Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  It was a happy time, and Dick thought they could drive the whole way back to Tuskingum in one day. But the heat increased, and the horse flagged. They had not got as far as Shawnee when the wind rose and blew the sky full of clouds. The thunder-heads mounted, and before sunset it began to lighten, and it grew so dark that they could scarcely see; but they followed the white turnpike. Ann was scared, and she was troubled about Owen and the children at the mills; but when in the blackness they came upon a man in the road, mixed up with three horses he was trying to lead and at the same time pick up his hat, which was blown off, she had to laugh with Dick.

  The laugh seemed to carry away her care. She made Dick stop at the first house and ask if they might pass the night. The man of the house said they might, and when he had helped Dick put up his horse he led them in to his family, who were gathered round a wood-fire on the hearth; and while Ann dried herself at the blaze her thoughts went again to the family at New Leaf Mills in anxiety for its safety; it seemed to her she had been recreant to them all.

  When the morning came, clear and cold after the storm, she decided that they would go straight on to the mills without stopping at Tuskingum; she did not wish to impose upon Jessamy, she said. Her heart did not go down, as she expected, at the sight of the mills. Powell was waiting at the door of the cabin, and the children ran out to welcome her and see what she had brought them. She felt a glow of happiness such as she had never known at New Leaf before, and she promised herself not to give way again.

  “Well, I see it has done you good,” Powell said, with a look at her.

  After a few days’ cold the weather turned warm again, and Felix came out sooner than Ann could have hoped, and Jessamy came with him. He went with Owen to the grist-mill, and looked it over with him; he said he had found a Fourdrinier machine which could be had cheap at second hand, and he would like to see if it could be put in without too much change. They came upon Overdale, who gave them no greeting before he could lurk into his den. Felix did not notice his rudeness, but it hurt Owen, who wished to be on gentle terms with the whole world and had not his brother’s business preoccupations to defend him. On their way back to the cabin he spoke of his vain efforts to get into kindlier relations with the miller.

  “I don’t believe I’d worry about him, Owen,” Felix said. “Of course, he thinks he will be out of a place when we make the change, but we can work him into our scheme somehow. I feel more hopeful about it since I’ve looked over the mill.”

  “Do tell Ann so!” his brother entreated.

  “I will. It’s been a hard experience for Ann. She ought to have some help in her work. She ought to have a girl.” —

  “That’s what I’ve been saying. I’ve been wondering if you could find out where Rosy Hefmyer is.”

  They had come to the cabin, where the sisters-in-law stood before the door in the sun. Ann was admiring the fashions of the younger woman with unenvious pleasure, asking where she got her bonnet and whether she had trimmed it herself.

  Felix called to her: “Ann, you remember that girl of yours you liked so much — Rosy Hefmyer?”

  “Did Owen ask you to hunt her up? It’s too bad.”

  “No, he didn’t; but she’s hunted herself up. She came to me at the store. She wants to get somewhere that her mother won’t find her; she’s just left a place to get rid of her. I told her about you here; and she’s crazy to come to you.”

  “Oh, Felix!” Ann could say no more; but penitence for all her impatience with Providence and her husband glowed in her heart.

  “I could have brought her with us to-day, but Jessamy thought there wasn’t room for three in the buggy.”

  “Indeed, Ann, that wasn’t the reason. I thought you ought to have the chance of saying whether you wanted her first, and I promised Mr. Powell” — for so his wife always called Felix to himself as well as others— “that I wouldn’t tell you about it. And have I?”

  “Not a single word, Jessamy; but if you had known what a blessing it would be to me, you could have. How can she get here, Felix? When can she come?”

  “To-morrow, if you want. She can come by the stage to Spring Grove, and you can send for her there, can’t you?”

  “Send? I would go and carry her here.” Ann had got her breath now.

  “Well, then, that’s settled. Perhaps you’ll like to know that we can put the Fourdrinier machine into the mill with very little change.”

  “You can? And when — But I won’t ask.”

  Felix smiled, with a cast of his eye at his brother. “Owen’s thought of some improvements he can make in it already.”

  “To be sure.” Ann recognized the joke with a laugh. “Well, it does seem as if the heavens were opening.”

  “The Pit’s been yawning a good while, Ann thinks. She thinks it’s time the heavens took their turn,” Owen said.

  Jessamy watched her sister-in-law’s face with shining eyes. She turned to her husband. “I didn’t tell her about the Fourdrinier machine, either.”

  “That’s more self-denial than you asked of yourself, Jessamy.”

  “I thought I’d better wait till you could see a place for it in the mill.”

  “Well, Ann, I’ve found a second-hand machine, very good and very cheap,” Felix said.

  She could only entreat him, “Oh, have you?” and then they all began to talk about it. They had talked about the Fourdrinier machine so much that the sisters-in-law believed they knew what it was like; the brothers really knew, and Owen knew best. He explained that his improvements were no joke, and specified them.

  “Well, now, come in and have something to eat before you go, if you must go,” Ann said; and she led the way indoors.

  They had a joyful meal together. The little girls helped their mother get it, and then asked to go with their brothers and play Indians on the island. In the talk the elders were left to themselves. Felix seemed in no haste to leave; he and Owen recalled again the jokes and joys of their boyhood.

  When Felix rose from the table his wife said: “Now, Ann, I’m going to ask you to let him lie down on your bed a minute before we start. It does him so much good to get a little nap after dinner.”

  “Oh, I don’t need a nap,” Felix protested.

  But Ann said: “Take him right in, Jessamy. I’ll be redding up the table; I won’t make any noise.”

  In a little while Jessamy came out, leaving the door ajar. “He wants me to sing,” she said, in a low voice. “I can’t, very well, without the piano, but—”

  Owen cleared his throat; his wife thought he was going to say he would accompany Jessamy on his harp, and she frowned at him; Jessamy was swallowing as if she were choking down a sob; then she sang “The Watcher”:

  “A watcher pale and weary

  Looked forth with anxious eye.”

  It was a song that every one sang in those days, a wail of grief in which happy young people poured out their joy. Jessamy sang it several times. When she ended they none of them spoke for a while.

  The sisters-in-law parted sadly; they said they did not know why they should cry: everything was so promising now. The brothers took leave with gay hopefulness.

  Ann and Owen watched their guests across the tail-race and out of sight. Then she asked, “How did you think he looked, Owen?”

  “Why, uncommonly well.”

  “She’s willing to have him come and live here now.

  She thinks it will be better here than in town.” She scanned her husband’s face. “Owen, Felix has had a hemorrhage.”

  “A hemorrhage!” Powell’s face twitched pitifully; then the light of temperamental hope glowed over it. “Oh, well, it will be all right with him by spring. It isn’t as if it had been in the fall. And isn’t it fortunate he should have such a place as the mills to come to? We must hurry forward the new house now. We can easily take them in with us there.”

  “Yes.” Ann said; “there’ll be no trouble about that. But do hurry it, Owen! It does seem to me you have been s
uch a long while about it. These delays, they almost kill me.”

  “Yes, poor girl, I know that,” Powell said. “Depend upon it, I’ll hurry things forward.” Ann went into the other room and left him to cover the fire. His heart ached for Felix, but he could not refuse the comfort he found in the solid hickory chunk which he saw would make a glorious bed of coals. When he had bedded it deep in the ashes, he went to the cabin door for a look at the night. The sky bristled with stars, and he thought how the coals would bristle in the morning. He felt the sweet unity of creation, the little things and the great things, and he felt that life and death in the measureless scheme were the same. Ann, with her homesickness, was as important to the Maker of the world as the largest of these flaming planets; He would care for her as He cared for them. Powell looked across at the pretty place where the new house was to stand, and he could almost see it standing there. Already Felix had come to them practically well; and they were all living there together, and New Leaf Mills was fulfilling every promise of its imagined usefulness.

  X

  THERE was a typical delay next morning when Powell sent his eldest son to meet the stage at Spring Grove and fetch Rosy Hefmyer. But it was not his fault, exactly, that the only horse which consented to be caught in the pasture for the service should be found to have cast a shoe when she fell captive to a peck measure of bran. “You must drive fast, Richard,” he instructed his son, “so as not to keep Rosy waiting at the Grove; she won’t know what to do after the stage gets in, but you must drive very carefully. Remember, the mare has no shoe on her off hind foot. You’d better go the river road; it’s longer, but it’s soft dirt the whole way, and there are a good many stony spots on the hill road.”

  With whatever speed he made, Richard did not get back to the mills till Rosy had been there an hour. She had come with Captain Bickler in his open buggy; he had found out at Spring Grove, where he had his law-office, that she wanted to go to the mills, and, as he was going that way, he brought her. He explained the fact to Owen, who stood with his hand on the buggy wheel talking politics with Bickler after thanking him for his neighborly act. They did not disagree widely. In his zeal for his own nomination for the legislature Captain Bickler did not widely disagree with any voter of the Whig ticket; and though Owen would naturally have disliked a man who had got his title of captain in the Mexican War, it was in Bickler’s favor that his company had been mustered in so late that he never went to the front. What Owen wished to make sure of was that Bickler favored a strong antislavery platform for the Whig party at the next State convention. There seemed no doubt of that, he reported to his wife, while confessing his impression that Bickler seemed rather a slippery character.

  “Well, he’s brought Rosy, at any rate,” Ann said, looking off to the hill where the girl was playing with the children among the fallen leaves, which the sun of the warm, dry spell had crisped again. “She’s just crazy about the place.”

  Ann’s motherly heart had not ceased to glow with the welcome she had given the girl when Rosy jumped down from the buggy and ignored her obligation to Captain Bickler in her shy escape to Ann’s arms. She began to romp with the children as soon as she put her little bundle of clothes into the house.

  “I never expected to have you again, Rosy,” the mother said. “How well you do look!” she said the next thing. She recognized the girl’s beauty by this tribute to her health: her blue, sweet eyes, her cheeks like red peonies, and her smooth mass of yellow hair, her firm, straight features, and her strong, full young figure. She was rather short, but Mrs. Powell did not notice that.

  “Well, now, you’ll feel more at home,” Powell said to his wife.

  “Oh yes,” she answered. “I have nothing to ask for now. But we mustn’t stand here talking. I won’t have a moment’s peace till we get the frame of the new house up. Do hurry the stuff out, Owen.” She was always saying something like that. “I declare, when I think of Felix and Jessamy coming I can’t wait. It was like him to look Rosy up for me. He was thinking of me when he ought to have been thinking of himself, poor boy,”

  “There is a great deal of Natural Good in Felix,” Owen allowed.

  He started toward the sawmill; and after a moment of smiling silence Ann ran over to Rosy and the children at the foot of the hill. She pretended to catch up a stick from the ground as she came near, and she called out: “You good-for-nothing things! When do you suppose we’ll have dinner? And Rosy the worst of you! Come straight along home with you.”

  The children shrieked joyfully and ran before her. Rosy stopped for her, panting. “Oh, Mrs. Powell, it just sets me crazy; it’s so nice here. It seems as if I couldn’t bear to go into the house yet. But I reckon I got to. You don’t want a hired girl to stay outdoors and help your children play.” She laughed at her own joke, and brushed away the dead leaves which the children had heaped over her dress.

  Mrs. Powell took some twigs from the girl’s tumbled hair. “Indeed, indeed, I’d like to play with you all myself. But I suppose you’d better come and see where we’re going to put you. I don’t believe you’ll think it’s indoors much. It’s a good thing we had anywhere for you, but I’ve been at Mr. Powell ever since we came to put up an outside kitchen for me, and that’s where you’re going to live; he only got it done last week, and there’s no stove in it yet. When we get the stove I reckon you’ll have to camp out in the cornfield.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t like anything better. It seems like as if it was summer a’ready.”

  “Yes, it’s been so for three or four days now. I heard a blackbird this morning. But he’ll be sorry he came yet.”

  “Yes, the birds don’t know everything about the seasons. They’re just as apt as not to take a warm spell for summer. Why, it ain’t Easter yet.”

  “Well, the children are beginning to talk about coloring eggs.”

  “I’ll be bound they are. Mrs. Powell, I speak to cover the calico eggs. I’ve got some pieces my cousin Polly give me that’ll make the nicest pattern for eggs you ever saw.”

  “I won’t interfere with you,” Ann assented. “ But now come and see where you are going to live.”

  She led Rosy through the cabin and out of the back door, where Powell had knocked together, as he said, a rude lean-to of slabs for a summer kitchen, and opening out of this at one side a small room where a cot-bed was placed under the window.

  “Why, it’s great, Mrs. Powell,” the girl said, taking note of a washstand and looking-glass, and the pegs to hang her clothes on. “I just wisht Polly Nairns could see it. She hain’t got anything half like it on the canal-boat; she has to sleep right in the very kitchen, almost on top of the stove.”

  Ann looked the joyous girl over with a new sense of her young beauty. “Well, I’ll just tell you what, Rosy; I’ll never let you sleep here in the world. It isn’t the place for you. We’ll put the boys in here, and you can have the loft.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Powell!” the girl lamented. “What did you get it ready for me for, if you didn’t mean to let me have it?”

  Ann faltered as to what she should say. Then she said: “You don’t know what an awful pack some of them are around here. I always thought of you as you used to be. But you’re — you’re grown up, Rosy.”

  “Well, just as you say, Mrs. Powell,” Rosy complied, demurely.

  “Rosy,” Mrs. Powell said, while she hesitated still, “have you seen your mother lately?”

  “Not since the place before last. But I knowed she was on the track of me, and that’s why I was so glad to get here. Why, I just broke down and cried when your sister-in-law ast if I would like to live with you. It was at market, and I couldn’t hardly wait till I could get home and tell Mrs. Linsey I was goin’ to leave. She knows about mother, and she was real nice when she understood.”

  “I hope Polly is keeping straight.”

  “Oh yes. It ain’t very nice being on the boat with the men, do you think; but the captain he looks after her.”

  “Rosy, it see
ms dreadful for me to ask you to warn her against your mother.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Powell. Polly’d never tell her where I am.”

  “I didn’t mean that exactly.”

  “Yes, I understand, Mrs. Powell. But Polly knows how to take care of herself a good sight better’n I do.”

  Ann drew a long breath. “Well, now, we must see about dinner.”

  She could not refuse the great relief that came into her heart; the clouds that had filled her home-bound heaven broke and drifted off to the far horizon of the outer world, and with the girl, who eagerly took up the household work, she could not refuse some share in Powell’s enjoyment of a thing that happened a few days later, though it was a thing that had struck terror to her heart while it was happening.

  Owen had gone to one of the outlying farms to make favor for some turnips, and she was standing at the cabin door waiting to see him come out of the woods on the rise of the eastward hill, when the team emerged at a speed which she had never known in either the horse or driver before. They came flying over the intervening distances, and as they seemed to flash by her she was aware of Powell rocking helpless on the seat and the reins, which had escaped his hands, dragging on the road under the horse’s feet. The horse whirled round the corner of the cabin dooryard into the open space before the grist-mill, and there, as in a mystical vision, she was aware of Overdale at the head of the horse, as if he had leaped from his place at the door of the second story, while Powell appeared softly to bound from the wagon and light on his feet. The rest of the event was solely of Powell’s experience, for as soon as Ann saw him safe on the ground she ran into the cabin and sank down sick.

  When he came to reassure her, he was laughing, and he justified his amusement as the effect of Overdale’s characteristic behavior. “When he decided that I wasn’t killed, or even seriously scared, he said, ‘ Now, dern you, we’re even,’ and he gave me the reins and turned his back on me and went into the mill.”