CHAPTER V

We have so far heard little of Mrs. Lyndsay; but, in fact, she was usually more felt than heard in the every-day life of the household. Archibald Lyndsay said, “She had but one defect, and that was not a fault. She was so entirely good that she lacked all human opportunity for the exercise of repentance.”

“There is no credit to be had in this world, my dear, for monotony of virtue,” said Anne Lyndsay. “When you do some of your sweet, nice things, that cost you no end of trouble, people merely say, ‘Oh, yes, Margaret Lyndsay! but she likes to do that kind of thing.’ For my part I prefer that wise mixture of vice and virtue which gives variety of flavor to life, and now and then adds the unexpected.”

This was said at breakfast on Sunday morning, the day after Rose had seen the dying lad, who now lay quiet in the dismal cabin where the mother sat angrily brooding over her loss.

Lyndsay had spoken of some pleasant act of thoughtful kindness on the part of his wife; and as Anne, laughing, made her comment, Margaret had shaken a menacing finger at her kindly critic, saying quietly:

64“Oh, I think we are very much alike, Anne”; at which there was a general outbreak of mirth, for these people were much given to laughter.

Lyndsay declared that he had observed the resemblance.

“And the boys inherit our goodness,” added Anne, demurely. “At least, it seemed to me I had evidence of it pretty early to-day; but then the hymn says, ‘Let boys delight to bark and bite.’ I disremember the rest, as Peter, our cook, says.” At this Ned gave his aunt’s gown a gentle pull, by way of respectfully intimating that she was getting them into difficulties.

“‘Let’ is permissive,” she went on. “I was not really disturbed, Archie”; for her brother was now curiously regarding a rather distinct scratch on Dick’s ruddy cheek.

“Raspberry thorns, Dicky?” he said, maliciously.

“No, sir.”

“Sleep-cats,” said Anne. “That was always our nursery explanation.”

“What then? Another row? I thought we had had enough for a week.”

“And on Sunday morning, Dick!” said the mother. “I wouldn’t.”

Anne looked up, amused at this latter declaration.

“Never mind, Margaret,” said her husband. “What was it about, boys?”

“Oh, it wasn’t much of a row. It was only a scrimmage,” said Dick. “Ned said King James cut off Raleigh’s head because he would smoke tobacco. Did you ever hear such nonsense?”

65“But Aunt Anne told me King James wrote a book against smoking,—didn’t you, aunt?” urged the smaller lad.

“And I said it was ridiculous,” cried Dick.

“And Jack he up and said it wasn’t, because if he was a king, and people didn’t do as he wanted, he would cut off their heads, like that,” said Ned, knocking off the end of an egg, by way of illustration.

“And so we had a melley,” remarked Jack. “It wasn’t much, and that’s all there was of it. I don’t see why people make such a fuss.”

“Suppose you let this suffice for the day, you rascals,” said Mr. Lyndsay.

“Yes, sir.”

“And it wasn’t Raleigh who brought tobacco to England, was it, Aunt Anne?” said Ned. “I told Dick it was Hawkins, and he wouldn’t believe me. I saw it in—”

“Where?”

Ned hesitated. His habit of lying on his stomach on the floor in the long winter afternoons, with some monstrous quarto, was matter for unending chaff on the part of the twins.

“Where was it, old Book Gobbler?” cried Dick. “Where was it?”

“It was in Hollinshead’s Chronicles,” returned the lad, coloring.

“You are right,” said Aunt Anne. “You would do better to read a little more yourself, Jack, than to laugh at Ned.”

“What’s the use, if I am going to West Point?” said Jack.

66“You will find out, I fancy, when you get there,” remarked Rose. “I am told it is dreadful.”

“Well, there’s time enough to think about it,” returned Jack, with his usual philosophical calm. “I wish it wasn’t Sunday. Oh, dear!” and he groaned in anticipation of the dullness of the day.

“Jack!” exclaimed the mother. “Oh, Jack!”

“Well, you can’t go to church, and there’s no fishing; and, mother, you know you don’t like us to read novels on Sunday, and I’ve read voyages until I know all there are up here,—and I don’t see what a fellow is to do.”

“I shall read the service before you all scatter.”

“Well, that doesn’t take long.”

As a means of passing the time, this device of her sister-in-law enormously delighted Anne. “I confess to a certain amount of sympathy with the unemployed. It is a Sabbath lockout.”

Margaret turned on her with abruptness; but Lyndsay said, quickly:

“My dear Anne, this is Margaret’s business. Keep out of other folks’ small wars. You are as bad as Jack.”

“That is true, Archie. I am a conversational free lance. I beg pardon, Margaret, I will never, never do it again.”

“Not until the next time,” returned Mrs. Lyndsay, with unusual ascerbity. “It is really of no moment,” she added, “but I like to manage the boys myself.”

“You are right. I was wrong to meddle.”

“I propose,” said Lyndsay, “that the two Gaspé men shall take you fellows up the Arrapedia. You will find it hard work if they let you pole, and you 67can’t drown there if you try; and the black flies, mosquitos, and midges will make you miserable. And, Jack, come here,—nearer. This in your ear: at the second bend there is an old clearing, and under the eaves of the cabin—now, don’t let it out—there is a mighty nest of hornets. I recommend it to your attention. I owe them a grudge.”

Jack’s face flushed with joy.

“Thank you, sir.”

Mrs. Lyndsay said, “What is it, Archie?”

“Oh, nothing; a little secret between Jack the Giant Killer and his pa.” Lyndsay had a pretty distinct notion that fighting hornets as a Sunday distraction would not be altogether to his wife’s taste.

“Don’t tell, Jack.”

“No, sir.”

“Honor bright!”

“All right, sir.”

“Won’t you tell us?” asked Ned of his father.

“No.”

“But I have an irresistible curiosity,” said the boy.

“And I have an impenetrable resolution to hold my tongue. You are to sail under sealed orders.” One of his delights was to offer problems to this sturdy young intellect. “Suppose, sir,”—and he put the old scholiast question,—“If the impenetrable were to meet the irresistible, what would happen?”

“That would be a row,” said Jack.

Ned had a deep dislike to being beaten by these absurd questions. His detestation of intellectual defeat was as deep as his brother’s disgust at physical discomfiture. He hesitated, flushed, and replied:

68“It couldn’t be at all, father, because it says in the Bible that the world will be destroyed, and, if there was an impenetrable, that couldn’t be at all,—I say it couldn’t be.”

“Shade of Confucius!” exclaimed Anne.

“But suppose.”

“I can’t.” He had a sense of wrath at the question. At last he said, “You might as well ask a fellow what would happen if the impossible met the incomprehensible.”

“Glory! what dictionary words!” cried Dick.

“Pretty well, old fellow,” said Lyndsay, laughing as they rose.

“Oh, I hate things like that.”

“Rose, Rose, put some lunch in a basket. We shall make a day of it. We will take the skiff and Tom. Put my note-book and pencils in the basket, and your sketch-book; and don’t forget my field-glass. Won’t you come, Margaret?”

“No; I am going to Mrs. Maybrook’s this morning, and, Archie, I want Hiram to attend to something at the church where Harry is. Don’t trouble about me.”

“Anne, won’t you come with us?”

“No; I am not good for all day. I shall go and have a talk with Mrs. Maybrook this afternoon. If I lie down until then, I may manage it. Margaret says it sweetens one for a week to see that woman. I mean to try the recipe.”

“I am getting very curious about her,” said Rose; “and there is so much to do, and I must catch a salmon to-morrow.”

“We kill salmon,” said Lyndsay.

69“But you catch them with a pole and a line.”

“No; they catch themselves; and we call it a rod, miss, please.”

“Yes, Marcus Aurelius.”

“At ten o’clock, sauce-box; and get your wits in order.”

“Ay, ay, sir!” and she touched her forehead and went to secure their lunch.

Anne took a book, as usual, and went out to lie under the porch in a hammock. The boats got away, and still she lay quiet. Delicate of features, the mouth and large gray eyes her only beauties; her nose fine, but large for the rest of her face, and aquiline; her forehead square, with a mass of brown hair set too high above its pallor for good looks, perhaps justified the common notion that Anne Lyndsay never had been even pretty. Years of pain and endurance had lessened, not increased, her natural irritability, and given to her face an expression of singular force. It may be added that she was a trifle vain of the small hands and feet which she, like all of her people, possessed.

As she lay at more than usual ease, dreamily happy as she noticed the sun, the shadows, and the far-stretching curves of the river, she saw a dugout, what in the North is called a pirogue,[4] put out from the farther bank. A woman stood in the stern and urged it across the swift current with notable strength and dexterity. Presently it ran onto the beach, and Dorothy Maybrook came up the steps, a basket in her hand.

4. Spanish, piriagua.

70As to most things, all books, and people in general, Anne Lyndsay had a highly vitalized curiosity; but, as to this woman, it was more eager than usual. She was mildly skeptical as to the fact that the wife of a small Quaker farmer, illy educated, and, of course, without the tact which makes sympathy acceptable, could have been what Margaret Lyndsay said this woman had been to her in the last summer’s trial. Anne was apt to distrust Mrs. Lyndsay’s unwonted enthusiasms. Also, this invalid lady was very democratic in theory, but by nature’s decree an aristocrat, whether she would or not. Thus, Anne Lyndsay was now a little on her guard, and more curious than she would have liked to have been thought.

But when, as Dorothy Maybrook advanced, a pair of large gray eyes came into the horizon of another pair almost as luminous, Anne, as she afterward explained, felt something akin to fascination. She made up her mind as Mrs. Maybrook approached that her facial expression was one of strange purity of repose. The next moment Miss Anne cast a foot over the hammock’s edge, and made an effort to rise, in order to greet the new-comer. But to get out of a hammock with ease is not given to mortals to achieve without much practice, and as all rapid movements were sure to summon at once her unrelenting enemy, pain, she fell back with a low exclamation, wrung from her by pain so extreme that she was quite unprepared. Sudden anger stirred within her, because she had so plainly betrayed her feelings to one who had been described to her as full of sympathy and almost incredibly competent to notice the peculiarities 71of men and things. If this woman should dare to pity her, in words or with looks!

“Good morning. Mrs. Maybrook, I am sure. I am Miss Lyndsay,” said Miss Anne, in her most tranquil voice, and it was capable of many tones.

Said Dorothy to herself, “That woman isn’t long for this world.” What she said aloud was:

“Yes, I’m Dorothy Maybrook. I brought over some wild strawberries for Mrs. Lyndsay. They’re very early, but there’s a sort of little nest right back of our clearing, and the sun gets in there constant,—seems as if it couldn’t ever get out,—and it hatches the berries two weeks before they’re done blooming anywhere else.”

“Thank you,” said Anne, who was making a difficult effort to catch with the foot outside of the hammock a slipper lost in the foiled attempt to rise.

Mrs. Maybrook set down the berries, and without a word went on her knees, took the dainty slipper, lifted the foot, bestowed a glance of swift curiosity upon it as she put on the slipper, and gently replaced the foot in the hammock.

“Sakes alive! If I was a man, I’d just say it’s beautiful. Being a woman, I’d like to know how you walk on them?”

“Oh, I don’t very much; not nowadays,” returned Anne, smiling. “Thank you.”

It was a neat little shot, although quite unconscious of aim. Miss Anne tried to think she disliked both the help and the outspoken admiration. She made a feeble effort to generalize the compliment, and so to get away from its personal application:

72“It’s a family failing, Mrs. Maybrook. Even our men have absurdly small hands and feet. I should have offered you a camp-chair. Get one, please, out of the house. I am quite incapable of helping any one,—even myself.” Mrs. Maybrook did as Anne desired, and sat down.

“My sister-in-law was going to see you to-day. Shall I call her! She must be in her room.”

“Oh, there’s time enough. That’s the only thing we have a plenty of up here. We ain’t time-starved, I can tell you.” Anne began to be interested. Quaintness of phrase was a thing so rare. For a few minutes she had been struggling with one of her few weaknesses. At last she gave way:

“Excuse me, but would you be so kind as to put the basket of strawberries in the house? The sun will spoil them.”

“Oh, but the sun is good for them. They won’t take any hurt.”

“But I shall. The fact is, when I was a girl I was picking strawberries in the White Hills, and a snake—oh, a rattlesnake—struck at me. I have been ever since unable to endure the odor of strawberries. I think it becomes worse as I grow more feeble. It is very absurd.” She was absolutely pleading her weakness to this simple woman, and had ceased for the time to be self-critical.

Mrs. Maybrook rose, and without more words, after carrying the basket to the cook’s house, returned around the cabin to her seat facing Miss Anne. The smile she wore as she came back would usually have been taken by Anne for vulgar comment on her own 73display of what might, with reason, have been taken for pure affectation. Now it struck Anne as being like her own habit of smiling large, or smiling small, as she said, at some humorous aspect of the passing hour.

“What amuses you?” she queried pleasantly.

“Oh, I was just a-thinking you might feel about those berries like Mrs. Eve might of felt when she was coming on in years and one of her grandchildren fetched her a nice, red apple. Guess he got warmed for it. Sandals might have come handy in big families, those days!”

Anne looked up, laughing gaily, and noting by the exception how rarely Mrs. Maybrook failed in her grammar.

“Delightful! Now I feel historically justified. Are there any snakes here?”

“Oh, no; none to hurt. But, bless me, I never can hear about snakes without thinking of Sairy Kitchins.”

“And what was that?” said Miss Lyndsay, enjoying talk with a mind as fresh and unconventional as her guest’s.

“Oh, it ain’t much. You see, I’ve had asthma so bad that Hiram and me, since the children are gone, we have traveled here and there, trying to find a place where I wouldn’t have it.”

“Have you suffered much?” said Anne.

“Yes,—quite my share. But there are worse things.”

“That is so.”

“Hiram and me get along most anywhere. We have a bit of money,—not overmuch. We are both pretty handy, and once we tried it two years down 74South, at Marysville, in Alabama. That was a right nice place for snakes.”

“Gracious Heavens! You talk as if you liked them.”

“Well, they’re handsome, and brave, and don’t want to hurt you; and how many men can you say that about?”

“A fair defense,” said Anne; “but what of Sairy Kitchins? I love a story; I am like a child.”

“Well, Sairy she had just come that spring. She was the wife of one of them Methodist preachers that don’t be let to bide long anywhere,—the kind that goes about the land seeking whom they may devour. As I came along the road with her there was a six-foot rattler lying right across in the sun. Down went Sairy on her knees. ‘Good lands!’ said I, ‘what’s the good prayin’ to that reptile? A whole camp-meeting couldn’t convert him.’ Well, we couldn’t get by him, and so I got a good, big stick of live oak, and fetched him a crack on the head, and one or two more to make sure. Then I said, ‘Come along, Sairy; he won’t sin any more; if that fool of a woman, Eve, had had any sense, and a live-oak stick handy, there wouldn’t have been no need of you and me going to meeting this hot day.’”

“I should think not,” cried Anne, laughing. “And what did Sairy say? I am quite on her side.”

“Oh, she told her husband, and I got prayed over a heap. It’s amazing how clear those preachers see the sins of other people.”

“I think it a delightful story. I shall tell the boys to-night. I haven’t laughed as much in a month.”

75“Dear me! It must be ten o’clock,” said Mrs. Maybrook, looking up at the sun, “and I must see Mrs. Lyndsay, and go home to cook Hiram’s dinner. But I would like to see the house. You know last year they tented. When I was here yesterday no one was about, and so I did not go in to look. I was dying to see it.”

Anne smiled. “Help me a little.”

The hand she met with hers was strong, well-modeled, and—if tanned by sun, and showing signs of toil in the broken nails—was, like the gown, scrupulously clean. Dorothy wore no head-cover, and her hair, which was fine and abundant, lay in flat, old-fashioned style on her temples, and was caught back in an ample and perfectly neat coil. Again, as Anne rose, the look of repose on Dorothy’s face, and also the absence of lines of care, struck her no less than the regularity of features. There was none of the slouch of labor; Dorothy sat erect, without touching the back of the chair; a woman of fifty or over, and still keeping many of the gracious curves of feminine maturity.

But what interested Anne most in Mrs. Maybrook as they moved about the room—which was hall, dining-room, and sitting-room—was her simple pleasure in the white curtains Mrs. Lyndsay had tied up with gay ribbons, the cane seats, and the covers of light Eastern stuffs, not very remarkable or costly, but, as it seemed, pleasing to the visitor. Anne thought she would have noticed the books, but of these she made no mention, albeit the collection was odd enough, because every one had brought what 76they liked, and the cleverly built book-shelves Pierre had made were full to overflow.

Very soon Mrs. Lyndsay appeared, gave the visitor a more than usually warm welcome, and at last asked about the Colketts and the child.

“It died last night,” said Mrs. Maybrook. “I was up there pretty early to-day. They’re awful hard folks to help any; it’s like setting up ten-pins, and down they go, in a minute. Hiram says they haven’t any ‘gitalongativeness.’ That’s a great word with Hiram.”

“Do they want help? What is there we can do?” said Mrs. Lyndsay.

“I wouldn’t know to tell you. Oh, dear, if I was that man, I’d drink, too.”

“No! No!”

“Yes, I’d drink! He did, some, yesterday; but I judge he’s taken none since Mr. Lyndsay was there. The fact is, Mrs. Lyndsay, Susan Colkett cared more for those children of hers than for her first man or Colkett, or anybody else, except herself. She’s just savage now, like a bear that has had its cubs taken away. And the worst of it is, she hasn’t got the means of wisdom in her, and never had, or else she’d have seen you can’t live in a pigsty and bring up live children. Oh! You were asking if they want anything?”

“Yes, Dorothy.”

“Well, Mr. Carington he went over yesterday afternoon. I guess he took the short cut or he would have met Mr. Lyndsay coming out. Mr. Carington must be a pretty nice man. There’s not many as 77young would give up Saturday afternoon fishing, even a bit of it, to go and see about a sick brat. Fishermen’s generally right selfish. He left them twenty dollars. But he had the high-up sense to give it to Susie. He’s a well set-up young man; I saw him poling a pirogue across. It takes a lot of judgment in a man’s legs to handle a dugout.”

“But you do it well, I fancy,” said Anne.

“Yes, but I’m a woman.”

“Good,” said Miss Lyndsay, and went out, leaving the others to talk alone.

Then Dorothy said, “What troubles that woman the most you couldn’t think, not if you lived as long as Noah.”

“And what is it?”

“It’s because there won’t be any tombstone. They’re all buried in the wood back of the cabin. Poor little kittens, just dead drownded in filth. She had better have thought more for them when they were alive.”

“I will speak to Mr. Lyndsay about it.”

“It would be just that much wasted.”

“Money is well wasted sometimes. You might think of the box of ointment, Dorothy.”

“It’s a long way between them two wastings.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. We shall see.”

“Well, I must go and cook Hiram’s dinner. Good-by.” And she went out and down to her dugout.

“What do you think of her, Anne?” said Mrs. Lyndsay, as the maiden lady came out of her own room.

“I think her most interesting, and altogether a remarkable person.”

78“A heart of gold!” said Mrs. Lyndsay. “You cannot imagine, Anne, what that woman was to me last summer.”

“I can,—I think I can now.” Mrs. Lyndsay went back to some household occupation, and Anne, returning to her hammock, lay thoughtfully watching the retreating pirogue and its capable guide, and smiling ever as was her habit.

Then she spoke aloud:

“That beats Marcus Aurelius. To have lost all her children, to have had sickness,—poverty, and not a wrinkle to record it all. That woman must have the self-contentment of a first-class angel. Ah, me!” And she turned again to the “Life of John, Lord Lawrence,” and was soon smiling over it, for in her heroic lives found glad and ready recognition.