"I don't know whether he had or not," said Cousin Tryphena, "I didn't ask. I didn't want to know. I know too much now!" She looked up fixedly at the mountain line, high and keen against the winter sky. "Jombatiste is right," she said again unsparingly, "I hadn't ought to be enjoying them … their father ought to be alive and with them. He was willing to work all he could, and yet he … here I've lived for fifty-five years and never airned my salt a single day. What was I livin' on? The stuff these folks ought to ha' had to eat … them and the Lord only knows how many more besides! Jombatiste is right … what I'm doin' now is only a drop in the bucket!"
She started from her somber reverie at the sound of a childish wail from the house. … "That's Sigurd …I knew that cat would scratch him!" she told me with instant, breathless agitation, as though the skies were falling, and darted back. After a moment's hesitation I too, went back and watched her bind up with stiff, unaccustomed old fingers the little scratched hand, watched the frightened little boy sob himself quiet on her old knees that had never before known a child's soft weight saw the expression in her eyes as she looked down at the sleeping baby and gazed about the untidy room so full of mire, which had always been so orderly and so empty.
She lifted the little boy up higher so that his tousled yellow hair rested against her bosom. He put an arm around her neck and she flushed with pleasure like a girl; but, although she held him close to her with a sudden wistful tenderness, there was in her eyes a gloomy austerity which forbade me to sentimentalize over the picture she made.
"But, Cousin Tryphena," I urged, "it is a drop in the bucket, you know, and that's something!"
She looked down at the child on her knee, she laid her cheek against his bright hair, but she told me with harsh, self-accusing rigor, "Tain't right for me to be here alive enjoying that dead man's little boy."
* * * * *
That was eighteen months ago. Mrs. Lindstrom is dead of consumption; but the two children are rosy and hearty and not to be distinguished from the other little Yankees of the village. They are devotedly attached to their Aunt Tryphena and rule her despotically.
And so we live along, like a symbol of the great world, bewildered Cousin Tryphena toiling lovingly for her adopted children, with the memory of her descent into hell still darkening and confusing her kind eyes; Jomatiste clothing his old body in rags and his soul in flaming indignation as he batters hopefully at the ramparts of intrenched unrighteousness … and the rest of us doing nothing at all.
THE GOLDEN TONGUE OF IRELAND
Tongue of spice and salt and wine and honey,
Magic, mystic, sweet, intemperate tongue!
Flower of lavish love and lyric fury,
Mixed on lips forever rash and young,
Wildly droll and quaintly tender;—