The Brimming Cup. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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СКАЧАТЬ "But seriously, I must tell you that she is a perfectly harmless and quite uninteresting old herb-gatherer, although the children in the village are a little afraid of her, because she is an Indian, the only one they have ever seen. She really is an Indian too. She knows every inch of our valley and the mountains better than any lumberman or hunter or fisherman in Ashley. She often goes off and doesn't come back for days. I haven't the least idea where she stays. But she's very good to our children when she's here, and I like her capacity for monumental silence. It gives her very occasional remarks an oracular air, even though you know it's only because she doesn't often open her lips. She helps a little with the house-work, too, although she always looks so absent-minded, as though she were thinking of something very far away. She's quite capable of preparing a good meal, for all she never seems to notice what she's up to. And she's the last member of our family except the very coming-and-going little maids I get once in a while. Ashley is unlike the rest of the world in that it is hard to get domestic servants here.

      "Now let me see, whom next to introduce to you. You know all your immediate neighbors now. I shall have to begin on Ashley itself. Perhaps our minister and his wife. They live in the high-porticoed, tall-pillared white old house next door to the church in the village, on the opposite side from the church-yard. They are Ashleyans of the oldest rock. Both of them were born here, and have always lived here. Mr. Bayweather is seventy-five years old and has never had any other parish. I do believe the very best thing I can do for you is to send you straight to them, this minute. There's nothing Mr. Bayweather doesn't know about the place or the people. He has a collection of Ashleyana of all sorts, records, deeds, titles, old letters, family trees. And for the last forty years he has been very busy writing a history of Ashley."

      "A history of Ashley?" exclaimed Vincent.

      "A history of Ashley," she answered, level-browed.

      Mr. Welles had the impression that a "side-wipe" had been exchanged in which he had not shared.

      Vincent now asked irrelevantly, "Do you go to church yourself?"

      "Oh yes," she answered, "I go, I like to go. And I take the children." She turned her head so that she looked down at her long hands in her lap, as she added, "I think going to church is a refining influence in children's lives, don't you?"

      To Mr. Welles' horror this provoked from Vincent one of his great laughs. And this time he was sure that Mrs. Crittenden would take offense, for she looked up, distinctly startled, really quite as though he had looked in through the key-hole. But Vincent went on laughing. He even said, impudently, "Ah, now I've caught you, Mrs. Crittenden; you're too used to keeping your jokes to yourself. And they're much too good for that."

      She looked at him hard, with a certain wonder in her eyes.

      "Oh, there's no necromancy about it," he told her. "I've been reading the titles of your books and glancing over your music before you came in. And I can put two and two together. Who are you making fun of to yourself? Who first got off that lovely speech about the refining influence of church?"

      She laughed a little, half-uneasily, a brighter color mounting to her smooth oval cheeks. "That's one of Mrs. Bayweather's favorite maxims," she admitted. She added, "But I really do like to go to church."

      Mr. Welles felt an apprehension about the turn things were taking. Vincent, he felt sure, was on the verge of being up to something. And he did not want to risk offending Mrs. Crittenden. He stood up. "Thank you very much for telling us about the minister and his wife, Mrs. Crittenden. I think we'll go right along down to the village now, and pay a call on them. There'll be time enough before dinner." Vincent of course got up too, at this, saying, "He's the most perfect old housekeeper, you know. He's kept the neatest flat for himself and that aged aunt of his for seventy years."

      "Seventy!" cried Mr. Welles, scandalized at the exaggeration.

      "Oh, more or less," said Vincent, laughing. Mr. Welles noticed with no enthusiasm that his eyes were extremely bright, that he smiled almost incessantly, that he stepped with an excess of his usual bounce. Evidently something had set him off into one of his fits of wild high spirits. You could almost feel the electricity sparkle from him, as it does from a cat on a cold day. Personally, Mr. Welles preferred not to touch cats when they were like that.

      "When are you going back to the city, Mr. Marsh?" asked Mrs. Crittenden, as they said good-bye at the door.

      Vincent was standing below her on the marble step. He looked up at her now, and something about his expression made Mr. Welles think again of glossy fur emitting sparks. He said, "I'll lay you a wager, Mrs. Crittenden, that there is one thing your Ashley underground news-service has not told you about us, and that is, that I've come up not only to help Mr. Welles install himself in his new home, but to take a somewhat prolonged rest-cure myself. I've always meant to see more of this picturesque part of Vermont. I've a notion that the air of this lovely spot will do me a world of good."

      As Mr. Welles opened his mouth, perhaps rather wide, in the beginning of a remark, he cut in briskly with, "You're worrying about Schwatzkummerer, I know. Never you fear. I'll get hold of his address, all right." He explained briefly to Mrs. Crittenden, startled by the portentous name. "Just a specialist in gladiolus seeds."

      "Bulbs!" cried Mr. Welles, in involuntary correction, and knew as he spoke that he had been switched off to a side-track.

      "Oh well, bulbs be it," Vincent conceded the point indulgently. He took off his hat in a final salutation to Mrs. Crittenden, and grasping his elderly friend by the arm, moved with him down the flag-paved path.

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

TABLE TALK

       Table of Contents

      An Hour in the Home Life of Mrs. Neale Crittenden, aet. 34 March 20.

      As she and Paul carried the table out to the windless, sunny side-porch, Marise was struck by a hospitable inspiration. "You and Elly go on setting the table," she told the children, and ran across the side-yard to the hedge. She leaned over this, calling, "Mr. Welles! Mr. Welles!" and when he came to the door, "The children and I are just celebrating this first really warm day by having lunch out of doors. Won't you and Mr. Marsh come and join us?"

      By the time the explanations and protestations and renewals of the invitation were over and she brought them back to the porch, Paul and Elly had almost finished setting the table. Elly nodded a country-child's silent greeting to the newcomers. Paul said, "Oh goody! Mr. Welles, you sit by me."

      Marise was pleased at the friendship growing up between the gentle old man and her little boy.

      "Elly, don't you want me to sit by you?" asked Marsh with a playful accent.

      Elly looked down at the plate she was setting on the table. "If you want to," she said neutrally.

      Her mother smiled inwardly. How amusingly Elly had acquired as only a child could acquire an accent, the exact astringent, controlled brevity of the mountain idiom.

      "I think Elly means that she would like it very much, Mr. Marsh," she said laughingly. "You'll soon learn to translate Vermontese into ordinary talk, if you stay on here."

      She СКАЧАТЬ