"Marjory across the seas," she thought, "to subdue Jeremiah just a little——" She closed her eyes. "Oh dear!" she thought, "what is the matter with me? These awful thoughts!" She opened them again and saw Jeremiah leaning on the table. His fists were closed about his knife and fork, and he held them upright, the handle ends resting on the cloth. John, curiously enough, did not seem bothered by this. He was watching Stuyvesant, who sat opposite.
"After that I started makin' bricks instead of layin' 'em. (Celie, ask that young feller to loan me a piece of bread. I want bread with my supper. I don't care what the style is.) So I begin to make bricks, an' when I look around and think that bricks done it all——" Jeremiah's voice faded. He left the rest to the imaginations of his listeners, while he laid a piece of bread flat on the table, and spread it en masse.
"I wisht my wife could have saw it," said Jeremiah as he loosened the piece of bread from the cloth. "She deserved everything. I never gave her nothing."
"You gave her a great deal," disagreed Cecilia. "You know you did! We were happy in that little flat. I remember that. We loved each other and we had enough to eat."
Cecilia was aware of Stuyvesant's eyes. They were so dear! She wondered if it was very wicked to love them, for she knew she always would.... And he had intimated that if Jeremiah were less prominent—Cecilia swallowed hard. The gods are visited with temptations, and too often they come to little humans. Cecilia was meeting hers. For the minute she felt anything possible, justifiable for the end she craved, and in the middle of her minute the white spark in her little heart flared.
"Papa," she said, "please tell Mr. Twombly about the time you hit the boss on the ear with a brick."
The request of that tale was her crucifixion on the cross of loyalty ... her proof beyond all doubt that her heart was in Jeremiah's rough old hands. Jeremiah looked pleased. His face lit rather pathetically. Cecilia answered his happy smile, and then she looked down at her plate. Her throat felt full and stiff. She found it hard to swallow.
Through a numbed consciousness she heard a long and much loved tale.
"I love him, I love him!" she chanted inside. "He and John are everything!" She looked up and found Stuyvesant looking at her. The way he looked made her gasp a little, and below the table she closed her small hands so tightly that her nails hurt her palms.
"An' then I sez, 'Yuh can lay yer own bricks,'" came in the voice of Jeremiah. "'An' here's one to begin with.' (It took him on the ear.)" He ended in parenthesis.