Country Neighbors Part 27

"I can't tell how folks look," said Wilfred. He spoke roughly, and she glanced at him in a calculated show of surprise. "Why, you've seen her.

She was at the meetin' the night I walked home with you."

"Was she?" said Lily. "Well, I never noticed the folks here very much till I begun to get acquainted."

But she had brought back to him a picture he had been forgetting: Annie, standing in her garden, sweet, serious, and so kind. He had hardly thought before of Annie's looks. People never spoke of them when they were recalling her. She was simply a person they liked to live beside.

The next morning Jim was at Mrs. Marshall's before breakfast--almost before light, she thought, because through her last nap she had heard his hoe clicking, and when she went out, there was the track of his wheelbarrow through the dew, and the liberated peonies, free of gra.s.s, stood each in its rich dark circle of manure.

A little later the Miller twins saw him coming, and Sophy was at the door awaiting him.

"Don't you want a cup o' tea?" she asked.

Sophy looked quite eager. It seemed to her that, with the garden resurrected, something was going to happen. Jim shook his head.

"I'll dig round them rose-bushes," said he. "Then I'll go an' git some dressin'."

"I'll pay for it," said Sophy. "You sha'n't have that to do."

"It's no consequence," returned Jim indifferently. "I can git all I want out o' Squire's old yard. I pay him for it in the fall, cobblin'. It's no great matter, anyways."

Sophy disappeared into the house, and came out again, hurriedly, with a trowel in her hand.

"I don't know but I'll work a mite myself," she said, "if you was to tell me where 'twas worth while to begin."

"Don't ye touch the spring things," said Jim briefly. He was loosening the ground about the roses, with delicacy and dispatch. "Let it be as it may with 'em this year. Come November, we'll overhaul 'em. You might see if you can git some o' the gra.s.s out o' that monkshood over there."

Sophy, in her sun-bonnet, bent over her task, and for an hour they worked absorbedly. Suddenly she looked up, to find herself alone. But there were voices in the other yard. He was working for Eliza. But Eliza was not helping him. She walked back and forth--Sophy could see her pa.s.sing the cracks in the high board-fence--and once she called to Jim in a nervous voice, "I wisht you'd go away."

Jim apparently did not hear. He went on freeing the peonies.

"No wonder things git pindlin' under this old locust-tree," Sophy heard him grumble. "Throwin' down leaves an' branches every day in the year.

Half on 't's rotten. It ought to come down."

"Well," said Eliza, "if it ought to come down, let it come. You know where to find the axe."

Sophy, on the other side of the fence, could hardly bear the horror and surprise of it. She forgot she was "not speaking" to her sister.

"O 'Liza!" she cried piercingly. "That was mother's tree. She set it out with her own hands. I dunno what she'd say."

There was a moment's quiet, and then Eliza's voice came gruffly:--

"You let the tree alone."

But Jim had no thought of touching it. He was working silently at his task. Sophy went into the house, trembling. She had spoken first. But it was to save the tree.

The warm spring days went on, and Annie Darling had not come. Weeds began to devastate her garden, and Wilfred used to look over the fence and wish uncle Jim would do something. Once he spoke to uncle Jim about it, in the way everybody had of making him responsible for the floral well-being of the neighborhood; but Gardener Jim would hardly listen.

"You 'tend to it! you 'tend to it!" he cried testily. "I've got all I can do to git them Miller gals' pieces into shape so 't they can sow a few seeds."

But one morning he sought out Wilfred, mending a gap in his own orchard wall by the road.

"Wilfred," said Gardener Jim, "have you 'tended to Annie's gardin?"

He had laid down his hoe and put up a foot on a stone in good position for talk.

Wilfred dropped his crowbar and came forward.

"Why, no," said he, irritated, he hardly knew why, as if by a call to a forgotten task. "n.o.body's asked me to 'tend to it."

Jim stood for a moment looking through the tree-s.p.a.ces, and then his gaze came back to his nephew, and Wilfred, with a start, realized that he had never before had the chance to look into uncle Jim's eyes. Now he found them direct and rather stern.

"Wilfred," said Gardener Jim, "don't you be a 'tarnal fool."

Wilfred said nothing, but immediately, he could not tell why, he seemed to be looking upon a picture of Annie standing among the flowers in her little plain dress. His heart was beating faster, and he said to himself that, after all, it would be sort of nice if Annie would come home.

Gardener Jim was speaking laboriously, as if he dragged out conclusions he had perhaps reached long ago and had not yet compared with any one.

"There's a time for everything. There's a time to graft a tree an' a time to cut it down. Well, it's your time o' life to make a 'tarnal fool o' yourself. Don't ye do it. If you do, like 's not when you're my age you'll be all soul alone, like me, an' goin' round 'tendin' to other folks's gardins."

Wilfred stared at him in wonder.

"I don't know," he found himself saying. "I might fix it, but I guess 'twould be kind o' queer."

Gardener Jim screwed up his face until his eyes were quite eclipsed.

"Queer!" said he. "Nothin' 's queer if you go ahead an' do it an' say nothin' to n.o.body. What if they do call ye crazed? That's another way to make 'em stan' from under an' let ye go it. There! I've said my say.

Ain't that your axe over there by the well? You take it an' come along o' me. I'd ha' brought mine, only I thought mebbe I shouldn't need it till to-morrer. But I guess I shall. I guess I shall."

Wilfred followed him along the road to the Miller house, and there they saw the twins. Sophy, obscured by a sun-bonnet, was on her knees, sowing seeds in a bed Jim had made for her the day before; but Eliza stood quite still among the peonies, looking off down the road.

Gardener Jim took his way into Eliza's part of the yard. She turned and looked at him uneasily, as if she wondered what exactions he might make to-day. Wilfred thought her face had changed of late. There were marks of agitation upon it, as if she had been stirred by unaccustomed thoughts and then had tried to hide them. Her eyes were troubled.

Gardener Jim walked over to the tall fence.

"Here, Wilfred," said he, "you take your axe an' knock off them boards.

The posts'll go too, give 'em a chance. They're pretty nigh rotted off."

Eliza came awake.

"Don't you touch my fence!" she called. "Don't you so much as lay a finger on it."

Wilfred gave her a compliant look.

"You can't do that, you know," he said, in an undertone, to Gardener Jim. "It's their fence. They don't want it down."

Gardener Jim made no answer. He took the axe from Wilfred's hand and dealt the fence a stroke, and then another, and at every one it seemed as if something fell. Eliza strode over to him, and, without reason, stood there. Sophy left her seed-sowing on the other side and came also, and she, too, watched the boards falling. The women were pale and their eyes showed terror, whether at the unchained power of the man or at the wonder of life, no one could have told.

Wilfred sauntered away to the old apple-tree, and began picking off twigs here and there, to drop them on the gra.s.s.