Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

The doctor's lady exclaimed in surprise. Jewels were rarely lost or found in that country. The gems oftenest lost were the sparkling seeds which flashed out of the jewel-weed; the finest pearls ever found were those which the mistletoe bore.

"Dear me, what a pity," lamented Mrs. Alexander. "And how was your pearl set?"

"It wasn't mine. I didn't notice how it was set. Oh, yes, I did. It was set amid roses and honeysuckle and humming-birds against a field of spotless snow," Lynn said, still more lightly.

The doctor's wife was not a dull woman. She understood his tone, though she did not understand what he meant. She had been eagerly scanning the big road, as far as she could see; thinking that a jewel dropped near by on the highway—unrolling like a broad band of brown velvet from the far green hills on the north to the farther green hills on the south—must sparkle and flash, showing a long way off in such brilliant sunshine. Now, however, she knew that Lynn was not in earnest, and she turned with a smile on her own face to meet the laughing frankness of his fine dark eyes. But a glance was just passing between the young man and the older man, and she caught that also, with the vague, helpless uneasiness, tinged with resentment, which every woman feels at seeing a sign of the freemasonry of men.

But a doctor's wife learns to overlook a good many things which she would like to have explained, if she be a sensible woman, as Mrs. Alexander was. This one merely said:—

"You are a joker, I see, as your father was. Nobody ever could tell when he was serious. Come in and sit with us. It's nice and cool these early mornings on the porch. Tie your horse to the fence. I thought when I saw you getting down from the saddle, that you meant to hitch him to Sidney's, and I was just going to call and ask you to tie him to ours instead. The doctor's horses pull boards off our fences every day, but it doesn't matter, because he keeps somebody to nail them on again; while Sidney has nobody but herself to depend upon."

"And even the resourceful Sidney—being a woman—can't drive a nail," remarked the doctor, deliberately.

He knew how well worn the truism was, but he used it designedly, as a toreador uses his scarf. He liked to see his wife flare up. Her kind eyes grew so bright and her wholesome cheeks so red, and it was always so delightfully easy to get her in a good humor again. It is a tendency which is very common in large men with amiable little wives like Mrs. Alexander, and one which is very uncommon in smaller men with wives of a different disposition.

Lynn Gordon, as an unmarried man, naturally knew nothing of these matters and blundered on, disappointing the doctor's confident expectations by asking the lady a question, which turned her attention in another direction. He inquired who Sidney was, seeing an opportunity for learning something about the girl behind the silver poplars.

There was no subject upon which Mrs. Alexander was more willing to talk, nor one upon which she could talk more eloquently, and she accordingly began at once to give Lynn the history of Sidney Wendall, whom she held to be a most interesting as well as a most admirable and remarkable character. It was no easy or simple thing, so the doctor's wife said, for a woman of the Pennyroyal Region to earn a family's living. In that country no white woman could work outside her own home (were there anything for her to do) on account of coming into competition with black laborers. And Sidney had received no training to lift her above the laboring class, having had even less than the average country education. And yet, as the doctor's wife pointed out, she had managed to maintain her family and herself in reasonable comfort and universal respect. It was all very well for the men to laugh at Sidney and make fun of her news and her gossip. It was all very well for them to say—as the doctor said, according to his wife, who flashed her eyes at him—that Sidney made her news out of the whole cloth when she did not get it over the grapevine telegraph. Everybody knew how hard men always were on any woman who was not pretty. As though poor Sidney could help the length of her own nose! Let the mean men make fun as much as they pleased! The indignant lady would like, so she said, to see one of them who had done his duty in the world more nobly than Sidney had done hers. She would also like, so she declared, to see one of them who kept as strict guard over what he said about his neighbors, and who was as free from evil-speaking and mischief-making, as Sidney was—for all her talking that they were always so ready to ridicule.