CHAPTER XI
IN WHICH GREAT PLANS ARE EVOLVED, AND THERE IS A SURPRISING EVENT
Since we had come to know the Star, Sunday afternoons were important occasions for Harriet and me. Nort was the first to visit us—soon after he came to Hempfield—but the old Captain and Anthy were not many Sundays behind him. They usually drove out with one of Joe Crane's horses (charged against advertising in the Star), and on such occasions the Captain was very grand in his long coat and wide hat—and gloves. He always greeted Harriet with chivalrous formality, inquired after her health, and usually had some bit of old-fashioned gallantry to offer her, which always bothered her just a little, especially if she happened at the moment to catch my eye. I had great trouble getting Fergus to come at all; but having once lured him out, Harriet's gingerbread soon finished him.
At first there was an amusing struggle between Harriet and Fergus, in which, of course, that Scotchman came off second best—and never knew that he was beaten! You see, Fergus is never entirely happy unless he can tip back in his chair, until you are certain he is going over backward and smash the door of the china closet. Also, he smokes the worst tobacco in the world. On the occasion of his second visit he went prowling around the room for a straight-back chair to sit in, but Harriet shooed him irresistibly toward an effeminate rocker, where he could gratify his instinct for tipping back, and not endanger the family china.
During the week that followed Harriet made a scientific study of the drafts in our living-room (that is, I think she did), and on the next Sunday she not only shooed Fergus into a rocker, but that rocker was so placed near the window that the tobacco smoke was drawn straight out of the room. After that, she made Fergus so comfortable within and without—especially within—that he thought her a very wonderful woman. As she is.
As for Harriet and me, these Sunday gatherings—which often included the Scotch preacher, or our neighbour Horace, or, rarely, the Starkweathers—these visits were delightful beyond comparison. By Saturday night there was not a speck of dust in the house that was visible to the naked eye, and by three o'clock Sunday (if there was no one in to dinner) Harriet and I began an unacknowledged contest to see which of us would be the first to catch sight of the visitors coming up the town road or across the fields. We both pretended we weren't looking—but we were.
It was on the Sunday afternoon following the publication of the poetry, just after I had come in from the barn, that I saw Nort coming down the lane which skirts the edge of the wood. He had a stick in his hand with which he struck at the foliage of the hazel brush or decapitated a milkweed.
"There's Nort!" I exclaimed.
It was miraculous to see Harriet twitch off her apron and, with two or three deft pats, arrange her hair.