"And when do you expect them back?" she asked finally.
"I don"t know," said the old lady, "but they"ll be back as soon as the work is over, you may depend--they don"t lag, my girls, neither of "em."
"I am sure of that," she a.s.sented quickly. "They are the hardest workers I ever saw: I wonder that they never rest, and tell them so."
"Time enough for resting when all"s done," said the old lady briskly.
"That was my mother"s word before me and I"ve handed it down to Ann and Hester."
"But then, at that rate, none of us would ever rest, would we?" she protested humourously.
"This side o" green grave?" the old lady shot out. "Maybe so. But podding peas is a kind of rest--after picking "em!"
"And have you really picked all these--and in the sun, too?" she said, surprised. "I trust not for me--I could get along perfectly..."
The old lady jumped briskly after her loaves, tapped the bottoms knowingly, then stood each one on its inverted pan in a fragrant row on the dresser.
"Peas or beans or corn--it makes no odds, my dear," she cried cheerfully. "It"s all to be done, one way or another, you see."
An inspiration came to the idler by the window, and before she had quite caught at the humour of it, she spoke.
"Why should you get my breakfast--for I am sure you are going to?" she said. "Why shouldn"t I--if you think I could--for I don"t like to sit here and have you do it all!"
"Why not, indeed?" the old woman replied, with a shrewd smile at her.
"Hester judged you might offer, and left the tray ready set."
"Hester judged?" she repeated wonderingly. "Why, how could she, possibly? How could she know I would come down, even?"
"She judged so," the mother nodded imperturbably. "The kettle"s on the boil, now, and I"ve two of the rusks you relished yesterday on the pantry shelf. Just dip "em in that bowl of milk in the window and slip "em in the oven--it makes a tasty crust. She keeps some chocolate grated in a little blue dish in the corner and the b.u.t.ter"s in a crock in the well. The brown hen will show you her own egg, I"ll warrant that."
Amused, she followed all these directions, and poured herself a cup of steaming chocolate, the first meal of her own preparing since childish banquets filched from an indulgent cook. And then, the breakfast over, she would have left the kitchen, empty just then, for the mistress of it had pottered out on one of her endless little errands, had not a sudden thought sent a flush to her forehead, so that she turned abruptly at the threshold and walking swiftly to the water spigot, sent a stream into a tiny bra.s.s-bound tub she took from the deep window seats, frothed it with Hester"s herb-scented soap, and rinsed and dipped and dried each dish and cup of her own using before the old woman returned.
"It is surprising how--how _satisfactory_ it makes one feel, really,"
she began hastily at the housewife"s friendly returning nod, "to deal with this sort of work. One seems to have accomplished something that--that had to be done... I don"t know whether you see what I mean, exactly...."
"Bless you, my dear, and why shouldn"t I see?" cried the other, scrubbing the coats of a lapful of brown jacketed potatoes at the spigot. "Every woman knows that feeling, surely?"
"I never did," she said, simply. "I thought it was greasy, thankless work, and felt very sorry for those who did it."
"Did they look sad?" asked the old worker.
In a flash of memory they pa.s.sed before her, those white-ap.r.o.ned, bare-elbowed girls she had watched idly in many countries and at many seasons; from the nurse that bathed and combed her own children, singing, to the laundry-maids whose laughter and ringing talk had waked her from more than one uneasy afternoon sleep.
"Why, no, I can"t say that they did," she answered slowly, "but to do it steadily, I should think..."
"It"s the steady work that puts the taste into the holiday, my mother used to say," said the old woman shortly. "Where"s the change, else?"
"But of course there are many different forms of work," she began, slowly, as though she were once for all making the matter clear to herself, and not at all explaining obvious distinctions to an uneducated old woman, "and brain workers need rest and change as much, yes, more, than mere labourers."
"So they tell me," said Hester"s mother respectfully, "though of course I know next to nothing of it myself. Ann says it"s that makes it so dangerous for women folks to worry at their brains too much, for she"s taken notice, she says, that mostly they"re sickly or cranky that works too much that way. Hard to get on with, she says they are, the best of "em."
"Indeed!" she cried indignantly, "and I suppose to be "easy to get on with" is the main business of women, then!"
"Why, Lord above us, child!" answered the old woman briskly, dropping her white potatoes into a brown dish of fresh-drawn water, "if the women are not to be easy got on with, who"s to be looked to for it, then; the children--or the men?"
She gathered up the brown peelings and bagged them carefully with the pea pods.
"For the blacksmith"s pig," she said. "We don"t keep one and he gives us a ham every year.... Not that it"s not a different matter with you, of course," she added politely. "There"s some, of course, that"s needed by the world, for books and music and the like o" that--I don"t need Hester to tell me so. There"s never an evening in winter, when all"s swept and the lamp trimmed and a bowl of apples out, and Ann and I sit with our bit of sewing, that I don"t thank G.o.d for the books Hester reads out to us. One was written by a woman writer that the doctor sent us here for a long, long time--poor dear, but she was feeble!
"She worked with the girls at everything they did, that she could, by doctor"s orders, and it put a little peace into her, she told me.
You"ve a look in the eyes like her--there were thousands read her books."
The guest rose abruptly.
"I never wrote a book--or did anything," she said briefly, and turned to the door.
"You don"t tell me!" the old mother stammered. "Why, I made sure by your look--what made ye so mortal tired, then, deary?"
"I must find that out," she said, slowly, her hand on the k.n.o.b.
"I--must--find--that--out!"
And on the balcony she paced and thought for an hour, but there was no calmness in her forehead till the afternoon, when alone with Hester"s mother, for the daughters did not return all that day, she worked with pressed lips at their tasks, picking Ann"s evening salad, sprinkling cool drops over Hester"s fresh-dried linen, brought in by armfuls from the currant-bushes, spreading the supper-table, pressing out the ivory-moulded cottage cheese and ringing its dish with grape-leaves gathered from the well-house.
So intent was she at these tasks, that she heard no footsteps along the gra.s.s, and only as she put the fifth chair at the white-spread table (for the old mother had been mysteriously firm in her certainty that they should need it) did she turn to look into the keen brown eyes of the wise physician who had left her weeks ago in the bed above them.
He gave her a long, piercing look. Then,
"I thought so," he said quietly. "We will go back to-morrow, you and I--I need your bedroom."
Through the open door she caught a quick glimpse of Ann and Hester half supporting, half carrying up the stairs a woman heavily veiled in black crepe; Hester did not join them till late in the meal, and went through the room with a gla.s.s of milk afterward. No one spoke further of her presence among them; no one thanked her for her services; all was a.s.sumed and she blessed them for it.
The doctor pa.s.sed the evening with his new patient, and when she mounted the stairs for her last night she found her simple luggage in the room next hers: there was no question of helping her to bed, and she undressed thoughtfully alone. The house was very still.
Her window was a deep dormer, and as she leaned out of it, for a breath of the stars, she saw Dr. Stanchon stretched in her chair on the balcony, his face white and tired in the moonlight. In the chair near her, so near that she could touch it, lay the frail creature in the grey dress, black now at night.
"It is his old patient!" she thought contentedly, remembering with vexation that she had absolutely forgotten to ask the house-mother about her and why she had not appeared; and she began to speak, when the other raised her hand warningly, and she saw that Dr. Stanchon slept.
Why she began to whisper she did not know, but she remembered afterward that their conversation, below breath as it was, was the longest they had yet had, though she could recall only the veriest sc.r.a.ps of it.
For instance:
"But Mary and Martha?" she had urged, "surely there is a deep meaning in that, too? It was Martha who was reproved...."
"One would imagine that every woman to-day judged herself a Mary--and that is a dangerous judgment to form, one"s self," the other whispered.
"But to deliberately a.s.sume these tasks--simple because they clear my life and keep me balanced--when I have no need to do them, seems to me an affectation, absurd!"
"How can a thing be absurd if it brings you ease?"
"But I don"t need to do them, really, for myself."
"For some one else, then?"