“Certainly, certainly,” said Miss Dexter, hurriedly trying on her bonnet. “Can you wait a moment? I won't be longer, Mr. Wise, it is just to lock the back door.”
The farmer nodded and drew up under the shade of Dexter's oak. It was a beautiful afternoon late in November, characterized by the clear cold air, the blue and gold of the sky, and the russet coloring of the foliage that mark the close of the Autumnal season. He looked in at Miss Dexter's little garden, admirably neat and well-trimmed; dahlias, hollyhocks, sweet William and asters, though done with blossoms, still bore their green leaves unsmitten by the frost. The windows appeared full of flowers too, but the blinds were skimp and faded and drawn down behind them. He started when he noticed this, for he knew the outer aspect of the house well, and had never seen such a thing before, except in case of sickness or death. The honest farmer thought and thought until Miss Dexter reappeared and assisted by him, got up in her place beside him. Even after that he went on thinking, and I must here tell you that it was not the first time Farmer Wise's thoughts had dwelt so persistently upon his companion and her house and personal history. For twelve years he had nursed a kind of mild distant passion for Miss Dexter at the Oak, unguessed at by her and his family, and only half understood by himself. He could not have said he was in love with her. He had been in love once when he married his first wife, who bore him a triad of splendid sons, one “keeping store” in the Western States and the other two at home on the farm, all three great giants of fellows, handsome in the fields or at barn-doors or in market-waggons, but plain on Sundays in black coats or at evening dances in the big ball-room at the Inn, when they would shuffle noisily through cotillons or labor clumsily through a Highland Schottische.
For himself, Farmer Wise was an honest, sincere, good-hearted man, a maker of money and a spender thereof—witness the fine red ploughs, the painted barns, the handsome team, Kentucky bred, and the inner decorations of his house, situated about five miles out of Ipswich, on the main-road. After Mr. Simon P. Rattray, he was the representative man of the district, although he did not come so closely into contact with the villagers. This penchant for the elder Miss Dexter had been a gradual, a slow but very sure and steady thing. Her father's death had increased it, so had that of Ellen her sister, and the farmer lived too far away to know as much as other people knew about the advent of the Mr. Foxleys. Had there been a sister or a daughter, or a wife or a mother, or an aunt or a cousin about the farm, he would have known very quickly. As it was, the girl who did the housework on the farm was as ignorant of gossip, its existence and the laws which govern its nature, as any male farm hand could be. When Farmer Wise put up his horses at the Inn three or four times a year, and sat down in the cheerful bar-room to drink a glass of whisky with his feet to the fire if it were winter, or a taller glass of Belfast ginger ale if it were summer, did he never notice Mrs. Cox? Mrs. Cox, well-to-do and popular herself, fresh, blooming and hearty, a young woman yet, and just the woman one would say, for him, and above all, the woman who thought most of him and ran to change her cap—the black one with the knot of rusty widow's crape—for the smart new one that held the velvet pansy when she saw the team coming. There's where he should have chosen the second time, there was the woman he should have noticed instead of poor, proud, foolish Charlotte Dexter, whom he half feared as a “lady born,” and who held in her heart, had he only knew it, the image of Mr. Joseph Foxley. The farmer got on with the English gentlemen at the Inn whenever he saw them “first-rate,” and it was of them he began most unsuspiciously to talk when he and Miss Dexter had crossed the bridge, ascended the hill on the other side of the river, and the team were settling to their work as they entered upon the dreary eight miles called the Plains which lay between them and the city. The farmer was consciously happy as he moved his ponderous body slightly nearer to his companion and tucked her in with his great hands, a single touch of one of them hurting her thin frame as if they were made of iron or stiff rope. He thought he was gentle too—poor man—but long years of manual labor had changed the natural soft flesh to the consistency of leather, in which immense muscles and joints seemingly of marble had been imbedded.
Besides, there was the delicate touch of another hand, as fine, as soft as a woman's and yet almost as strong as the farmer's, in her mind, a hand whiter than her own, though somewhat freckled, a hand that had taper fingers and well-kept nails, a hand that bore an antique seal ring and a fine pearl, a hand alas that had often retained her own in its warm clinging pressure, and once—only once, and that was three years ago—clasped her unresisting waist for a moment in the dark under the Oak while her sister fumbled at the gate. And just as she cherished these memories of Mr. Joseph, so did the widowed farmer retain the few occasions in his mind on which he had met Miss Dexter, spoken with her, given her a “lift” into town or up the road to the village store, for this was not the first use she had made of his gallant good nature and the Kentucky team.
He looked down at her now as they drove along in silence and noticed her thin black gown, her short jacket, her bit of black veil drawn over her bonnet, and her dingy travelling-bag with its tarnished clasp, and he heaved a sigh.
Charlotte was a “sizeable woman” thought Farmer Wise “and wants a good live garment sometimes, to bring her figure out and make more of it and do justice to it. A shawl now! How much would a good shawl be? I miss a woman round the place; I wouldn't know what to ask for. I might ha' stopped nigh the Inn and asked Mrs. Cox.” Ay, you might Farmer Wise, and have done another mischievous thing, upsetting Mrs. Cox for a week as she waited for a parcel from town and breaking her heart altogether as day after day followed and no parcel arrived.
“I ha' never seen the ekil of those Mr. Foxleys yonder,” began the honest farmer as something to start a conversation with. “I ha' never seen their ekil.”
“Oh!” said Miss Dexter. “Yes? In what way?”
“So gentle and so funny as they be. Gentlemen both of them with delicate hands and fine clothes—”
“Yes, yes,” murmured Miss Dexter under her breath, clutching at her bag and closing her eyes.