After she had washed the supper dishes and scrupulously swept the hearth, she rested, for a moment's thought, in the old rocking-chair, and then took her way, candle in hand, to the attic. There was no further self-confidence on the stairs; she was too serious, now. Her hours were going fast. The attic, in spite of the open windows, lay hot under summer's touch upon the shingles outside, and odorous of the dried herbs hanging in bunches here and there.
"Wormwood—thoroughwort—spearmint," she mused, as she touched them, one after another, and inhaled their fragrance. "'Tain't so long ago I was out pickin' herbs an' dryin' 'em. Well, well, well!"
She made her way under the eaves, and pulled out a hair-trunk, studded with brass nails. A rush-bottomed chair stood near-by, and, setting her candle in it, she knelt before the trunk and began lifting out its contents: a brocaded satin waistcoat of a long-past day, a woolen comforter knit in stripes, a man's black broadcloth coat. She smoothed them, as she laid them by, and there was a wondering note in her lowered voice.
"My Lord!" she whispered reverently, as if speaking to One who would hear and understand, "it's over fifty year!"
A pile of yellowed linen lay in the bottom of the trunk, redolent of camphor from contact with its perishable neighbors. She lifted one shirt after another, looking at them in silence. Then she laid back the other clothes, took up her candle and the shirts, and went downstairs again. In hot haste, she rebuilt the kitchen fire, and set two large kettles of water on the stove. She dragged the washing-bench into the back kitchen from its corner in the shed, and on it placed her tubs; and when the water was heated, she put the garments into a tub, and rubbed with the vigor and ease of a woman well accustomed to such work. All the sounds of the night were loud about her, and the song of the whippoorwill came in at the open door. He was very near. His presence should have been a sign of approaching trouble, but Old Lady Lamson did not hear him. Her mind was reading the lettered scroll of a vanished year.
Perhaps the touch of the warm water on her hands recalled her to the present.
"Seems good to feel the suds," she said, happily, holding up one withered hand, and letting the foam drip from her fingers, "I wish't I could dry outdoor! But when mornin' come, they'd be all of a sop."
She washed and rinsed the garments, and, opening a clothes-horse, spread them out to dry. Then she drew a long breath, put out her candle, and wandered to the door. The garden lay before her, unreal in the beauty of moonlight. Every bush seemed an enchanted wood. The old lady went forth, lingering at first, as one too rich for choosing; then with a firmer step. She closed the little gate, and walked out into the country road. She hurried along to the old signboard, and turned aside unerringly into a hollow, there, where she stooped and filled her hands with tansy, pulling it up in great bunches, and pressing it eagerly to her face.
"Seventy-four year ago!" she told the unseen listener of the night, with the same wonder in her voice. "Sir laid dead, an' they sent me down here to pick tansy to put round him. Seventy-four year ago!"
Still holding it; she rose, and went through the bars into the dewy lane. Down the wandering path, trodden daily by the cows, she walked, and came out in the broad pasture, irregular with its little hillocks, where, as she had been told from her babyhood, the Indians used to plant their corn. She entered the woods by a cart-path hidden from the moon, and went on with a light step, gathering a bit of green here and there,—now hemlock, now a needle from the sticky pine,—and inhaling its balsam on her hands. A sharp descent, and she had reached the spot where the brook ran fast, and where lay "Peggy's b'ilin' spring," named for a great-aunt she had never seen, but whose gold beads she had inherited, and who had consequently seemed to her a person of opulence and ease.