Part 6 (1/2)

”You sure,” she asked, ”that you stop to the ca.n.a.l draw?”

”Uh?” said the conductor, and when he comprehended, ”Every time,” he said, ”every time. You be ready when she whistles.” He hesitated, manifestly in some curiosity. ”They ain't a house in a mile f'om there, though,” he told her.

”I know that,” she gave back crisply.

When I heard her speaking of the ca.n.a.l draw, I found myself wondering; for a woman is not above wonder. There, where the trains stopped just perceptibly I myself was wont to leave them for the sake of the mile walk on the quiet highroad to my house. That, too, though it chanced to be night, for I am not afraid. But I wondered the more because other women do fear, and also because mine was the only house between the ca.n.a.l draw and Friends.h.i.+p Village; and manifestly the shortest way to reach the village would have been to alight at the station. But I held my peace, for the affairs of others should be to those others an efficient disguise; and moreover, the greater part of one's wonder is wont to come to naught.

Yet, as I seemed to follow this woman out upon the snow and the train kept impersonally on across the meadows, I could not but see that her bags were many and looked heavy, and twice she set them down to rearrange. I think a ghost of the road could have done no less than ask to help her. And I did this with an abruptness of which I am unwilling master, though indeed I had no need to a.s.sume impatience, for I saw that my quiet walk was spoiled.

When I spoke to her, she started and shrank away; but there was an austerity in the lonely white road and in the country silence which must have chilled a woman like her; and her bags were many and seemed heavy.

”Much obliged to you,” she said indistinctly. ”I'd just as li've you should take the basket, if you want.”

So I lifted the basket and trudged beside her, hoping very much that she would not talk. For though for my own comfort I would walk far to avoid treading on a nest, or a worm, or a magenta flower (and I loathe magenta), yet I am often blameful enough to wound through the sheerest bungling those who talk to me when I would rather be silent.

The night was one clinging to the way of Autumn, and as yet with no Winter hinting. The air was mild and dry, and the sky was starry. I am not ashamed that on a quiet highroad on a starry night I love to be silent, and even to forget concerns of my own which seem pressing in the publicity of the sun; but I am ashamed, I own, to have been called to myself that night by a little choking breath of haste.

”I can't go--so fast,” my companion said humbly; ”you might jest--set the basket down anywheres. I can--”

But I think that she can hardly have heard my apology, for she stood where she had halted, staring away from me. We were opposite the cemetery lying in its fence of field stone and whitewashed rails.

”O my soul, my soul!” I heard her say. ”I'd forgot the graveyard, or I couldn't never 'a' come this way.”

At that she went on, her feet quickening, as I thought, without her will; and she kept her face turned to me, so that it should be away from that whitewashed fence. And now because of the wound she had shown me, I walked a little apart in the middle of the road for my attempt at sympathy. So we came to the summit of the hill, and there the dark suddenly yielded up the distance. The lamps of the village began to signal, lights dotted the fields and gathered in a cosey blur in the valley, and half a mile to westward the headlight that marked the big Toplady barn and the little Toplady house shone out as if some one over there were saying something.

”You live here in Friends.h.i.+p?” the girl demanded abruptly.

I could show her my house a little way before us.

”Ever go inside the graveyard?” she asked.

Sometimes I do go there, and at that answer she walked nearer to me and spoke eagerly.

”Air all the tombstones standin' up straight, do you know?” she said.

”Hev any o' their headstones fell down on 'em?”

This I could answer too, definitely enough; for Friends.h.i.+p Cemetery, by the vigilance of the Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality, is kept in no less scrupulous order than the Friends.h.i.+p parlours.

”Well, that's a relief,” she said; ”I couldn't get it out o' my head.”

Then, because she seemed of those on whom silence lays a certain imaginary demand, ”My mother an' father an' sister's buried there,” she explained. ”They're in there. They all died when I was gone. An' I got the notion that their headstones had tipped over on to 'em. Or Aunt Cornie More's, maybe.”

Aunt Cornie More. I knew that name, for they had told me about her in Friends.h.i.+p, so that her name, and that of the Oldmoxons, in whose former house I lived, and many others were like folk whom one pa.s.ses often and remembers. I had been told how Aunt Cornie More had made her own shroud from her crocheted parlour curtains, lest these fall to a later wife of her octogenarian husband; and how as she lay in her coffin the curtain's sh.e.l.l-st.i.tch parrot ”come right acrost her chest.” This woman beside me had called her ”Aunt” Cornie More. And then I remembered the name which Doctor June had spoken on the train and the wheels had measured.

”Delia More!” I said, involuntarily, and regretted it as soon as I had spoken. But, indeed, it was as if some legend woman of the place walked suddenly beside me, like the quick.

Who in Friends.h.i.+p had not heard the name, and who, save one who keeps her own thoughts and forgets to give back greeting, would not on the instant have remembered it? Delia More's stepsister, Jennie c.r.a.pwell, had been betrothed to a carpenter of Friends.h.i.+p, and he was at work on their house when, a month before the wedding-day, Delia and that young carpenter had ”run away.” Who in Friends.h.i.+p could not tell that story?

But before I had made an end of murmuring something--

”I might 'a' known they hadn't done talkin' yet,” Delia More said bitterly. ”They say it was like that when Calliope Marsh's beau run off with somebody else,--for ten years the town et it for cake. Well, they ain't any of 'em goin' to get a look at me. I don't give anybody the chance to show me the cold shoulder. You can tell 'em I was here if you want. They can scare the children with it.”