[XXV]
During this talk Jane Hemingway had gone out to the fence to speak to Dr. Evans, who had passed along the road, a side of bacon on his left shoulder, and she came back, and with a low groan sat down. Sam Hemingway, who sat near the fire, shrugged his shoulders and sniffed. "You are making too much of a hullabaloo over it," he said. "I've been thinking about the matter a lots, and I've come to the final conclusion that you are going it entirely too heavy, considering the balance of us. Every man, woman, and child, born and unborn, is predestinated to die, and them that meet their fate graceful-like are the right sort. Seeing you takin' on after them doctors left actually turned me sick at the stomach, and that ain't right. I'll be sick enough when my own time comes, I reckon, without having to go through separate spells for all my kin by marriage every time they have a little eruption break out on them. Then here's Virginia having her bright young life blighted when it ought to be all sunshine and roses, if I may be allowed to quote the poets. I'll bet when you was a young girl your cheeks wasn't kept wet as a dish-rag by a complaining mother. No, what you've got to do, Sister Jane, is to pucker up courage and face the music—be resigned."
"Resigned! I say, resigned!" was the rebellious reply—"I say, resigned! with a slow thing like this eating away at my vitals and nothing under high heaven to make it let go. You can talk, sitting there with a pipe in your mouth, and every limb sound, and a long life ahead of you."
"But you are openly disobeying Biblical injunction," said Sam, knocking his exhausted pipe on the heel of his shoe. "You are kicking agin the pricks. All of us have to die, and you are raising a racket because your turn is somewhere in sight. You are kicking agin something that's as natural as a child coming into the world. Besides, you are going back on what you preach. You are eternally telling folks there's a life in front of us that beats this one all hollow, and, now that Providence has really blessed you by giving you a chance to sorter peep ahead at the pearly gates, you are actually balking worse than a mean mule. I say you ought to give me and Virginia a rest. If you can't possibly raise the scads to pay for having the thing cut out, then pucker up and grin and bear it. Folks will think a sight more of you. Being a baby at both ends of life is foolish—there ain't nobody willing to do the nursing the second time."
"I want you to hush all that drivel, Sam," the widow retorted. "I reckon folks are different. Some are born with a natural dread of death, and it was always in my family. I stood over my mother and watched her breathe her last, and it went awfully hard with her. She begged and begged for somebody to save her, even sitting up in bed while all the neighbors were crouched about crying and praying, and yelled out to them to stop that and do something. We'd called in every doctor for forty miles about, and she had somehow heard of a young one away off, and she was calling out his name when she fell back and died."
"Well, she must have had some load on her mind that she wasn't ready to dump at the throne," said Sam, without a hint of humor in his drawling voice. "I've always understood your folks, in the woman line at least, was unforgiving. They say forgiveness is the softest pillow to expire on. I dunno, I've never tried it."
"I'm miserable, simply miserable!" groaned Jane. "Dr. Evans has just been to Darley. He promised to see if any of my old friends would lend me the money, but he says nobody had a cent to spare."
"Folks never have cash for an investment of that sort," answered Sam. "I fetched up your case to old Milward Dedham at the store the other day. He'd just sold five thousand acres of wild mountain land to a Boston man for the timber that was on it, and was puffed up powerful. I thought if ever a man would be prepared to help a friend he would. 'La me, Sam,' said he, 'you are wasting time trying to keep a woman from pegging out when wheat's off ten cents a bushel. Any woman ought to be happy lying in a grave that is paid for sech times as these.'"
The widow was really not listening to Sam's talk. With her bony elbows on her knee, her hand intuitively resting on the painless and yet insistent seat of her trouble, she rocked back and forth, sighing and moaning. There was a clicking of the gate-latch, a step on the gravelled walk, and Virginia, flushed from exercise in the cool air, came in and emptied her apron in the chimney corner, from which her uncle lazily dragged his feet. He leaned forward and critically scanned the heap of wood.
"You've got some good, rich, kindling pine there, Virginia," he drawled out. "But you needn't bother after to-day, though. I'll have my wagon back from the shop to-morrow, and Simpson has promised to lend me his yoke of oxen, and let me haul some logs from his hill. Most of it is good, seasoned red oak, and when it gets started to burning it pops like a pack of fire-crackers."