“Miss Ellie’s all alone in the kitchen, hulling strawberries for supper,” she said very low. Then bending far over her desk, as if completely absorbed in her books, she went on: “It’s the south dining-room door. Go right in, take the basket with you—no, no, not that woman, too—and ask Miss Ellie if she won’t take charge of your basket for an hour or so.”
Samuel grinned. He wagged his head back and forth until his wig shook in sympathetic anticipation. Years and years seemed to fall from him, until with his small, thick-set figure and his sparkling, youthful eyes he looked like a boy getting ready to steal apples. With short, firm, quicksteps he entered the dining-room. No one would have thought him a victim of lumbago from his gait now. Then of a sudden, Miss Jessica, no longer able to contain herself, went into her private room, where he had consulted with the ten, and danced around with glee.
“Miss Ellie, you darling!” she whispered to herself. “I know you’ll do it!”
Miss Ellie, in a prim, dainty blue gingham dress, with a great bib apron enveloping her slender figure, sat at the south kitchen window hulling berries, the basket of red fruit on the table beside her, a yellow earthen bowl in her lap. Her silver-gold hair caught sunbeam lights from the window until each single thread danced and twinkled. Little curls of silver gold nestled against the nape of her slender neck. Her face was that of an April lady’s—first the clouds chased across it, clouds of contempt, of anger and of regret; and then it took on a soft blaze of tenderness and of passionate longing.
She did not want Mr. Samuel Jessup or any other man. She scorned the woman who might take him today for his home and that little sum of money; but why—why had she with all her power of loving and of attracting love, all the unspent passion of motherhood that had been her ruling passion since the doll-baby age—why had she come to see sixty-one without finding Mr. Right? Lovers in moderate numbers she had had in the days of long ago, and old people do not forget the loves of the springtime, but all the while—all through the spring and the summer and this swiftly passing autumn—or was it really winter-time?—there had never come to her one whom she would rejoice to call her mate! Him she did not regret so much nowadays, or she regretted him with a vague, indistinct feeling. He might have liked strong drink and smoked a strong pipe indoors. But the children! Ah, the children that had never come!
She had outlived all her people. There were no nieces, no nephews, no one in all the world whom she could call her own, and there had never been and never could be a little grandchild to pull at her skirts.
“Dran-ma! I love oo, dran-ma!” Only yesterday she had heard a little child lisp this into the ears of Mrs. Young.
“Dran-ma, I love oo, dran-ma!” whispered Ellie, bending far over the berries with the hot gushing of tears coming into her eyes.
Both the ache of motherhood and the ache of grandmotherhood were upon her. Never to have felt the touch of her own babe at her breast! And, now that old age had withered the breast, never to hear the prattle of grandchildren in her ears! And her ears were still so finely attuned, unlike the average grandmother! Miss Ellie looked up from her berries at the window. Her eyes were too dim to see, and wiping the tears away she looked out of the window again, down the garden. So, young girls stare wistfully as if they would look to the very end of the world and discover what, in the very end, may come to them.
The dining-room door opened. Miss Ellie turned back to her task. She scorned to look up and ask her fellow inmate of the Home who had won Samuel Jessup. It was probably Mrs. Homan coming to help with the supper. Steps came across the kitchen. Ellie bent far over the yellow bowl and went on with her berry hulling. It needed a great many berries to supply that supper table. The sunbeam darted down from the top of Ellie’s head to seek out with its twinkling, gold-shod feet the silver-gold curls in Ellie’s neck. The steps paused close beside Ellie. Suddenly the spinster realized that they were not Mrs. Homan’s steps and she looked up. Scorn, indignation, amazement, and then something more subtle, something which one sees in faces everywhere all over the world, and something which makes the world more beautiful, crossed her face. There stood Samuel Jessup with the huge market basket in one hand. He held out the basket to Miss Ellie. He looked at her eagerly, almost with piteous appeal, as if to say: