“I should like to see him,” Rupert reflected aloud. “I should like to see him.”
CHAPTER XX
The years had passed for the child Sheba so sweetly, and had been so full of simple joys and pleasures, that they seemed a panorama of lovely changing seasons, each a thing of delight. There was the spring, when she trotted by Tom’s side into the garden and he showed her the little, pale-green points of the crocuses, hyacinths, and tulips pushing their way up through the moist brown earth, and when he carried her in his big arms into the woods on the hillsides, and they saw the dogwood covered with big white flowers and the wild plum-trees snowed over with delicate blooms, and found the blue violets thick among the wet grass and leaves, and the frail white wind-flowers quivering on their stems. As they went about in this new fairyland, which came every year, and which still seemed always a surprise, it was their habit to talk to each other a great deal. The confidences they had exchanged when the child had not been able to speak, and which Tom had nevertheless understood, were enchanting things when she became older and they strayed about together or sat by the fire. Her child thoughts and fancies might have been those of some little faun or dryad She grew up among green things, with leaves waving above and around her, the sun shining upon her, and the mountains seeming to stand on guard, looking down at her from day to day, from year to year. From behind one mountain the sun rose every morning, and she always saw it; and behind another it sank at night. After the spring came the summer, when the days were golden and drowsy and hot, and there were roses and other flowers everywhere; wild roses in the woods and by the waysides, heavy-headed beauties in their own garden, and all the beds and vines a fine riot of colour. After these there were blackberries thick on their long brambles, and wild grapes in the woods, and presently a delicious snap of cold in the clear air night and morning, and the trees were dropping golden, amber, and scarlet leaves, while under the pale yellow ones which rustled beneath the chestnut-trees, there were brown, glossy nuts, which fell one by one with a delightful suddenness of sound at irregular intervals. There were big chestnut-trees in the woods near their house, and Tom and Sheba used to go before breakfast to look for the nuts which had fallen in the night. Hamlin County always rose at sunrise, or before it, and to go out in the heavenly fresh morning air and walk through the rustling, thickly fallen yellow leaves under the trees, making little darts of joy at the brown, glossy things bursting through their big burrs, was a delicious, exciting thing. Mornin’s hot breakfast held keen delights when they returned to it.
When the big wood-fires were lighted and there was snow and rain outside, and yams and chestnuts to roast in the ashes, and stories to be told and talked over in the glow of the red birch-log and snapping, flaming hickory sticks, the child used to feel as if she and Uncle Tom were even nearer together and more comfortable than at any other time.
“Uncle Tom,” she said to him, as she was standing in the circle of his arm on one such night, when she was about ten years old. “Uncle Tom, we do love each other in the winter, don’t we?”
“Yes, we do, Sheba,” answered Tom. “And we’re pretty partial to each other even in the summer.”
“We love each other at all the times,” she said. “And every morning that I get up I love you more than I did when I went to bed—every morning, Uncle Tom.”
Tom kissed her. He remembered what he had said one morning in the cabin in Blair’s Hollow ten years before.