Part 6 (1/2)

”Oh,” said Peter, ”wasn't it sudden?”

”Sort of. She'd been considerin' of it for some time, and last night she made up her mind. But I did think,” said Mrs. Blodgett, ”that she'd have said good-bye to _you_.” And not eliciting anything by way of a reply, she added: ”Miss Havens is a nice girl. I hate to think of her slavin'

her life out in an office. She'd ought to get married.”

”A girl has ever so many more chances in her home town,” Peter offered hopefully.

”Yes, I suppose so.” Mrs. Blodgett sighed. ”Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Weatheral?”

”Nothing, thank you.” He was lingering still on the landing on Mrs.

Blodgett's account, but he found his finger slipping between the leaves of the volume he had brought from the library.

”Ah,” she warned him, ”readin' is an improvin' occupation, but there's a book we hadn't any of us ought to miss, and that's the Book of Life, Mr.

Weatheral.” And somehow with that ringing in his ears, Peter spent several minutes walking up and down in his room before he could settle to his book again.

II

It was a week or ten days after Miss Havens left, before Peter went down to Bloombury for his midsummer vacation, a week in which he had the greatest difficulty in getting back to the House of the s.h.i.+ning Walls.

He set out for it almost immediately with a feeling akin to the release with which one returns to daily habit after the departure of an unexpected guest. But his thought would no sooner strike into the accustomed paths than Miss Minnie Havens would meet him there unaccountably, to begin again those long intimate conversations which led toward and about the House, but never quite to it. Peter found himself looking out for those meetings with some notion of dodging them, and yet once they were fairly off, he owned them a great relief from Blodgett's. Now that it was withdrawn, he realized in the girl's bright companions.h.i.+p the effect of the rose-red glow of the shade that Aggie drew down over the front parlour lamp on the evenings when the Gentlemen's Outfitter called. It had prevented his seeing until now, that the chief difference between himself and his fellow boarders, was that for most of them, this was a place where they had come to stay.

Having let Miss Havens go on alone to the place she was bound for, he had moments of dreadful sinking, as it occurred to him to wonder if he hadn't made a mistake in the nature of his own destination. Suppose, after all, he should find himself castaway in some oasis of determined sprightliness with Wally Whitaker in whose pocket pretenses of tips and margins he began to discern a poorer sort of subst.i.tute for the House.

He was as much bored by the permanently young shoe-salesman after this discovery as before it, but obliged to set a watch on himself lest in a moment of finding himself too much in the same case, he should make the mistake of inviting Wally to Bloombury for his vacation.

He was relieved, when at last he had got away without it, to be saved from such a misadventure, for he found his mother not standing the heat well, and Ellen anxious. He had never definitely shaped to himself the idea that there could anything happen to his mother; she was as much a part of his life as the aging apple trees and the hills that climbed, with low, gnarled pines to the sky's edge beyond the marshes, a point from which to take distance and direction. He began to note now the graying hair, the shrunken breast and the worn hands, so blue veined for all their brownness, and he could not sleep of nights because of the sweat that was on his soul, for fear of what might come to her. He would lie in the little room under the roof and hear the elms moving like the riffle of silence into sound, thinking of his mother until at last he would be obliged to rise and move softly about the place, as if by the mere a.s.sertion of himself he could make her safer in it. He wished nothing so much as not to disturb her, but she must have been lying awake often herself, for the second or third time this happened, she called to him. He came, half dressed as he was and drew the covers up close about her shoulders, and was exceedingly gay and tender with her.

”There's nothing troubling you, son?”

”Nothing--except to be sure there's nothing troubling _you_.”

She gave a little, low laugh like a girl.

”That's so like your father. I remember he would get up in the night when you were little, and go prowling about ... he used to say he was afraid the roof tree would fall in and kill you. And yet here you are....” She reached out to give him a little pat, as if somehow to rea.s.sure him. The low dropping moon made a square block of light on the uncarpeted floor; outside, the orchard waited for the dawn, and the fields brimmed life up to their very doors.

”You're like him in other ways,” she went on. ”Somehow it's brought him back wonderfully the last two or three days, and especially at night when I'd hear you creaking down the stair. There's a board there which always does creak, and I'd hear you trying to remember which it was, the same as _he_ used to----”

”I haven't meant to keep you awake, mother.”

”I've been awake. When you're getting along like, you don't sleep much, Peter. Sleep is for dreaming, some of it, and the old don't dream.”

”You're not to go calling yourself old, mother!”

”And me with a son going twenty-three! We weren't so young either when we were married, your father and I ... but I want you should sleep, Peter, and dream when you can. You have pleasant dreams, son?”

”Any amount of them.” He was going off into one of those bright fantasies of what he should do when he was rich as he meant to be, with which he had so often beguiled Ellen's pain, but she kissed him and sent him to bed again lest Ellen should hear them.

It was not more than a day or two after that the minister's wife caught young Mr. Weatheral walking with his mother in the back pasture with his arm about her, and was slightly shocked by it, for though it was thought highly commendable in him to have paid off the mortgage and managed a silk dress for her and Ellen besides, Bloombury was not habituated to a lively expression of family affection. Peter had consented to gather the huckleberries which Ellen insisted were of a superior flavour in the back pasture, on the sole condition that his mother should come with him, and the minister's wife had just stepped aside on her way to the Tillinghurst's to gather the southerwood which grew there, for the minister's winter cough, when she caught sight of them.

”She couldn't have stared more if she'd caught me with a girl.” Peter protested.