When gentle, soft-voiced Mrs. Harding was living, with her generous heart and hand, her noiseless, unostentatious way of settling a difficulty, it would have been quite impossible for him to have indulged in such an exhibition; she would have loved him out of it insensibly, and have so limbered the widow’s acrimonious tongue with the oil of kindness that the quarrel would have died at birth; but it was a sorry day for him when the better part of himself was laid away under the green in the cemetery, and he was quite free to be his untrammeled self.
Some way the mother’s voice, as it floated over the top of the ugly fence, reminded him of her. It was such a gentle, loving voice, with a flute-like clearness in it which made every word audible.
They had never had any children, he and the wife who would have made such a tender mother, but he imagined she would have spoken to them just as this mother was speaking if she had been surrounded by active, questioning lads and lasses, and his surly mood softened as he heard them chattering over the treasures of broken china they were finding in the widow’s refuse heap.
“We’ll build the playhouse right here. The big, high boards will make such a nice back,” said little Barbara.
“Maybe the man won’t like us to drive nails in his fence,” Rodney suggested.
“But this side of it is ours,” laughed the mother, softly. “He can only claim one side of even a nuisance; but you must be careful not to annoy him with too much noise.”
One side of a nuisance. How truly it was a nuisance, for Mr. Harding did not admire stockades himself. He had seen the inside of one in war times, and he had very nearly lost his life in trying to escape from it. He had an old wound in his leg yet that made him crosser on damp days than in dry weather, and here he was erecting stockades in his old age, to keep people out instead of in. It took all his self-control to keep from being ashamed.
Day after day he heard the childish prattle, and the pounding of nails as the building of the playhouse went on, sometimes with wrath, at other times with an almost eager curiosity to see and hear the little flock at their pretty play.
One day it rained, and silence reigned in the garden. His wound twinged and prickled all day, and he was in a furious mood toward evening as he went to straighten up some weak-backed plants that the rain had lopped over. A kitten was frisking about in a bed of choice strawberry plants—a saucy, disrespectful kitten which had evidently braved the terrors of the stockade, as he had done himself in the years gone by. He hated cats almost as he hated loud-voiced widows—perhaps he was thinking of the Widow Barlow, and of the joy it would be to take her as he was taking the kitten (loving little creature, it had never felt the touch of hatred, and didn’t know enough to run away), and, with one twist of his avenging arm, sling her over the fence. The kitten went over, legs and tail wildly outstretched, and little Barbara was at the window.
“Oh, mamma, he threw my darlin’ kitty right over the fence,” he heard her shriek, sobbingly, as she ran out and picked up her pet. “Kitty, kitty, is you killed?” she cried, breathlessly, as the little creature, stunned for a moment by its fall, closed its eyes and lay limply in her arms as she ran into the house.