A hundred happy memories filled the little low room as Alma Pflugel showed me her treasures. The cat purred in great content, and the stove cast a rosy glow over the scene as the simple woman told the story of each precious relic, from the battered candle-dipper on the shelf, to the great mahogany folding table, and sewing stand, and carved bed. Then there was the old horn lantern that Jacob Pflugel had used a century before, and in one corner of the sitting-room stood Grossmutter Pflugel’s spinning-wheel. Behind cupboard doors were ranged the carefully preserved blue-and-white china dishes, and on the shelf below stood the clumsy earthen set that Grosspapa Pflugel himself had modeled for his young bride in those days of long ago. In the linen chest there still lay, in neat, fragrant folds, piles of the linen that had been spun on that time-yellowed spinning-wheel. And because of the tragedy in the honest face bent over these dear treasures, and because she tried so bravely to hide her tears, I knew in my heart that this could never be a newspaper story.
“So,” said Alma Pflugel at last, and rose and walked slowly to the window and stood looking out at the wind-swept garden. That window, with its many tiny panes, once had looked out across a wilderness, with an Indian camp not far away. Grossmutter Pflugel had sat at that window many a bitter winter night, with her baby in her arms, watching and waiting for the young husband who was urging his ox-team across the ice of Lake Michigan in the teeth of a raging blizzard.
The little, low-ceilinged room was very still. I looked at Alma Pflugel standing there at the window in her neat blue gown, and something about the face and figure—or was it the pose of the sorrowful head?—seemed strangely familiar. Somewhere in my mind the resemblance haunted me. Resemblance to—what? Whom?
“Would you like to see my garden?” asked Alma Pflugel, turning from the window. For a moment I stared in wonderment. But the honest, kindly face was unsmiling. “These things that I have shown you, I can take with me when I—go. But there,” and she pointed out over the bare, wind-swept lot, “there is something that I cannot take. My flowers! You see that mound over there, covered so snug and warm with burlap and sacking? There my tulips and hyacinths sleep. In a few weeks, when the covering is whisked off—ah, you shall see! Then one can be quite sure that the spring is here. Who can look at a great bed of red and pink and lavender and yellow tulips and hyacinths, and doubt it? Come.”
With a quick gesture she threw a shawl over her head, and beckoned me. Together we stepped out into the chill of the raw March afternoon. She stood a moment, silent, gazing over the sodden earth. Then she flitted swiftly down the narrow path, and halted before a queer little structure of brick, covered with the skeleton of a creeping vine. Stooping, Alma Pflugel pulled open the rusty iron door and smiled up at me.
“This was my grandmother’s oven. All her bread she baked in this little brick stove. Black bread it was, with a great thick crust, and a bitter taste. But it was sweet, too. I have never tasted any so good. I like to think of Grossmutter, when she was a bride, baking her first batch of bread in this oven that Grossvater built for her. And because the old oven was so very difficult to manage, and because she was such a young thing—only sixteen!—I like to think that her first loaves were perhaps not so successful, and that Grosspapa joked about them, and that the little bride wept, so that the young husband had to kiss away the tears.”
She shut the rusty, sagging door very slowly and gently. “No doubt the workmen who will come to prepare the ground for the new library will laugh and joke among themselves when they see the oven, and they will kick it with their heels, and wonder what the old brick mound could have been.”
There was a little twisted smile on her face as she rose—a smile that brought a hot mist of tears to my eyes. There was tragedy itself in that spare, homely figure standing there in the garden, the wind twining her skirts about her.
“You should but see the children peering over the fence to see my flowers in the summer,” she said. The blue eyes wore a wistful, far-away look. “All the children know my garden. It blooms from April to October. There I have my sweet peas; and here my roses—thousands of them! Some are as red as a drop of blood, and some as white as a bridal wreath. When they are blossoming it makes the heart ache, it is so beautiful.”
She had quite forgotten me now. For her the garden was all abloom once more. It was as though the Spirit of the Flowers had touched the naked twigs with fairy fingers, waking them into glowing life for her who never again was to shower her love and care upon them.