Country Neighbors Part 17

"There!" said he.

He took the big armchair by the hearth, and Mariana drew her little rocker to the other corner. She seated herself in it, her hands rather tensely folded, and the cap'n regarded her mildly.

"Ain't you goin' to sew?" he inquired.

"Why, no," said Mariana, "I dunno 's I be. I dunno 's I feel like sewin' all the time."

"Well, I dunno 's there's any law to make a woman set an' sew," the cap'n ruminated. "Sewin' or knittin', either. Only, I've got so used to seein' you with a piece o' work in your hands, didn't look hardly nat'ral not to." He regarded her again with his kindly stare. "Mariana,"

said he, "you look like a different creatur'. What is 't's got hold of you?"

"Nothin', I guess," said Mariana. "Maybe I'm mad."

"Mad? What ye mad about?"

"Oh, I dunno. I guess I'm just mad in general. Nothin' particular, as I see."

"Well, if anybody's goin' to be mad it ought to be me," said the cap'n, lifting his brows with that droll look he wore when he intended to indicate that he was fooling. "I guess I've got to wash my own dishes an' bake my own johnny-cake for a spell. Mandy's goin' to leave."

"Mandy goin' to leave! Well, you will be put to 't. What's she leavin'

for?"

"Goin' to be married."

"For mercy sakes! Who's Mandy Hill goin' to marry?"

"Goin' to marry the peddler."

"The one from the Pines?"

Cap'n Hanscom nodded.

"He's been round consid'able this fall, but I never so much as thought he'd got anything but carpet-rags in his head. Well, seems he had. Now 't I know it, I realize Mandy's been stockin' up with tin for quite a spell. Seems to me I never see a woman that needed so much tinware, nor took so long to pick it out. I never got it through my noddle she an'

the peddler was makin' on 't up between 'em."

"Well, suz," said Mariana. "I never so much as thought Mandy Hill'd ever marry."

"I never did, either," said the cap'n. "But come to that, it'd be queer 'f she didn't sooner or later. Mandy Hill's just the sort of a woman nine men out o' ten'd be possessed to marry. Wonder to me she ain't done it afore."

Mariana shot a glance at him. There was fire in it, kindled of what fuel she knew not; but the flame of it seemed to scorch her. The cap'n was staring at the andirons and did not see it.

"I'd give a good deal," he said musingly, "if I thought I could ever come acrost such a housekeeper as you be, Mariana. But there! that's snarin' a white blackbird."

"Cap'n," said Mariana.

Her tone seemed to leap at him, and he had to look at her.

"Why, Mariana!" he returned. Her face amazed him. It was full of light, but a light that glittered. "By George," said he, "you looked that minute for all the world jest as your brother Elmer did when Si Thomson struck him in town meetin'. Si was drunk an' Elmer never laid up a thing after the blow was over an' done; but that first minute he looked as if he was goin' to jump. What is it, Mariana?"

"Cap'n," said Mariana. She was used to calling him by his first name in their school-day fas.h.i.+on, but her new knowledge of life seemed for the moment to have made all the world alien to her. "Cap'n, if anybody said you couldn't do a thing, wouldn't you say to yourself you'd be--wouldn't you say you'd do it?"

"Why, I dunno," said the cap'n, wondering. "Mebbe I would if 'twas somethin' I thought best to do."

"No, no. If 'twas somethin'--well, s'pose somebody said you was a Chinyman, wouldn't you prove you wa'n't?"

"Why," said the cap'n mildly, "anybody'd see I wa'n't, minute they looked into my face. n.o.body'd say anybody was a Chinyman if they wa'n't."

Mariana was able to laugh a little here, though a tear did run over her cheek in a hateful, betraying way. She wiped it off, but the cap'n saw it.

"See here, Mariana," said he stoutly, "who's been rilin' you up?

Somebody has. You tell me, an' I'll kick 'em from here to the state o'

Maine."

"Oh, it's nothin'," said Mariana. "Here, you lay on another stick. I was only thinkin' when you spoke of Mandy, what a fool she was to tie herself up to the best man in the world if she could get good wages, nice easy place same as yours is. Well, there, Eben! I do get kind o'

blue when the winter comes on and I sit here by the fire watchin' my hair turn gray. If anybody was to offer me a job, I'd take it."

"You would?" said Cap'n Hanscom.

She saw a thought run into his eyes, and hated it. She liked Eben Hanscom, but all the decorous reserves were at once awake in her, bidding him remember that she was not going to scale the trim, tight fence of maidenly tradition. He began rather breathlessly, and she cut him short.

"I'd come and be your housekeeper," said Mariana, hurriedly in her turn, "for three dollars a week, same as you give Mandy, and be glad and thankful. Only I'd want somebody else in the family. I dunno why, but seems if folks would laugh if you and me settled down there together like two old folks--"

"I dunno why they'd laugh," said the cap'n stoutly. His eyes were glowing with the surprise of it and the happy antic.i.p.ation of Mariana's tidy ways. "n.o.body laughed at me an' Mandy; leastways if they did, I never got hold on 't."

"Well, you see, Mandy's day begun pretty soon after your wife was taken, and folks were kinder softened down. Anyways, I couldn't do it. 'Tain't that I'm young and 'tain't that I'm a fool, but I'd just like to have one more in the family."

"Aunt Elkins might think she could make a home with us," said the cap'n, pondering. "No, she wouldn't, either, come to think. Her son's sent her her fare to go out to them this winter. Ain't you got some friend, Mariana?"

"No," said Mariana. She was watching him with a steady gaze, as if she had planted a magic seed and looked for its uprising. "If there was only somebody else that's left alone as you and I be," she offered speciously.

The cap'n felt a quick delight over his own cleverness.

"Why," said he, "there's Jake Preble."

"He never'd do it," said Mariana. She shook her head conclusively.

"Never 'n the world."

"I bet ye forty dollars," said the cap'n. "He could go over 'n' take care of his stock an' do his choppin', an' come back to a warm house.

I'm goin' to ask him. I'm goin' this minute. You set up, an' I'll be back an' tell ye."

"You take it from me," Mariana was calling after him. "He won't do it and it's noways right he should. You tell him so from me."

"I bet ye forty dollars," cried the cap'n.

The door clanged behind him and he was gone. Mariana had never heard him in such demented haste since the days when one squad of the boys besieged another in the schoolhouse, and Eben Hanscom was deputed to run for reinforcements of those that went home at noon. But she settled down there by the fire and held herself quiet until he should come. She seemed to have shut a gate behind her; but whether she had opened another to lead into the unknown country where women are like their sisters, triumphant over things, she could not tell. At the moment she found herself in a little inclosure where everybody could see her and laugh at her, and she could not answer back.

Before the forestick had burned in two, she heard him coming, but he was not alone. She knew that other step, marking out a longer stride, and the steady inarticulate responses when the cap'n talked. The cap'n opened the door and they walked in. Jake Preble was ahead, a tall, powerful creature in his working-clothes, his thin face with the bright brown eyes interrogating her, his mouth, in spite of him, moving nervously under the mustache.

"What's all this?" said he roughly, approaching her as if, Mariana thought, he owned her.