Ellen, the faithful maid of all work, stayed on with him at the old home; Jack wrote to him every week, and often came to spend Sunday with him.
“Aunt Louisa's real good to me,” he told his father, “but she's not like mother. Seems to me mother's kind of selfish staying away from us so long. When do you expect her back?”
“I don't know; not before winter, I'm afraid; and don't call her selfish, I won't have it! Your mother never knew she had a self.”
“If she'd only left Sue behind, we could have had more good times, we three together!”
“No, our family is four, Jack, and we can never have any good times, one, two, or three of us, because we're four! When one's away, whichever it is, it's wrong, but it's the worst when it's mother. Does your Aunt Louisa write to her?”
“Yes, sometimes, but she never lets me post the letters.”
“Do you write to your mother? You ought to, you know, even if you don't have time for me. You could ask your aunt to enclose your letters in hers.”
“Do you write to her, father?”
“Yes, I write twice a week,” John answered, thinking drearily of the semi-weekly notes posted in Susanna's empty worktable upstairs. Would she ever read them? He doubted it, unless he died, and she came back to settle his affairs; but of course he would n't die, no such good luck. Would a man die who breakfasted at eight, dined at one, supped at six, and went to bed at ten? Would a man die who worked in the garden an hour every afternoon, with half a day Saturday; that being the task most disagreeable to him and most appropriate therefore for penance?
Susanna loved flowers and had always wanted a garden, but John had been too much occupied with his own concerns to give her the needed help or money so that she could carry out her plans. The last year she had lost heart in many ways, so that little or nothing had been accomplished of all she had dreamed. It would have been laughable, had it not been pathetic, to see John Hathaway dig, delve, grub, sow, water, weed, transplant, generally at the wrong moment, in that dream-garden of Susanna's. He asked no advice and read no books. With feverish intensity, with complete ignorance of Nature's laws and small sympathy with their intricacies, he dug, hoed, raked, fertilized, and planted during that lonely summer. His absentmindedness caused some expensive failures, as when the wide expanse of Susanna's drying ground, which was to be velvety lawn, “came up” curly lettuce; but he rooted out his frequent mistakes and patiently planted seeds or roots or bulbs over and over and over and over, until something sprouted in his beds, whether it was what he intended or not. While he weeded the brilliant orange nasturtiums, growing beside the magenta portulacca in a friendly proximity that certainly would never have existed had the mistress of the house been the head-gardener, he thought of nothing but his wife. He knew her pride, her reserve, her sensitive spirit; he knew her love of truth and honor and purity, the standards of life and conduct she had tried to hold him to so valiantly, and which he had so dragged in the dust during the blindness and the insanity of the last two years.