"Well," said she, "I guess whatever I should give him "d only make him laugh."
"Flowers--and velvet--and honey--and myrrh?"
"Yes," answered Miss Susan with gravity. "Perhaps it"s jest as well some things ain"t to be had at the shops."
The schoolmaster took up his lamp again and walked to the door.
"We never can tell," he said. "It may be people want things awfully without knowing it. And suppose they do laugh! They"d better laugh than cry. _I_ should give all I could. Good-night."
Miss Susan banked up the fire and set her rising of dough on the hearth, after a discriminating peep to see whether it was getting on too fast.
After that, she covered her plants by the window and blew out the light, so that the moon should have its way. She lingered for a moment, looking out into a glittering world. Not a breath stirred. The visible universe lay asleep, and only beauty waked. She was aching with a tumultuous emotion--the sense that life might be very fair and shining, if we only dared to shape it as it seems to us in dreams. The loveliness and repose of the earth appealed to her like a challenge; they alone made it seem possible for her also to dare.
Next morning, she rose earlier than usual, while the schoolmaster was still fast bound in sleep. She stayed only to start her kitchen fire, and then stood motionless a moment for a last decision. The great white day was beginning outside with slow, unconscious royalty. The pale winter dawn yielded to a flush of rose; nothing in the aspect of the heavens contradicted the promise of the night before. It seemed to her a wonderful day, dramatic, visible in peace, because, on that morning, all the world was thinking of the world and not of individual desires. She went to the bureau drawer in the sitting-room and looked, a little scornfully, at two packages hidden there. Handkerchiefs for the schoolmaster, stockings and gloves for Solon! Shutting the drawer, she hurried out into the kitchen, s.n.a.t.c.hing her scissors from the work-basket by the way. She gave herself no time to think, but went up to her flower-stand and began to cut the geranium blossoms and the rose.
The fuchsias hung in flaunting grace. They were dearer to her than all.
She snipped them recklessly, and because the bunch seemed meagre still, broke the top from her sweet-scented geranium and disposed the flowers hastily in the midst. Her posy was sweet-smelling and good; it spoke to the heart. Putting a shawl over her head, she rolled the flowers in her ap.r.o.n from the frost, and stepped out into the brilliant day. The little cross-track between her house and the other was snowed up; but she took the road and, hurrying between banks of carven whiteness, went up Solon"s path to the side door. She walked in upon him where he was standing over the kitchen stove, warming his hands at the first blaze.
Susan"s cheeks were red with the challenge of the stinging air, but she had the look of one who, living by a larger law, has banished the foolishness of fear. She walked straight up to him and proffered him her flowers.
"Here, Solon," she said, "it"s Christmas. I brought you these."
Solon looked at her and at them, in slow surprise. He put out both hands and took them awkwardly.
"Well!" he said. "Well!"
Susan was smiling at him. It seemed to her at that moment that the world was a very rich place, because you may take all you want and give all you choose, while n.o.body is the wiser.
"Well," remarked Solon again, "I guess I"ll put "em into water." He laid them down on a chair. "Susan, do you remember that time I walked over to Pine Hill to pick you some mayflowers, when you was gittin" over the lung fever?"
She nodded.
"Susan," said he desperately, "what if I should ask you to forgit old scores an" begin all over?"
"I ain"t laid up anything," answered Susan, looking him full in the face with her brilliant smile.
"There"s suthin" I"ve wanted to tell ye, this two year. I never s"posed you knew, but that night I kissed your sister in the entry an" asked her, I thought "twas you."
"Yes, I knew that well enough. I was in the b.u.t.tery and heard it all.
There, le"s not talk about it."
Solon came a step nearer.
"But will you, Susan?" he persisted. "Will you? I know Jenny"d like it."
"I guess she would, too," said Susan. "There! we don"t need to talk no further! You come over to breakfast, won"t you? I"m goin" to fry chicken. It"s Christmas mornin"." She nodded at him and went out, walking perhaps more proudly than usual down the shining path. Solon, regardless of his cooling kitchen, stood at the door and watched her.
Solon never said very much, but he felt as if life were beginning all over again, just as he had wished to make it at the very start. He forgot his gray hair and furrowed face, just as he forgot the cold and snow. It was the spring of the year.
When Miss Susan entered her kitchen, the schoolmaster had come down and was putting a stick of wood into the stove.
"Merry Christmas!" he called, "and here"s something for you."
A long white package lay on the table at the end where her plate was always set. She opened it with delicate touches, it seemed so precious.
"My sake!" said she. "It"s a fan!" She lifted it out, and the fragrance of an Eastern wood filled all the room. She swept open the feathers.
They were white and wonderful.
"It was never used except by one very beautiful woman," said the schoolmaster, without looking at her. "She was a good deal older than I; but somehow she seemed to belong to me. She died, and I thought I should like to have you keep this."
Susan was waving it back and forth before her face, stirring the air to fragrance. Her eyes were full of dreams. "My! ain"t it rich!" she murmured. "The Queen o" Sheba never had no better. An" Solon"s comin"
over to breakfast."
A SECOND MARRIAGE
Amelia Porter sat by her great open fireplace, where the round, consequential black kettle hung from the crane, and breathed out a steamy cloud to be at once licked up and absorbed by the heat from a s.n.a.t.c.hing flame below. It was exactly a year and a day since her husband"s death, and she had packed herself away in his own corner of the settle, her hands clasped across her knees, and her red-brown eyes brooding on the nearer embers. She was not definitely speculating on her future, nor had she any heart for retracing the dull and gentle past.
She had simply relaxed hold on her mind; and so, escaping her, it had gone wandering off into shadowy prophecies of the immediate years. For, as Amelia had been telling herself for the last three months, since she had begun to outgrow the habit of a dual life, she was not old. Whenever she looked in the gla.s.s, she could not help noting how free from wrinkles her swarthy face had been kept, and that the line of her mouth was still scarlet over white, even teeth. Her crisp black hair, curling in those tight fine rolls which a bashful admirer had once commended as "full of little jerks," showed not a trace of gray. All this evidence of her senses read her a fair tale of the possibilities of the morrow; and without once saying, "I will take up a new life," she did tacitly acknowledge that life was not over.
It was a "snapping cold" night of early spring, so misplaced as to bring with it a certain dramatic excitement. The roads were frozen hard, and shone like silver in the ruts. All day sleds had gone creaking past, set to that fine groaning which belongs to the music of the year. The drivers" breath ascended in steam, the while they stamped down the probability of freezing, and yelled to Buck and Broad until that inner fervor raised them one degree in warmth. The smoking cattle held their noses low, and swayed beneath the yoke.
Amelia, shut snugly in her winter-tight house, had felt the power of the day without sharing its discomforts; and her eyes deepened and burned with a sense of the movement and warmth of living. To-night, under the spell of some vague expectancy, she had sat still for a long time, her sewing laid aside and her room scrupulously in order. She was waiting for what was not to be acknowledged even to her own intimate self. But as the clock struck nine, she roused herself, and shook off her mood in impatience and a disappointment which she would not own. She looked about the room, as she often had of late, and began to enumerate its possibilities in case she should desire to have it changed. Amelia never went so far as to say that change should be; she only felt that she had still a right to speculate upon it, as she had done for many years, as a form of harmless enjoyment. While every other house in the neighborhood had gone from the consistently good to the prosperously bad in the matter of refurnishing, John Porter had kept his precisely as his grandfather had left it to him. Amelia had never once complained; she had observed toward her husband an unfailing deference, due, she felt, to his twenty years" seniority; perhaps, also, it stood in her own mind as the only amends she could offer him for having married him without love. It was her father who made the match; and Amelia had succ.u.mbed, not through the obedience claimed by parents of an elder day, but from hot jealousy and the pique inevitably born of it. Laurie Morse had kept the singing-school that winter. He had loved Amelia; he had bound himself to her by all the most holy vows sworn from aforetime, and then, in some wanton exhibit of power--gone home with another girl. And for Amelia"s responsive throb of feminine anger, she had spent fifteen years of sober country living with a man who had wrapped her about with the quiet tenderness of a strong nature, but who was not of her own generation either in mind or in habit; and Laurie had kept a music-store in Saltash, seven miles away, and remained unmarried.
Now Amelia looked about the room, and mentally displaced the furniture, as she had done so many times while she and her husband sat there together. The settle could be taken to the attic. She had not the heart to carry out one secret resolve indulged in moments of impatient bitterness,--to split it up for firewood. But it could at least be exiled. She would have a good cook-stove, and the great fireplace should be walled up. The tin kitchen, sitting now beside the hearth in shining quaintness, should also go into the attic. The old clock--But at that instant the clash of bells shivered the frosty air, and Amelia threw her vain imaginings aside like a garment, and sprang to her feet. She clasped her hands in a spontaneous gesture of rapt attention; and when the sound paused at her gate, with one or two sweet, lingering clingles, "I knew it!" she said aloud. Yet she did not go to the window to look into the moonlit night. Standing there in the middle of the room, she awaited the knock which was not long in coming. It was imperative, insistent. Amelia, who had a spirit responsive to the dramatic exigencies of life, felt a little flush spring into her face, so hot that, on the way to the door, she involuntarily put her hand to her cheek and held it there. The door came open grumblingly. It sagged upon the hinges, but, well-used to its vagaries, she overcame it with a regardless haste.
"Come in," she said, at once, to the man on the step. "It"s cold. Oh, come in!"
He stepped inside the entry, removing his fur cap, and disclosing a youthful face charged with that radiance which made him, at thirty-five, almost the counterpart of his former self. It may have come only from the combination of curly brown hair, blue eyes, and an aspiring lift of the chin, but it always seemed to mean a great deal more. In the kitchen, he threw off his heavy coat, while Amelia, bright-eyed and breathing quickly, stood by, quite silent. Then he looked at her.
"You expected me, didn"t you?" he asked.
A warmer color surged into her cheeks. "I didn"t know," she said perversely.
"I guess you did. It"s one day over a year. You knew I"d wait a year."
"It ain"t a year over the services," said Amelia, trying to keep the note of vital expectancy out of her voice. "It won"t be that till Friday."
"Well, Sat.u.r.day I"ll come again." He went over to the fire and stretched out his hands to the blaze. "Come here," he said imperatively, "while I talk to you."
Amelia stepped forward obediently, like a good little child. The old fascination was still as dominant as at its birth, sixteen years ago.
She realized, with a strong, splendid sense of the eternity of things, that always, even while it would have been treason to recognize it, she had known how ready it was to rise and live again. All through her married years, she had sternly drugged it and kept it sleeping. Now it had a right to breathe, and she gloried in it.
"I said to myself I wouldn"t come to-day," went on Laurie, without looking at her. A new and excited note had come into his voice, responsive to her own. He gazed down at the fire, musing the while he spoke. "Then I found I couldn"t help it. That"s why I"m so late. I stayed in the shop till seven, and some fellows come in and wanted me to play. I took up the fiddle, and begun. But I hadn"t more"n drew a note before I laid it down and put for the door. "d.i.c.k, you keep shop," says I. And I harnessed up, and drove like the devil."
Amelia felt warm with life and hope; she was taking up her youth just where the story ended.
"You ain"t stopped swearin" yet!" she remarked, with a little excited laugh. Then, from an undercurrent of exhilaration, it occurred to her that she had never laughed so in all these years.
"Well," said Laurie abruptly, turning upon her, "how am I goin" to start out? Shall we hark back to old scores? I know what come between us. So do you. Have we got to talk it out, or can we begin now?"