Hillsboro People Part 32

When he looked abroad again, the valley was like a great opal, where the moon shot its rays into the transparent fog far below him. The road was white and the shadows black and one was no more devoid of mystery than the other.

The sky for all its stars hung above the valley like an empty bowl above an empty vessel, and in his heart he felt no swelling possibilities to fill this void. To the haggard old eyes the face of the world was like a dead thing, which did not return his gaze even with hostility, but blankly--a smooth, thin mask which hid behind it nothing at all.

He was startled by the sudden appearance of a dog from out of the shadows, a s.h.a.ggy collie who trotted briskly down the road, stopping to roll a friendly, inquiring eye on his bent figure. His eyes followed the animal until it vanished in the shadows on the other side. After the sound of its padding footsteps was still, the old man's heart died within him at the silence.

He tried vainly to exorcise this anguish by naming it What was it? Why did he droop dully now that he was where he had so longed to be? Everything was as it had been, the valley, the clean white fog, tossing its waves up to him as he had dreamed of it in the arid days of Nebraska; the mountains closing in on him with the line of drooping peace he had never lost from before his eyes during the long, dreary years of exile. Only he was changed. His eye fell on his mud-caked boots, and his face contracted.

"Oh, my! Oh, my!" he said aloud, like an anxious old child. "She couldn't ha' liked my tracking bog durt on to her clane kitchen floor!"

But as he sat brooding, his hand dropped heavily to the Round Stone and encountered a small object which he held up to view. It was a willow whistle of curious construction, with white lines criss-cross on it; and beside it lay a jackknife with a broken blade. The old man looked at it, absently at first, then with a start, and finally with a rush of joyful and exultant exclamations.

And afterward, quite tranquilly, with a s.h.i.+ning face of peace, he played softly on his pipes, "The Call of the Sidhe to the Children."

ADESTE FIDELES!

I.

The persuasive agent sought old Miss Abigail out among her flower-beds and held up to her a tiny chair with roses painted on the back. "I was told to see you about these. They're only four dollars a dozen, and the smallest school children love 'em." Miss Abigail straightened herself with difficulty. She had been weeding the gladiolus bed. "Four dollars," she mused, "I was going to put four dollars into rose-bushes this fall." She put out a strong, earth-stained old hand and took the chair. Her affection for her native Greenford began to rise through her life-long thrift, a mental ferment not unusual with her. Finally, "All right," she said; "send 'em to the schoolhouse, and say they're in memory of all my grandfathers and grandmothers that learned their letters in that schoolhouse."

She went back to her digging and the agent clicked the gate back of his retreat. Suddenly she stood up without remembering to ease her back. She heard the first shot from the enemy who was to advance so rapidly upon her thereafter. "Wait a minute," she called to the agent. As he paused, she made a swift calculation. "I don't believe I want a dozen," she said, much surprised. "I can't think of that many little ones." The agent took his notebook. "How many?" he asked.

The ponderous old woman stared at him absently, while she made a mental canva.s.s of the town. She spoke with a gasp. "We don't need any!" she cried. "There ain't a child in school under eleven."

"Take some now and have them handy," urged the agent.

Miss Abigail's gaze again narrowed in silent calculation. When she spoke her exclamation was not for her listener. She had forgotten him. "Good Lord of Love!" she cried. "There ain't a single one comin' up to sit on those chairs if I should buy 'em!"

The agent was utterly blotted from her mind. She did not know when he left her garden. She only knew that there were no children in Greenford. There were no children in her town! "Why, what's comin' to Greenford!" she cried.

And yet, even as she cried out, she was aware that she had had a warning, definite, ominous, a few days before, from the lips of Molly Leonard. At that time she had put away her startled uneasiness with a masterful hand, burying it resolutely where she had laid away all the other emotions of her life, under the brown loam of her garden. But it all came back to her now.

Her thin, fluttering, little old friend had begun with tragic emphasis, "The roof to the library leaks!"

Miss Abigail had laughed as usual at Molly's habit of taking small events with bated breath. "What of it?" she asked. "That roof never was good, even back in the days when 'twas a private house and my great-uncle lived in it."

Miss Molly fluttered still more before the awfulness of her next announcement.

"Well, the talk is that the town won't vote a cent toward repairs."

"They'll have to! You can't get along without a library!"

"No, they won't. The talk is that the men won't vote to have the town give a bit of money for s.h.i.+ngles. No, nor to pay somebody to take the place of Ellen Monroe as librarian. She's got work in the print mill at Johnsonville and is going to move down there to be near her mother's family."

"Oh, _talk_!" said Miss Abigail with the easy contempt she had for things outside her garden hedge. "Haven't you heard men talk before?"

"But they say really they _won't!_ They say n.o.body ever goes into it any more when the summer folks go away in the autumn."

Miss Abigail's gesture indicated that the thing was unthinkable. "What's the matter with young folks nowadays, anyhow? They always used to run there and chatter till you couldn't hear yourself think."

Miss Molly lowered her voice like a person coming to the frightening climax of a ghost story. "Miss Abigail, they _ain't_ any young folks here any more!"

"What do you call the Pitkin girls!" demanded the other.

"They were the very last ones and they and their mother have decided they'll move to Johnsonville this fall."

Miss Abigail cried out in energetic disapproval, "What in the Lord's world are the Pitkinses going to move away from Greenford for! They belong here!"

Miss Molly marshaled the reasons with a sad swiftness, "There aren't any music pupils left for the oldest one, the two next have got positions in the print mill and little Sarah is too old for the school here any more."

Miss Abigail shook her head impatiently as though to brush away a troublesome gnat. "How about the Leavitts? There ought to be enough young ones in that or family to--"

"They moved to Johnsonville last week, going to rent their house to city folks in the summer, the way all the rest here in the street do. They didn't want to go a bit. Eliza felt dreadful about it, but what can they do? Ezra hasn't had enough carpentering to do in the last six months to pay their grocery bill, and down in Johnsonville they can't get carpenters enough. Besides, all the children's friends are there, and they got so lonesome here winters."

Miss Abigail quailed a little, but rallying, she brought out, "What's the matter with the Bennetts? The whole kit and b'iling of them came in here the other day to pester me asking about how I grew my lilies."

"Why, Miss Abigail! You don't pay any more attention to village news!

They've been working in the mills for two years now, and only come home for two weeks in the summer like everybody else."

The old woman stirred her weighty person wrathfully. "Like everybody else!

Molly, you talk like a fool! As if there was n.o.body lived here all the year around!"

"But it's _so!_ I don't know what's coming to Greenford!"

An imperative gesture from the older woman cut her short. "Don't chatter so, Molly! If it's true, that about the library, we've got to do something!"

The interview had ended in an agreement from her, after a struggle with the two pa.s.sions of her life, to give up the tulip bulbs for which she had been saving so long, and spend the money for repairing the roof. Miss Molly, having no money to give, since she was already much poorer than she could possibly be and live, agreed, according to Miss Abigail's peremptory suggestion, to give her time, and keep the library open at least during the afternoons.

"You can do it, Molly, as well as not, for you don't seem to have half the sewing you used to."

"There's n.o.body here any more to sew _for_--" began the seamstress despairingly, but Miss Abigail would not listen, bundling her out of the garden gate and sending her trotting home, cheered unreasonably by the old woman's jovial bl.u.s.tering, "No such kind of talk allowed in _my_ garden!"

But now, after the second warning, Miss Abigail felt the need of some cheer for herself as she toiled among the hollyhocks and larkspurs. She would not let herself think of the significance of the visit of the agent for the chairs, and she could not force herself to think of anything else.

For several wretched weeks she hung in this limbo. Then, one morning as she stood gazing at her Speciosums Rubrums without seeing them, she received her summons to the front. She had a call from her neighbor, Mr.

Edward Horton, whom the rest of the world knows as a sculptor, but whom Miss Abigail esteemed only because of his orthodox ideas on rose culture.

He came in to ask some information about a blight on his Red Ramblers, although after Miss Abigail had finished her strong recommendation to use whale oil soap sprayed, and not h.e.l.lebore, he still lingered, crus.h.i.+ng a leaf of lemon verbena between his fingers and sniffing the resultant perfume with thoughtful appreciation. He was almost as enthusiastic a horticulturist as Miss Abigail, and stood high in her good graces as one of the few individuals of sense among the summer colony. She faced him therefore in a peaceable, friendly mood, glad of the diversion from her thoughts, and quite unprepared for the shock he was about to give her.

"I'm on my way to interview the trustees of the church," he remarked. "It is curious that all but one of them now really live in Johnsonville, although they still keep their nominal residence here."

"What do you want to see _them_ for?" asked Miss Abigail, with a bluntness caused in part by her wincing at his casual statement of an unwelcome fact.

"Why, I've had what I flatter myself is an inspiration for everyone concerned. I've got a big commission for part of the decorations of the new State House in Montana, and I need a very large studio. It occurred to me the other day that instead of building I'd save time by buying the old church here and using that."

Miss Abigail leaned against the palings. "_Buy our church!_" she said, and every letter was a capital.

"I didn't know you were a member," said the sculptor, a little surprised.