The years had gone, and her father had lived most miraculously long, considering how he had imposed upon his physique. A strong, hard, wiry old man, making it hard for everybody with whom he came in contact, yet having his virtues, too, that would crop out in erratic ways like putting Harriet Granniss for life into his daughter’s home without consulting her. Perhaps he did it for love. Emily tried to think so and tried to forget his hardness now that he was gone.
Once she had thought that perhaps if Nathan was anywhere in her world he would hear of her father’s death and come to see her, but five long years had passed, and no word had been heard of Nathan, and now she had settled it in her mind that he was either dead, or had forgotten, or perhaps he thought it was too late.
Then, yesterday, out of a clear sky, had come Becky’s quiet gossip. Nathan was alive! He had been seen and talked with by residents of Glenside. He had succeeded; and he was still unmarried! He had set up a home by himself! Amazing facts! Ever since she had heard them and felt the clutch of her heart and the leap of the blood into her cheek, she had wanted to get away and think. Her quiet midnight chamber had not been quiet enough for her to dare to really take out the sacred past and search into the innermost recesses of her heart. Somehow the walls would cry out to Harriet and make her know if she thought about it at home. The very wallpaper would reveal to those prying eyes that her housemate had a secret, and presently Harriet would propound some bald and piercing question that would throw a horrible searchlight into her brain, and Harriet would just pick out what she wanted and crow over it and sneer about it, and Emily would be done. And so she had come to this quiet childhood haunt to take out her soul and look into her past.
She skirted the old farm, going across the high bridge. In the distance she could see Ephraim Sears, its present owner, and Silas Hawkins, the hired man, pitching hay on the hay wagon—probably the same old hay wagon where she had ridden and played as a child. Everything about the old farm was well cared for, well preserved. And yet—what nonsense! It was years and years. She was forty-two! Twelve from forty-two—she must have been twelve the last time she rode on the hay wagon. Thirty years! Could a wagon live so long? Its lines were archaic against the horizon. It might be. But—could love live so long? Yet it had lived in her heart. At least the idea of it had lived. She could see the strong, fine lines of the boyish figure now as he stood with one hand on the gate and told her there would never be anyone else in his life to take her place, and it still made her heart thrill to think of it! But he would have changed. He must have changed, as she had. He would be fat and gray-haired, and different, perhaps. Other men were. There was Dill Foster, slouchy and grouchy, nothing at all like the slim, elegant youth he used to be. There was Joe Freeman, fat and red and a fool with women, instead of the fresh-faced smiling boy she remembered. Undoubtedly Nate would have changed. She had changed herself. She was an old woman. Old! old! old! She tried to rub it into her consciousness, but in spite of her the wind blew the idea away, and the birds laughed at her in a joyous song. She wasn’t really thinking those thoughts at all, and she knew she wasn’t, as she tripped along over the bridge, the same old bridge over which she used to go to school when Nate, carrying her books, walked beside her. Nate’s spirit wouldn’t have changed—hers hadn’t. To herself, she was the same little girl in a blue gingham dress. It was her spirit that stayed young and still wore blue gingham. Her eyes would be able to see the young spirit of Nate, and he would see her that way. They had always been able to look into each other’s spirits. That was what had made it possible for her to live all these lonely years without him, doing her duty and just waiting.
The men in the hay field had stopped their work and were watching her. Si Hawkins was pointing to her, and Ephraim Sears had turned clear around and rested on his pitchfork handle. She hastened her steps and slipped into the woods. It was no part of her plan to be recognized.
Down near the old swimming hole she found the flat rock where they used to eat their picnic lunches so long ago, and here she spread her tiny feast. She ate with relish and leisure, recalling faces long since gone, and jokes that she had not thought of for years; and always one face and one voice that rose above them all.
After her meal was finished, she swung herself carefully down the steepness till she came to the little path close to the water. It was overgrown with tangled weeds and flowers, but still there must be children’s feet that now and then traveled that way, for there was a path distinct beneath the overgrowth. It was a bit hard traveling, and she found her knees trembling, but more perhaps from excitement than fatigue. She told herself with a smile that Harriet would have made a great fuss about her doing it and would have prophesied rheumatism and broken limbs and all sorts of evils to follow. But this was Emily’s day, and she meant to have everything belonging to it.
She wandered up a little way above the swimming hole where the water was shallower and where they used to wade and cross on stepping-stones. There she sat down again, dreamily watching the little stream babble by her, rippling around the stepping-stones that still lifted their heads above the water here and there. Perhaps not the very same stones but more stones like them, and here as she looked there came a small procession of little bare feet of other days, and little gathered-up gingham skirts, laughing faces, flying curls, merry shouts, boys’ voices gruff and deep; and one voice—always one voice above them all.
By and by, led by an unquenchable longing, she stooped with reddening cheeks, half ashamed of herself, unfastened her neat, laced boots, and took them off. The cool freeze on her slim, stockinged foot gave a little thrill of shock, but she persevered. With a timid glance around and up where a saucy robin eyed her from a lofty perch, she unfastened her immaculate white stockings and slipped them off, sliding the whiteness of her feet beneath the black serge skirt that was just a little too long for the modern fashion.
For several minutes she sat thus, huddled on the stone, her feet deliciously cool against the lushness of the wild grass and the velvet of the moss. Somehow now she had done it, her age and station rose about her to shame her, and she half thought she heard a stir amid the tall grasses and wild yellow daisies on the opposite bank. But the sweet air moved about her soothingly, a bee sang drowsily, a bird caroled joyously far up, and the place grew still—still and alone, so after a little while she gathered courage and arose. She ventured cautiously down to the brink, her black skirts lifted, her little white feet gleaming like a child’s, and stepped out, with many hesitations, upon the first stepping-stone, and stood, poised like a small blue heron, on one little foot with the other tucked up almost out of sight. Then she put the other down on the next stone, a lower one, and the water laughed and ran over it in soft ripples and little cool stings. She laughed aloud herself and took another step, this time a slippery one, and farther, and she drew her breath quickly and paused to get her balance. How mortifying if she should fall in and have to go home wet! And Harriet—But she would never go home that way. She would stay in the woods till she dried. Not even for the fear of pneumonia would she go home and face Harriet’s consternation and contempt. She could hear the sharp, keen voice like a knife now cutting through the air: “You! A woman of forty-five!” Harriet always anticipated one’s age by a few measures. “You! a grown-up woman! to go wading like a child! Emily Dillon, you must be simpleminded! I always said you needed a nurse! No wonder your father left it in his will that I was to take care of you!”
Just like that she would say it! Harriet always managed to get that will in somehow when she was angry with her. Emily’s cheeks burned hotly with indignation, and she steadied herself with resolution. She would not fall in and she would not ever let Harriet know that she had gone wading. That should be a sealed secret between herself and the woods as long as she lived. She was here today to have a happy time, and no Harriet should hinder.
So she went all the way across, slowly, joyously, remembering how Nathan Barrett had walked beside her the first time and
held her hand till she was used to balancing alone on the slippery stones. It was as if he walked beside her now in all his young strength, and steadied her timid feet, and there was a light of wonder and delight in her eyes as she lifted them to the billowy clouds in the blue sky over the distant hay fields. Something was growing in her, an idea, vague and unformed, but so great and so breathless that she dared not entertain it till she was safe on dry land. Slowly, cautiously, she crept back again to her bit stone and dried her little white feet with her handkerchief; dried them quickly, surreptitiously, and slid them furtively into the stockings.
It was just as she started to put on one shoe that she heard a step somewhere, across on the other bank, and a rustle and crack of twigs. She stopped short, with her hands at her shoe, her breath held and that rigidness of form that a squirrel takes on a branch when someone approaches. An instant she held her breath and then turned her glance across the stream without even lifting her lashes. There was no sign of anyone. It might have been a heron, perhaps, or a chipmunk, yet it sounded like a step. In panic she hurried on her shoes and laced them with trembling fingers. Some time after, she heard another movement of the tall grass farther away toward the farm. She listened awhile and then stole away up higher into the deep of the woods out of sight on a mossy bank at the roots of great hemlocks that bent and dipped till their lacy branches reached the water and dimpled it now and then with a caress as it passed. Here she sat a long time watching the drifting lights and shadows as they sifted down around her through the lacy branches, lights reflected from the water or coming from the sun above, but soft and flickering and mysterious, like spirit-sunshine in a world of souls. And here, alone amid the green quiet of the woods with the little brook seeping, rippling happily below, a bee humming drowsily in the flowers across the bank, and the distant sound of scythes in the hay field over on the farm, she thought out her idea and made her real plan. Somehow here it seemed as though God was with her giving her courage to see things as they really were, with no silly barriers of her world that had held her in prison so long. She was thinking out a destiny, and she was not afraid to call her soul her own.
She did not go back by way of the bridge. She had too great a consciousness of the farmer and his helper, and now that she had come to her decision, she did not want to meet anyone or have the beauty of her day dispelled. Besides, there was barely time to get back to her appointment before the office would be closed. So she climbed the hill higher and went down on the other side to the pike that met the trolley farther on. She had to cross three fields, and hurried a good deal, trembling and breathless with the exertion and flushed with the heat, but she reached the trolley just in time. All the way into the city, she sat hugging herself with delight at what she had done, and at what she had decided to do. It was as if she looked at the details of the road, as she passed, with new eyes.
Chapter 15
It was half past six when Emily Dillon entered the door, and Harriet Granniss was just sitting down to a solitary meal.
“Well, you decided to come home at last, did you?” she said with an acrid smile. “It is a wonder you didn’t take dinner in town somewhere and make an evening of it.”
Emily Dillon smiled without the usual meek apology in her face.
“I was detained,” she said in a businesslike tone. “I expected to make the five thirty. I am sorry to have held back supper, but I had just time to get on this train without waiting to phone for you to go on and eat. I wish you would never wait for me when I am late.”
“Well, everything’s stone cold by this time,” Harriet answered haughtily. “Perhaps you enjoy cold muffins; I don’t! But I’m not one to sit down and gorge myself alone. Of course, if you prefer cold meals to hot ones I’ll have to take them, too. You speak as if you intend to make a practice of coming home late after this.”
“Well, perhaps I shall,” smiled Emily, putting her toque on a chair and sitting down at the table. “What beautiful muffins! And you’ve made some orange marmalade. I’m really very hungry, and it all looks so good.”
Harriet Granniss gradually grew more mollified and attempted to find out what Emily had been doing all day, but though she threw out every kind of an opening short of actually asking her point-blank, which she never could bring herself to do, Emily smiled and kept her own counsel. After supper Emily did the dishes and then went out on the porch and sat for an hour conversing with Harriet about the things she knew she liked to talk of: what kind of a suit Harriet would get for winter; how she would make over last winter’s purple tricotine, and whether it was really best to wash woolens in hot water or lukewarm; also whether the next-door neighbors lived as happily as they seemed to do, and whether the postmaster ever read letters. There was some gossip about a young girl who was pretty and wild, a slur about the Methodist minister, and a tale that a woman on the next street had wine on her table every day in spite of prohibition and had been seen in her car drunk several times, to which Emily would not condescend; but she managed to mollify Harriet with descriptions of winter coats she had seen in the shop windows, until finally she said good night with less than her usual stiffness, and they parted at the top of the stairs and went to their rooms.
Emily did not go to her bed immediately, tired though she was from her unusual day. Instead, she fussed over her immaculate bureau drawers for a while, laid out some clean garments for the morning, and sat long by her little desk going over papers, some of which she destroyed. The neighbor across the way told Harriet the next day that she should think they’d have a big electric-light bill, for she saw a light in Miss Dillon’s room at two o’clock when she got up to give Johnny his medicine.
But there was nothing about Emily Dillon’s face the next morning at breakfast to show that she had sat up late the night before. On the contrary, she looked serene as a summer morning and took all Harriet’s gibes with a good-natured smile.
“Well, I s’pose you’re going a-gadding again today,” snapped Harriet, setting down the coffeepot and letting her ample proportions into her chair carefully. “This is your day to go up to your bank with your check, isn’t it? It’s come, hasn’t it?” and she nodded inquiringly toward the long envelope that lay by Emily’s plate along with the weekly Methodist Review and a begging letter from her pet orphan asylum.
“Yes, it’s come,” said Emily indifferently, laying the letter by itself.
“Well, I s’pose those tomatoes’ll have to wait till you come back, for I’m not going to do them alone. For mercy’s sake hurry back! I don’t see why you can’t be reasonable and bank in Glenside. I’m sure if it’s good enough for me it ought to be good enough for you.”
“Well, you know, Harriet, I like to stick to the old bank where Father always went,” soothed Emily, tasting her coffee delicately like a bird.
“Oh yes, I know you’re traditional. You can’t ever do anything but what you’ve always done.”
Emily smiled at some inner thought.
“Now you’ll just waste the whole day. I know you. You’ll forget all about the tomatoes—”
Emily looked troubled for a moment.
“I’m sorry about the tomatoes, Harriet, but suppose we don’t put them up this year. Neither of us likes them put up anyway. I don’t really know why we grow them. I suggest that you pick them and give them to your friends.”
Harriet arose from the table in wrath and gave Emily the benefit of her most withering glance.
“That’s just like your easy ways, Emily Dillon. Give away perfectly good vegetables that we have and don’t cost us anything! Give them away when we ought to put them up just as everybody else does. We have them in our garden, and it’s a sin to let them go to waste! Give them away! Hmm!”
“But why have them in our garden?” questioned Emily mildly. “You know you don’t like stewed tomatoes, Harriet. And I never eat them.”
“I consider it my duty to eat everything that is set on the table. Whatever you do, I always do my duty,” declared H
arriet severely. “The Bible says that there is nothing common or unclean, and I can eat tomatoes or anything else that grows, even if I don’t like them. I’m not a slave to my dislikes as you are. And as for the garden, I’d be ashamed to say I hadn’t any tomatoes in mine. Why, everybody grows tomatoes of course!” She marched from the room with a gathering of soiled dishes and thumped them down in the sink. Emily carried hers and washed them as usual, without a word, and then, gathering up her mail, went to her room.