As she chose her path beside the dusty highway, lifting her skirts and taking care of her shoes as best she might, she found that she was fervently thanking God for these things. Friends who did not stand by in such a case were not friends. She would forget them and gradually life would bring to her friends that were worth while.
When finally she reached the place that she had set out to find, she realized why her father never had mentioned it. He had not considered it worth mentioning. It probably had come into his hands with some other deal and had remained there because he was unable to dispose of it.
Mahala did not know how to measure land by sight. She did not know where the forty acres surrounding the house began or ended. The house itself stood close to the road. It was so old that the roof was falling in. The front door stood slightly ajar. Surveying the place from the road, Mahala slowly shook her head. No one had lived there for years. The rank grass falling over the board laid from the gate to the stoop for a walk, proved it. The tangle of flowers and weeds growing across the front of the house and on either hand, proved it. The myriad sprouts springing up around the cherry and pear trees surrounding the house bespoke years of negligence.
Mahala tested the broad front stoop and the veranda carefully before she bore her full weight upon them. She pushed open the front door and used the same care with the floors. There were places where she trembled lest she should break through. In many spots the plastering had fallen and the bare laths grinned at her. Wind-blown limbs had broken in the windows and pieces of brick and stone testified that wanton children had deliberately smashed the glass in many places.
She looked at the littered hearth of flagging and wondered who had warmed their hearts before the fireplace. She counted the rooms and was dejected over their smallness—a living room, two bedrooms, a dining room, a lean-to kitchen, no upstairs, the roof and floors useless. The framework seemed sound. The chimney stood straight.
She walked around the house and found at the back a neglected old orchard of apple and other fruit trees and a stable slowly inclining southward with the burden of years and its own dejection. On a trip around the outside of the house, she found a wild sweet briar clambering up and covering one whole end, and looking closer she could see the siding boards that had outlined the dimensions of three-foot flower beds surrounding the building. Peering among the dry leaves and weeds, she saw that earlier in the season tulips, hyacinths, and star flowers had bloomed there. There were seed pods ripening on the spindling peonies and purple and white phlox were in bloom.
Instinctively, Mahala dropped to her knees and began to pull the weeds from among the flowers. Suddenly she sat back on her heels and looking up at the old building she smiled to it. Then she said to it: “So you were once a home. Some one loved living in you. Some one grew a wreath of flowers around you to make you pretty. Never you mind, you’re my home now and as soon as I earn some money I’ll come here to live—that’s a promise—and I’ll make you blooming and beautiful again.”
When Mahala heard her own voice saying these words, she realized the pull on her heart of possession. This was a wretchedly poor thing, but it was her own, her all. Every weed seemed to point an accusing finger at her. The old apple trees reached pitiful arms, begging to be denuded of suckers, to have their feet freed of encumbering growth, for their soil to be fertilized. The old house needed a new roof, floors, and plaster. The greater its needs, the stronger the appeal it made to Mahala in the day of her own need. Here was something to fight for. Here was something tangible to love and to live for, for after all, soil is soil, and forty acres of it is not to be discarded because of neglect, when it lies in a fertile valley near a river.
Finally Mahala arose. She returned to the back of the house and managed to raise some water at the old pump. She washed her hands, and then going back to the front, she sat down on the stoop, lightly screened by sun-flecked shadows, and spread beside her the lunch Jemima had prepared. She sat and ate her food very slowly, because her ears were busy with the birds, her eyes were on the sky, among the bushes outlining the indolent old fence sliding down of sheer inanition. She noticed a distant figure trudging down the road, a figure that moved toward her with a tired step actuated by unwavering purpose, a figure that one could recognize as far as it could be seen as the plodding form of a human following a hard road under the lash of duty. Mahala’s perceptions were quickened in this case by the fact that the oncoming figure was accentuated by a shimmering gleam of snowy white bobbing in the rear. She looked intently, and then slowly one hand reached out beside her and began dividing in halves the lunch that she had brought.
As Rebecca approached the gate, Mahala could see that she was covered with dust, that she looked more worn and tired than she ever had seen her. Whatever the thing might have been that inspired Rebecca’s endless search, it had this time led her to far counties over rough roads. There were times when she had been reported as having been seen beyond the confines of the state.