“No, it ain’t,” grinned Caleb, shouldering his long fork and picking up his bait-bucket. “It’s a man-trap!”
He slouched off down the bank.
“Don’t you worry,” I reassured the judge, who was looking sour. “I’ll take the house if I possibly can. You put your mind on getting Mattie moved out of it, and I’ll write you.”
I told Ruth about my interviews when I reached the cottage. “You’ve found out more about that house in the last twenty-four hours,” she replied in her leisurely way, “than I’ve ever heard in the five years I’ve lived here. I only pray you will take it now. The town-people won’t like it if you don’t; you’ve got their hopes aroused.”
“I have my own aroused,” I replied. “I have more hope now for the future than I have had for the last six months.”
Ruth saw me off cheerfully on the afternoon train, but I knew that in her kind heart were forebodings as to what might happen in my life before she could see me again. Her whole family would migrate soon now, and our winters would be spent in cities too far apart for us to help each other. If she could have known how much I was going to need her, she would never have left Star Harbor.
CHAPTER V
“THE SHOALS OF YESTERDAY”
AFTER I had been back in New York for a month I had about decided that Mrs. Dove was right.
Jasper had greeted my idea about buying the house with enthusiasm, but, when it came to details, with a stubborn refusal to face the facts and sign a check. To my entreaties that he go down and look at it, or write to Judge Bell about it, or arrange to move there soon, I was constantly met with, “Wait till after the play.”
We lived in four rooms in the old arcade near Columbus Circle which we had originally chosen because artists lived there, and at that time I had thought of myself as an artist. I did, in truth, have some flair for it, and a little education, which had been laboriously acquired at the School of Design associated with the Carnegie Technical Schools. Two years of marriage had seen the dwindling away of my aspirations by attrition. The one room that we had which possessed a window facing north, which by any stretch of good-will might have been called a studio, had been given up for our common sleeping-room, and Jasper, because of the constant necessity of his profession to keep late hours, was never out of bed until long after the sun had slid around to the court. I bore fate no grudge because of this. It was quite true, as he often pointed out to me, that I could paint out-of-doors or in some one else’s studio, but the day that I felt free to do this never came. When, after two years of married life, our finances still necessitated the curtailment of every extravagance, paints and canvas seemed one of the most plausible things to do without. It was only when prompted by the exhibition of some woman painter, who had evidently managed these things better, my husband would ask me why I did not paint any more, that I suffered momentarily. For the rest of the time his own work seemed to me much more important.