I stared at her hard, not even shifting my gaze from her as I let Jeddy slip down upon the sofa. She was in brown, and not in green, as I had seen her in the field near Saco.
“You changed your dress,” I said.
At that I heard my mother laugh. “Was it a good fight, Richard?” she asked as she put her arm about me and turned me toward the stairway.
* * *
By good fortune the next day was one of those fine unseasonable March days especially made for the loosening of the bands of ice that bind our Maine fields and streams. There was a sweet, warm, smoky breeze out of the northwest, a breeze that flattened the ocean near to shore, so that the waves were small and weak, dropping wearily on the sand as though they lacked the strength to press onward to the high-tide mark. I might have slept the clock around if my aunt Cynthy had not stood by my bed, smiling her gentle smile and holding in her hands a cup of clam broth to which she added a generous portion of horseradish juice—an excellent drink for relieving an aching head. When I told her about our fight at Wildes’ public house, she clucked her tongue sympathetically and sat on the edge of my bed to wash the cut over my ear. It was a little tender, this cut, but nothing to think about unless a boom should swing against it.
While she stitched a neat band of old linen around my head, she told me how Sir Arthur had gone with Nathan to Batson’s River to shoot teal, and how Lady Ransome was with my mother, asking a thousand questions concerning America.
When I came downstairs I found Lady Ransome beside my mother on our long sofa inlaid with satinwood. I thought she looked pale, though this may have been caused by the black dress she was wearing, a fetching dress that billowed out from her like a doll’s dress, making her seem too small to be a grown woman and a wife. She was at work on a piece of needlework, a white thing on a round frame, entirely useless-looking, to my mind, more for appearance than anything else; and she was telling my mother about her father, who, if I correctly understood the little I heard, was a man who considered it demeaning to work, but wholly respectable to permit his wife and children to toil like Barbary galley slaves. She was so interested, seemingly, in what she was saying that she was oblivious to my entrance; and when she had finished she went at her needlework as if she intended never to look up from it.
My mother lifted an eyebrow at me but spoke to Lady Ransome. “My child, here’s Richard himself come to tell you that you need distress yourself no more about him.”
Lady Ransome dropped her hands in her lap. “Oh, lud!” she exclaimed, looking up at me as if in despair, “your mother calls me ‘child’ out of meanness, I do believe! I remembered you spoke of chocolate custards, and because I asked for them she calls me ‘child’!”
“How many was it you ate?” my mother asked. “Five, it seems to me.”
“I tell you that was not the reason I went early to bed!” Lady Ransome declared. “It was because I was weary!”
My mother’s knitting needles clicked busily for a time, while Lady Ransome looked loftily from the window, wholly indifferent.
“Richard,” my mother asked, “is it too early for woodcock to be nesting?”
Lady Ransome tossed her head a little. “La! I fear it’s too warm for walking, and Sir Arthur will return shortly!”
“Do as you wish, my child,” my mother said. “You spoke so much of them, I thought you wished to see one.”
I could think of better ways to spend an afternoon than to walk in the woods with a girl who didn’t know her own mind two minutes running; so I was turning away with no further words when Lady Ransome shot a quick glance at me without lifting her head from her sewing—a glance so fleeting I couldn’t have sworn I saw it. Yet it left in my mind an impression of stifled hopefulness, such as I sometimes have from Pinky when I leave him lying in a comer of my cabin and he rolls an eye at me in the vain and momentary hope I may relent and invite him to come. Therefore I turned back and said that if her husband had never shot teal in our marshes he would be gone till sundown; for it would take him till then to learn he couldn’t kill them as they came down on a northwest wind unless he led them, as our duck hunters say, from here to Scarborough. As for the woodcock, I told her, there was no way of telling whether they were nesting until we looked, and the place to look was an island of pines and birches in the marsh where they had always nested since I was able to find my way about. If there was none, I said, I could show her something in the marsh pools that she had never before seen—sticklebacks building round nests under water and slashing at each other out of cussedness with the rows of bayonets on their backs.
“I don’t believe a word of it!” she said, proud and lofty. Then she dropped her needlework and hugged my mother’s arm to her. “When can we go?” she asked. “Is it true, what he says? And shall we see bears and Indians?”
“You’ll see no bears,” my mother said, “because there are none hereabouts; and even if there were, they’d run for miles to escape a man or a woman, being timid creatures. Neither will you see an Indian unless you go around by Perkins’ wharf, where there’s an Abenaki working on Westbrook Hopping’s sloop. You’ll know him, if you see him, by the way he wears his shirt tails outside his trousers. You can’t go walking in that dress, so you must change it: then you can go as soon as you like.”
Lady Ransome jumped to her feet, smiled up at me as gaily as though she had never learned how to be stiff or haughty, and ran from the room. We could hear her calling to Annie that she wanted her green dress.
“She’d be better off to stay here,” I said, “because she’ll get her feet wet and turn up her nose at the things she thinks she wishes to see.”
My mother shook her head and smiled her one-sided smile. “She’s like a puppy taught to stay quietly in a house with old people and not bark or chew shoes. She wants to play but doesn’t know how.” Her knitting needles darted in and out of the stocking yam. “Besides,” she added, “her lot may be pleasanter if this husband of hers should find some man willing and able to throw her a kind word.”
I went out in the sun to wait for her. A clean, soothing smell came from the hot sea sand. In the northwest wind the ocean was like ruffled dark blue velvet; and on the far side of Wells Bay the slopes of Mount Agamenticus rose sharp and smoothly curved. It came to me suddenly that there might be worse things than talk of war; and that, given the proper companions, another day or two on land could be mighty pleasant.
V
THERE is a wide-spreading beech tree with silvery bark in a clearing near the edge of the marsh that borders the tide creek on the northerly side of our farm; and when I set off with Lady Ransome we crossed the creek and struck in past this tree, which is covered with the initials of all the young folk who have kept company together since the earliest days of our town; for it stands in a pleasant spot, sweet with marsh odors and sheltered from the tang of unseasonable winds, and cursed only with mosquitoes, which are never troublesome to lovers.
She stared at this tree from every side, reading the initials and marveling at the hearts and arrows with which some of the initials were embellished, and asking about the people who carved them. I told her how a beech tree was always planted in every New England town by the first settlers in it, even before they planted corn, because without a beech tree the lovers would have no place to carve their initials and do their courting properly—and lacking this, there might be a dearth of marriages and consequently an insufficient increase in the size of the town. That was the trouble, I told her, with the earliest settlers in our province under the Lygonia Patent: they brought no beech trees with them from England, and therefore their settlements were not successful.
“You never tell me anything that isn’t a wild tale for children,” she complained. Then she begged for the loan of my knife so she could cut her own initials on the tree.
“You mustn’t do that!” I told her.
She stamped her foot. “Indeed,” she cried, “and why not? Give me your knife this minute, sir!”
> “Well,” I said, “you won’t believe it, but this is the truth: when a person cuts his initials on that tree he can never be content to five in any place but Arundel.”
She laughed lightly. “La!” she said. “I’d rather have your knife than hear about the strange weaknesses of your countrymen!”
Seeing she was bound to have her way I gave her the knife, and she went to hacking her initials in the bark, irregular and slovenly. I might have done it for her and carved an English crown over the letters, but she had been so hoity-toity about it that I said to myself she could make the whole tree into kindling wood without help from me. Nor was I sorry I had let her do it alone, for she was pleasing to look at as she stood pressed against the twisted trunk of the old beech, slim and straight in her bright green dress, cutting away at the bark with both her small hands clasped around the handle of my knife, and her bonnet fallen back from the copper-colored hair so that the braids in which it was twisted seemed like fillets of ruddy gold.
“There,” she said, when she stepped back to look proudly at the malformed E. R. that had resulted from her labors, “when you tell your tales to other girls, don’t forget to tell them Emily Ransome put her initials here and never came back again.”
She seemed to wait for me to speak, but since I could think of nothing I took my knife from her and pocketed it. “Of course,” she added, looking at me scornfully, “you’ll be glad to tell them this.”
“No,” I said, “we don’t talk of such things to other girls.” With that, when I had shown her the path, which ran in and out of the pines and bayberry bushes at the edge of the marsh, I went ahead so she would pester me no more with her notions.
When we came to the brook that runs into the marsh, making a sort of bight in the pines, I showed her, close under the bank, one of the round pools cut in the marsh as though the earth had been removed by an enormous doughnut punch. It was near the brook, and I knew it must have been recently filled by the tides, so that sticklebacks would come up into it from the ocean. I told her to sit quietly on the bank and stare into the pool, and soon she would see sticklebacks fighting.
We sat together on the smooth carpet of pine needles, peering down into the clear water, and when we had sat a while, dark arrows began to shoot from the sides of the pool toward the center and return again to the banks like streaks of darkness. “Those,” I told her, “are male sticklebacks driving the females from their nests.”
She clutched my arm as two streaks of crimson rose to the surface and slashed at each other. They were giants among sticklebacks, three inches long and shaped like mackerel, and the belly of each was blood red because of the mating season. As they slashed and fought, we could see the stiff spines, erect and murderous, along their backs. When one of them turned and ran, the other caught him by the tail, brought him to the surface, and shook him as a dog shakes a rat, slapping him about on the water.
“Why,” said Lady Ransome, as pleased as a small girl, “it’s wonderful! What else do they do?”
“They weave nests the size of crab apples out of soft pieces of water plants. There’s a hole at the bottom and top of each nest, and after the female lays her eggs, the male drives her away and stands guard beneath it, staring up at the eggs like a lovesick zany, and wriggling his fins to drive fresh water through the nest. When an egg falls out he picks it up in his mouth and blows it back, like a boy blowing a bean through an open window.”
“Then what?” she asked, her eyes as round as my mother’s blue beads.
“Then the eggs hatch out, and the faithful father eats all he can. When the marsh is flooded at the next spring tide he goes back to sea and forgets about them.”
“Like a sailor?” she asked.
I had nothing to say to this, so she smiled at me pleasantly enough and said, “La! I didn’t mean it! I’m sure no good sailor would eat little children!”
She leaned over and peered more intently into the pool. “Do you suppose you could find a nest?”
I lowered myself over the interlaced roots that held the bank intact, tossed my coat to her, and began to fumble among the growing things under water. I could feel the sticklebacks dashing themselves against my hands in a frenzy of rage, and soon I came across one of the loose nests. I passed my cap beneath it and drew it out; then turned back to Lady Ransome.
“Now,” I said, “you can never again say I don’t speak the truth.” I seized a bush at the edge of the bank and sprang onto the tangle of roots. The bush pulled loose, and somehow my foot turned under me. As I pitched slowly backward I heard Lady Ransome scream and saw her reach for my arm. The thought came to me that I would land on the cut made by the bottle during last night’s fight. Even as I thought it, the thing itself occurred. The little soreness in my head blazed into a mighty, all-pervading stab: then there was nothingness.
* **
I was conscious, when consciousness returned, of a cold wetness, coming and going, on the side of my head. A voice, close to my ear, said often and often, “Richard, Richard, can you hear me, Richard?’ Water, cold salt water from the feel of it, dripped on my head, which seemed to be solid, like a twelve-pound shot.
Lady Ransome was kneeling beside me. When I rolled over she held a wet cloth against the cut.
“I thought you’d he there all night,” she said. “Does it hurt?”
The air was cold, and there was a greenish pinkness in the west, so I knew the sun was down.
“No,” I said. “I’m all right.”
“I thought you’d bleed forever,” she whispered.
I looked over the bank and saw a splotch of blood on a bit of driftwood near the pool. I wondered, considering her slenderness, that she had been able to drag me up over the tangled roots.
“I’m not as helpless as you may think,” she said, answering my look. “If it hadn’t been for the bleeding I believe I could have dragged you home.”
My mind cleared. “You shouldn’t be here at this hour,” I told her. “Start back, and I’ll follow as soon as I can. Your husband will be angry.”
“Probably,” she said. “I’ll wait for you.”
“Go home at once,” I insisted.
She took the handkerchief from my head, and jumped down over the bank to wet it in the brook. When she returned, I rose to my feet, feeling as though my head had been beneath a log for days.
“Now we can tie this against the cut,” she told me. “Bend down.”
I bent down, and she fixed the pad in place. I could feel her soft arm against my cheek.
It was no great while before I was able to walk and disgusted to think of myself having fainting spells like a half-fed girl. By the time we reached the foot bridge across the creek Lady Ransome was clinging to my sleeve, trotting a little, every few steps, to keep up with me.
I had felt in my bones there’d be trouble when we reached our house, and so there was. It was dark when we came to the door. Lady Ransome ran into the front room before me and caught my mother by the arm. “He fell and struck his head again,” she said, “but it’s nothing.”
I kept my eyes on Sir Arthur, who sat close beside the whale-oil lamp on our center table, reading or pretending to read some papers that filled his lap and his hands. He threw her one hard, cold look, I saw: then seemed to have no further interest in her.
When Lady Ransome had told my mother, she went to her husband and stood behind him, pressing her cheek to his.
“I’m sorry to be late, Arthur,” she said, “but I couldn’t leave Richard until he got his senses back. Did you shoot many ducks?”
He moved his shoulders petulantly under her hands. “I think you knew I’d finish shooting by mid-afternoon, and that we might need to press on at once.”
“I thought I’d be back much earlier, Arthur.”
He moved his head a little to one side, as if to avoid the touch of her cheek against his, and at that she stood straight. “I supposed you understood you weren’t to leave, since there was a possibility we might
move on. You’re not to be trusted, I fear.”
At this it may be I made some slight movement, for he eyed me frigidly.
“See here!” he said, “didn’t you know better than to permit Lady Ransome to go gallivanting about, miles from any house? I can’t afford to be detained in a place like this! I should think even an innkeeper’s son would show more intelligence.”
I looked from Lady Ransome to my mother, who gave me a warning glance and went hastily from the room; and at the same time my brother Nathan came in. I turned from Ransome and spoke to Nathan. “Did you have any luck with the teal?” But it was Sir Arthur who took it upon himself to reply.
“Ow!” he said, hitching himself petulantly in his chair, “I never saw such birds! Really, you know, it’s fearful, they’re so nervous, always on the go! I could scarcely see them, they’d go by so fast! And they’d never sit down for a moment!”
“We got thirty-two,” my brother Nathan told me.
“Well, upon my word,” Sir Arthur said in his thin, fretful voice, “I think you shot all of them! Very humiliating, I assure you!”
I must admit that although Sir Arthur was as disagreeable a man in his speech, almost, as any man I ever knew, he was just and fair according to his lights. I can only say he seemed detestable to me. It was plain to be seen he considered me in the light of a groom or a footman and thought I should keep myself in another part of the house, well removed from his sight.
When my mother returned, she brought with her two glasses of hot buttered rum, a drink favorably known in our province, where it is thought the blandness of the butter softens the action of the rum and produces a kindlier and more genial glow than does the raw liquor. Yet it is little used, not only because butter is dearer than rum, but because of a general belief that the mixture may so soften the drinker as to lead him into dangerous generosities.
The Lively Lady Page 4