"Oh, Martha!" Emily cried to her, "you must promise me that, absolutely! Martha, I just couldn't let you go away to school again, unless you promise me that!"
"All right, I promise you. If you can't trust my—judgment, as you say"—she spoke sarcastically—"I suppose you can—believe—what I say."
Bob's eyes dwelt resentfully upon his daughter, and loyally on his distressed wife, all those painful last days before Martha left for the East.
"I'll bet you lost twenty pounds this summer, Emily!" he said, ruefully, when they were alone at length.
"Well, thank goodness for that!" she retorted, loyal to the child. "I wish I'd lost twenty more." She knew he would count grudgingly all the ounces she suffered. Yet it was no great thing to him if Martha had lost her very heart.
Chapter Six
They gathered their green tomatoes, to save them from the frost. Emily and Maggie, in the delicious kitchen, made chilli sauces and the good kind of vegetarian mincemeat. The house was filled with the excellent odors of the ends of the earth. Java and Jamaica were stirred into Illinois, and sealed away in sturdy bottles which took their places chronologically in the cupboard next to the wild grape and the crab-apple jelly below the spiced peaches. The bottles had to be pushed close against one another, now, to make room for them in the crowded shelves.
But when Emily looked into the cupboard of her heart, it was bare.
She had dug the gladiolas; she had cut the last of the lavender statice, which she had sown in happier days to make glamour in the painted room, and hung it head downward to dry with the rosy strawflowers. The frosts came and turned the hard maples gaudy. The old Fiske place seemed always to lose its head completely in the fall. There grew a barberry hedge along the front walk, which Emily's father had planted when he took down the white picket fence. He had simply put those little dry-looking shoots into the ground one rainy spring morning years ago, never imagining what riot he was planting. For years now, on every brilliant Sunday afternoon, while the leaves were falling, townspeople had walked out to see that hedge, to hear its rejoicings. The knowing had taken cuttings of it, to their disappointment, for even that offspring hedge just across the road had never been able to achieve quite such giddiness. Some people said it was the soil that did it. Others maintained it was the way in which the water soaked down to the river just there. Such cherries of ripeness, such roses and purple grapes and bleeding pomegranates of hues, such plums and persimmons and exotic luminous loquats glowing together, such oranges and oracles of color, no other hedge could summon. People got joy out of it according to their moods and natures. But Emily, for once, could take no pleasure in it.