon I should be sending for Mrs. Pillig and son Peter and moving away from Bert's.

Somehow the idea made me perversely melancholy. The house seemed lonely as I wandered through it, sniffing the strong odour of fresh paint.

I went out to find Mike, and learned that the small fruits had come--a hundred red raspberries, fifty blackcaps, twenty-five of the yellow variety, a hundred blackberries, not to mention currant bushes. We walked about the garden to find the best site for them, and finally chose for the berries the end of the slope between the vegetables and field crops and the pines and tamaracks. Here was a long, narrow stretch where the brook in times past had made the soil sandy, so that it drained well, but where the swampy land was close enough to offer the least danger of complete drying out. While Mike and Joe were ploughing the dressing under and harrowing, I took my garden manual in hand and carefully sorted out the varieties according to their bearing season. Then we began planting them in rows.

There is no berry so fascinating nor so delicious to me as a raspberry, especially at breakfast, half hidden under golden cream. There is something soft and cool and wild about it; it is the feline of berries.

As we planted, I could almost smell the fruit. I could fancy the joy of walking between these dewy rows in the fresh morning sun and picking my breakfast. I could imagine the crates of ripe fruit sent to market.

In the pleasures of my fancy and the monotony of measured planting, I lost track of time, nor did I think of Miss Goodwin. But thought of her returned at noon, however, when Mrs. Bert told me her head had felt better and she had gone off for a day's trolley trip to see the country. After all, it was rather selfish of me not to show her the country! Besides, I hadn't seen it myself. I had been too busy. Why shouldn't I take a day off? But I couldn't do that till the berries were all in, and that afternoon was not enough to finish them. It took all of the next day as well, and most of the day following, for we had the double rows of wire to mount as supports for the vines, and the currant bushes to set in as a border to the garden six feet south of the rose trellis. Most of this work I did alone, leaving Mike free for other tasks, and Joe free to cut the pea brush. I saw Miss Goodwin only at meals. After supper I had to drive myself to my ma.n.u.scripts.

"It will be you who will need a rest soon," she said the second morning, as she came down to breakfast and found me hard at work out on the front porch.

"I'm going to take one--with you!" said I. "I want to see the country, too."

She smiled a little, and picked a lilac bud, holding it to her nose.

She seemed quite far away now. The first few days of our rapid intimacy had pa.s.sed, and now she was as much a stranger to me as on that first meeting in the pines. I said nothing about her coming to the farm; I don't know why. Somehow, I was piqued. I wished her to make the first move. In some way, it was all due to my asking her to choose the paint for my dining-room, and that seemed to me ridiculous. I fear my manner showed my pique a trifle, for I did not see her anywhere about when I left after breakfast.

That evening I found the second coat of paint practically dry in the south room, and there was no reason why I shouldn't install my desk at last, order some kerosene for my student lamp, and do my work there, in my own new home, by my twin fires. The wind was east as I walked back to supper, and there was no sun to wake me in the morning, so that I slept till half-past six. Outside the rain was pouring steadily down, and I found Bert rejoicing, for it was badly needed. After breakfast I waylaid Miss Goodwin.

"No work on the trellis to-day," said I, swallowing my pique; "so I'm going to fix up the south room. I'm going to make twin fires out of some of the nice, fragrant apple wood you haven't sawed for me, and hang the Hiroshiges, and unpack the books, and have an elegant time--if you don't make me do it alone."

The girl shot a look around Mrs. Bert's sitting-room, where a small stuffed owl stood on the mantel under a gla.s.s case and a transparent pink muslin sack filled with burst milkweed pods was draped over a crayon portrait of Bert as a young man. I followed her glance and then our eyes met.

"Just the same, they are dear, good souls," she smiled.

"Of course," I answered. "But to sit here on a cold, rainy day! You may read by the fire while I work. Only please come!"

"May I read 'The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,' Doctor Upton?" she said.

"You may read the dictionary, if you wish," I replied.

She went to get her raincoat. It was cold out of doors, and the rain drove in our faces as we splashed down the road. The painters had made a fire in the kitchen range, and as we stepped in the warmth greeted us in a curious, friendly way. I brought several logs of dead apple wood into the big room, made a second trip for kindlings, brought my one pair of andirons from the shed and improvised a pair with bricks for the other fireplace, and soon had the twin hearths cheerful with dancing flames. Then I went back to the shed, and brought the two cushions which had been on my window-seats at college, to place them on the settle. But as I came into the room, instead of finding the girl waiting to sit by the fire, I saw her with sleeves rolled up washing the west window. Her body was outlined against the light, her hair making an aura about her head. As she turned a little, I caught the saucy grace of her profile. She was so intent upon her task that she had not heard me enter, and I paused a full moment watching her. Then I dropped the cushions and cried, "Come, here's your seat! That is no task for a Ph. D."

"I don't want a seat," she laughed. "I'm having a grand time, and don't care to have my erudition thrown in my face. I love to wash windows."