Part 16 (2/2)

”Why, Lord above us, child!” answered the old woman briskly, dropping her white potatoes into a brown dish of fresh-drawn water, ”if the women are not to be easy got on with, who's to be looked to for it, then; the children--or the men?”

She gathered up the brown peelings and bagged them carefully with the pea pods.

”For the blacksmith's pig,” she said. ”We don't keep one and he gives us a ham every year.... Not that it's not a different matter with you, of course,” she added politely. ”There's some, of course, that's needed by the world, for books and music and the like o' that--I don't need Hester to tell me so. There's never an evening in winter, when all's swept and the lamp trimmed and a bowl of apples out, and Ann and I sit with our bit of sewing, that I don't thank G.o.d for the books Hester reads out to us. One was written by a woman writer that the doctor sent us here for a long, long time--poor dear, but she was feeble!

”She worked with the girls at everything they did, that she could, by doctor's orders, and it put a little peace into her, she told me.

You've a look in the eyes like her--there were thousands read her books.”

The guest rose abruptly.

”I never wrote a book--or did anything,” she said briefly, and turned to the door.

”You don't tell me!” the old mother stammered. ”Why, I made sure by your look--what made ye so mortal tired, then, deary?”

”I must find that out,” she said, slowly, her hand on the k.n.o.b.

”I--must--find--that--out!”

And on the balcony she paced and thought for an hour, but there was no calmness in her forehead till the afternoon, when alone with Hester's mother, for the daughters did not return all that day, she worked with pressed lips at their tasks, picking Ann's evening salad, sprinkling cool drops over Hester's fresh-dried linen, brought in by armfuls from the currant-bushes, spreading the supper-table, pressing out the ivory-moulded cottage cheese and ringing its dish with grape-leaves gathered from the well-house.

So intent was she at these tasks, that she heard no footsteps along the gra.s.s, and only as she put the fifth chair at the white-spread table (for the old mother had been mysteriously firm in her certainty that they should need it) did she turn to look into the keen brown eyes of the wise physician who had left her weeks ago in the bed above them.

He gave her a long, piercing look. Then,

”I thought so,” he said quietly. ”We will go back to-morrow, you and I--I need your bedroom.”

Through the open door she caught a quick glimpse of Ann and Hester half supporting, half carrying up the stairs a woman heavily veiled in black crepe; Hester did not join them till late in the meal, and went through the room with a gla.s.s of milk afterward. No one spoke further of her presence among them; no one thanked her for her services; all was a.s.sumed and she blessed them for it.

The doctor pa.s.sed the evening with his new patient, and when she mounted the stairs for her last night she found her simple luggage in the room next hers: there was no question of helping her to bed, and she undressed thoughtfully alone. The house was very still.

Her window was a deep dormer, and as she leaned out of it, for a breath of the stars, she saw Dr. Stanchon stretched in her chair on the balcony, his face white and tired in the moonlight. In the chair near her, so near that she could touch it, lay the frail creature in the grey dress, black now at night.

”It is his old patient!” she thought contentedly, remembering with vexation that she had absolutely forgotten to ask the house-mother about her and why she had not appeared; and she began to speak, when the other raised her hand warningly, and she saw that Dr. Stanchon slept.

Why she began to whisper she did not know, but she remembered afterward that their conversation, below breath as it was, was the longest they had yet had, though she could recall only the veriest sc.r.a.ps of it.

For instance:

”But Mary and Martha?” she had urged, ”surely there is a deep meaning in that, too? It was Martha who was reproved....”

”One would imagine that every woman to-day judged herself a Mary--and that is a dangerous judgment to form, one's self,” the other whispered.

”But to deliberately a.s.sume these tasks--simple because they clear my life and keep me balanced--when I have no need to do them, seems to me an affectation, absurd!”

”How can a thing be absurd if it brings you ease?”

”But I don't need to do them, really, for myself.”

”For some one else, then?”

<script>