Dorothy was at times, when her audience suited her, a person who talked herself out in liberal amount, finding in self-utterance one of her few and most distinct pleasures. Yet she was never so full of herself as entirely to cease to think of others. She saw in a few minutes that Rose had lost hold of the talk, and was at intervals saying, “Yes, yes,” in an absent way, so as to keep up a decent appearance of being still interested in her companion’s words. Dorothy had by no means fine manners, but she had the automatically active instincts of a woman to whom tact was a natural gift. She too became silent, and they walked on for a time without more exchange of words.
Rose, like some young women of her age, was at times the easy prey of moods of absence, which carried her far enough from the hour or its company. She had preached herself a severe sermon, and now came back to the outer world again as they passed a marshy spot where, of a sudden, the wholesome wood odors rose around her, that delightful commingling of the scent of moldering trunks, resinous weepings of the pine, and the sweetness of the breath of the young spruces. Nature said, in her most tender tones, “Come back to me out of your tangle of self-discussion, and I will give you rest.” It was a delicately responsive organization to which this mute appeal was made, and the fine instrument answered to the call with no more consciousness of the gentle influence than has the swaying pine stirred to healthful exercise by the northland breeze.
“Don’t you like the wood-smells?” she said.
“Me? I guess I do. That’s queer about Susan Colkett; asked her one day if she didn’t love the spruce-smells, and she just said they hadn’t none.”
“That was odd. I could never like that woman, but I am very, very sorry for her.”
“Like her! Miss Rose, I saw her once killing chickens,—I never can do that,—and the woman was laughing all the while. I don’t love her, but—There’s the house; you wait here in the woods; I’ll get her out, and then you can talk. Sit down on this log. I’ll fetch her.”
“But are you not afraid, Mrs. Maybrook?”
“I? No; I’m old and tough, and it wouldn’t matter much—except for Hiram. There’d be nobody to p’int him,” and she laughed.
Then Rose took up her sermon again, and Dorothy walked to the back of the crumbling cabin, through the vileness of the cow-shed, which was connected with the house to save wintry exposures in caring for the cattle, now reduced in number to one lank, milkless cow.
Two decrepit chickens fled as she came by, and a long-legged, high-roofed pig lifted his snout above his empty trough and grunted a famine-born appeal. Her feet were noiseless in the slough of muck through which she picked her way with a grimace of disgust. At the open back door she paused, hearing high voices within. About to enter, she halted abruptly, and a look of intense attention came upon her face. The speakers were hidden, but in the dimness at the far end of the room, she saw the half of the bed,—one broken leg of it tied up to a splint of wood,—and above, the white sheet upon the figure of the dead child. She stayed motionless a moment, at first merely shocked at the rude noises in the chamber of death, but, when about to knock, stopped short again at the hearing of her own name.