AT the Baxters the late supper was over and the girls had not sat at the table with their father, having eaten earlier, by themselves. The hired men had gone home to sleep. Patty had retired to the solitude of her bedroom almost at dusk, quite worn out with the heat, and Waitstill sat under the peach tree in the corner of her own little garden, tatting, and thinking of her interview with Ivory's mother. She sat there until nearly eight o'clock, trying vainly to put together the puzzling details of Lois Boynton's conversation, wondering whether the perplexities that vexed her mind were real or fancied, but warmed to the heart by the affection that the older woman seemed instinctively to feel for her. “She did not know me, yet she cared for me at once,” thought Waitstill tenderly and proudly; “and I for her, too, at the first glance.”
She heard her father lock the barn and shed and knew that he would be going upstairs immediately, so she quickly went through the side yard and lifted the latch of the kitchen door. It was fastened. She went to the front door and that, too, was bolted, although it had been standing open all the evening, so that if a breeze should spring up, it might blow through the house. Her father supposed, of course, that she was in bed, and she dreaded to bring him downstairs for fear of his anger; still there was no help for it and she rapped smartly at the side door. There was no answer and she rapped again, vexed with her own carelessness. Patty's face appeared promptly behind her screen of mosquito netting in the second story, but before she could exchange a word with her sister, Deacon Baxter opened the blinds of his bedroom window and put his head out.
“You can try sleepin' outdoors, or in the barn to-night,” he called. “I didn't say anything to you at supper-time because I wanted to see where you was intendin' to prowl this evenin'.”
“I haven't been 'prowling' anywhere, father,” answered Waitstill; “I've been out in the garden cooling off; it's only eight o'clock.”
“Well, you can cool off some more,” he shouted, his temper now fully aroused; “or go back where you was this afternoon and see if they'll take you in there! I know all about your deceitful tricks! I come home to grind the scythes and found the house and barn empty Cephas said you'd driven up Saco Hill and I took his horse and followed you and saw where you went Long's you couldn't have a feller callin' on you here to home, you thought you'd call on him, did yer, you bold-faced hussy?”
“I am nothing of the sort,” the girl answered him quietly; “Ivory Boynton was not at his house, he was in the hay-field. You know it, and you know that I knew it. I went to see a sick, unhappy woman who has no neighbors. I ought to have gone long before. I am not ashamed of it, and I don't regret it. If you ask unreasonable things of me, you must expect to be disobeyed once in a while.
“Must expect to be disobeyed, must I?” the old man cried, his face positively terrifying in its ugliness. “We'll see about that! If you wa'n't callin' on a young man, you were callin' on a crazy woman, and I won't have it, I tell you, do you hear? I won't have a daughter o' mine consortin' with any o' that Boynton crew. Perhaps a night outdoors will teach you who's master in this house, you imperdent, shameless girl! We'll try it, anyway!” And with that he banged down the window and disappeared, gibbering and jabbering impotent words that she could hear but not understand.
Waitstill was almost stunned by the suddenness of this catastrophe. She stood with her feet rooted to the earth for several minutes and then walked slowly away out of sight of the house. There was a chair beside the grindstone under the Porter apple tree and she sank into it, crossed her arms on the back, and bowing her head on them, burst into a fit of weeping as tempestuous and passionate as it was silent, for although her body fairly shook with sobs no sound escaped.
The minutes passed, perhaps an hour; she did not take account of time. The moon went behind clouds, the night grew misty and the stars faded one by one. There would be rain to-morrow and there was a great deal of hay cut, so she thought in a vagrant sort of way.
Meanwhile Patty upstairs was in a state of suppressed excitement and terror. It was a quarter of an hour before her father settled him-self in bed; then an age, it seemed to her, before she heard his heavy breathing. When she thought it quite safe, she slipped on a print wrapper, took her shoes in her hand, and crept noiselessly downstairs, out through the kitchen and into the shed. Lifting the heavy bar that held the big doors in place she closed them softly behind her, stepped out, and looked about her in the darkness. Her quick eye espied in the distance, near the barn, the bowed figure in the chair, and she flew through the wet grass without a thought of her bare feet till she reached her sister's side and held her in a close embrace.
“My darling, my own, own, poor darling!” she cried softly, the tears running down her cheeks. “How wicked, how unjust to serve my dearest sister so! Don't cry, my blessing, don't cry; you frighten me! I'll take care of you, dear! Next time I'll interfere; I'll scratch and bite; yes, I'll strangle anybody that dares to shame you and lock you out of the house! You, the dearest, the patientest, the best!”
Waitstill wiped her eyes. “Let us go farther away where we can talk,” she whispered.
“Where had we better sleep?” Patty asked. “On the hay, I think, though we shall stifle with the heat”; and Patty moved towards the barn.
“No, you must go back to the house at once, Patty dear; father might wake and call you, and that would make matters worse. It's beginning to drizzle, or I should stay out in the air. Oh! I wonder if father's mind is going, and if this is the beginning of the end! If he is in his sober senses, he could not be so strange, so suspicious, so unjust.”
“He could be anything, say anything, do anything,” exclaimed Patty. “Perhaps he is not responsible and perhaps he is; it doesn't make much difference to us. Come along, blessed darling! I'll tuck you in, and then I'll creep back to the house, if you say I must. I'll go down and make the kitchen fire in the morning; you stay out here and see what happens. A good deal will happen, I'm thinking, if father speaks to me of you! I shouldn't be surprised to see the fur flying in all directions; I'll seize the first moment to bring you out a cup of coffee and we'll consult about what to do. I may tell you now, I'm all for running away!”
Waitstill's first burst of wretchedness had subsided and she had recovered her balance. “I'm afraid we must wait a little longer, Patty,” she advised. “Don't mention my name to father, but see how he acts in the morning. He was so wild, so unlike himself, that I almost hope he may forget what he said and sleep it off. Yes, we must just wait.”
“No doubt he'll be far calmer in the morning if he remembers that, if he turns you out, he faces the prospect of three meals a day cooked by me,” said Patty. “That's what he thinks he would face, but as a matter of fact I shall tell him that where you sleep I sleep, and where you eat I eat, and when you stop cooking I stop! He won't part with two unpaid servants in a hurry, not at the beginning of haying.” And Patty, giving Waitstill a last hug and a dozen tearful kisses, stole reluctantly back to the house by the same route through which he had left it.
Patty was right. She found the fire lighted when she went down into the kitchen next morning, and without a word she hurried breakfast on to the table as fast as she could cook and serve it. Waitstill was safe in the barn chamber, she knew, and would be there quietly while her father was feeding the horse and milking the cows; or perhaps she might go up in the woods and wait until she saw him driving away.
The Deacon ate his breakfast in silence, looking and acting very much as usual, for he was generally dumb at meals. When he left the house, however, and climbed into the wagon, he turned around and said in his ordinary gruff manner: “Bring the lunch up to the field yourself to-day, Patience. Tell your sister I hope she's come to her senses in the course of the night. You've got to learn, both of you, that my 'say-so' must be law in this house. You can fuss and you can fume, if it amuses you any, but 't won't do no good. Don't encourage Waitstill in any whinin' nor blubberin'. Jest tell her to come in and go to work and I'll overlook what she done this time. And don't you give me any more of your eye-snappin' and lip-poutin' and head-in-the-air imperdence! You're under age, and if you don't look out, you'll get something that's good for what ails you! You two girls jest aid an' abet one another that's what you do, aid an' abet one another, an if you carry it any further I'll find some way o' separatin' you, do you hear?”
Patty spoke never a word, nor fluttered an eyelash. She had a proper spirit, but now her heart was cold with a new fear, and she felt, with Waitstill, that her father must be obeyed and his temper kept within bounds, until God provided them a way of escape.
She ran out to the barn chamber and, not finding Waitstill, looked across the field and saw her coming through the path from the woods. Patty waved her hand, and ran to meet her sister, joy at the mere fact of her existence, of being able to see her again, and of hearing her dear voice, almost choking her in its intensity. When they reached the house she helped her upstairs as if she were a child, brought her cool water to wash away the dust of the haymow, laid out some clean clothes for her, and finally put her on the lounge in the darkened sitting-room.
“I won't let anybody come near the house,” she said, “and you must have a cup of tea and a good sleep before I tell you all that father said. Just comfort yourself with the thought that he is going to 'overlook it' this time! After I carry up his luncheon, I shall stop at the store and ask Cephas to come out on the river bank for a few minutes. Then I shall proceed to say what I think of him for telling father where you went yesterday afternoon.”
“Don't blame Cephas!” Waitstill remonstrated. “Can't you see just how it happened? He and Uncle Bart were sitting in front of the shop when I drove by. When father came home and found the house empty and the horse not in the stall, of course he asked where I was, and Cephas probably said he had seen me drive up Saco Hill. He had no reason to think that there was any harm in that.”
“If he had any sense he might know that he shouldn't tell anything to father except what happens in the store,” Patty insisted. “Were you frightened out in the barn alone last night, poor dear?”
“I was too unhappy to think of fear and I was chiefly nervous about you, all alone in the house with father.”
“I didn't like it very much, myself! I buttoned my bedroom door and sat by the window all night, shivering and bristling at the least sound. Everybody calls me a coward, but I'm not! Courage isn't not being frightened; it's not screeching when you are frightened. Now, what happened at the Boyntons'?”
“Patty, Ivory's mother is the most pathetic creature I ever saw!” And Waitstill sat up on the sofa, her long braids of hair hanging over her shoulders, her pale face showing the traces of her heavy weeping. “I never pitied any one so much in my whole life! To go up that long, long lane; to come upon that dreary house hidden away in the trees; to feel the loneliness and the silence; and then to know that she is living there like a hermit-thrush in a forest, without a woman to care for her, it is heart-breaking!”
“How does the house look,—dreadful?”
“No: everything is as neat as wax. She isn't 'crazy,' Patty, as we understand the word. Her mind is beclouded somehow and it almost seems as if the cloud might lift at any moment. She goes about like somebody in a dream, sewing or knitting or cooking. It is only when she talks, and you notice that her eyes really see nothing, but are looking beyond you, that you know there is anything wrong.”
“If she appears so like other people, why don't the neighbors go to see her once in a while?”
“Callers make her unhappy, she says, and Ivory told me that he dared not encourage any company in the house for fear of exciting her, and making her an object of gossip, besides. He knows her ways perfectly and that she is safe and content with her fancies when she is alone, which is seldom, after all.”
“What does she talk about?” asked Patty.
“Her husband mostly. She is expecting him to come back daily. We knew that before, of course, but no one can realize it till they see her setting the table for him and putting a saucer of wild strawberries by his plate; going about the kitchen softly, like a gentle ghost.”
“It gives me the shudders!” said Patty. “I couldn't bear it! If she never sees strangers, what in the world did she make of you? How did you begin?”
“I told her I had known Ivory ever since we were school children. She was rather strange and indifferent at first, and then she seemed to take a fancy to me.”
“That's queer!” said Patty, smiling fondly and giving Waitstill's hair the hasty brush of a kiss.
“She told me she had had a girl baby, born two or three years after Ivory, and that she had always thought it died when it was a few weeks old. Then suddenly she came closer to me—
“Oh! Waity, weren't you terrified?”
“No, not in the least. Neither would you have been if you had been there. She put her arms round me and all at once I understood that the poor thing mistook me just for a moment for her own daughter come back to life. It was a sudden fancy and I don't think it lasted, but I didn't know how to deal with it, or contradict it, so I simply tried to soothe her and let her ease her heart by talking to me. She said when I left her: 'Where is your house? I hope it is near! Do come again and sit with me. Strength flows into my weakness when you hold my hand!' I somehow feel, Patty, that she needs a woman friend even more than a doctor. And now, what am I to do? How can I forsake her; and yet here is this new difficulty with father?”
“I shouldn't forsake her; go there when you can, but be more careful about it. You told father that you didn't regret what you had done, and that when he ordered you to do unreasonable things, you should disobey him. After all, you are not a black slave. Father will never think of that particular thing again, perhaps, any more than he ever alluded to my driving to Saco with Mrs. Day after you had told him it was necessary for one of us to go there occasionally. He knows that if he is too hard on us, Dr. Perry or Uncle Bart would take him in hand. They would have done it long ago if we had ever given any one even a hint of what we have to endure. You will be all right, because you only want to do kind, neighborly things. I am the one that will always have to suffer, because I can't prove that it's a Christian duty to deceive father and steal off to a dance or a frolic. Yet I might as well be a nun in a convent for all the fun I get! I want a white book-muslin dress; I want a pair of thin shoes with buckles; I want a white hat with a wreath of yellow roses; I want a volume of Byron's poems; and oh! nobody knows—nobody but the Lord could understand—how I want a string of gold beads.”
“Patty, Patty! To hear you chatter anybody would imagine you thought of nothing but frivolities. I wish you wouldn't do yourself such injustice; even when nobody hears you but me, it is wrong.”
“Sometimes when you think I'm talking nonsense it's really the gospel truth,” said Patty. “I'm not a grand, splendid character, Waitstill, and it's no use your deceiving yourself about me; if you do, you'll be disappointed.”
“Go and parboil the beans and get them into the pot, Patty. Pick up some of the windfalls and make a green-apple pie, and I'll be with you in the kitchen myself before long. I never expect to be disappointed in you, Patty, only continually surprised and pleased.”
“I thought I'd begin making some soft soap to-day,” said Patty mischievously, as she left the room. “We have enough grease saved up. We don't really need it yet, but it makes such a disgusting smell that I'd rather like father to have it with his dinner. It's not much of a punishment for our sleepless night.”
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