Wheat and Huckleberries Part 7

There was the bunch of striped gra.s.s, growing still at the corner of the garden, and she felt a childish impulse to throw herself on the ground beside it, and hunt, as she used to, for two of the long silky spears which would exactly match. She had never quite done it in the old days.

Perhaps she could find them now. She peered up into the tallest of the elms and shouted for joy to find the nest of a fire hangbird swinging just as it used to among the long, lithe branches. She made her way straight to the tree where the pound sweetings grew, and laughed to find that it bore them still, large and golden as ever.

And here again a childish memory came back with a rippling delight over the years that were past. "Do you remember how I tore my dress one day, climbing that tree to get apples?" she appealed to Stella. "I could never bring enough down in my pocket, and if I took a basket up it was sure to spill and the chickens to peck the apples before I got down. One day I gave my dress a horrible tear going up. It scared me at first, and then it dawned upon me, What a place for apples! It was a woollen dress and the skirt was lined. I used that hole for a pocket, and filled the skirt full. It's a wonder I wasn't dragged from the tree by the weight of it. The gathers were dragged from the belt, I remember that perfectly, and how grandmother looked when I went in to share the booty with her," she added, laughing.

Oh, it was pleasant, this wandering over the old place, the finding and remembering!

It was really inside the house that things were most changed; but this, as Stella explained, was really a return to the way they rightly belonged. Much of the furniture which Esther remembered as crowding the dusky garret had come down, and some which her grandmother had rejoiced in as new and handsome had taken its place there. The haircloth sofa and chairs over which she had slipped and slidden in her youthful days had given place to an oak settle and chairs which, in spite of their old-fashioned shape, were roomy and comfortable. One, a delicious old sleepy hollow, covered with the quaintest of chintz, stood in the corner which had been the grandmother's, and the little, round light-stand was beside it, with the leather-covered Bible smooth as gla.s.s, and the candlestick and snuffers, as if she still might sit there of an evening to read.

"Grandfather himself prefers a lamp," Stella remarked, in pa.s.sing; "he says he's got past tallow dips, but out of respect to grandmother's memory-I impressed that on him strongly-he lets me keep the stand just as she used it."

She certainly had a genius for restoring the old, and doing it with an art which threw all its stiffness into graceful lines. The fireplace in the sitting room, which had been boarded up in Esther's day, with a sheet-iron stove in front of it, was open now, and the old bra.s.s andirons shone at the front. The old bricks had been cracked with age, but they had been replaced by some blue Dutch tilings representing Bible scenes, which gave the whole a charmingly quaint effect.

"It came high," Stella said to Esther, who hung on every word of explanation, "and I didn't know for a while as I should get what I wanted. There was a Colonial tile that would have been perfect, but grandfather wouldn't hear of it. Then all at once I lighted on this in a shop in Boston, and I knew the deed was done. Grandfather fell a victim to my account of the pictures, and I couldn't get them quick enough to suit him. I consider that fireplace my greatest triumph."

The house was really a succession of them. It was only at the pictures on the walls that the girl's desire to restore the old had stopped. "If there had only been some fine old family portraits!" she said mournfully. "But there weren't. I suppose our ancestors never had any money to spend for that sort of thing. There was positively nothing but some wretched prints, and one oil painting that grandmother saved her egg-money for months to buy; hideous thing, quite on the order of those that are advertised nowadays, 'Picture painted while you wait.' I had to banish them all. There was no other way. But I found some of grandmother's dear old samplers tucked away in the drawers, and I pinned them up around to take the edge off the other things."

"The other things" were some of them her own, and they mingled on the walls with photographs of foreign scenes, and here and there an etching with a name pencilled in the corner, to which she called attention as they pa.s.sed, with the air of one confident of impressing the beholder.

"Oh, I've picked up a few good things in the course of my travels," she said, after one of Esther's bursts of admiration. "I'll defy anybody to make a better showing than I with the amount I've spent. Mother thinks I've spent too much; but it's my only extravagance, positively my only one, and you have to let yourself out in some direction. It's all that makes saving worth while."

She seemed to have no vanity about her own work, but there was one bit of it before which Esther paused with a long delight, turning back from famous Madonnas again and again to gaze at it.

It was a picture of a sweet old face, framed in a grandmother's cap, very softly done in crayon, and it hung above the little stand in the corner. Below it, pinned carefully on the wall, was an old, old sampler, and the faded letters at the top spelled, "Roxana Fuller, aged eleven."

It was a deft hand, though so young, that had wrought it. There was exquisite needlework in the flowing border, and in the slender maidens at the centre, clasping hands under a weeping willow, above the lines:-

"When ye summers all are fled, When ye wafting lamp is dead, Where immortal spirits reign, There may we two meet again."

Why these two sweet creatures, evidently in the bloom of life, should have been consoling themselves with this pensive sentiment it was hard to see; but a consolation it may have been to the poor little artist who achieved them to think of Elysian fields where teachers should cease from troubling and samplers be no more.

It had grown dark in the house, too dark for any more searching of its treasures, when the two girls at last sat quietly down in the old south doorway. "If grandmother were only here it would all be perfect," said Esther, with a long, soft sigh. "Somehow it seems strange that she should be gone, and everything else just as it used to be. I had no idea I should miss her so."

"I always miss her when I sit in this doorway in the evening," said Stella. "It was her favorite place. She was so feeble in those last years that she seldom got beyond the threshold, but she said there was always some pleasant smell or sound coming in to find her. You ought to have seen her here in the spring. The door was always boarded up in the winter, with a bank across the threshold to keep out the cold, and she was so happy when it was opened. I used to tell her when the frogs began to peep, and she would listen and smile, and say it seemed to her their voices were softer than they used to be. Dear heart, she was so deaf in those days that I really suppose she only heard them singing in her memory, but it was all the same to her.

"Yes, it was all the same," she repeated musingly, "and just as real, though grandfather used to argue with her sometimes that a person who couldn't hear her own name across the room couldn't hear frogs peeping at a quarter of a mile. And she would admit it sometimes in a humble way, but she always forgot it, and enjoyed the singing just the same the next evening."

"She wasn't a bit like grandfather, was she?" asked Esther. She wanted Stella to keep on talking about this sweet old grandmother, whom she herself had known only in a brief childish way.

"Oh, dear, no," said Stella; "there couldn't be two people more unlike.

She never talked of herself, and she never quoted scripture unless it was one of the promises. Grandfather always lorded it over her in a way, and she was so frail toward the last that he did it more than ever. If the least thing ailed her he thought she was going to die right off, and he always felt it his duty to tell her that she was a very sick woman, and that it would not be surprising if she were drawing near her end."

She made a soft gurgling in her throat, then went on.

"But that never worried grandmother a bit. She always said she was willing to go if 'twas the Lord's will; but, do you know, in her heart she really expected to outlive him! She told me so once confidentially, and explained, in her perfectly sweet way, that she knew how to manage him better than any one else, and she was afraid it would be a little hard for us to get along with him if she were gone. She said it had been a subject of prayer with her for years, and she had faith that her prayer would be answered."

She paused, and Esther said gravely: "But she did die before him, after all. I wonder what she thought about her prayer then." Stella shook her head. "I don't know," she said; "I imagine she didn't think of it at all, but only that G.o.d wanted her. It would have been just like her."

Esther did not speak for a minute. She was pondering her grandmother's case, while the crickets in the gra.s.s filled the stillness with their chirping, and the long, clear call of a whippoorwill sounded from the woods. Presently she asked, "Did she know at the last that she was really going to die?"

"I think she did," said Stella. "I've always felt sure she did, though no one else feels just as I do about it."

She clasped her hands about her knees, and a graver note than usual crept into her musical voice, as she went on. "There was something like a paralytic stroke toward the end, and after that she never got up, but lay in bed, not suffering any pain, but only growing weaker every day. I was with her a great deal, and there never was any one easier to take care of. One morning I was watering the flowers in her window and I saw a cl.u.s.ter of buds, that were almost blown, on her tea rose. She was pa.s.sionately fond of flowers, and that rose was a special favorite, though it blossomed so seldom that any one else would have lost all patience with it. I knew how pleased she would be, so I took it over to her bed. 'Grandmother,' I said, 'there are some buds on your tea rose; it'll be in bloom in a day or two.' If you could have seen how her face lighted up! 'Why, why,' she said, 'my tea rose!' And then she put out her hands all of a tremble, as if she couldn't believe it without touching. I guided her dear old fingers, and she moved them over the bush as gently as if it had been a baby's face. 'Oh,' she said, 'it has blossomed so many times when something beautiful happened! Somehow, it seemed to know. It blossomed when Lucia was married, and the day your mother came home to live with you children; but I never thought it would be so now. A day or two, did you say; only a day or two more?' And then she closed her eyes with such a smile, and I heard her saying softly to herself,-

"'There everlasting spring abides, And never-withering flowers.'

"Her mind wandered a little all that day and the next, and she never once spoke of leaving us, but she slipped away at night as quietly as going to sleep, and in the morning the rose was in bloom. I told grandfather about it afterward, but he didn't attach any significance to it at all. In fact, I think he felt a little mortified, and he said if she had realized that she was on the brink of eternity she wouldn't have been thinking about a rose."

She was silent a minute, then added: "In one way I don't know but grandmother's prayer was answered after all, for grandfather seemed different after her death. He has been more considerate of us all, and we-yes, I guess we've tried harder to be good to him. We couldn't help it when we remembered how patient she always was."

The chirping of the crickets seemed to grow fuller and gladder in the summer stillness, and the notes of the whippoorwill came with yet mellower call. It was as if the influence of a sweet, unselfish, loving spirit filled the place, and somehow it did not seem to Esther Northmore at that moment a poor or paltry thing to have lived and died one of the common throng.

CHAPTER V

AUNT KATHARINE SAXON

In the privacy of their room that night Kate confided to Esther two resolutions. The first was that she would not again, during her stay at her grandfather's, needlessly expose her ignorance of any point of Bible history: "For if we're going to get mother into disgrace, and make him think she never taught us anything about it, it'll be a pretty business," she ended with feeling.

To this Esther gave cordial a.s.sent, but she was not so sure of Kate's wisdom in the other matter; for the girl, with her usual penetration, had guessed that the Eastern relatives held a somewhat exalted opinion of the superiority of New England to the rest of the United States, and announced her intention of correcting it to the best of her ability.

Esther, whose loyalty to her own section was not of a combative sort, suggested mildly that people's opinions about things didn't alter them, and that the grandfather, at his advanced age, should at least be left to the enjoyment of any prejudices he might have in favor of his native section.

But the allusion to his age should have been omitted. Kate shook her head at this, and declared that he of all others was the one not to be spared. Was it not his pride and boast that time had not robbed him of either mental or physical vigor? No, no; she should not hold herself debarred from supplying him with new ideas on any subject. It was only when he stood on Bible ground that she should let him alone.

It was evident the next morning that on this ground he did not intend to let her alone, for at family prayers he read the pathetic story of David's flight from his unworthy son, and his eyes sought hers for a moment with pointed meaning as he paused on the name of the loyal friend whose swift generosity remembered the fugitives, "hungry and weary and thirsty in the wilderness," and who of good right met them again with rejoicing in their hour of victory.

The quaint old story held the girl's absorbed attention to the end. She wished it were longer, and told her grandfather so after breakfast, adding that the way he read the Old Testament made it more interesting than common.

He received the compliment with complacence. "Well," he said, "I guess I do read it better than some folks. I guess I'm a little like those men in the days of Ezra the scribe, who stood up before the people, and 'read in the law of G.o.d distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand.'"

Kate privately wondered how many more people in the Bible her grandfather resembled, but she refrained from suggesting the query, lest he should claim her attention at once for the whole list.

It was while they sat at table that morning that he said, looking at her with the sudden lighting of face which marks a mental discovery: "It's your great-aunt Katharine that you put me in mind of. I knew there was somebody. It ain't your looks so much; but a way you have."

"Oh, grandfather, how can you?" cried Stella. "Kate, you won't thank him much for that when you know Aunt Katharine."

"She's the one I was named for, I suppose," said Kate. "I've heard mother tell about her. Well, if she's disagreeable, there won't be any love lost between us on account of the name. I never did like it particularly."

"Disagreeable!" cried Stella, "why, she's the queerest, most cross-grained, cantankerous-"

"Stella! Stella!" said her mother, severely. "Why will you prejudice your cousins against your poor Aunt Katharine?"

"My poor Aunt Katharine will do it herself quick enough," said Stella.

"Oh, yes," she added with a little shrug, as she saw her mother's lips parting again, "my mother's going to tell you that Aunt Katharine has had a great deal in her life to try her, and that she is really a remarkably bright and capable woman. It's perfectly true; and several other things are true besides."

"The trouble with my sister Katharine," said Ruel Saxon, setting down his cup of tea, which he had been drinking so hot that every swallow was accompanied by an upward jerk of the head and a facial contortion, "the trouble with Katharine Saxon don't lay in her nat'ral faculties. It lays in a stiff-necked and perverse disposition. When she gets a notion into her head she won't change it for anybody, and she's wiser in her own conceit than 'seven men that can render a reason.'"