They had all wanted to accompany her part of the way, and Belle had pleaded to be allowed to go and help nurse, but she had said them nay. She knew the accommodations of Hickory Farm, and it was easier to leave them where she had met them first, at the entrance of what would always be to her the city of delights.
Abraham Lincoln and the spring waggon! Had the whole beautiful summer been one delicious dream? Could it be only a week since she had stood entranced in that forest of flame? Here the leaves hung brown and shrivelled on the denuded branches, stray flakes of snow were in the air, and the early twilight fell chill and dreary.
‘I’m terrible glad to see you, Pauline, though I hated to spoil your visit,’ said Mr Harding, as he gave Abraham Lincoln a taste of the whip.
Pauline leaned towards him, and laid both hands upon his arm.
‘Poor father! I am so sorry for you! Now tell me all about it.’
And the tired man turned to the daughter who for his sake had left ease and beauty and friends, and shifted to her shoulders the burden which he found too heavy for his own.
The children crowded to meet her as she stumbled through the narrow hall-way into the kitchen. How dark it was! Her quick glance comprehended the whole scene, and the contrast between it and that other home-coming smote her with a keen sense of physical pain. She looked at the solitary lamp with its grotesquely hideous ornament of red flannel, at Susan’s expressionless, freckled face, at the boys in their copper-toed boots and overalls, at the good-natured, but hopelessly common-place Martha Spriggs, with her thin hair drawn tight into a knob the size of a bullet, and her bare arms akimbo. ‘Idealize her real!’ Would it be possible to idealize anything at Sleepy Hollow?
She got her welcome in various fashions.
‘It’s about time you were getting back!’ exclaimed Mrs Harding from the bed on which she was forced to lie, in bitterness of spirit, with Polly by her side. ‘I suppose nothing less than a stroke would have brought you. It beats me how people can be such sponges! I’m thankful I was never one to go trailin’ about the country after my relations. I never was away from home more than a day in my life till I was married, and it’s been nothing but work ever since, and now to be laid here like a useless log, with everything going hotfoot to destruction! It’s a good thing you’ve come at last, for the children are makin’ sawdust and splinters of every bit of crockery in the house, and that Martha Spriggs has no more management than a settin’ hen. I don’t suppose you’ll be much better, though. You never did hev much of a head, an’ now you’ve been up among the clouds so long, you’ll be more like to sugar the butter and salt the pies than before.’
Pauline lifted Polly from her uncomfortable position with a warm glow about her heart, which all the sick woman’s bitterness was powerless to quench. If she could see Richard Everidge, she would tell him that she did believe in altitudes now. It was possible even in the valleys to live above the clouds. ‘Do not seek happiness,’ Tryphosa had said, ‘but harmony with God’s will,’ and God’s will for her was Sleepy Hollow. ‘It is not what we do, but what we are, dear child,’ she seemed to hear her saying. She remembered reading that ‘the smallest roadside pool has its water from heaven, and its gleam from the sun, and can hold the stars in its bosom, as well as the great ocean.’ God could make a ‘perfect Christian’ even in Sleepy Hollow.