Part 3 (1/2)

I had no hesitation which direction to take, being guided by the sound of voices and wafts of penetrating odors.

It was a fortunate direction, for I discovered on the way my lost apparel artfully concealed under a small melodeon, and, strangely enough, I was again brought face to face with my deserted couch and the weeping lady on the wall. She held me a moment with the old fascination. As I put up my gla.s.ses, I thought I detected in her face a hitherto unnoticed buoyancy of expression and not having wholly escaped in my life from ideas of a worldly nature, I reflected that, probably, her regretted consort had left her with a sufficient number of thousands.

In this same connection, I was reminded that I, myself, had started out on an independent career, and wondered if it would be unkind or undutiful in me to start a private bank account of my own. I concluded that it would not.

When I entered the little room where the Keeler family was a.s.sembled:--

”Why, here's our teacher!” exclaimed Grandma Keeler in accents of delight, and came to meet me with outstretched arms. ”We couldn't abear to wake ye up, dearie,” she went on, ”knowin' ye was so tired this mornin'; and there's plenty o' time--plenty o' time. My Casindana come home!” she murmured, with a smile and a tremble of the lips, and a far-away look, for the instant, in her gentle eyes.

In fact, the whole Keeler family received me with outstretched arms. If I had been a long-lost child, or a friend known and loved in days gone by, I could not have been more cordially and enthusiastically welcomed.

The best chair was set for me; glances of eager and inquiring interest were bent upon me.

I accepted it all coolly, though not without a certain air of affability, too, for I had a natural desire to make myself agreeable to people, when it wasn't too much trouble; but I was quite firm, at this time, in the conviction that there was little or no faith to be put in human nature.

On the whole I was much entertained and interested.

The two children came to climb into my lap, but this part of the acquaintance did not progress very fast. I thought they must have been struck by something in my eye (I was merely wondering abstractedly if their heads were not out of proportion to the rest of their bodies), for they paused, and Mrs. Philander called them away sharply.

Mrs. Philander was a frail little woman,--she could not have been over thirty or thirty-two years old,--not pretty, though she had a very airy and graceful way of comporting herself. Her eyes were large and dark, with a strange, melancholy gleam in them.

I never knew the secrets of Mrs. Philanders heart. She had often a tired, tense look about the mouth, and seemed often sorely discontent; but she had the sweetest voice I ever heard. She was familiarly called Madeline.

Grandpa or Cap'n Keeler was over eighty years old. He had a tall, powerful frame--at least, it spoke of great power in the past--and I thought his eye must have been uncommonly dark and keen once.

From his manly irascibility of temperament, and his frequent would-be authoritativeness of tone, one might have inferred, from a pa.s.sing glimpse, that Grandpa Keeler was something of a tyrant in the family; but I soon learned that his sway was of an extremely vague and illusory nature.

Grandma Keeler was twenty years his junior. She had not married him until she was herself quite advanced in life, and had had one husband.

”To be sure,” I heard her say once, ”I ain't quite so far advanced as husband, but, then, it don't make no difference how young the girl is, you know.”

She used to sit down and laugh--one of Grandma's ”r'al good laughs” was incompatible with a standing posture--until the tears rolled down her cheeks, and she had to wipe them off with the corner of her ap.r.o.n.

She had been thrown from a wagon once--how often and thrillingly have I heard dear Grandma Keeler relate the particulars of that accident! She had broken at that time, I believe, nearly every bone in her body. Long was the story of her fall, but longer still the tale of her recuperation.

In due course of time, she had grown together again; could now use all her limbs, and was in superabundant flesh. There was an unnatural sort of stiffness about her movements, however, her way of walking particularly.

She advanced but slowly, and allowed her weight to fall from one foot to Another without any perceptible bend of any joint whatever.

I have stood at one end of a room and seen Grandma Keeler approaching from the other, when it seemed as though she was not making any progress at all, but merely going through with an odd sort of balancing process in order to maintain her equilibrium.

As for Grandma Keeler's face, there was enough in it to make several ordinary scrimped faces. Besides large physical proportions, there was enough in it of generosity, enough of whole-heartedness, a world of sympathy. The great catastrophe of her life had affected the muscles of her face so that although she enunciated her words very distinctly, she had a slow, automatic way of moving her lips.

The room where the breakfast-table was set was the same that I had entered first, on my arrival at Wallencamp. It was low and small, but capable, as I learned afterward, of holding any amount of things and people without ever seeming crowded. There was a cooking-stove in it, and many other articles of modest worth, so artlessly scattered about as to present a scene of the wildest and richest profusion.

Art was not entirely wanting, however. There was a ray of it on the wall behind the stove-pipe, the companion-piece to ”Bereavement,” ent.i.tled ”Joy,” and represented my heroine of the bed-chamber, reclining on a rustic bench in rather an unflounced and melancholy condition. In one place there hung a yellow family register, which was kept faithfully supplied from week to week with a wreath of fresh evergreens. It was headed by a woodcut representing a funeral, Grandma Keeler said; but Grandpa Keeler afterwards informed me, aside, with much solemnity, that it was a ”marriage ceremony.” Near the foot of the list of births, marriages and deaths, I saw ”Casindana Keeler; died, aged twenty.”

We sat down at the table. There was a brief altercation between Dinslow and Grace, the little Keelers, in which impromptu missiles, such as spoons and knives and small tin-cups, were hurled across the table with unguided wrath, and both infants yelled furiously.

Grandma had nearly succeeded in quieting them, when Madeline remarked to Grandpa Keeler, in her lively and flippant style:--

”Come, pa, say your piece.”