CHAPTER VIII.
"Ho, ye who seek saving,
Go no further. Come hither, for have we not found it?
Here is the House of Fulfilment of Craving;
Here is the Cup with the roses around it,
The world's wound well healed, and the balm that
hath bound it."
"I'm going to church next Sunday," said Judith to Andrew, as they walked through the chestnut woods. It was evening. Far away beyond the level fields an after-glow opulent in gold was streaming up over the sky—a radiance, living, like the memory of love, long after its source had vanished from the view. The day had been intensely warm, and the wood was full of the pungent odours of leaves, mingled with the sweeter scent of dying wild roses.
Coming to them faintly from far-off fields they could hear the lowing of thirsty cows, eager to be let out of their pastures to the ponds. And from the grass meadow which bordered the chestnut woods came the crop, cropping of Andrew's horses grazing greedily, now that the heat of the day had declined.
Judith wore a white frock, and had a bunch of somewhat limp-looking ferns in her hand. It was impossible for her to leave the woods without some spoil. Andrew walked by her side, tall and brown, his cap pushed far back upon his head, a measureless content within his eyes. Rufus followed sedately, keeping a wary lookout from the corner of his eye for squirrels and rabbits.
Sleepy, white-winged moths were fluttering aimlessly hither and thither amid the grasses, and now and then a bird's call rang through the trees.
"Going to church?" said Andrew. "Isn't that a new idea?"
"Yes," said Judith, a little wistfully. "Mrs. Morris wants me to, and—I wish I was good."
Andrew's face was very tender as he turned towards her. "I don't think you are such a great sinner."
She looked at him half happily, half doubtfully. "Well, I'm going anyhow; Mrs. Morris seems so anxious about it."
"I'll go, too, then."
"Oh, will you?"
"Yes."
They walked on a few moments in silence; then Andrew said:
"Will you sing in church?"
"Oh," said Judith, "they'll have singing! I hadn't thought of it. Yes, I'll sing with the rest."
Andrew chuckled.
"What is it?" demanded Miss Moore, drawing her level brows together in interrogation.
"Oh, nothing," said Andrew.
"Yes, it is something."
"No, really."
"You were laughing at me."
"No, honestly, I wasn't."
"Certain?" Miss Moore looked at him suspiciously.
"Come and look at the horses," said Andrew.
So they crossed from the path, through the narrow belt of trees to the pasture fence, and presently, in answer to Andrew's calls, the horses came trotting up one by one, standing shyly and sniffing with outstretched noses at Andrew's hand. He crossed the fence into the field and fed them with bunches of grass. Judith looked on longingly.
"Could I come over?" she asked doubtfully.
"Yes, indeed," he said. "Do."
"Turn your back, then."
Andrew obeyed promptly, and Miss Moore mounted slowly to the top rail, where she stood uncertainly a moment. It slipped, she gave a little cry, and the next instant Andrew had lifted her lightly down. He held her for a second in his arms; each felt the tremour of the other's heart, and then she was released and was standing trembling by his side. The horses pricked their ears and eyed her nervously, and Andrew gazed down at her with his heart in his eyes.
She held out one of her ferns to the horses, shrinking a little closer to Andrew as they drew near to sniff at it with their velvety muzzles. One after another lipped at the fern, but would not take it.
"They won't eat that," said Andrew, and his voice was very gentle. "Offer them this."
So Judith held out the grass he gave her, catching hold of his sleeve like a child for protection when his big Clydesdale colt stretched out his head towards her. And presently the horses left them one by one, till all were gone except Andrew's clean-limbed bay, upon whose back the wet mark of the saddle was yet visible, for Andrew had ridden into town that afternoon. And Judith grew bolder and patted its soft nose and beautiful neck, and Andrew watching her thought that nowhere, surely nowhere, in all the wide world was there a sweeter woman than this. And he longed to question the universe, if within all its realm there was anything so lovely as the fragile hands which showed so white against Rob Roy's arching neck.
The twilight deepened. A little wistful wind rippled through the long meadow-grass.
"We must go," said Andrew, "or the dew will wet you."
"Oh, it wouldn't hurt me," said Judith.
"Better not risk it," said Andrew. So they walked along within the meadow to the gate, Rob Roy following them, every now and then touching Andrew's shoulder with his outstretched nose. He stood whilst the bars were taken down, and whinnied softly as they left him. "What a dear fellow he is," said Judith.
They soon reached the Morris house, where Mr. Morris was mending a bridle on the doorstep, and Mrs. Morris in the fading light was busy carrying out a plan to frustrate the assaults of the chickens upon her flower beds: for every chicken in Mrs. Morris's possession seemed inspired with an evil desire to scratch up her seedlings so soon as she transplanted them from the boxes in the kitchen to the beds in front of the house. So between the rows of balsams and marigolds and amongst the ruby-stemmed seedlings of the prince's feather, Mrs. Morris had stuck in bits of shingles.
"There," said Mrs. Morris, straightening herself after plunging her last piece into the earth. "There! I guess them chickens has got their work cut out for them before they root out them plants. They do seem to be possessed by evil speerits, them chickens! That's the third planting of marigolds, and what prince's feather there is left is only what sowed itself last year and came up late. My sakes! wasn't it hot in town to-day, Andrew?"
"Yes," said Andrew, from where he stood leaning against the porch.
Judith was standing by Mrs. Morris, looking at the flower beds where each little seedling was surrounded by a palisade of narrow strips of shingle.
Mrs. Morris brought out some chairs, and they sat talking in the dusk while the summer moon grew out of the horizon, and slowly, slowly sailed aloft, paling as it attained its height, till from a glowing disk of yellow it changed to a shadowless silver shield.
"Won't you sing to us, Miss Moore?" asked Andrew.
"Yes, do," urged Mrs. Morris.
"What will I sing!" asked Judith, but without waiting for an answer began. She sang an Italian love-song, a masterpiece of passion and pain—sang it as perhaps no living woman could sing it, making music in such fashion that the hearts of her hearers were melted within them, voicing in it all the timorous new joy, the half-happy fears that filled her heart, with somewhat of the poignant pathos of renunciation. Some one says, "Music is the counterpart of life in spirit speech," and it would seem that in one perfect song there may be condensed all the emotion of life and love, all the pathos of pain and parting. As the song died away Andrew gave a long sigh. The pleasure of such music ofttimes prolongs itself to pain. Perhaps it was some recognition of the great value of Judith's gift of song, perhaps it was because she sang familiarly an unknown tongue that made Andrew suddenly feel the chill of a great gulf fixed between them. The arms which had held her for a moment in the pasture-field yearned with ineffable longing for a joy denied them.
But Judith was singing again, "The Angels' Serenade," one of the loveliest things ever written. When she finished there was a silence. Mrs. Morris' hard-worked hands were clasped tremblingly together, tears were streaming over her face, her heart was yearning towards the little mounds in the unkempt churchyard.
"Hannah," said her grey-haired husband, laying his hand upon her shoulder. Their eyes met. That was all; but dumbly they had shared the cup of their sorrow. A bitter communion, one would say, yet good to make strong the spirit, as the bitter barks strengthen the body.
And a few minutes later Mrs. Morris slipped away into the house, perhaps to open that shrine where were hidden some tiny half-worn garments, perhaps out of sympathy for the two young people who might wish to be alone; and when Judith began to sing again, she and Andrew were alone, for Mr. Morris, with lumbering attempts at caution, had followed his wife.
Andrew's heart was aching with inexplicable pain. Judith was singing an old theme, composed long since by some frocked and cowled musician, whose rigid vows and barren life could not quite suppress the dream of music within his soul. It was a simple and austere melody, yet endued with a peculiar pathos, the yearning of a defrauded life for the joy that should have crowned it, the regret of a barren present for a fruitful past, the wail of the must be for the might have been.
And as she sang, the gulf which Andrew had perceived between them widened into a great black sea, across which her voice came to him where he stood alone forever upon the shore; and just as the pain grew too poignant to be borne, a bat darted near them, Judith gave a frightened cry and fled to his side, and the gulf was bridged in a second by a strong strand knit of a woman's foolish fear and a man's reassuring word.
And soon a light shone down from an upstairs window. Judith started up. "You must go straight away home," she said, "Mrs. Morris has gone to her room."
"Come as far as the gate with me," said Andrew, and she went. But after they had talked a moment Judith remembered the bats, so, of course, Andrew had to take her back to the porch in safety.
At length he was forced to go, so with a last "good-night," and a last long look into her eyes, he strode away to his home on the hill.
The leaves of the chestnut trees were rustling in uncertain flaws of wind; the crickets were creaking eerily from out the darkness; the fields, all pearled with dew, shimmered in the moonlight.
It was a solitary hour. But Andrew's heart was light within his breast; Judith's eyes had been very sweet when she said "Good-night."
And Judith climbed the blue-painted wooden stairs to her little corner-room, and lay long awake, forgetting the promise of her great future, forgetting the efforts of the past, forgetting the debt she owed her manager, only knowing that she loved and was beloved again, only recalling the eyes this brown young farmer had bent upon her, only remembering the tender strength of his arms, as, for a moment, they had encircled her. A simple dream this? Perhaps. But let such a vision once weave itself into the fabric of a life, and all else will seem poor and mean beside it.
It was a beautiful sunshiny Sunday as Judith stood in the porch waiting for Mrs. Morris, who presently appeared, clad in a black calico with white spots on it, black silk gloves and a bonnet with a purple flower.
Judith had dressed herself in a little frock of pale green linen, and her face bloomed like a rose above it. Her hat and parasol were of the same cool tint as her frock, and as the walk in the sunshine flushed her cheeks with unaccustomed colour, she looked much like a sweet pink flower set in green leaves; at least, so Andrew thought when he saw her entering the church beside Mrs. Morris.
The Methodist church was slowly filling with women and children. Sam Symmons' Suse had just gone in, and the Misses Green were but a few yards behind. The men in Ovid had an evil habit of standing along the sides of the churches talking whilst the first hymn was being sung; and frequently, if there was any particularly interesting topic on hand, till the first prayer was offered. In winter the sunny side was chosen; in summer they availed themselves of the scanty shade afforded by the slanting eaves, standing, their heads and shoulders in shadow, their freshly polished shoes glistening in the sun, their jaws moving rhythmically as they chewed their wads of "black strap." A remark made at one end of the row percolated slowly to the other, each man judicially revolving it in his mind and voicing his opinion in deliberate nasal tones.
"Lord, a little band and lowly,
We have come to worship thee,
Thou art great and high and holy,
Oh! how solemn we should be."
So the women and children sang inside, accompanied by a wheezy melodeon. They heightened the effect by emphasizing the adjectives strongly and singing "sollum" with great unanimity in the last line.
Andrew listened for Judith's voice, but evidently she had concluded not to sing. Andrew was disappointed. He had been looking forward in high glee to watching the amazement of his neighbours when they heard that marvellous voice. The truth was, Judith had not seen him where he stood beside the church, and was too busy looking about surreptitiously to see if he had fulfilled his promise about coming, to think of the singing either one way or the other. And when she saw Miss Myers sitting stiffly alone in the corner of a pew near the front, her heart sank like lead, and all her happy eagerness over the service departed. She was piqued, too, and began to feel a nasty heartache stirring within her breast.
The singing was over. An interspace of quiet betokened to those outside that the prayer was in progress, and a rustling of leaves and settling of dresses proclaimed the fact that the preacher and his congregation wore ready for the serious business of the day, the proceedings up to this point being tacitly regarded as the preliminary canter before the weekly contest with Original Sin, that dark horse which, ridden by that knowing jockey, Opportunity, wins so many races for the Evil One. At this juncture the men came in one by one, each trying to look as uninterested in his neighbours as possible, to give the impression that this influx of the male element was purely accidental and not the result of concerted movement.
It is somewhat doubtful if this impression was conveyed to the preacher, as the same circumstance had occurred every Sunday since he had been there; and certainly it deluded none of the women, who, well aware of the gossiping tendencies of their men, never held themselves at the approved "attention" attitude till this stage in the proceedings, but who then waxed marvellously stiff as to posture, and marvellously meek as to expression.
When Judith looked up next time, it was to meet two eager, grey eyes looking at her from Miss Myers' pew, and all at once the incipient heartache vanished, a calm of sweet content fell upon her spirit. She looked around, and apprehended all the poignant blending of pathos and absurdity about her. Her eyes softened as they fell upon old Sam Symmons' hard-wrought hands resting on the top of his stout stick, and lighted as she saw Tommy Slick's rose and white face and impish eyes showing above the door of a centre pew. Her tender eyes sought out and read the story of the deep-lined faces about her, and a great pity for their narrow lives filled her.
The sermon was just begun when the green baize door swung back a little, and an investigating dog entered. He was one of those nosing, prying, peering dogs which seem to typify so exactly the attitude of some people towards their neighbours' affairs. He peregrinated through the pews, around the melodeon, up and down the aisle, and then turned his canine attention to the preacher's reading desk. The preacher became manifestly uneasy; all his sensitiveness slowly centred in his heels, round which the dog sniffed. Judith, whose sense of the humorous was painfully acute, gave one glance at Andrew, and then became absorbed in trying to control her laughter. The dog still lingered where he was. The preacher's face was flushed; his words faltered. Every one felt that some one else should do something.
At length, after many significant gestures and nudges from his wife, Hiram Green rose and approached the dog with outstretched hand, rubbing his fingers together in the manner which we imagine impresses a dumb animal with a deep sense of pacific intentions. The dog backed away. Hiram followed as the dog retreated. It paused, wagging its tail doubtfully. Hiram sat down on his toes and patted his knee in a wheedling manner with one hand, whilst with the other he made ready to grasp his prey. The dog came a little nearer.
Hiram grasped—but grasped short; his fingers met on empty air, and he nearly overbalanced. For the moment he had the wild feeling a person experiences when a rocking-chair goes over with him—a sort of gasping clutch at terra firma.
Judith was nearly in tears from agonies of suppressed laughter, knowing, as she did, that Andrew was waiting to catch her eye. That, she felt, would finish matters so far as she was concerned; a sense of companionship makes one's appreciation of a joke painfully intense.
Hiram was conscious that the Sunday School in the gallery was red with suppressed excitement; that his neighbours' interest in the sermon was purely perfunctory; he even had a horrible thought that the preacher himself was laughing at him. In this he was wrong; the preacher was nearly distracted, having lost the thread of his sermon, and was maundering wildly on, hoping to disentangle his argument before Hiram caught the dog.
Hiram, grown desperate, added to his alluring gestures the blandishment of half-voiced words, which sounded like "Poor dog," "Good dog," but which meant, "You infernal brute." The dog succumbed at length, its last suspicions allayed by this specious use of the gift it did not possess, and presently the congregation was edified by seeing Hiram, flushed, but with an expression of great loving-kindness, carry the dog gently down the aisle. Slowly and softly Hiram carried him until near the door, when circumstances made him accelerate his speed, for the dog was Tommy Slick's Nip, a shiny, smooth-coated dog, and Hiram's hold was gradually slipping. He had an unpleasant but confident premonition that the dog would reach for him, as dogs are prone to do, when his fingers got to the tender spot beneath the forepaws. However, he reached and passed the baize door in safety, and in the second which followed, the congregation, with the sigh with which one relinquishes an acme of intense and pleasurable excitement, turned its attention to the preacher. At that moment there came a shrill and ear-splitting yelp. Hiram had taken the dog to the top of the steps, and applied his foot in the manner most likely to speed the parting guest. Hiram entered and took his place with a very red face. He felt dimly that the yelp was a criticism upon the smile with which he carried the dog out. To Hiram that sermon did not tend to edification.
That particular Sunday was a memorable one in Ovid. The congregation had just gathered itself together after the incident of the dog, when the preacher announced the hymn. It was one of the few really beautiful hymns, "Lead, kindly Light."
Judith rose to sing with the rest, and with the second word her voice joined with the others, dominating them as the matin song of the lark might pierce through the chatter of sparrows along the eaves. When Judith opened her lips to sing, music possessed her, and, a true artiste to her finger-tips, she never sang carelessly. Absorbed in her book—for she did not know the words—she sang on. The people looked and wondered, and one by one the voices died away, the wheezy notes of the melodeon faltered forth from beneath the second Miss Green's uncertain fingers, and Judith sang on serenely, standing erect, her head held high, her soft throat throbbing like a bird's. Outside the air was golden with yellow sunshine, within it was cool and darkened. A rift of light slanted through the closed shutters of the window near which Judith stood; thousands of little motes danced in it, specks and gleams of gold. Through the open windows there came the odour of dried grass, and every now and then a flaw of wind brought a whiff from Oscar Randall's field of white clover. Andrew had laughed in the meadow as he thought of Judith's voice electrifying the people in the church, but he had forgotten that he himself was not secure against its charm. Laughter was far from his thoughts now.
"Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on.
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on."
The words, upborne upon the wings of matchless song, seemed to soar far beyond the confines of the little church, taking with them the inarticulate trust and hope and confidence of all these humble folk.
The preacher sat looking at her, pale and entranced. This singing seemed suddenly to open a long-closed door in his life, so that once more he looked down that chimerical vista from out the misty distances of which illusive hands beckoned him on to brighter things. He had once dreamed of a loftier destiny than the life of a Methodist preacher, but that was long past; still it was sweet to recall so vividly the season when his spirit had wings. He sat before his congregation, a tall, spare man, large of bone and awkward, with a countenance upon which self-denial had graven deep cruel lines, a brow that had weathered many bitter blasts. In type he was near allied to the people before him, the last man, one would fancy, whom dreams would visit. And yet, as he listened to this stranger girl, singing alone in the midst of his congregation, there fell deeply upon him the trance of dead delight; the simple panorama of his past spread itself before his eyes, blotting out the faces before him as a shimmering mist obscures an unlovely scene.
It was a very simple vision, a "homespun dream of simple folk." He saw a rosy-cheeked village girl, for whose sake he as a village lad had worked and toiled and slaved. He had fought for education and success that he might lay them at her feet. He had kept her waiting long. She was only a poor, pretty girl, and she had other lovers. One night, when her lover in a garret in the city was poring over his books, his head aching, his heart faltering, yet persevering as much for her sake as for the sake of his faith, she, driving home from a dance through dewy lanes and softly-shadowed country roads, promised to marry the farmer's son who was taking her home.
The news reached him in his garret, and something flickered out of his face which never shone there again. But with the tenacity of his race he stuck to his work. His heart was in the green fields always, and he had come from a long line of country men and women. He had no inherited capacity for learning, but he got through his course somehow, and became an accredited minister, and the day he was ordained the news of her death reached him, and that was all. He had never censured her; in his thoughts she had ever been an angel of sweetness and goodness, and as Judith sang, all these things rushed back upon his heart. It was with a very white face and a very soft voice that he rose to address his people, and he spoke home to their hearts, for he knew whereof he spake when he dealt with the pains and trials and troubles of their lives. He was only the height of his platform removed from them, and he had paid dearly for his paltry elevation, but from its height he saw, far off perhaps, but clear, the shining of a great light, and with ineloquent, slow speech he strove to translate its glory and its promise to the people before him.
Church was over; the people pressed slowly along the aisle into the palpitant warmth of the summer afternoon. Miss Myers came up to Judith when she stood for a moment at the door, and invited her to go home with them to the house on the hill, and Judith, nothing loath, consented. So presently she and Andrew, with Miss Myers, were walking through the slumberous little streets of the village.
As they drew near the house of Bill Aikins, they caught sight of him sitting on the doorstep peeling potatoes, beads of perspiration upon his brow, for he was suffering sorely from Kate's weekly infliction of a white shirt.
Bill had "a little wee face, with a little yellow beard, a Cain-coloured beard," and usually wore a deprecatory smile upon his countenance. He was possessed of a perfect temper, and whatever his lot might seem to others, to himself it was all that could be desired. To be the husband of such a woman, could man desire a better fate? And, indeed, Kate Aikins was a fine-looking woman, tall and straight. Old Sam Symmons often said she was a "gallant figure of a woman."
As they passed the house they heard Kate's voice sounding shrilly from within:
"He did what! Weighed the paper with the cheese? And you stood by and never said a word? I'll be bound! Well, 'a fool and his money is soon parted.' There's truth in them old sayings yet. The idea of you being scared to speak to Hi. Green and him cheating you before your very face! Land sakes! What's he I wonder? Next time you go to buy cheese you take paper with you. He asks enough for the cheese without paying for paper."
As they got beyond hearing, Judith's face burned out of sympathy for Bill's embarrassment. However, Bill was in nowise troubled. He knew his wife would be quite as ready to express herself towards any one else in the village as to himself, and a philosophy born of that reflection entirely prevented Bill from feeling in any degree abashed by strangers enjoying his wife's eloquence.
It was only two days since she had announced to him with much satisfaction that she had "just told Sarah Myers what she thought of her," and she had expressed a longing desire of late to have a five minutes' talk with Andrew Cutler, relative to some supposed slight he had put upon her. The whole village was well aware of many instances of Bill's discomfiture when Kate first married him and undertook his reformation.
There was the day when Bill, well on towards being thoroughly drunk, was returning home down the village street, walking carelessly through the deep slush of early spring. Kate met him. She, if truth be told, was on the lookout for him, having despatched him more than two hours before to get some starch from the store.
Between waiting for the starch and waiting for Bill, Kate was wroth when she opened the door to begin her search. By an unlucky chance, her first step took her over the ankles in icy slush, which, strange to say, instead of cooling her wrath, raised it to white heat. Therefore, when she, carefully picking her way up one side of the street, beheld Bill advancing down the other, regardless of mud and slush, she paused in disgust, until he was nearly opposite to her, and then ejaculated in a tone of deepest disbelief in her own vision—"Bill! is that you?"
"No," promptly replied Bill, "nor nobody like me either;" with which the valiant Bill had resumed his way, feeling proud that he had not only dismissed certainty but even suspicion of his identity from Kate's mind.
Before long he was a sadder and for the nonce, a wiser man, for Kate reached home as soon as he did, and thereupon gave him to understand in a very unmistakable way that he was her property and she knew it.
All Ovid remembered this, and indeed could not well forget it, for every wash-day, when starch naturally cropped up as one of the circumstances attendant upon the event of washing, Kate might have been heard by any passer-by giving Bill a full and dramatic account of the occurrence, with preface upon drunkenness in general, and appendix upon Bill's phases of the vice in particular, and copious addenda, of contempt, contumely and vituperation. Bill listened, marvelling and admiring, for her flow of language was a great source of pride to Bill, albeit directed at himself.
Indeed, he sacrificed his comfort willingly to enjoy the mental treat her angry eloquence afforded him. There had been times, however, when Kate's lessons had taken a more practical and infinitely less entertaining form. It was one of these which effected Bill's final reformation. The memory of it brought smiles to the lips of Ovidians, young or old, whenever they met Bill.
With all good managers in Ovid, it is the custom to salt down a small barrel of herrings in autumn. These they buy from their fisherman neighbours for a dollar per hundred. Now Kate, who was certainly, as even her enemies admitted, a forehanded woman, sent Bill with a silver dollar, to get her a hundred herrings, one day when the proper season came around. With this Bill duly proceeded to the fishermen, paid his dollar and got his herrings. As he turned to go, Sam Turner shouted an invitation to him to come down at night and have a share of the beer which was to be on tap at the Upper Fishing Station. Bill assented and went his way.
After his six o'clock supper, he told Kate he was going to get his saw sharpened at the blacksmith shop, and so set out. He left the saw at the blacksmith's, then smartened his pace along the street, down the steep incline to the river's edge, carefully along the river path until he disappeared into the fisherman's little hut.
The door was closed, then Bill, Sam Turner, and some half-dozen others gathered round the keg of smuggled beer, and all went merry as the traditional wedding bell.
About half-past eleven, Bill and the others emerged. The cask was empty—their condition the antithesis of the cask's. Lurching, stumbling, falling, sliding along the river path; scrambling, crawling, climbing up the banks to the level, then along the street to Bill's home. All this took time, and it was the hour when ghosts do walk ere they neared Bill's door. A dim light gleamed in the window. "Beacon tha' lights me home, boys," said Bill, who, having passed the transitory phases of moroseness and pugnaciousness, to the higher state of tears and courage, had now reached the acme of sentiment and drunkenness simultaneously, and was ready, as he expressed several times on the way up the bank in a voice which came from different attitudes, as the speaker stood upright, crept, or lay flat, "To kish Kate and fight for the country b'gosh." Bill and his friends approached the door. Bill gently tried it. It was locked, so Bill said. They each tried it in turn, and each pronounced it locked in a voice betokening a strange and new discovery. They each knocked in turn—silence. They each kicked in turn—silence. Then Bill said in a lordly way, "Kate, open the door!" adding in an aside to his fellows, "I'll forgive her, kish her, make her happy." Then again, "Kate, open the door!"
Kate did open the door, with such abrupt and unexpected suddenness that Bill, standing before it, balanced back on his heels and raised his outspread hands. His confreres were preparing to make back-stays of themselves to brace Bill up, when Kate's hand and arm reached forth, and, with one single movement, as Sam Turner afterwards graphically described her action, "yanked" Bill into the house and slammed the door.
There was silence for a moment, followed by a slow sliding sound. His late companions surrounded the two uncurtained windows and prepared to watch events.
Bill had slowly slid down, until he was now in a sitting posture on the floor, with his back against the door. Kate had vanished; she soon entered from the back of the house bringing two pails of water, with which she proceeded deliberately to give Bill a cold bath. Bill said several times in a weak voice, "Kish me, Kate," but Kate, preserving an admirable silence, continued the deluge until Bill, with some show of sobriety and nimbleness, arose. By this time the water was pouring out beneath the door, and the watchers outside were shivering sympathetically. As Bill rose, he certainly looked miserable enough to excite pity, even in Kate's heart; but the worst was not yet.
Disregarding the water streaming on the floor, Kate proceeded to arrange two chairs, with an accompaniment of cloths, knives, salt, and a small keg. Lastly, she produced two baskets of herrings. It was now evident to the horrified watchers that her dire purpose was to make Bill clean, wash, and salt down the hundred herrings then and there. And such was the case. The watchers stayed until eyes and limbs were weary, and then crept away awe-struck at the terrors of matrimony, and deeply impressed by Kate's moral supremacy.
And Bill worked and worked. His hand was unsteady, and his blood flowed freely from numerous cuts to mingle with the herrings. He scraped and scraped, and bedaubed himself with scales. He salted and salted, and the salt bit his many cuts. But Kate was inexorable. Every herring was cleaned, scaled, washed, salted and packed, and the débris thoroughly cleaned up before the miserable, white-faced, repentant Bill was allowed to rest, and during it all Kate talked and talked and talked. From that night Bill was a changed man, and his admiration for Kate became more than ever pronounced.
Every time one of those herring appeared on the table, Kate gave Bill a résumé of the whole affair, with variations upon her theme, which her vivid and fertile imagination suggested. After the herrings were finished, she revived the subject whenever the names of any of those with him that night, fish, the river, or the fishing station were mentioned. These were the regular cogent subjects. But any reference to salted meats, cold water, late hours, etc., was very apt to draw forth a like narration, so that a day rarely passed without Bill's memory being refreshed thus, which was indeed a work of supererogation, for Bill never forgot it.
Andrew and Miss Myers recited many such tales for Judith's edification as they walked up to the Cutler house, and whilst they sat at table.
But later on, when Miss Myers hastened off to count the eggs which had been brought in, to see if her chickens were properly fed, and to generally look after the ways of her household, the talk fell into other channels.
Andrew and Judith talked seriously, looking into each other's eyes with no veil upon their own, each drinking deeply of the peaceful rapture of the hour. The scents from the old garden filled their nostrils, the breath from the box diffused through the other odours a thread of fresh bitterness, savouring them from satiety.
A great clematis hung at one side of the porch, the deep green of its leaves set close with purple stars. Upon the other side a Tartarean honeysuckle was covered with coral-coloured buds. Far off in one corner they could see a blur of gold where the thorny Scotch roses were a mass of bloom.
They sat long talking, and presently Miss Myers came round the corner of the house with her dress tucked up about her and the servant girl following with water pails; and soon the scent of fresh moist earth was mingled with the fragrance of the flowers.
Rufus lay at their feet, looking up at them with wistful, hazel eyes. It was a simple scene, yet in it was being enacted a drama of delight.
There is no sweeter time in a woman's life than the first hours of a mutual love ere speech has profaned it. Judith was having her halcyon hour now, and she rejoiced in it with sweet natural happiness. The memory of her greatness had all but faded from her memory; now and then from sleep's horizon it pointed a threatening finger at her; now and then in morning dreams she recalled it vaguely, the wraith of a not unhappy season. But she had no fear of it. Her only apprehension was that she had misread the message in Andrew's ardent eyes, and that fear only lived when they were apart, for, as she welcomed him upon the old weather-beaten doorstep, where the spent petals of the loose-leaved climbing roses lay, blots of crimson on the grey, or bade him farewell at the gate where the white syringas surrounded them with the odour of orange blossoms, she found in his eyes the strength and blessing of a deep and perfect love.