“Perhaps, if there’s no one to come between us, she may be fond of me.”
She was fond of him. He was her very little life itself. No one had ever come between—nothing ever could.
She had by that time shot up into a tall, slender slip of a girl-child. She was passing, even with a kind of distinction, through the stage of being all long, slim legs and big eyes. The slim legs were delicately modelled and the big eyes were like pools of gold-brown water, fringed with rushes.
“I never seen a young ’un at thet thar young colty age es was es han’some es thet child o’ Big Tom’s,” Mis’ Doty often remarked.
By the frequenters of the Cross-roads Post-office she was considered, as was her protector, a county institution. When she had reached three years old, she had been measured against the wall, and each year her increase of inches was recorded amid lively demonstrations of interest. The smallness of her feet had also been registered, and the thickness and growth of her curling hair ranked as a subject of discussion only second in interest to the development of crops.
But this affection notwithstanding, a curious respect for her existed. She had played among them in the store in her little dusty pinafore; one and all of them had given her rustic offerings, bringing her special gifts of yellow popcorn ears, or abnormal yams unexpectedly developed in their own gardens, or bags of hickory nuts; but somehow they did not think or speak of her as they did of each other’s children.
Tom had built a comfortable white house, over whose verandah honeysuckles and roses soon clambered and hung. In time the ground enclosed about it had a curious likeness to the bowery unrestraint of the garden he had played in during his childhood. It was a pleasure to him to lay it out on the old plan and to plant japonicas, flowering almonds, and syringa bushes, as they had grown in the days when he had played under them as a child, or lounged on the grass near them as a boy. He and Sheba planted everything themselves—or, rather, Sheba walked about with him or stood by his side and talked while he worked. In time she knew almost as well as he did the far-away garden he took as his model. She learned to know the place by heart.
“Were you a little boy then, Uncle Tom?” she would say, “when there was a mock-orange and a crape myrtle next to the big yellow rose-bush?”
There were even times when he found her memory was better than his own, and she could correct him.
“Ah! no, Uncle Tom,” she would say; “the pansies were not in the little heart-shaped bed; they were all round the one with the pink harp-flower in the middle.”