Country Neighbors Part 18

That air of his had pleased her once: it gave her a curious little thrill of acquiescent loyalty; but now it simply hurt, and the instinct of resentment rose in her. What right had he to own her, she asked herself, when it only made other women scornful of her? She lifted her head and faced him. What he saw in her eyes he could not perhaps have told, but it suddenly quieted him to a surprised humility.

"You goin' over to keep house for him?" he asked, with a motion of his head toward the cap'n, who seemed to be pet.i.tioning the G.o.d of domesticity lest his new hopes be confounded.

"Yes," said Mariana, "but I ain't goin' unless he can get one or two more. I'm tired to death of settin' down to the table alone. One more wouldn't be no better. Three's the kind of a crowd I like. Two's no company. Don't you say so, cap'n?"

"I prefer to choose my company, that's all I say," the cap'n answered gallantly.

Jake looked from one to the other and then back again. What he saw scarcely pleased him, but it had to be accepted.

"All right," said he. "If you want a boarder, no reason why you shouldn't have one. I'll shut up my place to-morrer."

The red surged up into Mariana's cheeks. She had not known it was easy to cause such gates to open.

"When's Mandy goin'?" she asked indifferently.

"Week from Wednesday," said the cap'n. He was suffused with joy, and Mariana, in one of those queer ways she had of thinking of inapposite things, remembered him as she saw him once when, at the age of fourteen, he sat before a plate of griddle-cakes and saw the syrup-pitcher coming.

"Thursday, then," she said. "I'll be along bright and early."

She rose and set her chair against the wall. That seemed as if they were to go.

"You'd better by half stay where you be in your own home," she called after Jake, shutting the door behind him. "You won't like settin' at other folks' tables. You've set too long at your own."

He came back, and left the cap'n waiting for him in the path. There he stood before her, the gaunt, big shape she had watched and brooded over so many years. Something seemed to be moving in his brain, and he gave it difficult expression.

"Depends on who else's settin' at the table," he remarked, and vanished into the night.

Mariana, moved and wondering, wanted to call after him and ask him what he meant; but she reflected that the women who inspired such speeches probably refrained from insisting too crudely on their value. Then she flew to the bedroom and began to sort her things for packing.

In two weeks she was settled at the cap'n's, and Jake Preble had come to board, doggedly, even sulkily, at first, and then suddenly armed with that quiet acceptance he had ready for all the changes in his life. But Mariana smoothed his path to a pleasant familiarity with the big house and its ways, and he began to look about the room, from his place at the table with his book or paper, wonderingly and even pathetically, as she thought, recalling the time before his sister died when his own house had been full of the warm intimacies of an ordered life. The captain reveled in the comfort of his state. He brought in wood until Mariana had to bid him cease. He built fires and drew water, and his ruddy face shone with contentment. She made his favorite dishes and seemed not to notice when Jake, too, in his shy way, awoke to praise them. She even read aloud to the cap'n on a Sunday night from the life of women who, the t.i.tle declared, debatably, had "Made India what It is." On such nights of intellectual stress Jake betook himself to the kitchen and ostentatiously pored over the "Scout in Early New England." The cap'n, who was hospitality itself, trudged out there one night, in the midst of a panegyric on Mrs. Judson, and besought him to come in.

"If you don't like that kind o' readin', Jake, we'll try suthin' else,"

he conceded generously. "I jest as soon play fox an' geese Sunday nights if anybody wants to. I ain't one to tie up the cat's tail Sunday mornin'

so 's she won't play."

"I'll be in byme-by," said Jake, frowningly intent upon his page. "You go on with your readin', cap'n. I'll be in."

But, instead, he walked out and down the road to his own lonely house, and Mariana, though her brain followed him every step of the way, went on reading in the clearest voice, minding her stops as she had been taught when she was accounted the best reader in the cla.s.s. But in those days of reading-cla.s.ses her heart had not ached. It ached all the time now. She had shut the gate behind her, and the one she opened led into an unfamiliar country. Mariana had been born to live ingenuously, simply, like the child she was. Woman's wiles were not for her, and the fruit they brought her had a bitter tang. But whether her campaign was a righteous one or not, it was brilliantly successful. She could hardly think that any women, looking on, were laughing at her, even in a kindly way. She had taken her own stand and the world had patently respected it. Immediately on her moving to the cap'n's she had gone out in her best cashmere and made a series of calls, and far and wide she had gayly announced herself as keeping house because she wanted the money; in the spring, she told the neighborhood, she meant to take what she had earned and make a journey to Canada to see cousin Liddy, who had married into a nice family there, and over and over again had written for her to come.

"I guess Eben Hanscom never'll let you step your foot out of his house now he's tolled you into it," Lizzie Ann West remarked incisively one afternoon, when Mariana, after a pleasant call on her, stood in the doorway, saying the last words the visit had not left room for. "He ain't goin' to bite into such pie-crust as yours, day in, day out, and go back to baker's trade."

"I don't make no better pie-crust'n you do," said Mariana innocently.

"Mebbe you don't, but you're on the spot, and there's where you've got the whip-hand. Eben Hanscom ain't goin' to let you go. He's no such fool."

"Well," flashed Mariana, "I'd like to see anybody keep me when I've got ready to go." She was on the doorstep now, and the spring wind was bringing her faint, elusive odors. She felt like putting her head up in the air like a lost four-footed creature and snuffing for her home.

"Oh, I guess you'll be glad enough to stay," said Lizzie Ann, with a shrewdness Mariana hated. "The cap'n's takin' to clippin' his beard.

He's a nice-lookin' man, younger by ten years than he was when she's alive, and neat 's a pin."

Mariana chose her way back along the muddy road, choking a temptation to turn the corner to her own little house, build a fire there, and let single men fight the domestic battle for themselves. But that night when the spring wind was still moving and she stood on Cap'n Hanscom's doorstone and looked at the dark lilac buds at her hand, the tears came, and the cap'n, bearing in his last armful of wood for the night, saw them and was undone. He went in speechlessly and piled the wood with absent care. He stood a moment in thought, and then he called her.

"Mariana, you come here."

She went obediently.

"You ain't homesick, be you?" the cap'n inquired.

She nodded, like a child.

"I guess so," she responded. "Leastways, if 'tain't that I don't know what 'tis."

The cap'n was looking at her pleadingly, all warm benevolence and anxious care.

"I know how 'tis," he burst forth. "You've give up your home to come here, an' you feel as if you hadn't anything of your own left. Ain't that so, Mariana?"

"I guess so," Mariana returned at random. "Mebbe I'll go down and open my winders to-morrow. I want to look over some o' my things."

The cap'n seemed to be breathing with difficulty. Mariana had heard him speak in meeting, and thus stertorously was he accustomed to announce his faith.

"Mariana," said he, "it's all yours, everything I got. It's your home.

You stay here an' enjoy it."

"Oh, no, it ain't," cried Mariana, in a fright. "I've got my own place same 's you have. I'm contented enough, Eben. I just got kinder thinkin'; I often do, come spring o' the year."

"Well, I ain't contented, if you be," said the cap'n valiantly. "I never shall be till you an' me are man an' wife."

"O my soul!" Mariana cried out. "O my soul!"

"What's the matter?" said Jake Preble. He had just come over from his own house with a spray of lilac that was really out, whereas the cap'n's had only budded. Jake had felt a strange thrill of triumph at the haste his bush had made. He thought Mariana ought to see it.

"There's nothin' the matter," she told him in a high, excited voice, "except I've got to go home. I've told Cap'n Hanscom so, and I'll tell you. I ain't goin' to eat another meal in this house. There's plenty cooked," she continued, turning to the cap'n in a wistful haste, "and I'll stop on the way down the road and tell Lizzie Ann West you want she should come and see you through. Don't you stop me, either of you. I'm goin' home."

She ran up the stairs to her room, and tossed her belongings into her trunk. Over the first layer she cried, but then it suddenly came upon her that she was having her own way and that it led into her dear spring garden, and she laughed forthwith. Downstairs the cap'n stood pondering, his eyes on the floor, and Jake regarded him at first keenly and in anger, and then with a slow smile.

"Well," said Jake presently, "I guess I might 's well pack up, too."

"Don't ye do it, Jake," the cap'n besought him hoa.r.s.ely. "I guess, think it over, she'll make up her mind to stay."

"Guess not," said Jake. It was more cheerfully than he had spoken that winter, the cap'n wonderingly thought. "I'll heave my things together an' go back to the old place."

In a day or two it was all different. They had moved the pieces as if it were some sober game, and now Mariana was in her own little house, warming it to take out the winter chill, and treating it with a tender haste, as if she had somehow done it wrong, and Lizzie Ann had gone to Cap'n Hanscom's. Mariana had hesitated on the doorstone, at her leaving, and there the cap'n bade her good-by, rather piteously and with finality, though they were to be neighbors still.

"Well, Eben," she hesitated. There was something she had meant to say.

In spite of decency, in spite of feminine decorum, she had intended to give him a little shove into the path that should lead him, still innocently, to her own blazonment as a woman who could have her little triumphs like the rest. "If you should ever feel to tell Lizzie Ann I was a good housekeeper," she meant to say, "I should be obliged to you."

He would do it, she knew, and from that prologue more would follow. The cap'n would go on to say he had besought her to marry him, never guessing, under Lizzie Ann's superior system of investigation, that he had disclosed himself at all. But as she mused absently on his face, another spirit took possession of her, the one that had presided over her humble hearth and welcomed the two men there in the neighborly visits that seemed so pleasant in remembrance. What did it avail that this or that woman should declare she was unsought? She was ashamed of waging that unworthy war. She found herself speaking without premeditation.

"You know what Lizzie Ann West says about you?"