Even Mr. Harbison thought well of Willie’s performances. They were smuggled to him by the mother, and carefully returned to their place when the poet was out of the house. Mr. Harbison knew all that was going on in the world. A dozen times a year he left the grinding of the mill to meet his old chums at the capital, or to quicken the action of his blood in Chicago. A couple of stimulating days tinctured and made endurable his month of mill work. A man of luxurious tastes cannot lose his tastes with his means. He was a judge of poets, and said Willie might as well take to poetry as to anything, for business did not pay a man of sound faculties in these days.
The hum of bees could be heard all around this unfinished brick house growing mossy at the gables, and its shadow was long on the afternoon sunshine. It was that alert and happy time of year when the earth’s sap starts new from winter distillation.
You could hear the voices of children calling in play as they loitered home from school; the days were so long that the cows would not come up the pasture until nearly seven o’clock.
Willie trudged across lots to supper. Mrs. Harbison met him at the north side of the house, having her garden knife and rake in her hands. She put them on the stepless front-door sill, which had never been and never would be pressed by the foot of an arriving guest. This stone sill was high enough for a seat, and she sat down, tilting her sunbonnet back, and smiling at Willie. He was floured from head to foot. Little of his boyish beauty except its clear innocence remained to him. His nose was large for his head, and on his head the auburn curls were shorn to a thin crisping layer.
His young sister was putting supper on the table in the dining-room, his brother was fisting with another boy on the railroad, and up the cow lane came his father with the slow step and somewhat of the ponderous white presence of the walking statue in “Don Giovanni.” But closest knit of all this family, mother and son talked together in silence, some birds in the mulberry-tree over their heads making the only calling and replying that could be heard. Before Willie reached her, he held up his hands and signed in the deaf-mute language:—
“The preacher has come back.”
Mrs. Harbison raised her hands and darted her fingers into various shapes, saying thereby, “Did you see him?”
“No,” Willie replied as swiftly; “I only saw his coffin in the wagon, and Nancy Ellen sitting beside it. She had to bring him the whole twenty miles from where he died, in a wagon.”
“Because it wasn’t on a railroad?”
Willie nodded.