A HINT FROM CHILDHOOD
As the spring advanced and Judge Emery’s widow recovered a little strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the younger son of the family.
One day in May, a throbbingly sunshiny day, full of a fierce hot vigor of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton’s darkened parlor. As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but her mother gave a cry and flung herself into his arms.
“I’ve come to take you home with me, Momma dear,” he said quietly, using the old name for her, which had been banished from the Emery household since Lydia’s early childhood. The sound of it went to her heart.
The newcomer smiled at her over his mother’s head. It was her father’s smile, the quaint, half-wistful, humorous smile, which had seemed so incongruous on the Judge’s powerful face. “I’m your brother Harry, little Lyddie,” he said, “and I’ve come to take care of poor Momma.”
During all that summer it was a bitter regret to Lydia that she had seen her brother so short a time. He had decreed that the sooner his mother was taken away from Endbury, the better for her, and Mrs. Emery had clung to him, assenting passively to all he said, and peering constantly, with tear-blurred eyes, into his face to see again his astonishing resemblance to his father. They had left the day after his arrival.
He had found time, however, to go out to Bellevue for a brief visit, to see Lydia’s home and her little daughter—Paul was away on a business trip—and the half-hour he spent there was one that Lydia never forgot. The tall, sunburned Westerner, with his kind, humorous eyes, his affectionate smile, his quaint, homely phrases, haunted the house for the rest of the summer. The time of his stay had been too breathlessly short for any serious talk. He had looked about at the big, handsome house with a half-mocking awe, inspected the “grounds” with a lively interest in the small horticultural beginnings Lydia had been able to achieve, told her she ought to see his two hundred acres of apple-trees; and for the time that was left before his trolley-car was due he played with his little niece and talked over her head to his sister.
“She’s a dandy, Lyddie! She’s a jim-dandy of a little girl! She ought to come out and learn to ride straddle with her cousins. I got a boy about her age—say, they’d look fine together! He’s a towhead, like all the rest of ’em—like their mother.”
For months afterward Lydia could close her eyes and see again the transfigured expression that had come over his face at the mention of his wife. “Talk about luck!” he said, after a moment’s pause, “there never was such luck as my getting Annie. Say, I wish you could know her, Lyddie. I tell you what—shoulder to shoulder, every minute, she’s stood up to things right there beside me for twelve years—Lord! It don’t seem more than six months when I stop to think about it. We had some hard sledding along at the first, but with the two of us pulling together—. She’s laughed at sickness and drought and bugs and floods. We’re all through that now, we’re doing fine; but, honest, it was worth it, to know Annie through and through as I do. There isn’t a thing about the business she doesn’t know as well as I do, and good reason why, too. We’ve worked it all out together. We’ve stuck close, we have. I’ve helped in the house and with the kids, and she’s come right out into the orchards with me. Share and share alike—that’s our motto.”
He was silent a moment, caressing Ariadne’s dark hair gently, and reviewing the past with shining eyes. “Lord! Lord! It’s been a good life!” He turned to his sister with a smile. “Well, Lyddie, I expect you know something about it, too. You certainly are fixed fine, and everybody says you’ve married a splendid fellow.”