“God’s Providence is Mine Inheritance.”
And I at once set out for home determined to get Estelle to print it, in beautiful old English script, and paint a flower border and then I would hang it in his room. Rob loved pretty things, like a girl. I knew Estelle would be a little scornful at my idea of helping Rob with a motto, I who was the practical one; but a small thing will sometimes have a strong effect upon a morbid mind.
That was the idea that was uppermost in my mind as I hurried out of the yard, by the long stables, to make a short cut to the river bank and cross on the ice, when I ran into Loveday coming out of the old, unused carriage-house. Now there was nothing astonishing in that, for Marcella, Uncle Horace’s housekeeper, was Loveday’s second-cousin and they often visited each other, but the astonishing thing was that Loveday should start guiltily at sight of me, flush scarlet over to the crisp black waves of her hair and thrust something that she held in her hand hastily under her shawl—Loveday, whose greatest horror was of “under-handedness” and who boasted that she never had had a secret in her life.
I glanced back, involuntarily, at the old carriage-house. I remembered suddenly that Hiram Nute’s photograph wagon was stored there for the winter. A traveling photograph gallery had been one of Hiram’s “combernations” of the last summer. It had suited his taste admirably.
“There wasn’t nowhere that you saw so much human nater, without it was top of a tin-peddler’s wagon, as you did a takin’ folks’ photographs,” he said.
Loveday withdrew her objection that it was “kind of flighty,” in view of its paying qualities, and Hiram gave it up reluctantly and late, for the winter. I remembered hearing that Uncle Horace had given him the use of the old building as a storage house. I also remembered having seen Hiram running the wagon in there just before Thanksgiving.
It seemed quite natural that Loveday should have gone into it, to see that all was safe, Hiram having gone on one of his essence-peddling tours into another State. But why—why should Loveday look guilty about it? She stammered that she was going in a minute to see Marcella; she hadn’t time to be gallivantin’ ’round, but seein’ there was sickness in the house she expected ’twas folks’ duty to come and inquire. It struck me that this was probably the first time in her life that Loveday had prevaricated. The stress of the moment turned her pale and afterwards she looked angry—either at herself or me. She had had some errand to Hiram’s photograph wagon and it was a secret one; so much was easy to gather from Loveday’s manner. But when even Loveday became mysterious I felt that life was too involved a matter for my simple brains.
I left her with relief, and slid out upon the river; the strong west wind blew me toward the shipyard, and I stopped to see Dave. I had not been there since he had gone to work, partly because it was not an attractive place in the winter, partly because I shrank from seeing him at work there.
Dave evidently did not shrink from being seen. When I came near he was swinging himself down from the stocks of the ship whose inside work he was helping to finish. At first I could not discover to whom he was talking, but I saw that he looked like a young Viking with his fine, athletic shape and his blond coloring, even in his blue overalls, that pair had one of Estelle’s patches upon the knee, and his rough working jacket.
Alice Yorke and her father had been skating; they were such lovers of the sport that they were not deterred, like the rest of us, by the roughness of the ice which had frozen in little ridges after a thaw. The doctor had broken one of his skates and had stopped at the shipyard to repair it. It was to them that Dave was talking, when I came up, with as graceful and nonchalant an air as if he were in the most correct of evening dress at a reception. He had a hammer in his hand and he unloaded his overalls’ pockets of nails and screws to find something with which to mend Dr. Yorke’s skate.